'Route 66'

That skinny, two-lane highway has occupied the American consciousness since 1926. Its winding black pavement was the first road to link Chicago to Los Angeles, and over the years, millions of Americans looked for adventure, refuge and opportunity along its path.

NPR 100 Fact Sheet

Title: (Get Your Kicks On) Route '66

Artist: Word/music by Bobby Troup

Performed by Nat King Cole

Reporter: Hannah Lord

Producer: Elizabeth Blair

Editor: Elizabeth Blair

Length: 9:15

Interviewees: Marie Cole, Widow (DAT available)

John Pizzarelli, Musician (DAT available)

Bobby Troup, archive tape

Freddie Cole, Brother (DAT available)

Recordings Used: Route 66

Chances are the Chicago-born pianist Nat King Cole traveled Route 66 for the first time in the early 1930s as a teenager in a bus. He and his older brother Eddy played in a dance band that toured small clubs from Illinois to Oklahoma. Then they joined the touring company of Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along. Eventually, Nat King Cole made it to Los Angeles. In 1937, he and two musician friends, bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore formed the King Cole Trio.

On The Road

By the time Bobby Troup headed West from his home in Lancaster, Pa., Nat King Cole was already a well-known jazz musician. Troup, an ex-Marine, was an up and coming songwriter. In the early 1940s, he wrote for Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey, and Sammy Kaye made a hit out of his song "Daddy." With the royalties from "Daddy," Bobby Troup bought a used Buick and he and his wife headed for Los Angeles.

"My first wife and I were eating at a Howard Johnson's restaurant and looking at the road map. She looked at it and she said, 'Why don't you write a song about Route 40,'" Troupe recalled in a 1985 radio interview. "And I said, 'Well, that's really kind of silly, because we're going to pick up Route 66 right outside of Chicago and then take it all the way into Los Angeles.' So we're driving along, and she said, 'Get your kicks on Route 66.' I said, 'God, that's a marvelous idea for a song.'"

Playing For Nat King Cole

Troup finished half of the lyrics in the car. Once he got to LA, he hooked up with an agent named Bullet Durgstrom, who insisted that Troup play some of his songs for Nat King Cole. In an interview with biographer Robert Roth, Bobby Troup said he was a nervous wreck when he first met Cole.

"So I sat down at the piano, and I'll never forget it. There was a little riser at the piano. And I was so nervous, I got on the riser and I — the bench slipped off the riser and I went backwards," he recalls. "I got back on, and I played him 'Baby, Baby All The Time,' and he loved that song. Of course he can say baby better than anyone in the world. And every other song I'd try to play he say, 'Oh, that "baby" song. I like that "baby" song.'"

Troup continues, "I was trying to think of something great. How often do you get the opportunity to play for Nat King Cole? I said, 'Nat, I wrote a song on the way out here, it's just half-finished, but I think maybe you'd like it.' So I played '66,' and he liked it so much, he started playing with me. And he said, 'Bobby, get me "Baby, Baby All The Time," finish "Route 66" and give me that, and I'll record them both.' So on March the 16th, 1946, he recorded them both."

Nat King Cole's recording of Bobby Troup's "Route 66" spent eight weeks on the pop charts. When Troup died last year, he'd earned more than $4 million in royalties from that song alone.

For Nat King Cole, "Route 66" marked a turning point. In the early 1940s, he was a respected jazz pianist, and some of his trio's jazz recordings have been called masterpieces. But by the mid-40s, that began to change, in part because Nat King Cole wanted to reach more people, as he told the BBC in 1963. "My choice in song has been directed completely by a commercial interest, because to be honest with you, I'm a businessman," he said. "And I think when I say business, it's like a salesman in a store. You take one of your big department stores, their aim is to try to encourage you to come in and buy, and they've come up with merchandise that has a mass appeal."

Far fewer Americans drive cross country these days, but for millions of people, the song "Route 66" continues to conjure an image of riding westward with the top down along a two-lane blacktop looking for adventure. Just last year, Congress decided this was an image worth holding on to. They approved $10 million for the preservation of Route 66.

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