Song Information and Story
"Dark Lady" was written by The Ventures keyboard player Johnny Durrill. He recalled: "I spent a week in his (Snuff Garrett's) office playing him songs, one of which Cher recorded. Later, when I was on tour in Japan with the Ventures, I was writing an interesting song. I telegraphed the unfinished lyrics to Garrett. He said to 'make sure the bitch kills him.' Hence, in the song both the lover and fortune teller were killed."
The "Dark Lady" of the song's title is a fortune teller. The narrator of the song learns that her lover has been unfaithful to her with, as the fortune teller says, "someone else who is very close to you." The narrator returns home in a state of shock, unable to sleep, and then realizes that she had once smelled, in her own room, the perfume the fortune teller had been wearing. She races back to the fortune teller's place with a gun and catches her lover and the fortune teller "laughing and kissing," and shoots them both to death in a fit of rage.
In 1974, "Dark Lady" topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for one week, becoming Cher's third solo #1 hit. The song was also a #1 hit in Canada and Sweden, a top ten hit in Norway and a top twenty hit in the Netherlands. Like "Half-Breed," the song struggled in West Germany and the UK, though it managed to reach top forty status in the UK.
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