Long before she was an iconic diva made almost entirely of plastic, Cher was a beautiful woman and one heck of a good singer. Never more so than on this story song.

She had hits with and without her husband Sonny Bono and, as great as Sonny & Cher were together, she never had a song as fantastic as this one. It really is one of the all-time greats.

A hectic, pell-mell pastiche of a Phil Spector production (Cher got into the biz singing backing vocals for Spector), its opening line – “I was born in the wagon of a travelling show” – sucks you into its world from the start, making you want to know more about this itinerant family, travelling the south in a turn-of-the-century century medicine show, making money whatever way they can. 

The women “dance for the money they throw” (you assume they’re burlesque dancers, or strippers) and the men “preach a little Gospel, sell a couples bottles of Doctor Good” – snake-oil elixir with supposedly magical properties – to the men of whatever godforsaken settlement they’ve stopped at that night. 

It’s an extraordinary story song, densely packing themes of racism, teenage pregnancy and prostitution into its tale of a family of travelling carnival performers, with an almost Marxist class consciousness in its core analysis of how the cycle of poverty and exploitation is fated to follow them through to the next generation.

It’s got a slice of B-movie horror thrown in when the 16-year-old narrator, travelling from town to town with her family, gets impregnated by  an older boy they give a ride to from Mobile to Memphis. “Papa woulda shot him if he knew what he’d done,” Cher sings, in a throwaway line that chills the blood. 

Read between the lines and this could be the story of any immigrant family today: a strong hard-working unit forced to adapt to hostile circumstances and faced with prejudice at every turn: “We hear it from the people of the town – they call us gypsies, tramps and thieves.”

Yet the locals who scorn them are hypocrites who lust for what the family is selling. “Every night all the men would come around, and lay their money down,” Cher sings, hinting at gambling or prostitution – the only way for the family to survive. 

Of course, I didn’t pick up on any of this back in 1971 when the song went to No.4, giving Cher her first hit since Bang Bang five years earlier. I just thought it was a rollicking good tune – which it certainly is.