This is my take on this famous country song, solving a cold murder case.
The scene is set …early summer in the lower Mississippi valley….”The third of June a sleepy dusty delta day.”….”I was out chopping cotton, my brother was baling hay…” Their Father was a good farmer, rotating his crops… Cotton in time takes fertility out of the soil…so for some years he sows grass to let the land recover.
It is when they go back to the house for lunch that the young woman gets the bad news that her lover Billy Joe McAllister, has killed himself ….jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge…drowning in the river.
Papa did not approve of Billie Joe…one of the local bad boys.. “never had a lick of sense” and his family farm “seems like nothing ever comes to no good up on Chochtaw ridge’….this was far poorer less profitable land .
They find it hard to believe that this young man has suddenly killed himself….”I saw him at the sawmill yesterday up on Chochtaw ridge” now he is dead….
Her brother recalls happier times when he Tom and Billie Joe had put a frog down his sisters back at the local movie show…”and were you talking to him after church just last Sunday night”.
With the local gossip going round….it is hard for a young couple to keep their relationship a secret, it is just as bad as the old communist East German secret Police.
Her mother notices her daughter is suddenly in shock…not eating…even though Mom has been cooking all morning….Mum mentions the latest bit of gossip from their minister “Brother Taylor” who had dropped in that morning ,and had been invited to lunch that Sunday.
“He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Chochtaw ridge…and she and Billie Joe was throwing something off the Tallahatchie bridge.”
There was a man passing through their community…that no one seems to have noticed. A man from a rich honorable family who has gone bad…he forced himself onto this young woman. As she was waiting for her lover….but Billie Joe turns up and kills this man with his bare hands. The young people knowing they have committed a murder…cover it up by dumping the body in the river..
In early summer there is a lot of water flowing through the rivers, and the current will take the body away very quickly.
I would think that the evil man was very cunning… knowing how not to be noticed by any of the locals. parking his car some distance away…keeping under cover.
The song takes up one year later…”since they heard the news about Billie Joe”…Her brother and his new wife Becky Thompson “suddenly” have the money to buy a business in Tupelo (Elvis Presley lived there in his younger years). They were sharecroppers renting or leasing the land, they would be comfortable but would not have a lot of money.
Family honor is very important in the south….The rich family would have given this young woman and her family a lot of money to cover it up…the fact that a member of the family that went bad had forced himself onto her…they would have hired a good private detective to sort it out quietly.
Billie Joe was a gentleman…before he killed himself he sent a letter to the local sheriff …taking sole responsibility for the murder and putting the young women in the clear. Yes the Sheriffs department was in on the cover up…The Sheriff being an older wiser man would have made his own arrangements with the rich family.
There was something else wrong with Papa; an underlying condition…people with bad lungs were the first victims of the Covid virus…a fit healthy farmer would not die from a virus.
Her Brother is arranging accommodation for them in town…while the two women are selling off the farm equipment…under the condition they are allowed to stay on for a while in the farmhouse while a neighbor has taken over the lease on the land…
Both women are suffering loss …Mama does not want to do much of anything, while the young woman throws flowers off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
I really wonder if she will find love again…Billie Joe’s selfless act.. is a hard act to follow.
GT
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