The mysterious Miss Bobbie Gentry celebrates her 70th birthday today. However, we will never know how she celebrated this significant milestone...
Why? Well, as the review in The Guardian of a BBC Radio 2 documentary back in 2012 pointed out:
...Bobbie is known for two things: Ode to Billie Joe, her astonishingly creepy 1967 single, and her sudden, deliberate disappearance.Happy birthday, Miss Gentry, wherever you are!
After Patchwork, her last album of new material was released in 1971, Bobbie walked out of the spotlight, span on her heel and never looked back. She spent just four years as a star, first knocking the Beatles' All You Need is Love off the top of the US charts, then presenting two primetime shows – one for BBC2 (destroyed: argh), one for CBS in the US – making some exceptional albums, notching up another massive single (Fancy), headlining in Vegas. But she was out of time: her glamorous look, including bigger-than-big hair, meant that Bobbie wasn't taken seriously in an era of no-makeup singer-songwriters...
[Apparently she] phoned a couple of her old producers in the last few years – one, Rick Hall, to talk about Reba McEntire's version of Fancy; the other, Jimmie Haskell, to say that she'd written a new song. He didn't have time to help produce it, so he suggested someone else. Bobbie never contacted them. And now she won't return Haskell's calls. She is one cool customer.
We particularly miss your hairdo - here in huge form on Hollywood Palace [skip to the 46m40s point, as the original clip has gone from YouTube]:
Bobbie Gentry (born Roberta Lee Streeter, 27th July 1944)
