Bobbie Gentry – "Fancy" (1969)

Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy

They'll be nice to you

I’m a doting grandparent.  So I totally get why Bobbie Gentry’s grandmother – who lived on a Mississippi farm that didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing – traded the family milk cow for a piano for her seven-year-old granddaughter.

Bobbie used that piano to compose her first song, which was titled “My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog.”  (I bet he was a good dog, too.)

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Bobbie Gentry – who was born Roberta Lee Streeter in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in 1942 – was raised on her grandparents’ farm because her parents got divorced shortly after she was born and her mother moved to California.

Gentry took her stage name from a 1952 movie, Ruby Gentry, which starred Jennifer Jones as a poor-white-trash Southern girl who dreamed of becoming rich: 

Bobbie’s life resembled the movie heroine’s up to a point, but she left Mississippi and moved to the Palm Springs, California area to join her mother when she was 13.

Bobbie attended a private high school in posh Rancho Mirage, which may have the most golf courses per capita of any burg in the whole damn U. S. of A.  (Many famous entertainers – including Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra – and powerful political figures – including Gerald Ford, Spiro Agnew, Barbara Boxer, and Barack Obama – have either owned homes there or visited frequently.)  

Gentry then moved to Los Angeles, where she attended UCLA and then the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. 

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The heroine of Ruby Gentry didn’t get rich by moving to California and becoming a world-famous singer-songwriter.  She pulled herself out of poverty the old-fashioned way – by marrying a rich older man.

Bobbie Gentry followed her namesake’s example by marrying casino magnate Bill Harrah (who owned properties in Las Vegas, Reno, and Tahoe, and once possessed the finest collection of rare and exotic cars in the world) when she was 27 and he was 58.  

Bill Harrah and Bobbie Gentry

Five months later, they were divorced.  (Gentry wasn’t a success when it came to being a wife.  Her second marriage lasted not quite two years.  Her third marriage – to singer-comedian Jim Stafford of “Spiders & Snakes” fame – also lasted less than two years.  She’s remained single since divorcing Stafford in 1980.)

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Gentry never came close to replicating the success she had with her 1967 mega-hit, “Ode to Billie Joe.”  

Like that song, her second-biggest single – “Fancy” – tells a Southern Gothic-style story.  It made it to the top forty on both the pop and country charts in 1969.  

Reba McEntire’s remake of “Fancy” was a #8 country-western hit in 1991.  

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Between 1967 and 1981, Bobbie Gentry was a very busy woman.

She recorded seven studio albums, produced and choreographed a popular Las Vegas revue, and frequently appeared on American, Canadian, and British television.

Bobbie Gentry in a recording studio

But that all came to a sudden end in 1981.  Bobbie Gentry hasn’t recorded, performed, or given interviews since then.

A couple of years ago, a Washington Post reporter tracked her down – she lives in a very nice gated community near Memphis – and called her on the phone, hoping that Gentry would grant her an interview.

But Gentry – who is currently 76 years old – hung up on her.

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Click here to listen to “Fancy,” which Bobbie Gentry called “my strongest statement for women’s lib.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: