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Jessie is a boy in Rick Springfield’s 'Jessie’s Girl'

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11 Jan 2022
5 min read
Question: in rick springfield's "jessie's girl," jessie is...

Passing on a shot at alliteration, “Gary’s Girl” just wouldn’t have had the same ring.

Conveying desperate and not-so-latent wanting of a best pal’s girlfriend, Rick Springfield’s 1981 hit, “Jessie’s Girl” reached that year’s top pop chart with a combination of smart, catchy lyrics and the curiosity of a gender-neutral title.

Leading the fifth studio album, Working Class Dog, for the Australian-born Springfield, the tune was a summer smash in ’81, reaching the top of the Billboard chart in August of that year; ultimately, the song spent 32 weeks on the chart and enjoyed further influence across the music world as it was the No. 1 song in the country exactly when MTV debuted.

Presenting an engaging, building crescendo between verse, chorus and bridge (along with rare lyrical use of the word “moot”), “Jessie’s Girl” finds pure covet from the outset; so sings the song’s opening two verses:

Jessie is a friend, yeah
I know he's been a good friend of mine
But lately something's changed that ain't hard to define
Jessie's got himself a girl and I want to make her mine

And she's watching him with those eyes
And she's loving him with that body, I just know it
Yeah 'n' he's holding her in his arms late, late at night

In later recalling the song’s impetus to Songfacts, Springfield said of the both the friend and the “girl”:

"I don't know her name. It was a brief relationship I had when I was making stained glass for a while. I was going to a stained glass class in Pasadena, and I met this guy and his girlfriend. I was completely turned on to his girlfriend, but she was just not interested. So I had a lot of sexual angst, and I went home and wrote a song about it. Then about four months later I stopped going to the class and lost contact with them. The only thing I remember is his name was Gary, so I changed the name, because 'Gary' didn't sing very well. But the whole thing is absolutely what I was feeling. He was getting it and I wasn't, and it was really tearing me up. And sexual angst is an amazing motivator to write a song. Actually, Oprah's people tried to find her, and they got as far back as finding the stained glass guy. I couldn't remember his name, but I said it was late '70’s; they found him, and he had died two years earlier, and they'd thrown all his papers out a year after that. So we missed finding out who she was by a year."

It’s also roundly-believed that “Jessie” was founded in Gary wearing the jersey of Ron Jessie, who was a wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams.

Despite not finding the girl, the singer no doubt found salve in his success; concurrent to the country’s top hit, Springfield wasn’t just all over the radio in the early ‘80’s, he was on TV, too, starring as Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital from 1981-83 (a role he’d later reprise thrice more, first from 2005-08, then again in both 2012 and in 2013, for the show’s 50th anniversary).

Echoing the song’s lasting popularity, “Jessie’s Girl” has been revisited in myriad movies, perhaps most notably in 1997’s Boogie Nights.

And though he never (yet) again reached No. 1 status, Springfield has remained prolific on the mic, ultimately record 22 total studio albums.

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