Bobbie Gentry

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Bobbie Gentry (born Roberta Lee Streeter; July 27, 1944) is an American singer-songwriter who was one of the first female country artists to compose and produce her own material.  Her songs typically drew on her Mississippi roots to compose vignettes of the Southern United States.

Gentry rose to international fame with her intriguing Southern Gothic narrative "Ode to Billie Joe" in 1967.[2] The track spent four weeks as the No. 1 pop song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was fourth in the Billboard year-end chart of 1967  and earned her Grammy awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1968.

Gentry charted eleven singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and four singles on the United Kingdom Top 40. Her album Fancy brought her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. After her first albums, she had a successful run of variety shows on the Las Vegas Strip. She lost interest in performing in the late 1970s. Since 2010 Gentry has lived in a private gated community

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZt5Q-u4crc

Ode to Billie Joe" is a 1967 song written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry, a singer-songwriter from Chickasaw County, Mississippi.

The single, released in late July, was a number-one hit in the United States, and became a big international seller. Billboard ranked the record as the No. 3 song for 1967 (the other two were #2 "The Letter" by the Box Tops and #1 "To Sir With Love" by Lulu). 

The song is ranked #412 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" and at #144 in Pitchfork's 200 Best Songs of the 1960s.

The recording of "Ode to Billie Joe" generated eight Grammy nominations, resulting in three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell.  Rolling Stone also ranked the song #47 on its list of the 100 greatest country songs of all time in June 2014.

The song takes the form of a first-person narrative with "sparse" musical accompaniment, that reveals a tale about a family's dysfunctional - and overtly indifferent - reactions to the shocking news of a local boy's suicide. He is suggested as connected in some way to the young female narrator. The song concludes by expressing the malaise, death of her father, and depression affecting the narrator and her own family over the following year. Its theme - according to Gentry - is indifference and the emotional gaps between people