"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. The song is ranked #412 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The recording of "Ode to Billie Joe" generated eight Grammy nominations, including three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell.

This song is a first-person narrative that reveals a quasi-Southern Gothic tale in its verses by including the dialog of the narrator's family at dinnertime on the day that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge." Throughout the song, the suicide and other tragedies are contrasted against the banality of everyday routine and polite conversation.

The song begins with the narrator and her brother returning, after morning chores, to the family house for dinner. After cautioning them about tracking in dirt, "Mama" says that she "got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge" that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," apparently to his death.

At the dinner table, the narrator's father is unsurprised at the news and says, "Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o' sense; pass the biscuits, please" and mentions that there are "five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow." Although her brother seems to be taken aback ("I saw him at the sawmill yesterday.... And now you tell me Billie Joe has jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"), he's not shocked enough to keep him from having a second piece of pie. Late in the song, Mama questions the narrator's complete loss of appetite ("Child, what's happened to your appetite? I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite,") yet earlier in the song recalled a visit earlier that morning by Brother Taylor, the local preacher, who mentioned that he had seen Billie Joe and a girl who looked very much like the narrator herself and they were "throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

In the song's final verse, a year has passed, during which the narrator's brother has married and moved away. Also, her father died from a viral infection, which has left her mother despondent. The narrator herself now visits Choctaw Ridge often, picking flowers there to drop from the Tallahatchie Bridge onto the murky waters flowing beneath.

The bridge mentioned in this song collapsed in June 1972.

In an interview with Bob Harris broadcast by BBC Radio 2 in Bob Harris Countryon 16 April 2009, singer Rachel Harrington claimed that Bobbie Gentry originally wrote 11 verses but deleted six because a record producer thought it was too long.

"Ode to Billy Joe" was originally intended as the "B side" of Gentry's first single recording, a blues number called " Mississippi Delta," on Capitol Records. It was originally a seven minute recording with only Gentry's guitar backing the lyrics which told more of the story of what happened to Billie Joe at the Tallahatchie Bridge. After the original version was finished, the label executives realized that this song was the better option for a single release. Thus, they went back into the studio with the string orchestra for backing and cut the song length almost in half. Cutting the length and lyrics provided the song with a mystical allure which left more to the listener's imagination about what really happened to Billie Joe. It also made it more suitable for radio airplay.

Gentry continually dismissed speculation that the song was autobiographical. At the height of the song's popularity, numerous rumors circulated that she had been questioned by Mississippi police.

The song's popularity proved so enduring that in 1976, nine years after its release, Warner Bros. commissioned author Herman Raucher to adapt it into a novel and screenplay, Ode to Billy Joe. The poster's tagline, which treats the film as being based on actual events and even gives a date of death for Billy (June 3, 1953), led many to believe that the song was based on actual events. In fact, when Raucher met Bobbie Gentry in preparation for writing the novel and screenplay, she confessed that she herself had no idea why Billie Joe killed himself. In Raucher's novel and screenplay, Billy Joe kills himself after a drunken homosexual experience, and the object thrown from the bridge is the narrator's ragdoll.

Billy Joe's story is analyzed in Professor John Howard's history of gay Mississippi entitled Men Like That: A Queer Southern Historyas an archetype of what Howard calls the "gay suicide myth".

Bob Dylan's 1967 "Clothesline Saga," (on the album The Basement Tapes) is a parody of the song. It mimics the conversational style of "Ode to Billie Joe" with lyrics concentrating on routine household chores. The shocking event buried in all the mundane details is the revelation that "The Vice-President's gone mad!". Dylan's song was originally titled 'Answer to "Ode"'

The Austin Lounge Lizards' "Shallow End of the Gene Pool", from their 1995 album Small Minds, is melodically similar to "Ode to Billie Joe", and ends with the line "and that's why Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge".

The November 15, 2008 Saturday Night Livefeatured Kristen Wiig and guest host Paul Rudd (with guitar) in a skit as a duo covering the song's melody, but with lyrics regarding a delivery man attempting to deliver a package, reading off the tracking numbers, etc.

In 1967 American/French singer-songwriter Joe Dassin had much success with a French translation of the song, that tells exactly the same story almost word for word, only with the characters reversed. The narrator is one of the sons of the household, and the character who committed suicide is a girl named Marie-Jeanne Guillaume.

A quick overview of the translated names and places:

Besides the change in character names and locations, there are also obvious changes to various environments like the food, the crops, etc. For example, instead of "Pickin'cotton", the narrator took care of the vineyards. The setting is a fictitious small town in south west France. The river Garonne however is real.

In 1968, a Swedish translation by Olle Adolphson titled "Jon Andreas visa" was recorded by Siw Malmkvist. It is faithful to the story in "Ode to Billie Joe", but has changed the setting to rural Sweden.