INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - NANCY SINATRA, BOOTS

Since it's Mother's Day, I wanted to feature an album that reminds me of my mom. Hands down, this was my favorite LP in her respectable collection of vinyl. It was the coolest LP in the stack and has one of the best songs ever written on it. The album is worthwhile for that song alone. If they'd just repeated These Boots are Made for Walking 12 times on the record, it would still be an amazing album by any standard. When I moved out on my own, this was the first album I pilfered from mom's collection to add to my own.

Let's start by talking about that song. This was the one that made Nancy a star. Of course, she had a leg up, what with being the progeny of no less than the "chairman of the board", ol' blue eyes, Frank Sinatra. Her career was pretty well guaranteed in some ways. No one's gonna mess with Frankie's little princess, capisce? So she could've farted out garlic and pepperoni and radio stations would have played it for a bit, just to make Frank happy. And yeah, she wasn't a great voice. There wasn't a lot of range there, but she had something much more valuable than technical skills. She had presence and A.T.T.I.T.U.D.E!

Lee Hazlewood, the album's producer and the author of the song, had been planning on saving the song for his own album, but Nancy heard it and said is was wrong for a male vocalist. She thought it came off as abusive in the hands of a man, but she insisted she could give it the right read. Reluctantly, Lee conceded and they recorded the song. In her hands, it became a symbol of female empowerment. At a time when women were just starting to find their voice in pop culture, Nancy came out of the gate as this fierce little firecracker who wasn't going to take shit from anyone. When she intoned that she was gonna "walk all over you", it had better send chills down your spine because she meant business and carried it off with every word.

The rest of the album, while vastly overshadowed by its hit single, is no less loaded with great songs, many courtesy of Hazlewood. They may not reach the same heights as Boots, but that's only a relativity as on their own, they still tower above a lot of the pop music of the day. It's all music which has earned the term "timeless" and deserves to be heard for generations to come.