100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #22 Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made For Walkin’

Released: 1965

Cool is such an ephemeral, fleeting status, one usually conferred by hipsters on a purely subjective basis to people and things with a point to prove. Like any other decade as taste and fashions warped in the sixties, stuff became frosty, avatars like Andy Warhol, Twiggy, Mick and Keith, hell, even The Beatles were cool after they loosened up a little.

But you know what lasts longer than cool? Kitsch. Chintz. Uncool. However you want to describe the opposite of cool, there’s no arguing that is has a durability, an unworried, unself aware half life. Nancy Sinatra had to contend with being the daughter of the father, but after joining the family business (No, not that one) domestic success was elusive, until she met maverick writer and producer Lee Hazlewood, of whom she managed to persuade to donate her a song.

These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ so her argument went would be better delivered from a female perspective, intuition which allowed the slightly weird, misogynist narrative to be completely reversed. In possession of surely the most famous double bass line in pop history courtesy of The Wrecking Crew’s Doug Berghofer, it was whatever you wanted it to be, from novelty curio to S&M dungeon fodder. The one thing it wasn’t was cool, which is probably the main reason why fifty years on you still have a better chance of hearing it than anything by The Velvet Underground.