Almost 60 years have passed since folks started humming along to Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 smash hit song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” and people today not only still know bits and pieces of the lyrics, they continue to talk about them.
It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day.
I was out choppin’ cotton, and my brother was balin’ hay.
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat.
And Mama hollered out the back door, “Y’all, remember to wipe your feet!”
And then she said, “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge.
“Today, Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”
Where was the real Billie Joe bridge, if there is such a thing? There are at least three possibilities, maybe four.
Most folks see the sense in the Mississippi Country Music Trail marker’s claim to the site of Ashwood Bridge that spans the Tallahatchie River between Greenwood’s Grand Boulevard and Money Road. Ashwood Bridge, a concrete bridge that replaced an ancient metal bridge, was opened in 1954. Gentry was born in Chickasaw County in 1947 and moved to Greenwood when she was 6, which would have been in 1953.
The long-gone metal bridge would have been visible for part of that time, and folks who were her classmates remember that she attended the close-by North Greenwood Elementary School, which is now known as Bankston Elementary.
So it’s possible that Gentry, as a youngster, saw the old bridge near her school. Maybe she was driven over it. If so, Money Road would have taken her to the community of Money, which also had an old metal bridge spanning the Tallahatchie. This bridge, like the other, has been replaced by a concrete structure.
Greenwood residents who are now around age 70 or older remember the collapse of the metal Money bridge when they were teenagers or young adults. There’s an unsubstantiated story that a truck was driving over the bridge when it fell into the Tallahatchie, and there’s another that’s just as colorful.
Gilliam Ashcraft, who was born in 1955, said he understands that “two guys had put in at the bridge” before boating out to gig for frogs. “They came back to get out, but they couldn’t see the bridge.” It had disappeared into the Tallahatchie. Perhaps, said Ashcraft, “this was due to underwater scour,” in which the current weakened the structure.
Here’s where Ashcraft’s story gets interesting. In 1975, he was working on the family farm, Roebuck Plantation, that borders the Yazoo River south of Greenwood between Rising Sun and Sidon. It was summertime and the movie “Ode to Billie Joe” was being filmed at locations around Greenwood, including the Roebuck Bridge over the Yazoo River. The bridge was metal and rundown, perfect for use as the film version of the Billie Joe bridge.
Ashcraft said his father, the late John Ashcraft, would say that the Roebuck Bridge used to be the old Tallahatchie Bridge that connected Grand Boulevard and Money Road and was replaced in 1954. His father claimed that the Leflore County Board of Supervisors had the metal Tallahatchie Bridge “loaded onto a barge, floated it down the river and re-erected it at Roebuck Landing and that is how the bridge got down there,” Gilliam Ashcraft said.
The Ashcraft family had moved into a family home nearby in the late 1930s. “We only knew because the family lived right there by the bridge. But Dad is the one who told me where it came from,” Ashcraft said.
If this is fact, then one of Greenwoodian Allen Wood Jr.’s memories takes an unexpected turn. It makes him smile to remember that during the filming of the movie “Ode to Billie Joe,” a group of folks held a naming ceremony for the bridge at Roebuck to match the song.
“This is one thing that is kind of emblematic of the Delta,” Wood said. “We are the only people around that had a Tallahatchie Bridge over the Yazoo River.”
Wood is skeptical of the Ashcraft family account. “There was always a bridge down there. They couldn’t really move that bridge. They couldn’t float it.”
But if the account happens to be factual, then the group in 1975 had renamed the bridge by its old name and unknown to them, the Yazoo had been spanned by a real Tallahatchie Bridge for many years.
In any case, the old metal bridge at Roebuck, which had replaced a ferry, was torn down and junked, and a soaring concrete bridge was constructed. This was named for two Leflore County supervisors, James Hooper and Alix Sanders. The Hooper-Sanders Bridge was built tall and wide to meet U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requirements that it would allow for river traffic to run beneath it, but there’s not any of that these days. “I hope someday they will reopen the river for navigation,” said Ashcraft.
There’s a fourth possibility. There used to be an iron bridge spanning the Tallahatchie between the Shellmound and Sunnyside communities along U.S. 49 north of Greenwood. Mike Turner, a Greenwood auto dealer, grew up on the east side of the Tallahatchie. As a youth, he traveled across the Shellmound bridge on a school bus. Turner said his father always told that this bridge was the Billie Joe bridge, and it’s possible his father was correct.
The song “Ode to Billie Joe” has other unresolved questions. What did Billie Joe and his girlfriend toss from the bridge? Why did Billie Joe take that jump? Only Bobbie Gentry knows what she was thinking when she wrote the lyrics.
And only Bobbie Gentry can say which bridge — if any — she had in mind when she wrote “Ode to Billie Joe.” She lives so reclusively that members of the public do not know where she resides. So far, she’s not speaking up. And why should she? The mystery is one of the best things about the song.
- This article first appeared in Leflore Illustrated, a quarterly magazine published by The Greenwood Commonwealth.
