1966 Nancy Sinatra: These Boots Are Made For Walkin'

A good way to get moving up any corporate ladder is to have your father on the board of directors, but in fairness to Nancy she always was her own woman and hitching herself to professional maverick Lee Hazlewood was never going to grease the wheels of commerciality; there are some strings even Frank couldn't pull. 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'' is undoubtedly Hazlewood's best known song and something of a standard, but there's a degree of weirdness bubbling just below that catchy surface that makes the song a more interesting proposition than first listen might suggest.

For a start, there's a curious incongruity between the musicians and Nancy's vocal. As played by The Wrecking Crew, 'Boots' is a lithe twist of a tune kicked off by Chuck Berghofer's snaking down to the gutter bassline that rams right angles against the later ladder scaling horns that punctuate the song's aura of sleaze. But despite all this mischief, Ms Sinatra sounds like she's following a different drum altogether with her flat intonation of the lyric exuding a pure indifference to whatever her would be lover is trying to convince her of.

"You keep saying you've got something for me, something you call love but confess" - Nancy acknowledges his presence, but that's as far as it's going to go. She's not going to be suckered in to his bullshit and there's a deliciously savage aural knee in the groin in her "HA!" that follows the knowing "you keep thinkin' that you´ll never get burnt"; Nancy is nobody's fool, mess her around and her boots are going to walk right out the door.*

Proto feminism wrapped up in a fist that can tickle as well as it can punch, 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'' has attitude in spades and a keen edge that cuts a path for Patti Smith, Debbie Harry et al to follow, right through to Bikini Kill and Riot Grrl but with none of the soap box anger or the novelty spectacle of an uppity woman on her high horse - just power derived from her sex (rather than in spite of it) mixed with strength through personality, something Sinatra has in abundance. And oh yes, it's sexy as hell.

* I can hear exactly the same dismissiveness in Tanya Donnelly's derogatory sneer of "boy" on Belly's 'Feed The Tree', a term used in a way that makes it sound like the ultimate put-down.