Route 66 was 20 years old and World War II had just ended when Bobby Troup, an aspiring songwriter from Pennsylvania, decided to head west. As it turned out, that early 1946 campaign did more than anyone could have imagined to establish the highway as a symbol of free American liberty.
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Troup, who was 25 at the time, had already earned a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, had written a hit song (“Daddy” in 1941, sung by Sammy Kaye), had worked for bandleader Tommy Dorsey, and had served as a Marine during the war years. But to restart his career as a songwriter and actor, he believed he needed to be in Los Angeles. So he and his wife, Cynthia, headed their 1941 Buick toward California.
They started on US 40 and then took Route 66 in Illinois. Along the way, as Troup told author Michael Wallis in the book “Route 66: The Mother Road,” Cynthia came up with a phrase she thought was worthy of singing.
Bobby Troup, composer of the hit song “Route 66” and grand marshal of the Route 66 Salute parade in Duarte, California, rides in a 1948 Buick convertible and greets fans in 1996.
(Louisa Gauerke / Associated Press)
“Enjoy Route 66,” he said.
Troup took this from there, creating “a kind of musical map of the highway.”
As Troup later recalled in an introduction According to a book about Route 66 by Tom Snyder, they heard Louis Armstrong play at a club in St. Louis, stopped at Meramec Caverns in Missouri, and discovered that “a good portion of the road was absolutely miserable: narrow, only two lanes, and very winding through the Ozarks and Kansas.” Then came a snowstorm in Texas.
At the end of the trip, the fast-paced tune was half finished. Then, less than a week after his arrival, Troup had the opportunity to pitch some songs to Nat “King” Cole, who had already gained fame with hits like “Sweet Lorraine” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”
They were sitting next to a piano on stage, after Cole's last set of the night at the trocadero on the Sunset Strip, when the nervous young songwriter decided to share his unfinished tour song.
“I climbed on the riser, pulled the piano bench back a little, it fell over the side and I fell on my back,” Troup confessed in a later comment. interview.
Still, Cole “loved it,” Troup recalled. “He actually got up on the piano with me and played it.”
This was February. By mid-March, the song was finished and Cole was recording it in a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, part of Route 66.
The final version named a dozen towns along the route, including these words:
Now you pass through Saint Looey.
Joplin, Missouri,
And Oklahoma City is very pretty.
Do you see Yellow?
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagpole, Arizona.
Don't forget Winona.
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.
Won't you catch up with this timely advice?
When you take that trip to California
Get to work Rgo out 66.
In April, Capitol Records released “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” and the song quickly rose to No. 11 on the Billboard best-selling singles chart. Before 1946 came out, it had been recorded again, this time by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. That version moved to 14th place.
Musicians Nat “King” Cole, left, and Bing Crosby, circa 1945.
(NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)
The song, which arrived just as postwar America was rediscovering leisure travel, was a huge hit and, for many, a painful irony. Even with the Green Book guidance used by many African-American travelers in those days, it would have been deeply risky (and illegal in some places) for any black man, including Nat King Cole, to eat and sleep on Route 66. This was a year before Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball. two years before the US military was integrated.
As Candacy Taylor says in her 2020 book “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America,” “the open road was not open to all.” In the 1950s, Taylor writes, “about 35% of the counties along Route 66 did not allow black drivers after 6 p.m.,” and six of the eight states along the route still had segregation laws. Cole may have helped sell Route 66, Taylor writes, but “the carefree adventure he was promoting was not for him.”
Documentary photographer Candacy Taylor at the New Aster Motel in Los Angeles in 2016. In her book “Overground Railroad,” she writes about the discrimination black travelers faced while driving on Route 66.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Two years after recording the song, when Cole and his increasingly wealthy family bought a mansion in Hancock Park and became the neighborhood's first black homeowners, many neighbors tried to keep him out. poisoned the family dog and burned racist slurs on his lawn.
The Coles stood still. The family was still in that house on South Muirfield Road in 1956, when Cole became the first African-American to host a network television show, and in 1965, when cole died of cancer at 45 years old.
Troup, who later divorced Cynthia and married singer-actress Julie London, recorded more than a dozen albums, and Little Richard and Miles Davis recorded other songs. As an actor, Troup played many guest-starring roles on television, playing Dr. Joe Early on the 1970s television show “Emergency!” and had a small role in Robert Altman's 1970 film “MASH.”
Meanwhile, the song continued playing. Over the years, covers were recorded by Perry Como, Sammy Davis Jr., Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Manhattan Transfer, Michael Martin Murphey, Asleep at the Wheel, Buckwheat Zydeco, Depeche Mode, Glenn Frey, Brian Setzer Orchestra and John Mayer. At different points in the 2006 film “Cars,” Berry and Mayer's versions are heard. troop, who died in 1999He never forgot the difference the song made, both in his life and in the way people think about the road.
“Based on that song, I was able to go out, buy a house and stay in California,” Troup told Wallis. “When I was putting it together, I never realized I was writing about the most famous highway in the world. I just thought I was writing about a road, not a legend.”
The Rolling Stones are among the countless musicians who have recorded covers of “Route 66.”
(David Redfern/Redferns via Getty Images)
