I don't believe this song is about infanticide. The family's dinner wouldn't have been so routine nor would the discussion of Billy Joe's suicide if the girl had been pregnant in front of her family. Whatever happened, it is obvious the family doesn't know that the girl and Billy Joe were intimate.
When asked about it, all Bobbie Gentry said was that the song was about "man's inhumanity to man."
Given the context of the times in which it was written and wildly popular, a student of mine once commented that Billy Joe symbolized the draft of young men into the Viet Nam War. Lots of young men, 55,000 of them, basically jumped off a bridge when they went to Viet Nam never to come home.
I am not sure if it was that specific, but the heartache behind the lyrics was definitely aimed at the loss of Billy Joe, not the loss of an infant. The mystery of what the two threw off the bridge, I believe, is overshadowed by the sense of loss and the passage of time as presented in the last verse. There is no other clue in the song as to what might have been thrown. But there is in every verse a sense of shock and sorrow, loneliness and regret, waste and carelessness.
I don't believe this song is about infanticide. The family's dinner wouldn't have been so routine nor would the discussion of Billy Joe's suicide if the girl had been pregnant in front of her family. Whatever happened, it is obvious the family doesn't know that the girl and Billy Joe were intimate.
When asked about it, all Bobbie Gentry said was that the song was about "man's inhumanity to man."
Given the context of the times in which it was written and wildly popular, a student of mine once commented that Billy Joe symbolized the draft of young men into the Viet Nam War. Lots of young men, 55,000 of them, basically jumped off a bridge when they went to Viet Nam never to come home.
I am not sure if it was that specific, but the heartache behind the lyrics was definitely aimed at the loss of Billy Joe, not the loss of an infant. The mystery of what the two threw off the bridge, I believe, is overshadowed by the sense of loss and the passage of time as presented in the last verse. There is no other clue in the song as to what might have been thrown. But there is in every verse a sense of shock and sorrow, loneliness and regret, waste and carelessness.