Bobbie Gentry Set Us Free

The country musician who vanished by choice—and the art of crafting one's own life

Music writing for non-musicians is incredibly difficult. I have close friends who speak of music in its most formalistic and technical terminology. For a non-musician, things are much hazier.

At best, we hope to infuse our descriptions with poetic and reverential quality. We understand that music is a felt sense, a felt art form. At its time of production, it is a material endeavor with physical participation - sweat, breath, and coordination.

When music is recorded and played over datelines, through the darkness of night and the unsettled chaos of dawn, it transcends its physical form and becomes a part of the air. It has the power to transform a listener, to make them feel as if their identity goes offline and becomes the music.

Our music story begins in Spokane, a small-big town, a once powerful broker of extractive capital projects. With its glory days far behind it, my friend Jazmin grew up here, went to school at Ferris High School, dealt with religious bullshit, rebelled, and scratched an emo itch, but was still a country girl from Milton-Freewater who lived poor just like me. Looking back on it now, it's no surprise that our worlds narrowed closer and closer until making contact. Our friendship began with her warmth and accelerated with our shared love of music.

That day we were heading down 2nd Avenue, the sun-star and peerless blue sky conspiring to bring to light every graffitied and pissed-on street light, every crumbling concrete corner. As we drove to a work gig, Jazmin grabbed the aux cord and changed my life with a song — Bobbie Gentry's "Fancy."

Bobbie, the creative powerhouse and country music legend is undeniable, and thus so was that moment. Hearing Bobbie for the first time was the best thing to happen that day, and undoubtedly the best thing to happen to our friendship. It was part music, part little girl's prayer and part bond of two women on the move.

Later, after talking about Bobbie's "disappearance," we planted the seed for something, some project to bear fruit. Possibly a film.

Much has been written about Bobbie's disappearance from the public, but Jazmin and I believe we can do better - for her and for those who love her. What follows is the narrative of our shared project, one we hope you will join us on.

Bobbie's Life + Disappearance

From the get, there was more to Bobbie. Her early life was set adrift from her mother and father, born on her family's Chickasaw County farm outside Woodland, Mississippi. Her origins were bare, but she learned to play piano through watching church pianists play. As she learned, she started composing and performing music at age seven. She developed her art over time and in church halls before her mother called her to Southern California.

Roberta, as she was called then, slipped off the cloak of southern poverty and basked in the newborn and brassy light of a new state and a new class. Mom had "moved on up," and her new husband's country club membership thrust Bobbie into a world completely foreign to her. Music was the red thread that ran through her early existence and this period was no different; Bobbie began teaching herself guitar, banjo, and bass.

1967 back in Chickasaw County with her grandparents. (Chickasaw County Historical Society)

Over time, Roberta became Bobbie, a girl to a young woman. She and her mother made music as a duo. Bobbie modeled around Palm Springs and lived a relatively carefree and sometimes wild life - music remained the constant thread.

From Jazmin and I's research, it is clear that Bobbie worked from early adolescence. If not through performance, then through modeling. Early on, she saw the Hollywood effect of identity and, with a similar tactic, gave herself a new name. Upon graduating, Roberta lifted "Bobbie Gentry" from Ruby Gentry, a film about a poor young woman who desperately marries the town's tycoon. This theme, inspired partly by a movie about a woman moving through different classes, runs consistently throughout Bobbie's life, informing her greatest life and art-making decisions.

"I don't really have a great time doing it, but I have a need to write. I am driven to being industrious, and the finished product is well worth the effort."

Bobbie held a tension between letting her drive control her output. She understood the powerful forces at work within her and seemed to resent them in some small ways. The arc of her creative life was propelled by this tension, leading her to co-write songs with Jody Records in 1963 after years of performing in clubs. This kernel of success and collaboration led to increasingly better deals for Bobbie, and in 1967, her biggest and unexpected break came.

Bobbie's biggest ambition up to the album "Ode to Billie Joe" was to write and sell songs to other artists, but the cost of hiring another singer for her songs pushed Bobbie into the recording booth. The resulting demo, which included the song "Mississippi Delta," landed her a contract with Capitol Records. The demo served as the master recording, except "Ode," which included string arrangements composed by Jimmy Haskell. Capitol balked at "Ode" 's length, a shocking seven-minute long epic, but convinced Bobbie to shorten it to a more pop-friendly four. The tactic worked: Capitol pressed and released 500,000 copies - the most it had at that time. "Ode" eventually knocked The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club" off the top of the charts in 1967.

The album's success was in some ways marred by a lawsuit between Bobbie and her co-producer Bobby Paris. Gentry saw Paris' involvement as minimal and insisted then, and throughout her career, that she was the principal producer of her work. Like the cultural touchstone that influenced her name change, continual wresting away power and influence over her intellectual property haunted Bobbie's output.

Six years of songwriting produced seven albums. Her successful run on the music charts transformed into another six years of lucrative and highly orchestrated shows on the Vegas Strip. She headlined at the Riviera and Caesars Palace from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s - purportedly making upwards of $100,000 per week at her peak. This era included her variety hour with BBC, making Bobbie the first woman to do so. However, the Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour experience was not exactly a happy one, as the producers sanitized her creativity, disallowing her male dancers to appear in drag during the Andrews Sisters skit, and forbidding her to perform Fancy in its entirety due to the songs supposedly risqué lyrical content. Again, Bobbie's creative urges were stymied by those in control.

Three short marriages. Partial ownership of the NBA Phoenix Suns. A son, Tyler Stafford, was born from her second marriage to Jim Stafford. Television appearances, a variety hour. Fame. Notoriety. In 1981, Bobbie was one of many guest stars on the NBC special "An All-Star Salute to Mother's Day," during which she sang just one song: a rendition of the Broadway tune "Mama, A Rainbow," dedicated to her mother who was in the audience. This was to be her last public appearance.

Why Are We Telling This Story?

In part, this is a journey with a friend to discover what it means to commit to creating something of value in the world. Value is, of course, relative, but between the two of us, we know that it generates an impossibly bright and combustible energy that is sustaining and makes life worth living. However bright, we want to understand the implications of Bobbie's departure from public music making.

Incidentally, Jazmin and I both grew up in situations similar to Bobbie's, with Jazmin living in a world partly cared for by a grandmother who listened to the songwriter. It was as a child that Jazmin first heard Bobbie, in possibly the most cinematic way I, as an outsider to Jazmin's memories, can imagine. In the warm-hued and cluttered living room, a mid-century stereo console drawer partly slid open, grandma's hands placing a record onto the turntable as the long arm of the player eased into place, its needle sinking gently into the vinyl's groove. Jazmin recalls the particulars, the soft glow of time, the light, the place in which she lived, and the complicated people she loved and who loved her.

The lyric that I belt out with excitement to this day ‘You know I might have been born just plain white trash, But Fancy was my name’ has always rang with hope, overcoming one’s origins, and pride in where she eventually ended up. - Jazmin

Her father Jim, unstable and neglectful, left Jazmin in bitter and uncomfortable situations, but being at her grandmother's house felt safe. After a brutal back-and-forth custody battle between her father and mother, Jazmin finally went to live with her mother in Spokane. This passage of time probably felt pretty lonely, but also opened another, broader aperture of what was possible for a young girl from Milton-Freewater. She and I both know these feelings and talk about the fact that no matter how far we've come, people of better means will always be able to smell the poor on us. Not literally, of course, but the little things that give us away. A nervousness to be polite and mannered, the crooked teeth that never suffered a correction. The clothes, the unpolished gestures. Unlike polite society, we have eaten every morsel on our plates, even into increasingly better adulthoods, still hanging onto a fear of missing our next meal.

Like Jazmin, I was cast about by my family. I lived in different worlds, from Kansas to Illinois and Florida and back based on my mother's impatience and simmering rage at my non-compliance. I have and always will be headstrong. This, combined with always seeming to be the new kid, got me in trouble more times than I care to admit.

The tangled vine-laden structures of Bobbie's Mississippi childhood are imprinted vividly on the smallest version of me - the one who clung to Florida sycamores and smelled fresh green and fallen walnuts. The little girl of broken down cars on the side of the highway, a complicated relationship with God, and slow, painful, and lonely Midwestern summers.

Jazmin and I have, for most of our lives, had not. We have survived, and in some very special and precious-to-us-ways, thrived. We don't take this for granted, particularly as we look over our creative output - the things that challenged us to be better than what was expected. It was our art, our reading, and our secret nerdy passions that gave us hope for something better. We see Bobbie as the match to our internal flames. A woman who grabbed lightning's tail as it flashed across the sky, letting go only momentarily to fall back to earth and leave the Milky Way behind.

For us, Bobbie's story is also about class and gender. Her story reminds us of the lingering guilt of "getting out." Of what can be done with all the memories, the messed up ones, and the ones of romance and regret. How do you move on in your life when the one you lived for so long clings to you like honey on the comb, but less sweet?

What right do you have to make anything of leisure, transcendence, when so many people we know or used to know are stuck with their feet firmly on the ground? These feelings of guilt are vastly magnified by foisted-upon-us illusions of being some #girlboss, the neoliberal, out-for-herself, and upwardly mobile pick-me.

Bobbie wasn't this. Instead, she is an antidote. The pressure to constantly bloom and produce regardless of her real passions stirred Bobbie only for so long before she decided enough was enough.

Performing in More Ways Than One

Bobbie had many examples of what it meant to exist as a woman. The song "Fancy" is her articulation of that - even if written and performed under the guise of fictional songwriting.

As a young girl, Bobbie's mom left to gain a better life. She married "up" and sent for Bobbie, who, up until that point, had learned the machinations of femininity from Hollywood films, church matriarchs, and her grandmother. To be a woman was to perform. To hope that the performance was strong enough to elicit a warm embrace from a man, and not just any man, but one who could make life a little easier. This is a fairytale many of us socialized as women are taught to believe. The gestures that make up the tender and complicated space dubbed "woman" are a confusing mix that repeatedly begs us to mask real desire.

When Jazmin and I research Bobbie, we continually encounter commentary on who Bobbie was. What we see are her exquisite, glamorous, and often handmade and designed outfits, and her highly choreographed individual and group performances. Her neat, chestnut hair styled in a teased and permanent bouffant emblematic of the 1960s. Her belled sleeves and kohl-lined almond-shaped eyes. Her perfect and hypnotic sways as she sang. The content of her songs, which often reference life in the South, narratives of life's luster lost. A sort of desperation and despair is woven into each line. These were the songs that made her popular, a household name, but what kind of desperations pervaded Bobbie's life?

And what more is there to this woman who enriched so many others through her music? What were the thoughts behind the woman who came from nothing, who eventually studied philosophy at UCLA and later at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music? Who clawed her way through a stratified music industry, only to be bitten on the hand by male producers who laid claim to her intellectual and artistic output?

Was she sweet?

Was she shrewd?

Was she wise?

She may have been all three in equal measure. Perhaps she was none. Maybe the beauty of her disappearance is that we'll never know—and maybe that's exactly how she wanted it. Bobbie is still alive, nestled in a gated community outside Nashville, but her public appearances ceased in 1982, shortly after her final appearance on the Country Music Awards.

We want to tell Bobbie's story not because we demand her public presence – for everyone has the right to be forgotten, and especially for women, the right to privacy. We want to tell Bobbie's story sweetly and shortly. We make no demands of her, but we want you to know her as we know her. And through knowing her, we get to examine what emboldens us all to believe that our creative lives have meaning, even if that meaning is connecting with others through our art.

Bobbie rode a self-directed wave once she landed in California and chose to move from behind the curtain of songwriting to song-performing. She could have turned a corner back into obscurity, into simply being a credit on a song or two. For some reason unbeknownst to any of us other than her close friends, she chose to grasp her creative identity fully, and then, suddenly, leave. From start to end, in a world that does not allow for women to make choices, Bobbie made as many for herself as she could. She will have lived, and eventually, she will die by her own rules and choices. And outside of her utterly unique musical creations, her insistence on making choices for herself is one of the most powerful things about her.

This essay relied upon my and my co-director Jazmin Ely’s research and ideation. We hope you enjoy this insight into Bobbie and will stay tuned as we develop the project further.