"The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" is a song by American poet and songwriter Shel Silverstein. It was originally recorded by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show and also by the English singer Marianne Faithfull. Taken from her 1979 album Broken English, it was released as a single in November 1979. It is featured on the soundtracks to the films Montenegro, Tarnation and Thelma & Louise. Faithfull also performed the song during a guest appearance in the episode "Donkey" from the fourth season of Absolutely Fabulous.
In an interview on ITV's The South Bank Show aired on 24 June 2007, Faithfull said that the story she intended to put across in it was that Lucy climbs to the rooftop but gets taken away by "the man who reached and offered her his hand" in an ambulance ("long white car") to a mental hospital, and that the final lines ("At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found forever / As she rode along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair ...") are actually in her imagination at the hospital. Thelma and Louise has a similar fatalistic theme.
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