Tomorrow, the 8th, is the birthday of Nancy Sinatra, glamorous
daughter of Frankie. Not something I would think would make a bit of difference
to me, but not long ago I picked up a compilation of her hits. The inspiration
for that was a passing remark a friend made on facebook, invoking Lee
Hazlewood, a name I hadn’t heard in some time, at the time. Hazlewood wrote and
produced some of Nancy’s hits and the two were a flamboyantly fun duo in those
mod days of the late Sixties. And today’s song, written by Hazlewood, was the hit that made her a name
(even though she was born with a very famous one).
“Boots” is everything you’d want in a sultry, fun, sexy
song. It’s a song that I remember making me a little uneasy, as a kid. I loved
that weird guitar slide that Hazlewood insisted on, played on guitar by Billy Strange,
it was so immediately recognizable and sounded so cool. But the song’s
implications? This pair of self-propelled boots are going to start walking all
over someone? Is the wearer of the boots even responsible for what such boots
do?
And the way Nancy sings it, with a kind of high and mighty
air, winking at her victim, is almost depraved. It’s been said that Hazlewood
coached her to sing it like a sixteen year old who has sex with grown men. The
key isn’t underaged sex as a depraved act, so much, as the cool, man-handling
outlook of a little minx who doesn’t take it at all seriously. Her boots, then,
are sex appeal itself, the power of the female—or rather the power of desire
for the female—over a grown man.
The speaker of the song is telling off a man who has tried
to use her, “You keep lyin’ where you oughta be truthin’.” Messing around with
other women means she's going to mess him up, so that the very notion of such a woman as a plaything is what is
being dealt with. Nancy with her unflappable sangfroid would seem to be
striking a blow for a certain kind of sexual politics.
What kind? The liberated enough to choose my own sex object kind. The part that might give one pause—“You keep thinking
that you’ll never get burned—ha! / I just found me a brand new box of matches /
And what he knows you ain’t had time to learn.” I guess as a kid one hears in
this the challenge of the “maturing faster than boys” female of popular lit who
can easily have a sugar daddy if she wants one, and it’s not for his money or
things but for his sexual prowess, his knowledge, so to speak, of what little
girls are made of. Cool, daddy-o.
About the video: it’s the kind of thing you would see on pop
music TV in those days, and I know I did. It’s not that Nancy can dance really
well or anything and by the terms of the sexier-than-thou divas of today she
seems to find the whole shaking and wiggling bit kind of silly, plus she’s sort
of wholesome, but, as everyone knows, wholesome in sexy boots and tights is hot.
Whether this is hot or silly or something else is up to you. But boots are sexy.
Are you ready, boots?
Start walking!
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