Bobbie Gentry

Ode to Billie Joe began as a seven-minute song with only Gentry's guitar. It was cut to five minutes and given strings, and in 1967 it came out on the other side of a blues called Mississippi Delta. Disc jockeys chose it. It passed the Beatles' All You Need Is Love to reach number one on the U.S. pop chart, climbed to number thirteen in Britain and the country top twenty, and won three Grammys. Its narrator watches Billie Joe drop something off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and the song never says what. A 1976 film grew out of it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bryant's Grocery — 7.9 mi
  The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 16 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 24 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 27 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.

More markers nearby

• Greenwood — 1.3 mi
• Point Leflore — 1.4 mi
• Hubert Sumlin — 1.6 mi
• Furry Lewis — 1.8 mi