{"id":301898,"date":"2025-11-19T21:23:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/301898\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T21:23:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:23:12","slug":"who-is-the-eagles-song-witchy-woman-all-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/301898\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is the Eagles song ‘Witchy Woman’ all about?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

(Credits: Showtime \/ The Eagles)<\/p>\n

Wed 19 November 2025 19:11, UK <\/p>\n

Before the release of their second single, \u2018Witchy Woman\u2019, the Eagles<\/a>, and Don Henley in particular, had to prove themselves as songwriters. Then came this slinking, sultry number, carried over from guitarist Bernie Leadon\u2019s days in the Flying Burrito Brothers.<\/p>\n

The remnant was creditable, but the Eagles were aiming higher. So, Henley endeavoured to take Leadon\u2019s demo and turn it into something altogether more spellbinding. And no, the inspiration powering him on was not Stevie Nicks, even if she has since said she would\u2019ve considered it a major honour.<\/p>\n

After Henley had wrestled into something approaching a country rock opus, the track soon strutted its way into the top ten of Billboard\u2019s singles chart and captured the imagination of the aforementioned Stevie Nicks<\/a>, who was only 24 when it was released in August of 1972, and she was searching out her break as a songwriter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Henley\u2019s lyrics about a \u201crestless spirit\u201d with \u201craven hair and ruby lips\u201d seemed to embody the allure of the West Coast for rock fans in the early 1970s, while the group harmonies on the chorus showed just what the Eagles were all about. There was something wild and dark about the song, contrary to the bright guitar jangles and earnest, folksy charm of \u2018Take It Easy\u2019, the band\u2019s debut single that Glenn Frey had written with Jackson Browne.<\/p>\n

It seems that Henley dreamed up his song\u2019s protagonist as a feverish vision<\/a> while bed-bound and burning up with a bad case of the flu. She didn\u2019t appear out of nowhere, though. A book he was reading to pass the time, as he recovered, by English author Nancy Mitford, gave him a sense of the character he was writing about.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Eagles in all their glory. (Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n

Mitford was principally a novelist but was also known for her biographies of some of history\u2019s most romantic figures, including a book about Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of French king Louis XV, and another about the love life of Renaissance man Voltaire. Yet it was Mitford\u2019s story of a more modern romantic icon that captured Henley\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

Who was the book about, then?<\/p>\n

It was Mitford\u2019s 1970 biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, the famed novelist and visual artist whose appearance in American literary circles and troubled marriage to F Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s captivated the public, that the Eagles songwriter was reading while bedridden. Mitford\u2019s Zelda traces the tragic life of the early 20th century\u2019s archetypal \u201cflapper\u201d girl and femme fatale, from her introduction to future husband Scott in 1918 to her premature death at the age of just 47 when the hospital where she was institutionalised burnt down.<\/p>\n

In a 2016 interview<\/a> about his band\u2019s debut album, Henley remembered learning about how Fitzgerald \u201cdrifted in and out of psychiatric hospitals suffering from schizophrenia (or more likely, bipolar disorder), while her husband\u2019s health and career spiralled downward, due to his abuse of alcohol.\u201d The way Mitford portrayed her subject\u2019s struggles with mental illness and its impact on her art and public persona influenced his characterisation of the titular \u2018Witchy Woman\u2019.<\/p>\n

The song isn\u2019t all about Zelda Fitzgerald, though. Henley has described the title character as \u201ca composite\u201d, of Fitzgerald and \u201cthe roommate of a girl\u201d he was going out with at the time. She took an active interest in the occult, practising what he called \u201cwhite witchcraft\u201d by enacting s\u00e9ances, palm reading, and other mystical rituals. While Henley wasn\u2019t convinced about these practices, he \u201cthought it was charming and seductive\u201d and apparently worthy of writing a song about it.<\/p>\n

Henley filled in any lyrical gaps with images of shamanism that he\u2019d taken from the books of Peruvian-American academic Carlos Castaneda. Overall, then, \u2018Witchy Woman\u2019 is the generalised characterisation of a wayward seductress with a soft spot for sorcery, more than the portrait of anyone specific. <\/p>\n

Nevertheless, no one inspired it more than the woman who had most of American high society under her spell during the Roaring Twenties. He simply took it upon himself to welcome her into the Sordid Seventies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Showtime \/ The Eagles) Wed 19 November 2025 19:11, UK Before the release of their second single,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[53387,6346,88,216,157034],"class_list":{"0":"post-301898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-don-henley","9":"tag-eagles","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-zelda-fitzgerald"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}