"Fancy" is a song written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry in 1969. The song depicts its heroine overcoming poverty to become a successful escort. Gentry viewed the song as a feminist statement: The country song was a crossover pop music hit for Gentry. It was covered in 1990 by country music artist Reba McEntire on her albumRumor Has It. McEntire's version surpassed the original on the country music charts, reaching the Top Ten on Billboard's Hot Country Hits in 1991.
Content
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 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" 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 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.
Critical reception
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".
Chart performance
Reba McEntire version
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". 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. As of November 2019, the song has sold 760,000 digital copies in the United States. 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.
Music video
The music video for the song tells the story of the song itself in more detail. It opens with the title character, Fancy Rae Baker, played by McEntire, riding in a taxi cab and arriving at the site of the small shack on the outskirts of New Orleans where she grew up, which is now abandoned. The video takes something of a creative license with the song as McEntire's version of Fancy, much like McEntire herself, is a famous singer and actress. The story of the song plays out against the background accompanied by flashbacks of Fancy's past with her mother and baby sibling playing prominent roles. Near the end of the video, Fancy visits her mother's grave in the backyard of the shack and sees her mother's ghost standing nearby. She tells her that she understands now and forgives her. As the video ends, Fancy departs in her taxi and a large sign is seen in the front yard that says that the property is to be the future home of the Fancy Rae Baker Home for Runaways, dedicated to the memory of her late mother, with the home's motto "to thine own self be true". Though the song's lyrics indicate that the events described took place in the summer Fancy turned 18, in the video, the clothing worn by the characters, and the surrounding bare foliage, would appear to indicate winter conditions in southern Louisiana. Another strange fact about the video was it was not filmed in Louisiana; it was actually filmed on a cold, rainy, January day, a few miles outside Nashville.
