Why would a mother name her daughter Fancy? I have heard some strange names for children in my time, to be sure, but Fancy is not one of them. I want to stick a pin in this question because I will return to it later, but the mystery of the song “Fancy,” performed by its songwriter Bobbie Gentry as an autobiographical song, begins with its name. I first became familiar with the song in the early 1990s when it was remade by Reba McEntire. The song was successful both of the times it was released as a single. Bobbie Gentry took it to the top 30 in country and the top 40 in pop where it became her second and last top 40 mainstream hit. Reba McEntire took it to the top ten in country where it became one of the biggest country hits of 1991. Yet this modest success does not in any way capture the way that this song is viewed as a legendary feminist anthem of freedom from the snobbery of respectable people and the way they look down on those who do what they need to do in order to survive and to rise from desperate poverty.

It is important when examining the song “Fancy” as written by Bobbie Gentry and as performed by her as well as by Reba McEntire is that both women in presenting this song viewed it as autobiographical in some fashion. Bobbie Gentry herself came from a poor background and had raised herself up to become a mainstream singer-songwriter noted for her enigmatic and challenging songs, and about a year before releasing “Fancy” as a song had been in a brief marriage with the owner of casino company Farrah’s, which mirrors the song’s maternal advice that if a pretty girl is good to rich men they will be good to her. It is unsure how much of the song is meant to be a description of her life, with the melodramatic story of a dying mother sending her daughter to prostitute herself coming straight out of a melodramatic tradition that was old by the time a similar story turned up in the “Two Elizas” subplot of Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility. In Bobbie Gentry’s story, this intergenerational poverty that Fancy and her family struggle with is based out of New Orleans, about which more will be said later as well. In both versions of the song, the singers are keen to make the song as self-identifying as possible. Reba McEntire makes Fancy a rising up and comer as a country singer and actress, as she was, in her music video, while Bobbie Gentry views her young adulthood as being a struggle to rise through and from sex work, but what is most important to note here is that both singers meant the song to demonstrate their own pride in having risen from the social position of their birth even if others looked down on them for it. As singers, musicians, actors and actresses, writers, and other creative types are often seen as people of low morality and character by provincial social elites, this aspect of their experience makes sense.

What we have, so far, then, is a song that is viewed as a classic that deals delicately with subjects many people find to be unpleasant if not taboo, and that is the exploration of prostitution as a means of betterment of one’s life. It should be noted that this song has layers, layers which are not often explored, and so we should acknowledge that even its recognizable layers are filled with what we view as troublesome and problematic material, so that when we examine still deeper layers of the song and find even more that is unpleasant and troublesome, we can say that at least we were warned. It is unclear just how deep Bobbie Gentry wanted to go in this song, but before we tackle the lyrics of the song, I felt it worthwhile to warn the reading audience that it is going to get increasingly unpleasant from here, as this song stumbles upon some dark corners in American history and culture that most people would rather not think about. With that warning given, let us turn to the lyrics of the song and see what it is that Bobbie Gentry was saying about herself and her own background here.

The first verse of Fancy goes like this [1]:

I remember it all very well lookin’ back.
It was the summer I turned eighteen.
We lived in a one-room, run down shack
On the outskirts of New Orleans.

We didn’t have money for food or rent.
To say the least we were hard-pressed.
Then Momma spent every last penny we had
To buy me a dancin’ dress.

Momma washed and combed and curled my hair,
And she painted my eyes and lips.
Then I stepped into the satin dancin’ dress.
It was split in the side clean up to my hips.

It was red, velvet-trimmed,
And it fit me good,
And starin’ back from the lookin’ glass
Was a woman where a half-grown kid had stood.”

As “Fancy” is part of a tradition of epic country story-songs, the story here appropriately begins when the eponymous Fancy was eighteen as the older Fancy is looking at where her life’s trajectory was launched. Fancy came from a deeply poor family without money for food or rent, and her mother spent all of the family’s money to buy an expensive and revealing dancing dress for her elder daughter, and put make-up on her face, making the young and presumably somewhat naive Fancy wonder what was going on, as she had not previously been prepared to handle the adult responsibilities that were being placed on her shoulders at that moment. The more alert listener or reader can see in that song the guiding hand of a worldly wise mother putting her young and presumably innocent daughter into a dangerous world, but this is not viewed as a negative by the narrator herself, whatever anyone else might think about the matter.

What follows next is the first and longest version of the chorus, which appears in condensed form a few more times in the album between the verses:

“”Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down
Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down
Lord, forgive me for what I do (Please)
But if you want out, well it’s up to you
Now, don’t let me down
Your Momma’s gonna help you move uptown”
(Don’t let me down, don’t let me down)”

If Fancy is not yet aware of what is happening, her mother has no such defense, as she is aware when she bought the dress and put it on her teenage daughter (who might or not be eighteen at this time, depending on how early in the summer the song begins at) that she is doing something for which forgiveness is needed from God. That said, at this point we see Fancy’s mother telling her that if she wants a better life for herself, it is going to be up to her. The mother wants her daughter to live a better life than she did, and sees only one way that is going to happen. The lyrics, of course, will spell it out for those who do not find it obvious enough already.

The second verse of Fancy goes like this:

“Momma dabbed a little bit of perfume on my neck
And she kissed my cheek.
Then, I saw the tears well up in her troubled eyes
When she started to speak

She looked at our pitiful shack and then
She looked at me and took a ragged breath.
“Your Pa’s runned off, and I’m real sick
And the baby’s gonna starve to death.”

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 that was talking
Askin’ “Momma what do I do?”
“Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy,
And they’ll be nice to you.””

If the first verse did not paint the melodramatic scene vividly enough, here, with a roach crawling over her high heels and her mother’s dying appraisal of the state of her family, Gentry spells it out for us. Fancy is portraying herself, again, as innocent and rather clueless of the burden that is being placed on her, as her mother only gives her the advice that her rise in life is going to depend on her ability to charm gentlemen through her charisma. We might look down at this advice, but it must be admitted that if more young women were raised to be nice to gentlemen, they might find the kindness and politeness repaid, perhaps even many times over. That said, this particular verse is a stellar example of negative nostalgia, in that the scene here is not something anyone would want to return to. Fancy is leaving her impoverished background behind.

The third verse of Fancy is as follows:

“Well, that was the last time I saw my Ma
The night I left that rickety shack,
‘Cause welfare people came and took the baby.
Mom died and I ain’t been back.

But the wheels of fate had started to turn,
And for me there was no way out.
And it wasn’t very long ’til I knew exactly
What my Momma been talkin’ about.

I did what I had to do,
But I made myself this solemn vow
That I was gonna to be a lady someday,
Though I didn’t know when or how.

I couldn’t see spendin’ the rest of my life
With my head hung down in shame.
I mighta been born just plain white trash
But Fancy was my name.”

It is in this third verse that the listener, if they have been slow enough not to catch on so far, finally is told what it is that Fancy is doing. Even here, though, Gentry is rather indirect and understated about what is going on. After hearing the dying counsel of her mother, she leaves home and sells her body on the streets, determined to be a lady somehow without much knowledge in how to do so. In addition, she is determined not to feel ashamed for doing what had to be done to survive. This is gentle, to be sure, in its portrayal of the horrors of prostitution, but it is not sentimental in its attitude. With her mother dead and her baby sibling taken in by the state, and her father already run off, there was nothing for her to return home to. Fancy sees herself as having been born as plain white trash with higher aspirations, but there is something more going on here, and we will return to this question of identity later.

The fourth verse, with the final chorus and the song’s abrupt ending, go as follows:

Wasn’t long after a benevolent man
Took me in off the street.
And one week later I was pourin’ his tea
In a five-room hotel suite (yes, she was).

Well, I’ve charmed a king, a congressman,
And an occasional aristocrat,
And I got me a Georgia mansion
And an elegant New York townhouse flat.

And I ain’t done bad (she ain’t done bad).

Now, in this world there’s a lot of self-righteous hypocrites
That would call me bad,
And criticize my Momma for turnin’ me out
No matter how little we had.

And though I ain’t had to worry about nothin’
But now on fifteen years,
I can still hear the desperation
In my poor Momma’s voice ringin’ in my ear.

“Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.
Lord, forgive me for what I do (please),
But if you want out, well it’s up to you.
Now, don’t let me down.
Your Momma’s gonna help you move uptown.”

And I guess she did.”

The song ends with a demonstration of the success that Fancy found over the fifteen years after her mother died and, as Gentry elegantly put it, turned her out. Fancy, looking back, views herself as not having done anything wrong in finding and enjoying the charms of wealthy gentlemen, political leaders, and the property she has obtained through such means. She views the moral condemnation of self-righteous hypocrites as being of no account because what was important to Fancy, and implicitly the audience as well, is making one’s life as good as it can be, regardless of what has to be done to get there. Despite the fact that her success depended on the kindness of wealthy men disposed to share some of their wealth with her in exchange for her charms, Gentry views this story as a feminist one because of the agency that Fancy took (and that Gentry took) in rising above the state of her poor and deprived family background.

So far we have examined the context of “Fancy” as a song that both Reba McEntire and the song’s songwriter and original performer Bobbie Gentry viewed as autobiographical and as a source of defiant pride as being expressive of their choice to rise above where they came from. There are elements of this song, though, that carry much darker resonance with people who did not have the same freedom and autonomy as the singers of this song, though, and to point at those layers, let us take several aspects of the song “Fancy” and lay them before the reader. Fancy is portrayed as being an oddly named poor white girl from the area near New Orleans whose father abandoned the family and whose mother pushes her into the street to take advantage of the notorious fondness of Southern gentlemen for elegant light-skinned prostitutes as a means of advancing herself.

In the 19th century, New Orleans was famous for its fancy trade, where attractive girls and women who were a quarter, an eighth or even less black were prostituted to make as much money for their owners before they were worn out and tossed aside after years of use and abuse. Indeed, there was a whole segment of the slave trade, specific to the United States, by which attractive girls who had generations of white fathers and had become increasingly white after generations of mixture between free white fathers and slave mothers, which was labeled as the Fancy trade. Was it deliberate that Fancy was given the name of those who without their consent turned out by their fathers or masters (sometimes the same person) to profit others and not themselves were involved in the fancy trade? And if this was deliberate, was Fancy herself following in a family tradition of prostitution that had gone back to slavery when Fancy’s maternal ancestors (we may gather) were not considered to be white at all, but were rather slaves who could nonetheless pass as white, only turning the tables on the tradition by using it as a way out of poverty instead of being an element in multigenerational exploitation? If that is the case, then even being considered as poor white trash would have been an important step up on the social scale that allowed Fancy to rise where her mother’s folk had not been allowed to rise through their expertise in charming Southern gentlemen. I will leave it to the reader to decide if these larger and darker layers are deliberate or coincidental, and to what extent they reflect on the tone and meaning of Gentry’s classic tale of prostitute uplift.

[1] Lyrics throughout from Musixmatch, searched on Bing on September 15, 2023.