Cher - Dark Lady (1974)

"Dark Lady" is a pop rock song recorded by American singer-actress Cher, and the title selection from her eleventh studio album, Dark Lady. Written and composed by John Robert "Johnny" Durrill and produced by Snuff Garrett, it was released as the album's first single in early 1974. The song became Cher's third solo U.S. number one hit on March 23, 1974, and her last until "Believe" twenty-five years later.

"Dark Lady" was written and composed by The Ventures's 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." Thus, "Dark Lady" may with some accuracy be described as a murder ballad, even though the narrator of its lyrics essentially commits a crime of passion.

The critic Peter Fawthrop, writing for Allmusic, called this song a "grimly comedic folk song."

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." Advised to leave the fortune teller's shop, never to return, and to forget she has ever seen the fortune teller's face, the narrator returns home in a state of shock, unable to sleep, and then realizes to her horror that she had once smelled, in her own room, the very perfume the fortune teller had been wearing. Sneaking back to the fortune teller's shop with a gun, she there catches her lover and the fortune teller "laughing and kissing," and shoots them both to death, presumably 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.