Whatever happened to Bobbie Gentry? In search of country music’s great vanished star.

Whatever happened to Bobbie Gentry? In search of country music’s great vanished star....

Glen Campbell, left, and Bobbie Gentry, center, at the 1968 Grammy Awards, where Gentry won top female honors. (Harold Matosian/AP)It’s the third of June. Somewhere in Mississippi, it’s another sleepy, dusty delta day. Since the summer of 1967, when the Southern gothic ballad “Ode to Billie Joe,” set on this day in that place, first hit the airwaves, the song has captivated 

American pop culture in a way few ever have. Written and sung by an unknown young woman from Mississippi named Bobbie Gentry, it was an eerie, minor-key mystery about an unnamed young woman and her family sitting around a farm dinner table discussing, in elliptical terms, the suicide of Billie Joe McAllister.
It sold tens of millions of copies. It knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts. It spawned a 1976 movie. It made Gentry a hot Vegas star. She kicked around with Elvis and Tom Jones and briefly married casino magnate Bill Harrah.

The song’s iconic success also helped launch one of the most enduring riddles in pop: Whatever happened to Bobbie Gentry?

She had a few minor hits after “Ode,” appeared on early ’70s entertainment shows and then went kapoof in the early 1980s. No appearances. No pictures. No interviews.

Over time, she became regarded as the J.D. Salinger of pop music. She made Harper Lee look chatty. She went full Garbo.
It’s most often reported that she is living in seclusion in Los Angeles, as if she has morphed into a Southern-fried Norma Desmond holed up in a creepy mansion on Sunset Boulevard.

That isn’t true.

And Gentry spoke to a reporter, for this story, apparently for the first time in three decades. We caution you not to get too excited about that. It’s one sentence. Could be two.