“Fancy” by BOBBIE GENTRY

The barefoot country girl from Mississippi could write a good story, and gave her own a twist ending.

…but Fancy was my name

Roberta Streeter was born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, where she lived on a farm without electricity or running water. Her grandparents traded a cow for an upright piano, which she taught herself to play and on which she wrote her first song, “My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog.” She later lived with her father in Greenwood, MS, 130 miles downriver from Memphis, before moving west to live with her mother, who had remarried and married well. It was there in Palm Springs that she saw the movie Ruby Gentry¹, about a poor girl (coincidentally with the same first name as her mother) who marries a rich man she doesn’t love, and took the name Bobbie Gentry. 

Gentry said she only sang on the demo of “Ode to Billie Joe” to save money on hiring a singer, but that demo, along with the southern soul hipshaker “Mississippi Delta,” got her signed to Capitol Records in June of 1967. “Ode to Billie Joe” was presumed to be the B-side, but after veteran arranger and film composer Jimmy Haskell emphasized the song’s narrative² by overdubbing ominous, cinematic strings, it was released as a single on July 10. She was still performing the casino circuit with her Hawaiian-themed review — a style she’d picked up dancing with Johnny Ukulele’s Vegas act — at the time. By the end of August, it was the #1 song in the U.S., where it stayed for four weeks, and her debut, Ode to Billie Joe, supplanted Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as #1 on the album charts. 

Her second album, The Delta Sweete, on which she played most every instrument and by most accounts produced, was in stores by the following February. Its deep south fantasia didn’t hold much for those looking for a sequel to “Ode to Billie Joe,” and the record’s ornate theatricality didn’t hold with Capitol’s image of her as a simple country girl — country yes, but hardly simple. (As a florid piece of late-60s pop art, it remains a fascinating listen.) The record skimmed the charts and produced two moderately successfully singles, the swampy, seemingly lusty “Okolona River Bottom Band,” and a cover of Doug Kershaw’s Cajun classic, “Louisiana Man.” Local Gentry was released that September, and while stylistically a more able follow-up to Ode to Billie Joe, it tanked. She’d have likely been consigned as a one hit wonder if not for the album of duets with an ascendant Glen Campbell released only a month later, which produced a hit in “Gentle On My Mind.”

“Fancy” comes from Gentry’s 1970 album of the same name, her sixth album in three years. It’s the only song she wrote for the album, and it’s a proper follow-up to “Ode to Billie Joe” in how it tells a compelling story. For Gentry’s many talents (singer, songwriter, painter³, music producer and theatrical producer -- her self-run Vegas review won awards, broke attendance records, and made bank) her greatest is as a storyteller. “Ode to Billie Joe” is rich in detail, but also a masterful show-don’t-tell narrative. We never learn what the narrator and Billie Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge; if we did, it would distract from what she later described as a “sort of a study in unconscious cruelty," the casual indifference to tragedy shown by the girl’s family in lyrics like “Billie Joe never had a lick of sense / pass the biscuits please.” 

Gentry said that “Ode to Billie Joe” originated as a short story, which she also claimed for “Fancy.” This new story begins with a scenario similar to where the first one leaves off — a mother and daughter alone and in desperate circumstances. This narrator, however, isn’t going to throw anything away.  

Fancy was made with producer and studio owner Jim Hall at FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, AL, the original home to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Hall gives the song a “Son of a Preacher Man” treatment; Gentry’s cover of the Dusty Springfield hit on her Touch ‘Em with Love album, her fifth, is where she found her stride in a transition into a sultry blue eyed soul singer. “Fancy” has a similar insistent but subdued rhythm, here pulled along by the crack off the rim of the snare. Moaning strings underscore the verses while horns punch up the choruses; portentous drum rolls echo in the distance as the narrative unfolds: An 18 year-old done up in “a satin dancin' dress that had a split on the side clean up to my hip” is given the one chance at life that her bereft mother felt she had:

She handed me a heart shaped locket that said

"To thine own self be true"

And I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across

The toe of my high heel shoe

It sounded like somebody else, it was talkin'

Askin', "mama, what do I do?"

She said, "just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy

They'll be nice to you"

The third act of Fancy’s story is announced by all instruments going quiet except for the notably more funky drums, which snap the reins on the tempo. Here is where a story turns from a potential tale of tragic harlotry to how the “mama’s gonna move you uptown” plan came to fruition. And over a swelling Muscle Shoals groove, she dares us to judge her for it:

Now in this world, there's a lot of self-righteous hypocrites

That'd call me bad

And criticize mama for turning me out

No matter how little we had

But though I ain't had to worry 'bout nothin'

For nigh on fifteen years

Well, I can still hear the desperation

In my poor mama's voice ringin' in my ears

"Here's your one chance, Fancy, don't let me down

Oh, here's your one chance, Fancy, don't let me down”

Gentry said in 1974, “‘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, day care centers, and abortion rights.” It was her last hit, and an even bigger one for Reba McIntyre 20 years later. She continued with her Vegas show, which was a top draw on the strip, and with those considerable earnings to invest, built a business portfolio with holdings in real estate, her music publishing company, Gentry, Ltd., and the Phoenix Suns as the NBA team’s first owner. She sold the team in 1980, which is about when she began to withdraw from public life altogether.

This, too, is often a setup for a tragic story: a faded celebrity retreating into seclusion. Bobbie Gentry’s own third act also has a ring of triumph, however. The barefoot girl from Chickasaw County made what we like to call “fuck you money” except when the fuck you is directed at our attention. She’d seen enough of how we saw her, and you can’t be friends with Elvis, like she was in the Vegas years⁴, and not feel the corrosive effects of fame. Her “move uptown” was moving out of any kind of spotlight. As she told Boston Globe columnist Marian Christy during her Vegas heyday, “Success is recognition and an open channel for creative energies. But I’m tired of hearing artists say they don’t perform for money. Fame without fortune is empty.”

11 Song Playlist

“Fancy” and a brief survey of Gentry’s songs, plus The Geraldine Fibbers’ blistering 1997 cover of “Fancy,” a favorite of mine, featuring Carla Bozulich’s flame-thrower vocal and Nels Cline (Wilco) on guitar. (Reba’s cover is fine but it’s got enough play already.)

Crap Video Quality, Amazing Pantsuit

Gentry on the Johnny Cash Show. Wow.

Thanks

You made it this far, all the way to the end? Thanks for sticking it out. I hope I made it worth it. Your shares and comments are like the end of Elf, where belief in Christmas what powers Santa’s sleigh. Except that the sleigh is a free email. Or the guy who writers it. Something like that.

1. Starring Jennifer Jones, Karl Maldon, and Charlton Heston.

2. It’s frequently described today as a “southern gothic” narrative. Southern surely, but it’s hardly gothic. From Encyclopedia Britannica, “Southern gothic, a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents.” The everyday quality of the story is the point. The girl’s family are just dicks.

3. The liner notes to the Girl from Chickasaw County box set cite Gentry as the painter of the Fancy and Patchwork album covers.

4. Elvis and Gentry’s friendship made them tabloid fodder. She eventually sued Movie Stars Magazine in a $2,000,000 defamation suit for its cover claiming that she was pregnant with Presley’s baby.