"If you’re looking to portray loss of innocence, your character dropping flowers into a muddy river ain’t a bad metaphor," Tommy Tomlinson writes about the 1967 song, "Ode to Billie Joe" on Nieman Storyboard. "Every writer can learn from music – not just rhythm and pacing and mood, but the poet’s efficiency a songwriter needs to tell a story in the short span of a song. Bobbie Gentry wrote a textbook here in 358 words."
.png)
