Right from the start of her career, country singer Bobbie Gentry was surrounded and shrouded in mystique. Owing to her smokey, dusty and earth-worn voice, many early listeners couldn’t work out whether the voice they were hearing drifting over the radio waves was from a Black singer or a white one. Others wondered who wrote all those fantastic songs she was singing. Surely there was a man behind the lyrics for songs such as ‘Mississippi Delta’, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ and ‘Fancy’?

But while those questions were quickly answered as her star grew—she was a white southern singer, with a lot of the blood of the land in her voice, blood which also spilled into all of her self-penned lyrics—a far bigger question has grown up around her name since her last public appearance in 1982: Whatever happened to Bobbie Gentry?

When she first appeared on the scene, she sounded at times like Karen Dalton, at others like June Carter, and yet also at turns like Dusty Springfield . In fact, her singing style blended and meshed the best attributes of all of those women and then some; the blues and bite of Dalton, the Southern charm of Carter and the deep soul of Springfield come together in Gentry’s voice to create a beguiling, captivating and entrancing blend of Americana, dust, lust and grit.

While her voice may have at times invoked images of those three women, she was singing for every woman. Gentry was a powerful and empowering woman, working in an industry and genre that was even more male-dominated than it is today. Not only was she a multi-talented musician who wrote her own songs, but those close to her in the 1970s also characterised her as a “remarkable businesswoman” who knew how to use her talent, position, appeal, and feminism to guide her career and retain control over her direction.

And she wasn’t afraid to show it publicly, either, helping other women empower themselves. Of one of her biggest hits, she said, “‘Fancy’ is my strongest statement for women’s lib, if you really listen to it. I agree wholeheartedly with that movement and all the serious issues that they stand for—equality, equal pay, daycare centres, and abortion rights.”

And it wasn’t just the women of her time she was inspiring. While plenty of the other dominant genres of the era got into bed with each other and swapped ideas, it wasn’t often that country and soul converged like they did when Gentry got into the studio. When she recorded ‘Fancy’ at the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals with the greatest producer of his era, Rick Hall, her gritty blend of soul, country, southern roots music, funk and real-life lyrics caught the ear of and inspired swamp-rock songsmith Tony Joe White.

“I hadn’t started writing yet,” he later remembered of the first time he heard Gentry. “I was listening to the radio one day, and I heard ‘Ode to Billie Joe’. Man, this girl with a great voice, playing a cool guitar, and I thought: ‘How real can you get?’ I thought, I am Billie Joe–I’ve picked cotton and been in the river and been in the swamps. I thought if I ever write something, it’s got to be as real as ‘Ode to Billie Joe’. It wasn’t too long after that I started on ‘Polk Salad Annie’.”

Another thing that Gentry and Tony Joe White had in common was that they complimented their own songs with covers from the Great American Songbook and the pens of more modern geniuses like Burt Bacharach and Hal David but infusing and imbuing those songs with their own distinctive southern styles so that you’d never know the songs once belonged to somebody else.

And one of the most fascinating, not to mention mind-blowing, facts about her career is that she managed to fit it all into such a short space of time. From her Grammy-winning 1967 debut album Ode to Billie Joe —which swept to number one in the Billboard 200 , Country and Cash Box charts as well as going to number five in the R&B charts—Gentry released six further records over the next five years, but she never released another album again after that.

Though her last record, Patchwork from 1971, was well-reviewed, it was so badly received commercially that both the album and its singles failed to chart. Gentry would only return to the studio once more, in the late 1970s, though the songs she recorded at those sessions would never make their way onto a finished album. A few short years on from those unsuccessful sessions, Gentry made her final ever public appearance when she attended the Academy of Country Music Awards on April 30, 1982.

Since then, she hasn’t been seen on the stage or in the studio, and any screen appearances have been re-runs from her old TV show. She doesn’t give interviews, and she doesn’t release new music. Over the years, rumours have abounded that she can be found living in a gated community outside Memphis, Tennessee, while other whispers have her tucked away in the more sprawling, urban landscape of Los Angeles.

These days, you’re more likely to find her ghost in the lyrics of songs by Nikki Lane, Margo Price, Kacey Musgraves or Taylor Swift. Her whereabouts are as mysterious as the “something” she and Billie Joe were seen throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge in her most famous song.