Bobbie Gentry

Bobbie Lee Gentry is an American singer-songwriter who was one of the first female artists to compose and produce her own material in the context of the post-war American music scene. Her songs typically drew on her Mississippi roots to compose vignettes of the Southern United States.
Gentry rose to international fame with her intriguing Southern Gothic narrative "Ode to Billie Joe" in 1967. The track spent four weeks as the No. 1 pop song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was fourth in the Billboard year-end chart of 1967 and earned her Grammy awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1968.
Gentry charted eleven singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and four singles on the United Kingdom Top 40. Her album Fancy brought her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. After her first albums, she had a successful run of variety shows on the Las Vegas Strip. She lost interest in performing in the late 1970s. Since 2010, Gentry has lived in a private gated community outside Memphis, Tennessee.

Description provided by Wikipedia under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 4.0