'Ode To Billy Joe' By Bobbie Gentry - Week 1 Entry 1: Response(s) To Stimulus

Scenario/Introduction:

For this assignment, in my chosen group of 6 actors, we will be required to work and progressively devise a Physical Theatre performance that must last for a duration of 15 - 30 minutes. For this assignment, in these blog entries, I will be discussing and identifying the dramatic potential of ideas, character and performance that I and/or we thought about using the song 'Ode To Billy Joe' by Bobby Gentry as the given stimulus.

In this first entry for the first week on this assignment, I will be listing my initial response(s) to the given stimulus to then after include the considerations that I had made as to what the song provokes. This can range from things like feelings, stories, themes, colours, inspiration, thoughts, ideas, character and its overall dramatic potential.

Here is the full song of 'Ode To Billy Joe':

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"
Then she said, "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge
Today Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

Papa said to Mama as he passed around the black-eyed peas
"Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o' sense, pass the biscuits, please
There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"
And Mama said it was a shame about Billie Joe anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billie Joe McAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night
I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know, it don't seem right
I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge
And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Mama said to me, "Child what's happened to your appetite?
I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched single bite
That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh by the way
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billie Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

A year has come and gone since I heard the news 'bout Billie Joe
Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus goin' round, papa caught it and he died last spring
And now Mama doesn't seem to want to do much of anything
And me I spend a lot of time picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Response(s) To 'Ode To Billy Joe' Stimulus:

Whilst listening to the given stimulus for this assignment, I had managed to conjure up a total of three responses.

Response 1:

The first response to this stimulus is when I only listened to the music of 'Ode To Billy Joe' whilst cancelling out the lyrics entirely to help create the image of what kind of setting the story of this devised piece could potentially take place in.

The Setting/Theme/Characters: Whilst listening to the music, I had thought of a wasteland kind of setting with a slightly barbaric theme in the sense that the world is in a Post-Apocalyptic state and that the Human race itself has gone to the peak of madness (splitting off into different tribes, going to war against each other for territory), this then brought the idea of this story maybe taking place in a future time period sometime after the Apocalyptic event that may have occurred. This idea of the Human Race going mad was not the case for the whole of the population within this setting as there are some more civilized areas where people would try to build a non violent community.

The Story: The story that I'd thought of to go along with this type of music was that of a lone delivery man (Courier) travelling by walking/running to different places all around this Post-Apocalyptic setting to try and complete his job. Whilst travelling, this Courier would encounter a variety of situations involving a mixture of violence, use of persuasion and choosing sides as there is this theme of barbarism to potentially block his path and he'll need some support to help him on this dangerous journey.

What Colour Did I Think Of: When thinking about a colour to go along with this response, I would say that the colour Beige/Yellow would suit it perfectly. I say this because Beige/Yellow are both really bland colours and are most commonly seen in wasteland environments like, for example, a desert.

The Dramatic Potential/Feelings: In my opinion, this response is a good one and has the potential to be expanded to the point that the story me and my group could start to devise for this assignment can involve the feelings of sadness (if a certain character dies), happiness (if a set of characters have a good time in this setting and/or there's a happy ending to the story) and tension (for those moments where there's violence, remembering that the Courier, whom is the main character in this story, has no experience with firearms). This does indeed bring forth a great deal of dramatic potential and I'd love the opportunity to include some, if not, all of the ideas I've had for this response when it comes to the group devising discussion.

Response 2:

The second response to this stimulus is when I listened to both the music and lyrics of 'Ode To Billy Joe' at the same time to help create a more followed and developed story for this devised piece.

The Setting: Whilst listening to both the music and the lyrics, the setting of the story had changed from my interpretation of a wasteland to result in a farmland/countryside. I'd mainly gained this knowledge through the lyrics listed on the second line of the song, which I've listed above, where it says "I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay".

The Story/Characters: I then started to think more about the characters in this story opposed to my first original response. I was thinking that the story could involve a family (Mother, Father, 2 Son's and a Daughter) with one of the sons being the character mentioned constantly throughout the entire song: Billy Joe. Perhaps at some point before this story took place, Billy Joe had left home due to him and his parents having a misunderstanding rendering his brother and sister to not think much of him. When the family had received news that Billy Joe had jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, they only imagined the worst outcome, being death, but they all tried not to care about it since they were more focused on having the food which the mother had prepared for the family.

Since it was a woman singing this song, she could be the same person as the daughter in this story and she's telling the audience listening of her past stories with this being one of them. Later on in the song, it talks about how the daughter may have been seeing Billy Joe in several places even though he had supposedly died by jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. This had started to make the daughter in the story greave more over the death of one of her brothers which she never really knew since she would of been young when he left home. This sense of the daughter losing her sanity had rendered her in not eating as much food, which concerned the mother more and more. This had made the mother have the local priest, Brother Taylor, have sessions with the daughter to try and discover her problems and perhaps fix them so things can go back to normal. This is only until Brother Taylor mentions about seeing someone who looked like the daughter with Billy Joe himself up on the Tallahatchie Bridge whilst he was out of town on holiday.

The story then passes a year and the daughter has left home to follow her chosen career path. But there is still the case of the daughter greaving over Billy Joes' death, so this makes her go up on the Tallahatchie Bridge daily to throw off a banquet of flowers to pay her respects.

The Dramatic Potential/Feelings: I think that this second response may be one that I'd pick over the other since this response is more story driven and with the fact that I prefer a full on sadness performance over one that would involve a mixture of feelings. There is also the opportunity to mix both stories together, which can make with some good dramatic potential.

Response 3:

This third response is slightly different than the previous two as I've interpreted the words used in the text to create my own original story whilst also involving some unscripted choices.

Characters: At some point in the song, the lyrics mention that the character 'Brother Taylor' had seen someone that looked a lot like the, what I think is due to my previous responses, the daughter/sister character in the story, but I've changed this concept and made it so that the girl in the story could be an ex girlfriend.

The Story: What Brother Taylor actually saw was a past image of Billy Joe and this girl sitting on the Tallahatchie Bridge having a conversation, but Brother Taylor couldn't make out what the couple were saying at the time as he was not there to hear it in reality. The conversation that Billy Joe and the girl character were having was also with a recently born baby that they didn't initially want. Both Billy Joe and the girlfriend were in their early teens meaning that they couldn't afford an abortion, and since the baby has actually been born, they have no idea how they're still going to afford having it and are having this conversation up on the Talahatchie Bridge to work out what to do with it.

The conversation can be anything from putting it in a care home, just leaving it on the street for someone to come pick it up, telling their parents since they don't know about the child, even the thought of killing it was in Billy Joes' mind... but not the girlfriend. This got to the point that they actually had a full on argument with each other and Billy Joe got so mad that he just threw their baby off the Tallahatchie Bridge into the river below out of mental rage. This then put the girlfriend into a real state, a state that made her kill Billy Joe with his own pocket knife. After realizing that she had committed a murder, she disposed of the body and the weapon by throwing them also into the river below luckily with no witnesses.

The story then goes forward a couple of years and the girlfriend has near forgotten about this tragic event due to constant hypnotherapy sessions. It was only when she was watching the news on the TV that her memories started to crawl back into her mind. Billy Joes' deceased body had finally been found not far from the Talahatchie Bridge going down-stream. Because all of the guilt had fallen back into her mind, she had considered going to the police to confess for her crime. But before doing so, she wanted to visit the Talahatchie Bridge one last time to throw this time a banquet of flowers for the baby that she was going to suggest to Billy Joe to keep as a mother should never be separated from her child, no matter the circumstances.

The Dramatic Potential/Feelings: This was going to be the ending to this sad and aggressive story filled with moments of heartbroken, tear-filled horror. To perform this story also within this assignment will be an incredible opportunity to try and devise since it's my own creation/interpretation of the story in 'Ode To Billy Joe' and the dramatic potential is definitely there, perhaps even more so than the previous 2 responses.