This is my first foray into the 33 1/3 series, and it wouldn't have been anything like my first choice based on the subject. I've been commissioned to write a piece of similar length and pop culture focus, and my first thought was of the 33 1/3s, a series I've seen now and again but never actually browsed. I was bemused to discover my university library has just two titles: "The Who Sell Out," and this one, "Ode to Billie Joe." Despite a life-long hatred for the Gentry song (and really, that type of droning country-western), I took them both home, and being an insomniac, I started this one first.

And I read through it in a single 90-minute sitting.

Tara Murtha's approach is clearly investigative, pitching herself as the voice of a generation of listeners taken in by the spell of the song - and by the persona concocted by Bobbie Gentry herself. The book plays out like a mystery as Murtha sorts her way through Gentry's short career, noting performance styles, conflicting anecdotes from colleagues, and the constant heavy, sticky, Southern Gothic haze through which the Gentry mystique can only be seen. If this sounds like a textual translation of the "Ode" song's uneasy languor...well, that's exactly how it comes across. The more I read, the more I wondered if Murtha, introduction-writer Jill Sobule, and numerous other participants even like the song, or Gentry, that much - or if, in fact, it's a lot more complicated than that. They're in awe. They're inspired. They're shocked. They're a little bit uncomprehending, too. It's as if they heard something they didn't quite understand when they were very, very young, and it's been haunting them ever since. Perhaps "Ode to Billie Joe" haunts anyone who's really stopped to listen to it carefully.

The book is nominally about the album, and more expansively about Gentry's career as a whole, but Murtha keeps coming back to that damn song. Like "Picnic at Hanging Rock," the equally uncomfortable novel that came out the same year of 1967, "Ode" is less about the disappearance of the central character than the effect their departure has on others. It's catastrophic, even under the veil of stoicism, and it wounds. Here, Murtha finds a longer, deeper scar created by Bobbie Gentry herself. She didn't jump off a bridge, but she's gone - never, it seems, to return - and everyone touched by her, in whatever small way, has come out irreparably changed. ( )