Country Music Hall of Famer and pop culture icon Reba McEntire‘s career song and forever show closer. An unexpected anthem for the LGBT community. Bobbie Gentry’s dissertation on female empowerment.

“Fancy” is so much more than a mid-charting ’90s country radio hit – it’s a boot-straps story of hope that has spoken to generations of music lovers from wildly different social and economic backgrounds.
Gentry wrote and performed “Fancy,” releasing it in 1970.

“‘Fancy’ is my strongest statement for women’s lib, if you really listen to it,” Gentry explained.

McEntire, who identifies with the ‘from nothing-to-something’ plot of the song, re-released “Fancy” in 1991. It topped out at No. 8 on Billboard’s country songs chart – by metrics nowhere near McEntire’s biggest hit. Thirty-four years later, there’s not a better example of a song from that era that outperformed country radio and its charts. Streaming didn’t exist at the time, so the song’s life mainly depended on McEntire, fans, CMT, and country radio. Where country radio faltered – the others rallied.

McEntire turned Gentry’s provocative song into her performance legacy.

She told Parade that, out of all her songs, “Fancy” most closely mimicked her own personality.

“It’s about a rags‑to‑riches way of life,” she said. “Persevere, stay in there, work hard, and you’ll achieve your dreams.”

“Fancy” lyrics detail a survival story of a young girl escaping poverty in Louisiana. To save her daughter from starvation, the mother scrapes together enough money to buy her daughter “a dancing dress.” She did her daughter’s hair and makeup and then sent her out to do sex work. In the song, the girl never saw her mother again.

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-heeled shoe/ It sounded like somebody else that was talking/ Asking Mama, “What do I do?”/ She said, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy/They’ll be nice to you”

McEntire, a movie, television, and Broadway star, adapted the song into one of the most memorable music videos in country music history.  The singer portrays the adult Fancy Rae Baker, an affluent and famous woman in black fur, who takes a taxi back to the rickety shack where she grew up. A sign in its yard tells viewers she plans to turn it into a home for runaways.

McEntire compared it to Cinderella and the Broadway musical she starred in, “Annie Get Your Gun,” telling Country Living they’re all “poverty then make it in the big world.”

Much like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” or Cher’s “Believe,” it’s a defiant anthem for those who have to fight to be seen – one of the reasons the LGBT community embraces “Fancy.”

“The big part of the story is she did something that wasn’t socially accepted … but she got where she wanted to go,” David Lowman, the performer behind the Coti Collins persona and a Reba impersonator, told Oxford American. “And she didn’t care what people thought.”

Lowman even shared a stage with McEntire in concert, serving as a body double in the famous red dress during a fiery stunt.

“Reba would be on the other side, at the end of the fire,” he told Oxford American. “So it looked like … Reba traveled, in the red dress, across the stage.”

Most of the time, however, when country music fans think they see McEntire on stage, they do.

“I become Fancy Rae Baker when I sing ‘Fancy,” she told Absolute Radio.

A Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that McEntire “jumped into the role, singing it with a don’t-you-dare-judge-me authority.”

Thirty-four years after McEntire’s version—and 55 years since Gentry first released it—”Fancy” remains a benchmark for narrative songwriting. It paved the way for artists like Miranda Lambert and Ashley McBryde to tell the sometimes messy and layered stories that reflect listeners’ complex and multifaceted lives.