The Carroll County Accident on the Tallahatchie Bridge

the Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

By Wes Clark

To understand this article you first have to be familiar with three songs, for which lyrics are posted below.

I don't consider myself especially stupid. Sure, it sometimes takes me a while to catch on to certain kinds of things (like calculus, which troubled me in college), but when it comes to the arts, I think I'm pretty sharp.

I listen to classical music a lot and have become adept at picking up subtleties and nuances. In Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, for instance, there's a scene where the heroine, Marie, seems distracted. For a brief moment the orchestra plays a distorted version of a march theme associated with a Drum Major whom Marie admired from a window. Clearly, Berg means to impart that Marie is becoming obsessed with the Drum Major. (She later has a disastrous affair with him.)

And in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, I quickly understood and appreciated all the little cinematic hints that Deckard, himself, may be a replicant - one of the biologically engineered beings he hunts down and kills.

Don McLean's song American Pie is replete with interesting commentary about popular music - all of which I can pick up and figure out for myself. (That is, once I actually stopped to listen to the lyrics and figured out that it wasn't about the American Civil War, which was my original understanding of the song! I got hung up on that "This'll be the day that I die" part.)

The odd thing about me is that when it comes to the Country-Western ballad I'm totally lost. And that's where Carroll County Accident, Ode to Billy Joe and The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia come in.

The first song of this trilogy I had heard was the Ode to Billy Joe, which was a hit for Bobby Gentry in 1967, when I was eleven. The lyrics completely mystified me. What was thrown off the bridge? And why? I didn't find out until after I had married my dear wife Cari, in 1980. A sharp person herself, a constant reader and a former disk jockey at a radio station, Cari understood popular music. Being female, she also understands human interrelations far better than I do.

Cari's sister had seen a movie adaptation of the song that explained the mystery: Billy Joe MacAllister was a self-repressed homosexual, and leapt to his death out of shame and frustration.

Or something like that. I don't know if that's what Bobby Gentry intended - the lyrics are pretty abstruse. I assume that, because she's the songwriter and presumably owns the rights to the song, that she was consulted by the filmmakers and approved of the plot.

Vicki Lawrence had a hit with The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia in 1973, not long after American Pie arrived to befuddle me. At the time I was seventeen, and trying to wrap my brain about who did what to whom and why the lights went out, puzzled me. I figured the reason why the lights went out (which I assumed was the most important part of the song), was because somebody was electrocuted for murder in a place in the American South served by a rickety power grid. It was only until Cari, exasperated, pointed out the key lyric "Little sister don't miss when she aims her gun" that the figurative lights came on for me. Duh.

Carroll County Accident I have never heard; I came across it when I did an article about the amazing LP cover art of Porter Wagoner not long ago. What caused my interest was visual: Who is this man with the sculpted hair and the outlandish wagon wheels on his jacket, why is the camera angle so odd, and why is sweat streaming down his face? Is he watching the Carroll County Accident? Or does he know it's about to happen? Or, worst of all, did he cause it? Intrigued, I did some searching on the Internet and came across yet another puzzling, subtle set of lyrics - which I printed out and took home for Cari's analysis and explanation.

Ohhh... I see. Walter Browning and Mary Ellen Jones were having an affair! And Porter Wagoner, after expending some sweat thinking about it, saw no reason to tarnish the posthumous reputations of anyone and disposed of the ring. (Where it was retrieved by Smeagol, who became Gollum, and...)

I don't recall exactly when we first started having our discussions about the meaning of Country-Western ballads, but Cari was (and is) mystified at how dense I could be. "Oh, for crying out loud, Wes!" was (and is) a constant cry. Being somewhat perverse by nature, I find the whole thing amusing. So, naturally, to tease my wife I sometimes inject the topic into completely unrelated conversations about people:

Cari: "Wes, we've had this conversation before; she's the friend of my cousin, who had the kid with the eye problem. Remember? She was in a car wreck?"

Me: "On the Tallahatchie Bridge?"

Cari, you see, has a stunning capacity for remembering the details associated with other people's lives. As for me, I'm an engineer. When it comes to most people-details, it goes in one ear and out the other. Perhaps that's why I have problems with song lyrics in the first place.

My wife might disagree, but this whole matter has had the odd effect of enriching our married life somewhat. After all, when people stop communicating, they grow apart. And even an argument is still conversation. (Not the preferred means of communication, I know.) I was amazed to discover that, when Dad died, after 25+ years of married life where they constantly bickered and argued, Mom had all the usual signs of grief and heartbreak. She had actually loved him.

So every time the subject of song lyrics in songs comes up between Cari and me, I smile. As we are rapidly becoming empty-nesters and the topics of conversation are less centered around the logistics of raising kids, this can be expected to happen more often. I suppose it would be a good thing for our marriage if I became less of a tease.

Or perhaps not.

NOTE: Cari didn't pick up on the fact that, according to Bobby Gentry, the Tallahatchie Bridge is in Carroll County. (Where Porter Wagoner's accident took place?) Ah... but which Carroll County? Doing a quick search on the Internet, I see Carroll Counties in Iowa, Maryland, Kentucky, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia (where the lights went out). Possibly other states, as well. However, since the Tallahatchie Bridge is in Mississippi, Bobby Gentry must be talking about that state - her state of birth, as it turns out.

By the way, there is no Candletop, Georgia, which is mentioned in Vicki Lawrence's song. If there were, I feel certain it would be in Carroll County, Georgia.

Trivia from Avocado Memories reader Ken Denney! From wordiq.com: "The country song Carroll County Accident, a hit for and now one of the signature songs of Porter Wagoner, was written by noted country songwriter Bob Ferguson when he passed through Carroll County when driving from Nashville to Memphis on U.S. Highway 70." So Porter's Carroll County is in the Volunteer State.

Lastly, I'd like to see a show where Bobby Gentry, Vicki Lawrence and Porter Wagoner get together to panel a discussion about obscure Southern car accidents and homicide cases...

Additional info from Internet correspondant William Scott Lincoln: "I happened to brush past your site when I was looking for information about the song "Ode to Billy Joe." Just thought I'd point out that I found out that the event probably didn't take place in Carroll County, Mississippi. The Tallahatchie River doesn't run through there. It runs down into the delta region of Mississippi south of Sardis, MS. I also found a site that has a scan of an old map of that county, where the separation between the delta lowlands and the highlands to the east was once known as Choctaw Ridge. So where the river comes down from the highlands would be where the song is describing."

Postscript by Wes, 7/26/06: I just listened to Herman's Hermit's "Henry the Eighth." I just realized that the reason why he's the eighth is because the widow's been married seven times before (I always misheard it as "several.") So he's the eighth husband - therefore, Henry the Eighth. Since 1965 I thought the song was about the historical character Henry VIII - I obviously didn't bother listening to the lyrics.

Isn't pop music swell?

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