It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “These Boots are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra
March 15, 1966
“These Boots are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra
#1 on the Record Retailer Singles Chart (UK), February 17 – March 16, 1966
As a confessional about aging, Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year” was almost redundant. Nothing made Frank seem more like a middle-aged emblem of another era than the ascendance of his daughter Nancy and her defiant, risqué rock ‘n’ roll. Nancy Sinatra wasn’t a sweet, demure teenager; she was a 25-year-old divorcée with Brigitte Bardot-inspired big blond hair and snaky black eyeliner, dressed in scandalous fashions like hot pants, miniskirts, and go-go boots. Fittingly, her first big hit wasn’t some saucer-eyed song of devotion, but a dirty/sweet kiss-off taunting the unfortunate chucklehead who didn’t treat her right.
At the time that Nancy Sinatra recorded “These Boots are Made for Walkin’,” she had just ended a five-year marriage to teen idol Tommy Sands and was in keen need of a refreshed, modernized image. She found the ideal foil in Lee Hazlewood, a gritty Texan with a basin-deep baritone, who had drawn notice writing and producing for rockabilly guitarist Duane Eddy. The pair seemed to come from different worlds, but together they offered a pairing of extreme gender archetypes: he, the hard-bitten rambler; she, the dewy-eyed siren. (Their 1967 duet “Some Velvet Morning” even fluctuates between time signatures depending on who’s singing.)
On the Hazlewood-penned “Boots,” however, Sinatra is left to inhabit both roles by herself. By wedding her girlish purr to Hazlewood’s terse, tough-guy phrasing, Sinatra both confirms and subverts conventional expectations of femininity, turning “Boots” into a cross between a come-on and a threat. (Hazlewood’s legendary note to Sinatra, to sing it “like a 16-year-old girl who fucks truck drivers,” strikes at a similar muddling of innocence and experience, sensuality and filth.) Likewise, even the fact that Sinatra was singing about boots — rugged men’s footwear co-opted as ultra-trendy women’s fashion, both covering legs and emphasizing their form — felt hip and transgressive.
Any hint of danger in the record, however, is mostly defused by its sense of humor, from the childlike vernacular (“truthin’,” “samin’”), to the flamboyantly upbeat horns, to Chuck Berghofer’s heat-warped doublebass slide, at once foreboding and absurd. Even Sinatra’s warning that “one of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you” is delivered with a wink. Is this playfulness meant to assure listeners that her forwardness is just role-playing, that they don’t have to take her seriously? Or is the song tripling back on itself, smuggling in a feminist message in the guise of just kidding? (Sinatra’s wry delivery does suggest she’s telling a joke to someone who’s not getting it and relishing the thought of how hard the punchline will land once he does.)
“These Boots Were Made for Walkin’” topped the UK pop charts at the same time that “Lightnin’ Strikes” was ruling the Top 40 in America. It would be neat symmetry to think of “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” as a rebuke to its counterpart’s questionable sexual politics. Whereas the conventional gender attitudes and Four Seasons-esque falsetto leaps of “Lightnin’ Strikes” fit squarely within the mold of early ’60s pop (even as its weirdness elevates it to some other dimension), Nancy Sinatra’s self-assured sexiness and tart, plainspoken vocals epitomized the increasing directness of the latter half of the decade.
“Boots” ultimately succeeded “Lightnin’ Strikes” as a #1 hit in America as well, a move that could be parsed as a jump-cut from one version of the ‘60s to another. But neither song is quite that easy to pin down either, both delivering their messages with a wink, or perhaps even a wink-upon-a-wink. In an era where traditional gender roles were being questioned, both songs offer ambiguous answers, muddying the waters between what’s intended to be ironic and what’s just camp. That in itself, more than their lyrical themes or vocal styles, marks both songs as thoroughly modern, splitting the difference between the repression and naïveté of the past and the radical changes just around the bend.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
