Re: Banning the Dixie Chicks

Date: 20 Mar 2003 03:23:49 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.fan.cecil-adams
Size: 2,948 bytes

>>
>>RM Mentock wrote:
>>>
>>> But murder ballads, sure, keep 'em. What else would we throw
>>> off the Tallahatchee bridge?
>>>
>>
>>No, no. Billy Joe *jumped* off the Tallahatchee bridge.
>>
>>They even made a movie about it (and this is not the only movie inspired
>
>>by a country song, yikes!) Apparently he jumped because he had a gay
>>sexual encounter and couldn't live with it.
>
>I realize that the lyrics don't support it, but as a kid listening to
>the song, I had concluded that Poppa was observed from a distance
>tossing something (Billy Joe) off the bridge, presumably for lustin'
>after his daughter.
>
>In the novel. BJ gets the guilts after cavorting with a hooker,
>heterosexually.
They threw the Dixie Chicks CD over the bridge.
Didn't Cece cover this one? Anyway....
IIRC, and I probably don't, in the TV movie with Robbie Benson, what BJ cavorts
with may wear a dress, but has a hell of a five o'clock shadow. The boy never
had a lick of sense anyhow.
But the story was originally a song, not a novel, no? In the Ode, Billy Joe
jumps off the bridge apparently because earlier, he and his girlfriend threw
something off the bridge. The girl by the way, is the singer of the song, the
story's narrator, and the story holes are left up to the listener to fill.
And there could be several explanations, some of which were explored in tor
invented for the movie.
One explanation is that she and Billy Joe managed to bring to term an
illigitimate child, without the folks knowing. And that child, stillborn or
whatever, was what was tossed over the bridge.
The folks weren't gwine to let them be together no how, even if they were more
concerned about how much cotton she picked than whether she looked preggers or
not. Then BJ took the plunge himself. The song doesn't go into much more than
that, if that much.
When the mystery of the lyric was made into a TV(?) movie, the network fleshes
out a plot of a senselickless Billy Joe doing something so dreadfully wrong
that he ends up taking a drink. They manage to suggest rather than tell a
possible solution, not only to keep the mystery intact, but probably because
there was only so much they could get by with on network TV in those days
anyway, in the innuendo department. Benson goes about the film in sexual
angst, apparently because he hasn't gotten any since that fatal slip up that
caused a bundle to hit the creek, or whatever, and in a confused perhaps guilty
stupor, has it on with a carny. Then he hits the drink after the carny
incident, because he discovered he really would stick it in anything that
moved, losing his romantic ideals, whatever. I don't think the TV movie goes
as far as suggesting that a baby was tossed in the drink earlier, perhaps some
other dark secret substituted for the possible bastard, such as a diary.
I suggest someone that has actually seen the thing since its first airing judge
the accuracy of this recollection.