Nancy Sinatra – These Boots Are Made For Walkin’

Lee Hazlewood wrote it for a man to sing — and tried to keep it off the album right up until it made Frank Sinatra’s daughter a bigger star than her father, briefly, in early 1966.

The most famous put-down in 1960s pop almost never reached Nancy Sinatra at all. These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ was written by Lee Hazlewood as a song for a man to sing — he’d even cut a version himself — and the line that sparked it came from Frank Sinatra, who’d drawled “they tell me them boots ain’t built for walkin'” in the 1963 comedy-western 4 for Texas. When Hazlewood played it for Nancy, she reportedly loved it instantly. He was less sure a woman should sing it. She talked him into it — and turned a throwaway into the record that defined her.

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By 1965, Nancy Sinatra’s career was going nowhere. She had signed to her father’s Reprise label in 1961 and released a string of singles that charted only in Europe and Japan; she was, by her own account, on the verge of being dropped. Reprise paired her with Hazlewood, a producer best known for his work with guitarist Duane Eddy, and the partnership clicked immediately. He gave her a new persona to match the song — cool, assertive, a little dangerous — and an image built around the era’s go-go boots craze. The demure daughter of Ol’ Blue Eyes was gone.

Written for a man, transformed by a woman

The record was cut on November 19, 1965, at United Western Recorders in Hollywood, with arranger Billy Strange and the crack session players later known as the Wrecking Crew. Its signature is that descending bass slide — played by Chuck Berghofer — which Hazlewood famously coached into place, telling him to make the sliding notes closer together until it sounded right. Over that, Sinatra delivered the lyric with a flat, unbothered cool that was the whole point: a woman calmly informing a cheating man that she was done, and that those boots were going to walk all over him. Released in mid-December 1965, it shot to No. 1 in both the United States and the United Kingdom in early 1966.

There was a small irony in Hazlewood’s role afterward. As the Boots album sold, he reportedly began objecting to the hit version, calling it a perversion of what he’d written — though, as Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine later pointedly noted, he’d happily collected royalties on it for years. The complaint went nowhere. The song was already bigger than its writer’s second thoughts.

Out of her father’s shadow

For a moment in early 1966, Nancy Sinatra’s fame eclipsed even Frank’s. These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ made her a pop force entirely on her own terms, and its swaggering, self-possessed attitude — a woman refusing to be pushed around — landed squarely in step with the shifting culture of the mid-’60s. The song took on a second life among American troops in Vietnam, where soldiers adopted it as their own, and it has since been covered across genres from country to thrash metal, by everyone from Billy Ray Cyrus to Megadeth.

Sixty years on, it remains one of the most instantly recognizable records of the decade, and the cornerstone of a career that ranged far beyond it — the Hazlewood duets, the Bond theme “You Only Live Twice,” the chart-topping father-daughter duet “Somethin’ Stupid.” But it’s the boots that endure: two minutes and forty seconds of cool, written for a man, that became one of pop’s great declarations of independence the moment the right woman put them on.