I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.
After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.
We didn’t know it would be the last.
Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.
There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I had taken the kids to the Johnny Cash Museum the day before. I showed them his guitar, his crucifix ring, his handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues.”
They shrugged. They knew Johnny Cash — his baritone blared through their childhoods — but preferred the Glen Campbell Museum, where we belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy” karaoke to the horrified amusement of other patrons. Nashville was in full “Nash Vegas” mode and the kids lapped up the flash. Being in the Johnny Cash Museum was too much like being at home.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” my son said when he found me on a bench, tears streaming down my face.
“Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m watching the last music video Johnny Cash made before he died. He was dying in this video. He was 71, the same age my parents are now. I was so scared they would die when covid came. I still am. I keep thinking about it and how lucky we are to see each other again.”
“And celebrate the anniversary,” he said. He was ten.
“That’s right. Watch with me. You can see a whole life in this video. You can see life go by so fast. Decades and decades, memory and regret, time too fast to bear.”
America’s culture of cruelty and those who dare to notice.
By Sarah Kendzior | June 2, 2025
It was the 30th of December, and I was driving the Natchez Trace Parkway, looking for Bobbie Gentry.
I didn’t want to find her. I only wanted to know she was out there, eluding everyone.
I wanted her to outwit every man who did her wrong. Many are dead: Bobbie Gentry is in her 80s. She hasn’t appeared on stage since 1981, when, after a series of music industry disputes, she left public life behind with a steadfastness unrivaled.
I was not the first to explore Chickasaw County, Mississippi and other Gentry haunts, hoping for a glimpse of the singer. For over forty years, no stranger has tracked her down. Gentry wanted to disappear and she got her way. She is rumored to be happy. I am likely angrier about the treatment of Bobbie Gentry than Bobbie Gentry is.
It’s only fair when a trailblazing woman gets burned that younger women pick up the torch.
In 1967, Bobbie Gentry destroyed the Summer of Love. The Beatles crooned “All You Need Is Love”, flower-haired hippies swayed — and in July, Bobbie Gentry released “Ode to Billie Joe”, a spare acoustic ballad about a suicide whose true horror was the politesse and apathy which with it was greeted.
What America needed was not love. America needed truth served cold and clever. “Ode to Billie Joe” framed cruel indifference as mystery. Americans ate it up like a southern noontime dinner.
Ode to Billie Joe knocked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band off the top spot. It made Gentry, who wrote and sang the title track, a massive star. The genre-defying hit — “I don’t sing white or colored; I sing southern,” she explained — dominated the Hot 100, country, easy listening, and R&B charts. Gentry was indefinable, independent, and confident in her dark lyricism.
As a result, she had to be punished. America loves to blame the messenger, especially when the message presages darker days. Some believe the flower power era ended with the Manson murders. “Ode to Billie Joe” suggests the sunny sixties never existed.
“Ode to Billie Joe” is the first-person tale of a family eating dinner on the third of June, “another sleepy dusty Delta day.” They are discussing Billie Joe McAllister, a local boy who died after jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Later, it is revealed that not long before his death, a preacher saw Billie Joe throw something — never named — off the bridge while accompanied by the female narrator of the song. The family members portray Billie Joe’s death as inevitable (“Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge”) and unimportant.
They care more about their meal than his suicide. The song’s most chilling line is “Pass the biscuits, please.”
The parents do not notice how Billie Joe’s death shakes the narrator. In the final verse, it is a year later, and she spends her time throwing flowers off the Tallahatchie Bridge. During that year, “There was a virus goin’ ‘round and papa caught it and he died last spring, and now mama doesn’t seem to wanna do much of anything”.
She recites these horrors like a grocery list.
* * *
In the years after 2020 — when covid ravaged America and protests raged over the brutal murder of George Floyd, only for both tragedies to ultimately be abandoned in favor of apathy — I listened to “Ode to Billie Joe” hundreds of times.
The Summer of 2020 was no Summer of Love. But it was a summer that was supposed to mean something. The next few years were aimed at convincing us that it didn’t, and that we were foolish to believe it would. The real crime was compassion. The real crime was noticing and caring and wanting to make it right.
The biggest villains, in the Biden years, were the messengers: epidemiologists and activists and documentarians of tragedy battling a brigade of pundits and politicians who wanted us to pass the biscuits, please, and ignore that body under the bridge.
* * *
One would think that after “Ode to Billie Joe” — a commercial success and lyrical masterpiece housed in the University of Mississippi library next to Faulkner — Bobbie Gentry would be allowed to do whatever she wanted.
To believe this is to not understand how women are treated in creative industries. When a woman has an unconventional hit, the reaction is often to try to contain her, even sabotage her. Success does not protect female writers — not even from their own publishers.
Instead of gaining support, Gentry found her abilities questioned. “I am a woman working for herself in a man’s field,” she told an interviewer in 1974. Reporters insulted her intelligence. Men took credit for her ideas. She was entangled in industry lawsuits, which she won. She became so wary of management contracts that she limited them to six months to ensure her freedom. Every career move was a tightrope of painstaking navigation and vindicated paranoia.
Her follow-up, The Delta Sweete, was true to Gentry’s vision: enigmatic ballads, raucous soul, and dark southern covers, including “Sermon” (popularized by Johnny Cash as “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”) and “Parchman Farm”, about the notorious Mississippi prison. The US press largely ignored the album and it sold poorly.
“No one bought [The Delta Sweete] but I didn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Gentry in 1968. I don’t know whether to believe her, but I’m glad she said it.
When America lost interest in Gentry, she became the first female songwriter to host a variety show on the BBC. She often co-directed, but the BBC would not give her formal credit, and she left.
When America regained interest in Gentry, she headlined Vegas revues and partnered with Glen Campbell, becoming an Americana sex symbol and a southern gothic intellectual all at once. A bandmate described her as “an overpowering presence” who micromanaged her elaborate shows. In Vegas, she married a rich man 31 years her senior and divorced him four months later, making lots of money. She signed on to an “Ode to Billie Joe” movie, making lots of money again.
Enough money to vanish in style.
The 1970s brought the voluntary end of Gentry’s career and some of her best songs. In 1969, she headed to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record Fancy, released in 1970, under the production of Rick Hall, one of few men to consistently champion her talent.
While on book tour this April, I visited FAME. I stood under the Fancy cover: a painting of Gentry wearing the red velvet high-slit gown of her album’s protagonist, a teenage girl named Fancy who slept her way out of destitution and into independence, unrepentant about doing what she needed to survive.
The tour guide played “Fancy” in the very room where Gentry recorded it. I felt like I was seeing a ghost, but it was the indomitable spirit of the song: Gentry’s second and final hit. Like Fancy, Gentry rewrote the rules of a rigged game before she quit it.
Gentry’s 1971 album, Patchwork, was another commercial failure. Produced solely by Gentry, it alternates between character vignettes; musical interludes; and wry, sad confessions — in particular, the closer, “Lookin’ In”:
I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out, I’m on the road again Feelin’ like I’m in a pantomime But the words will come to me in their own good time Tumblin’ and stumblin’ over in rhyme And the ugliest word that I ever heard, my friends, is sacrifice It’s an easy out for all you should have been…
She never made another record.
* * *
Bobbie Gentry was so ahead of her time that she had to leave it.
Was “Ode to Billie Joe” inspired by Till’s murder? No one knows. Gentry refused to reveal what was thrown off the bridge, believing it incidental to the indifference expressed in the face of tragedy. Scholar Kristine M. McCusker hypothesized that the song reflects changing attitudes of southern whites — including whether to show guilt — at the time Gentry penned the lyrics.
“Ode to Billie Joe” reflects 1955 and 1967 and 2025. American cruelty masquerading as respectability is timeless. What’s hard to fathom today is a cutting social critique becoming a mainstream hit. The music industry has been drained of its power to reflect the people, despite Gentry’s themes resonating now more than ever.
This is particularly true since 2021. The pandemic “ended” when officials decided to bury public health data: another sleepy Delta covid day. Sedition went unpunished until public memory became blurred enough to rehabilitate a coup plotter. Promises made in 2020 to end racist police brutality were not only broken but mocked by the very politicians who made them. (In one particularly grotesque example, Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for dying.)
On social media, anyone could join the callous chat. Americans mourning loved ones were berated. Americans hit by natural disasters were told by distant strangers to “just move.” Americans stripped of rights were ignored by former allies. Emotional breakdowns in public places were filmed and posted online so that a person having the worst day of their life could have an even worse one. Americans were told they deserved what they got and what they got was horrific: the agony, and the apathy.
Cruelty was incentivized for profit and boosted by algorithm. Good-faith arguments could not happen when both “good” and “faith” had vanished. But Americans were not supposed to discuss that: not in a way that acknowledged collective pain. We were told to “move forward”, politician code for “turn your back”. Move forward, they implored, justice is divisive to the unjust.
Gentry is foremost a storyteller. Her songs are not overtly political. But tragedy feeds politics, and politics breeds tragedy, and Americans have been both the predators and the prey. There are few who convey the cruelty of abandonment, and its maddening ambiguity, like Bobbie Gentry.
“Ode to Billie Joe” is known as a sad song. But its sadness lies in the absence of mourning. Death came and people shrugged. If they grieved, they grieved alone.
* * *
In December 2023, I belted out Bobbie Gentry songs as I drove through her name-checked towns of Kosciusko and Okolona and Tupelo. I took in the lay of her land, imagining it in her time. But it is still Gentry’s time: it will always be Gentry’s time. In America, every day is the third of June.
Over the last four years, as cruelty flourished and creativity fell under fire, I turned to Gentry. She didn’t compromise; she didn’t cut and run. She outwitted the industry that sought to suppress her. She had faith that her work would endure after she left the stage — and it did. Gentry destroyed respectability and then did the most scandalous thing of all: abandoned fame for freedom.
Sixteen hours may sound like a crazy amount of run time, but considering Ken Burns was covering nearly 100 years of music, his PBS documentary “Country Music” was anything but “too long.” It was excellent from start to finish, and I didn’t want it to end. That said, the venerable documentarian with the puddin’ bowl haircut made several glaring omissions. There are five performers that I believe Mr. Burns gave short shrift.
Here they be:
#1 GLEN CAMPBELL
Glen Campbell deserved more than the brief mention he had in the documentary. He was the most popular “cross-over” artist of his time (not always a compliment, but in this case it is.) “The“Glen Campbell Good Time Hour” television show, which aired 1969-1972, featured crackerjack live performances and duets with the likes of Ray Charles, Tom Jones, “newcomer” Linda Ronstadt, C&W greats Roger Miller, Merle Haggard and many others. Like all the variety shows of that time, the great music was punctuated with slimy celebrity walk-ons and unfunny comic skits, but what the hell can the son of an Arkansas cotton-picker do about that?
Can one possibly overstate the greatness of Glen Campbell’s most famous songs “Galveston,” “By The Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “Wichita Lineman”? (Each composed by the legendary Jimmy Webb.)
Glen called “Wichita Lineman” the favorite of all his songs. Mine too. In an interview before his death, Glen said that he filled in what might have been a third verse of “Wichita Lineman” with a guitar solo, one now considered iconic. He performed the solo on a six-string bass guitar belonging to legendary L.A. bass player Carol Kaye.
He was one of the most respected session musicians of the ‘60s – a certified member of the famed collection of session men deemed The Wrecking Crew. (There’s a documentary on those rascals also – check it out). That’s Glen’s guitar on Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” LP, and on Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night.” By his own count he played on 586 recordings. “None of those singing stars I backed even knew my name,” he has said. ” I was just the guy at theend of the line, picking guitar.” Among country guitar pickers – he had few peers.
And of course, Glen Campbell could sing! Along with his songs, Campbell’s duet album with the mysterious and talented Delta beauty Bobbie Gentry was nearly as good as George & Tammy’s duets, peaking at #1 (in 1968, no less!) Their on-screen chemistry was, well maybe not “clean as country water”, but certainly “wild as mountain dew.”
His TV show always began with the opening chords of “Gentle On My Mind,” the classic written by John Hartford, who was also a regular on the show. Some consider that song not only Glen’s signature, but the greatest country song of all time.
Glen’s life story was a country song – complete with drug addiction, love affairs (Tanya Tucker), booze, fights, jail, and comebacks (“Rhinestone Cowboy”). For christsake, he even shared a movie screen with John Wayne (“True Grit”).
He had a sad, but beautiful ending to his career and life. Following his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Campbell embarked on a final “Goodbye Tour” with three of his children joining him in his backup band. He said about his disease at that time, “The stuff I can’t remember is great because it’s a lot of stuff I don’t want to remember anyway.”
Wouldn’t footage of one of those final shows of Glen & Family have been perfect for a documentary that had such strong themes of family, faith, struggle, and Redemption?
#2 ALISON KRAUSS
This omission is even more curious than that of Glen Campbell, because Alison is as popular as she’s ever been, and has never been more respected in the greater music community (recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music.)
She has sung or played fiddle with nearly all the country artists in the documentary, including Dolly, Emmylou, Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill. She’s also collaborated with performers outside of country music, such as Elvis Costello (who wrote “Scarlet Tide” which she beautifully performs in the film Cold Mountain), and the famed classical cellist Yo Yo Ma (singing on “Slumber My Darling,” a song written by Stephen Foster in the year 1862.)
Alison is actually the most awarded singer and the most awarded female artist in Grammy history. She was a Nashville “Outlaw” from the get-go, signing with Boston’s Rounder Records in 1987 and staying loyal to her tiny record label even after she became popular. She has performed on the Academy Awards and sung at the White House (invited by President Barack Obama). She has even recorded an excellent duet album with Led Zeppelin’s Robert.
Even with her forays into rock, pop, and classical music, she has been a guardian of the true Bluegrass musical tradition from her teenage years to today.
So, how in Sam Hill did Mr. Burns pass on all this? Maybe I’m biased, as I first saw her play a live show in 1985 when she was just 18 years old, in a church hall less than a mile from my current home. I’ve loved her ever since.
Had Burns given her proper treatment, he may have used this sublime live performance of Alison performing the country spiritual “Down To the River To Pray,” a song featured in the Coen Brothers’ brilliant film, O Brother Where Art Thou?
#3: AUSTIN CITY LIMITS
Burns barely mentioned PBS’ iconic Austin City Limits in his documentary, even though he used lots of footage from the show. Now in its 40th season, Austin City Limits was far more entertaining, musically challenging, and more influential than anything ever presented on the often-creepy CMT! (Ralph Emery? bleh!)
Ralph Emery and “Shotgun Red”… Bleh!
Austin City Limits” first aired in 1975, with Willie Nelson featured in the pilot, and Asleep at the Wheel and Bob Wills’ Original Texas Playboys on the first episode. Each week since then, I could turn to my local PBS station and have the opportunity to see live performances from C&W legends like Ernest Tubb, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. But even more cool was discovering new performers on the “fringe” of C&W, getting little exposure elsewhere; performers like Lyle Lovett, Buddy Miller, Lucinda Williams, Shelby Lynne, Jim Lauderdale, John Hiatt, the Avett Brothers, Neko Case, The Jayhawks, Nanci Griffith, and Joe Ely – all who were first introduced to me by watching Austin City Limits.
“It was the biggest deal for me because it was a show for musicians,” singer Sheryl Crow said when invited on the show. “It was where you got to see authentic singer-songwriters, authentic players and it was the mark of real musicianship.”
Authentic, cutting-edge, and inclusive, Austin City Limits has done more to promote real country music than any similar coming out of Nashville. And of course, Austin City Limits featured the greatest theme song ever – Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues” (“I wanna go home with the armadillo…”)
#4 IRIS DEMENT
It’s not completely surprising that singer-songwriter Iris DeMent was ignored on the documentary. DeMent is notoriously shy and seldom gives interviews. She doesn’t always smile in photos. She mainly sings gospel music, yet she herself teeters between being an agnostic and an atheist. She’s recorded only six albums since 1993. Yet I completely agree with National Public Radio’s assessment of Iris:
“Iris DeMent makes music that celebrates humanity’s efforts toward salvation, while acknowledging that most of our time on Earth is spent reconciling with the fact that we don’t feel so redeemed. Grounded in hymns, early country songs, gospel and folk, DeMent’s work is treasured by those who know it for its insight and unabashed beauty.“
There is “unabashed beauty” in the seminal country songs Burns repeats through his documentary – songs like the Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘Waiting For a Train” and “Miss the Mississippi.” Iris DeMent is so grounded in that tradition, her best songs would fit comfortably on those original recordings of the Carters and “The Blue Yodeler” made in Bristol, Tennessee in the year 1927.
She was born in Arkansas, the youngest of 14 children in a Pentecostal household. Her beautiful song “Mama’s Opry” describes hearing her mother singing along to records by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family (“Nothing in the world is as dear to me, as the sound of my Mama’s Opry”. )
Her debut album, 1992’s “Infamous Angel,” included the song David Byrne would record, “Let the Mystery Be.” Another song from the debut LP, “Our Town” was memorably played during the closing scene for the final episode the much-adored TV series “Northern Exposure.”) Television critics have referred to that scene as the finest ending to a television series ever, and I believe most of the credit should go to Iris’ touching recollection of her the hometown of her youth.
The Los Angeles Times wrote on July 26, 1995:
“Northern Exposure” was in fact quite life-affirming in its celebration of community, friendship and nature and its respect for diversity and life’s imponderables. Now it’s passing away. Yet even as it does so, the show gently reminds us once again, with tonight’s final montage and its last brilliant musical selection of Iris DeMent’s “Your Town”, that life goes on. Let’s dance.”
In 1999, Iris sang four duets with John Prine on his wonderful album “In Spite of Ourselves,” including the great title track. In 2004 she recorded Lifeline, a collection of traditional Protestant gospel songs. In her liner notes, DeMent recounts how her mother sang these songs in times of stress looking straight at the sky, “as if she were talking to someone.” In 2012, she recorded a song “The Night I Learned How Not to Pray.”
While some find her vocal stylings contain too much twang, Merle Haggard once called her “the best singer I’ve ever heard.” Iris believed that title belonged to Tammy Wynette, for whom she dedicated the song “Making My Way Back Home” from her last LP. “Tammy was just the greatest country singer there ever was.”
About the country songs she writes, Iris has says, “I’m not writing for my own entertainment. I’m writing and singing as part of a calling. I feel like I have a job to do, and I invite the spirits of the dead into my room; I invite my history, the people who got me here. When I go to work, I actually call to mind other people I’m close to. I sort of pray.”
Country Music? Country music is Iris DeMent.
#5 JOHN PRINE
John Prine is, in my opinion, the best songwriter living today.
Of John Prine’s greatest song, “Angel From Montgomery,” Bonnie Raitt has said, “I think that song probably has meant more to my fans and my body of work than any other song.” Prine says he wrote the song based on a “vivid picture of this woman standing over the dishwater … She wanted to get out of her house and her marriage and everything. She just wanted an angel to come take her away from all this.”
While “Angel From Montgomery” is often listed amount the top 100 country songs of all time, other performers prefer “Paradise,” “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” “Souvenirs,” or “Unwed Fathers.” Bob Dylan’s favorite is “Lake Marie.” Johnny Cash’s had a hit with “Sam Stone” in 1971, even though Cash cut-out Prine’s original lyric, “Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.” Prine’s songwriting has been described as “veering from humorous to devastating, often in the same line.”
Since Prine’s self-titled debut in 1971, he has recorded over 20 albums (my favorites are “The Missing Years” and “In Spite of Ourselves”), and performed concerts around the world. A young journalist named Roger Ebert wrote a rave review for the Chicago Sun- Times, essentially launching Prine’s music career. Next, an admiring Kristofferson got him his first record contract. Dylan and Cash soon hailed Prine as one of the best songwriters of his generation. Today Prine is listed among the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Grammy Hall of Fame inducted his 1971 debut album in 2014.
A new generation of songwriters have adopted him as mentor and hero. Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell and Margo Price, each have opened for Prine. “We hold him up as our Hank Williams,” says Todd Snider. Kacey Musgrave had a hit with the awesomely-titled “Burn One With John Prine.” I’d like to burn one with him, too. Who wouldn’t?
As for a great Country Music “story” – he was working as a mailman when he recorded that first record. He served in the Army, stationed in Germany, during the Vietnam War (how in the world did Burns not interview Prine in his segment about the Vietnam war?) His grandpa was a carpenter. He’s been beating cancer for about 20 years. And like Jesus Christ, he eventually found his “Irish bride.” (see “Jesus, the Missing Years”.)
So. Many. Great. Songs.
I love the songs of Townes Van Zandt, Gram Parsons, and Guy Clark – each of whom Ken Burns devoted considerable time. None of these can hold a candle to John Prine as a songwriter. (True, Gram and Townes died young). But just as Townes’ most unforgettable song “Pancho and Lefty” was dissected for its greatness in the documentary, so could “Angel From Montgomery,” and several other Prine compositions – like “Hello In There”:
“Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger And old rivers grow wilder every day Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, “Hello in there, hello”
John Prine is a national treasure. He became the first songwriter ever to read and perform his work at the Library of Congress – a tribute usually reserved for prize-winning authors, politicians and respected academics.
I can’t for the life of me figure out how Ken Burns left John Prine out of his documentary on country music. But it’s a big ol’ goofy world, right? The good news is that Prine will soon be the focus of his own documentary (working title “John Prine: Hello in There”). Hello and thankfully not yet goodbye.
“Up in the morning Work like a dog Is better than sitting Like a bump on a log Mind all your manners Be quiet as a mouse Some day you’ll own a home That’s as big as a house …
There’s a big old goofy man Dancing with a big old goofy girl Ooh baby It’s a big old goofy world”
