I’m not a songwriter, but I do have a suggestion for those who are.
If you think you have a potential hit on your hands, make sure the lyrics include a specific date.
Just ask Bobbie Gentry.
Monday was June 3, or “was the third of June” in the lyrics of Gentry’s classic 1967 hit “Ode To Billy Joe,” as anyone who spent as much as a minute on social media was certainly reminded.
The opening lines “Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day” are fixed in the collective memory of generations of country/popular music fans, especially here in Mississippi, Gentry’s home state.
The song made Gentry an overnight sensation. In fact, her debut album of the same name briefly knocked The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” off the top of the album charts, no small achievement.
Even so, a song released 57 years ago doesn’t get much streaming play. Even plays of a hit song diminish over the years and decades, eventually producing only a trickle of royalties in this modern age of popular music.
On June 1 or June 4 or, really, just about any other day, streaming of “Ode To Billie Joe” is pretty random.
Ah, but on June 3 each year, the song surges in popularity, producing a tidy payday for the Gentry, now 81. The famously reclusive entertainer hasn’t done an interview in more than 40 years, so we can only speculate what “the third of June” has meant to her finances.
But it’s easy enough to see that the inclusion of that date somehow made the song truly timeless.
I’m surprised songwriters haven’t caught on, but they clearly haven’t.
I could find only a few songs that mentioned specific dates (not including Thanksgiving, Christmas or the 4th of July, New Year’s).
Jon Bon Jovi’s 2016 song, “August 7, 4:15” was a tribute to the daughter of his former personal manager. The child disappeared near the family home and was found murdered a mile away. It remains an unsolved crime.
Rapper and record-producer J. Cole’s “January 28” is his birthday while Al Stewart’s “Night of the 4th of May” from 1972 was a fictional (I think) story about a man who has an affair and is haunted by the memory of that date.
None of those songs were chart-toppers, but a fourth song that mentions a date certainly is. Like “Ode” it was written by a Mississippian, in this case West Point’s Barrett Strong (with co-writer Norman Whitfield).
Mention the opening line of 1971’s “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” – “It was the third of September“ – and fans of Motown and The Temptations will respond, almost as a reflex, “The day I’ll always remember.” I suspect that “Papa” streaming gets a spike each year when Sept. 3 rolls around.
Lots of songs have months or days of the weeks in their titles and lyrics, but having a specific day to spark a recollection is pretty good marketing. Every year that date rolls around, people remember and respond.
In that sense, The Four Seasons’ 1975 “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” was a missed opportunity.
How easy it would have been to have altered “Oh, what a night/Late December back in ‘63” to
“Oh, what a night/Sixth of December back in ‘63.”
Any random number would have linked the song to a date and generated some play.
This is the easy part, of course.
Writing a hit song, one so memorable that fans can cite the lyrics, is a rare and unpredictable thing.
Even the most successful and prodigious songwriters only manage to pull them off a handful of times.
So, in the event you are a songwriter, I strongly recommend you make reference to a specific date in every song, which really shouldn’t be that hard to do. That way, if one of your songs hits the popularity lottery, you’ll have a reliable once-a-year payday to carry you into old age.
“Was the third of June” didn’t contribute anything meaningful to the story Bobbie Gentry told in “Ode to Billy Joe.” But as it turns out, it’s the one line that always brings the song back to our attention each year.
It was an unintentional stroke of marketing genius, as it turned out.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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