Song Background and Plot
The song is styled much in the vein of a late 1950s/early 1960s rock-and-roll song, as evidenced by its saxophone solo during the musical bridges.
"Bobbie Sue," named for the song's main character (and described as "the sweetest grape that ever grew on the vine"), is in a sense about an 18-year-old woman's sexual awakening. The role of boyfriend, the song's antagonist, is filled by the singer.
The first verse establishes that the antagonist had heard about Bobbie Sue from a friend, and he quickly spends as much time with her as possible. After turning 18, Bobbie Sue begins to rebel against her parents — Robert and Ruth — and decides to marry her boyfriend. Bobbie Sue's parents apparently disapprove of the relationship ("Her Daddy told her that she'd have to wait/Her Mama said don't make a big mistake"), but the young couple is determined to elope ("But we'll keep driving till we're out of state/And when they find us it'll be too late").
Read more about this topic: Bobbie Sue (song)
Famous quotes containing the words song, background and/or plot:
“The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)