These Boots Are Made For Walkin’
“LEE Hazlewood changed everything,” says Nancy Sinatra. “I was doing bubblegum music and singing in higher keys and he said, ‘That’s not right. You’re not a virgin any more. You’ve been married and divorced. We need to get you where you belong.’ And he was right – it was silly to keep doing what I called ‘Nancy nice lady’. It was time for a change.”
“So Long Babe” was the first fruits of this new collaboration and it charted where all the ‘Nancy nice lady’ singles had failed to. With its kiss-off lyrics and Sinatra’s low, nonchalant delivery, it was what Hazlewood would call “dumb”. “He’d say, ‘If it’s dumb, it’s good,’” says Sinatra, speaking to Uncut from her Hollywood apartment. “Meaning not stupid, but simple. It’s tough to do that, it really is.”
Hazlewood’s next planned single for Sinatra was “The City Never Sleeps At Night”. But when the singer heard another new track he and arranger Billy Strange intended to record for a Hazlewood record, she demanded to cut it herself. “I fell in love with the song, right there and then.”
To track the song, “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”, they enlisted the help of the crack studio musicians later known as the Wrecking Crew, who recorded it in a couple of hours and a handful of takes at Hollywood’s famed United Western Recorders.
“I always thought
