(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66

Bobby Troup wrote “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” in 1946, driving west from Pennsylvania to California with his wife Cynthia, who reportedly suggested the title phrase somewhere along the highway itself. He pitched it to Nat King Cole within weeks of arriving in Los Angeles, and the King Cole Trio – Cole on piano and vocals, Oscar Moore on guitar, Johnny Miller on bass – recorded it that same year for Capitol. No drums, no horn section, just three musicians and Cole’s voice, and it’s the arrangement’s restraint that made the song portable: a road-trip novelty simple enough that jazz combos, rock bands, and orchestras alike could all make it their own without touching the melody’s actual shape.

That portability is the whole reason this is an 80th-anniversary entry worth noting rather than a historical footnote. The Cole recording became a modest hit in 1946, but the song’s real life has been as raw material – Chuck Berry’s harder-edged 1961 rock and roll version, the Rolling Stones’ cover two years later, dozens more since, each one keeping Troup’s list of towns (St. Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo) intact while completely replacing the genre underneath it. Cole’s original doesn’t sound like a rock song and was never trying to be one; it sounds like exactly what it is, a small jazz combo swinging through a new tune on a Los Angeles session date, unaware it was about to become one of the most-covered American songs of the century.

Greatest of All Time! – not because the arrangement is ambitious, but because a piano trio and a highway list of towns turned out to be sturdy enough to outlive every genre that’s borrowed it since.

Hero image: 1946 King Cole Trio “Route 66” sheet music/single cover, Capitol Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.