Fancy (Bobbie Gentry song)

The Southern Gothic style-song is told from the perspective of a woman named Fancy, approximately thirty-three years old, looking back to the summer she was 18.

Fancy's family (consisting of Fancy, a baby sibling whose gender is not mentioned, and their mother; the father having abandoned them) lived in poverty — "a one room, rundown shack on the outskirts of New Orleans". Her mother is terminally ill and has no one to care for the baby.

In a last, desperate act to save Fancy from the vicious cycle of poverty, her mother spends her last money to buy Fancy a red "dancing dress", makeup and perfume, and a locket inscribed with the phrase "To thine own self be true". She encourages Fancy to "start sleeping uptown" (a line not mentioned in McEntire's remake) and to "be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they'll be nice to you," implying prostitution is the only way Fancy will be able to gain financial independence. Soon after, Fancy's mother dies and her baby sibling becomes a ward of the state.

Fancy recalls her mother's parting words: "Here's your one chance, Fancy, don't let me down" and "If you want out, well, it's up to you." She soon becomes entangled in the world of prostitution, her "head hung down in shame," and vows to find a way out and become "a lady someday, though (she) didn't know when or how." Fancy is taken in off the streets by a "benevolent man" and begins having multiple relationships with wealthy, powerful men, which she parlays into owning a Georgia mansion and a New York City townhouse flat. In the end, she denounces "self-righteous hypocrites" who criticize her mother for putting Fancy into prostitution, stating that her life of luxury through selling sex was preferable to a life of pious poverty.

Much of the fictional Fancy story had parallels in Gentry's own life: she too had grown up in poverty in the South, and although she never explicitly admitted being a prostitute, she had less than a year prior to releasing the song married the much older casino magnate Bill Harrah in a marriage that would last less than a year.

The song was a cross-over country and pop hit for Gentry in early 1970. The album containing the song received a Grammy nomination for "Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance, Female".[2]

In 1991, Reba McEntire took the song to number eight on the Billboard Country charts. McEntire also produced a popular music video for the song, expanding on the song's storyline. For years, McEntire has encored her live concerts with the hit, singing the first half of the song in a ragged black mink coat and hat then removing them to reveal a floor length red gown for the second half. McEntire has referred to the song as her "possible signature hit". (The edit of the song heard on most radio stations cuts the song short after three verses, before the title character makes it off the streets.) Since 1984, Reba wanted to record it but her producer at the time, Jimmy Bowen was against it because he believed the song was too closely associated to Gentry. When Reba changed producers to Tony Brown, she was able to record it for her 1990 album Rumor Has It.[6] As of November 2019, the song has sold 760,000 digital copies in the United States.[7]

In 2014, a mashup of McEntire's version of "Fancy" and Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's hit recording of the same title surfaced on the Internet. The mashup, which replaces the Charli XCX-sung chorus in Azalea's hit with the chorus from McEntire's "Fancy," was reviewed favorably by the country-music website TasteOfCountry.com.[8]

In 2020, masked Canadian cowboy crooner Orville Peck released a cover of the song on his Show Pony EP. In an interview with country music publication The Boot, Peck notes that his version is inspired by both the Bobbie Gentry original and the 1991 version recorded by McEntire, which Peck also considers an "original" in its own right. "I liked the high energy of that version when I was a kid especially," Peck explains, although his stripped-down version of the song harkens more toward the Bobbie Gentry record. [9]

Certifications

Region	Certification	Certified units/sales
United States (RIAA)[12]	Platinum	1,000,000
Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics