The Rarest-Ever Ella Fitzgerald Single: “Are You Ready, Boots?”
A Slightly Early Ella Fitzgerald Birthday Post!
The birthday of Ella Fitzgerald isn’t until the 25th of this month, but I wanted to do a post in celebration, not least because on Saturday, April 13, I’m doing a special live episode of Sing! Sing! Sing! for KSDS’s bi-annual pledge week, which we are titling Ella Fitzgerald: Deep Cuts! Here’s a story about one of the very deepest of those deep cuts. As Nelson Algren would say, “It was a secret buried as deep as God’s toenails.”
For all the brilliance of Norman Granz as producer for Ella Fitzgerald - the songbook series, the live albums, the transition from jazz clubs to concert halls, the international tours - one area where he had a significant blind spot was contemporary songs. He was correct to focus Fitzgerald on the iconic composers of the Great American Songbook, but there are all kinds of indications that Fitzgerald herself wanted to be more au courant as well. She kept abreast of the latest trends in popular music and there were many songs she sang in concert that she rarely got the chance to record. Along with Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, and Jerome Kern - the latest three subjects of the Songbook series - Fitzgerald should have also done albums of Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach, and Cy Coleman - maybe even Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim; she eventually got around to a Jobim album, but it was roughly ten years after the fact.
Fitzgerald and Granz ended their relationship with Verve in 1966, six years after Granz had sold his interest in the company to MGM Records. Their final Verve release derived from the spectacular series of concert tours Ella did in that year with Duke Ellington. In July 1966, they performed together at the Antibes Jazz Festival. At the time, two LPs worth of material were released as Ella & Duke at The Côte D'Azur. Then, 30 or so years later, following Fitzgerald’s death in 1996, we were all treated to a monumental eight-CD package titled Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington – Côte D'Azur Concerts On Verve.
After returning home from the July 1966 tour with Duke, Fitzgerald would stay out of the studio for the remainder of 1966. The next year, she would tape three albums for Capitol Records, without Granz’s involvement. (These don’t have a good reputation among Ella fans, but I confess that there are tracks on all of them that I love, such as her reading of the country classic “Born to Lose.”) At the start of 1967, Fitzgerald would be back in Europe, again touring with Duke Ellington.
But in the fall of ‘66, Fitzgerald was mostly working locally. As Judith Tick reports in the highly recommended biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald, she played nine nights at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles in September, again in conjunction with the Ellington band. Roughly two weeks later, she taped an appearance on The Danny Kaye Show, which was broadcast on October 5th. Like many other TV hosts of the period, Kaye was a major jazz fan and gave Fitzgerald a generous amount of solo space. Among other things, she sang “The Moment of Truth” - about which more presently.
Fortunately, at least two nights in the Greek Theater run were taped, at least one by the prescient and insightful engineer-producer Wally Heider ( who deserves his own series here on Slouching Towards Birdland). With Granz’s permission, both the first night, Wednesday, September 14, and the last, Friday, September 23, were recorded. After Wally’s death in 1989, many of his tapes - mostly live big-band concerts from the west coast - began turning up on British CDs, including the September 23 Greek Theater show, released on a label called Submarine as Duke Ellington And Ella Fitzgerald – Live At The Greek Theatre, Los Angeles 1966 in 1994.
The opening night concert, September 14, was apparently taped by another engineer. (Or at least it wasn’t in the Heider collection that circulated in the 1990s, otherwise it surely would have also been issued on a foreign CD at that time.) The September 14 show was filmed as well; according to J. Wilfred Johnson in his 2001 Ella Fitzgerald - An Annotated Discography, excerpts were telecast on local California TV on Sunday, September 25.
As we’ve seen, Fitzgerald was always excited to include new popular songs that she loved on her personal appearances, even if she - one of the most prolifically recorded artists in American music - never had the chance to record them. The 1966 European tour with Duke had her singing Bacharach’s “Wives and Lovers,” the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” “The Moment of Truth,” and Jobim’s “So Danó Samba” (Granz included the latter on the Côte D'Azur album at least.)
On September 14 at the Greek, she included two contemporary songs: “The Moment of Truth,” a 1963 song that had clicked, as Ed Sullivan would say, for Tony Bennett, composed by the lesser-known songwriter Frank Scott with the arranger and trombonist Tex Satterwhite, and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.” The latter, written by songwriter and producer Lee Hazelwood, was a major hit for Nancy Sinatra at the start of 1966, and, I think it’s safe to say, is now regarded, 50-plus years later, as one of the most iconic songs of the decade.
Although Fitzgerald was between recording contracts, she wanted some of this material to be released and heard, particularly those two newish songs, “Boots” and “Moment of Truth.” Apparently, she and Granz made an arrangement with EMI Records in London to release four songs from the September 14 show on their subsidiary label Stateside, which at the time primarily released American material. Stateside would release two contemporary songs and two standards, although they weren’t paired as such.
Stateside released one 45 RPM single and one EP. The 45, Stateside SS 569, paired “Boots” with Ella’s latest version of “Stardust.” The 45 states plainly, “Ella Fitzgerald with the Jimmy Jones Trio - produced under the personal supervision of Norman Granz.” There’s no mention of Ellington, although this apparently was his horn section along with the Jones Trio (with bassist Jim Hughart and legendary drummer Ed Thigpen).
She also included “Stardust” on the final night at the Greek, so we’ve heard it. She recorded the Carmichael classic many times in her career, most recently in 1962 as a bossa nova. The 1966 version is an especially lovely reading, in which Ella, as she frequently did in ballads from this period, included a special, Billy Eckstine-like tag. (“The stars they keep climbing / with perfect timing…”) The September 23 performance also has Ella improvising a spontaneous bit beforehand about how the Los Angeles heat - this was an open air theater - is making her hair “looking like Phyllis Diller.”
The EP, Stateside SS 1044, which was released with a picture cover (see above), included “Boots” and “Stardust,” along with the Ellington standard “I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So” and “Moment of Truth.”
Fitzgerald and Granz also made what seems to have been a semi-private pressing, of the two contemporary songs, under the imprint of “Salle Records” - Salle was Ella’s name spelled backwards and the name of her production company. (The Stateside 45 also states, “A Salle Productions” [sic].) You would think the Stateside discs would be slightly easier to find, since they were at least actually released commercially, but I have never seen or heard a copy of the single or the EP. Both sides of the Salle 45, however, do turn up on the YouTubes:
In January 1967, as we’ve seen, Fitzgerald and Ellington were touring Europe again, and their concerts from Rotterdam (January 28), Milan (January 30), and Paris (January 31) were recorded, the latter coincidentally from the Salle Pleyel Theater. The Milan and Paris concerts were also telecast, and the videos are in circulation amongst collectors; they are both fairly spectacular and truly deserve to be seen and released on home video. The Paris concert has a special bonus in that it contains what is apparently the only other document of Ella doing both “Boots” and “Moment of Truth” - backed by Ellington’s Orchestra no less. (David Palmquist’s epic Ellington itinerary / chronology The Duke Where and When has considerably more details on this tour.)
Ella’s “Moment of Truth” is as great as we’d expect, a solid swinger with a kind of Cahn & Van Heusen vibe, similar to “The Tender Trap” and “Ring-A-Ding-Ding” - Bobby Darin also wrote numerous songs in this genre, like “The Breaking Point.” They all sound like Sinatra Capitol singles or B-sides, or even lesser grade B Sammy and Jimmy. “Moment of Truth” is a fun, swinging number and a particularly strong one for Ella. In all, we have four examples of her singing “Moment of Truth,” all live:
1 - from the July 1966 Antibes Jazz Festival with Ellington, not issued until the epic Côte D'Azur Concerts On Verve package in 1996;
2 - the September 14 Greek Theater version issued on rare singles;
3 - from The Danny Kaye Show on October 5, 1966, which has been issued on home video;
4 - and the January 31 Paris concert.
It’s a terrific, exhilbarating arrangement by Jimmy Jones - the veteran pianist and musical director, who worked much more extensively with Sarah Vaughan, was only with her for a few seasons, spelling Tommy Flanagan - and Ella does not disappoint.
“Boots” is also a triumph. Fitzgerald doesn’t seem like she’s embarrassing herself by “covering” a pop hit, she wholeheartedly immerses herself in the idiom of the song while also bringing it over into her wheelhouse. As with her 1964 re-arrangement of “Can’t Buy Me Love,’ she adopts an aggressive, bluesy tone and a defiant attitude.
In earlier generations, innumerable torch songs depicted women as being passive, submissive and helpless victims, subject to all manner of abuse from their men. It’s been argued persuasively, by singer Carole J. Bufford among others, that many of the hits of the 1960s constitute the beginnings of an early feminist statement in pop music, in which women are more inclined to push back against these losers and lover men. Here, Nancy Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald literally kick back, threatening to walk all over the unfortunate male who did them dirt.
On the face of it, “Boots” wouldn’t seem like prime material for Ella, but she sings the heck out of it. Ella talked about the song in a contemporaneous interview in the Los Angeles Times (quoted by Ms. Tick): “I’ll sing ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’ That’s not my kind of song but it did all right for me and there will be kids in the audience. . . . We also have a new arrangement of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” We’re going to do it a little different than What’s-her-Name does it." Ella was obviously being playfully coy when she referred to Nancy Sinatra as “what’s-her-name.” The Jones arrangement also refers to the famous bass part, with descending quarter tones, in the Sinatra-Hazlewood hit version.
Ella starts with a verse - undoubtedly her own writing - as if she’s talking to a shoe salesman: “Hey Mister, Hey Mister, I need a pair of shoes / Those big ones, those big boots, to walk away my blues.” Then she launches into the familiar lyrics, “You keep sayin’ you’ve got something for me…” Later, she shouts, “Come on and walk, boots! Walk all over him!” She adds, “Step on him, baby! Crush him! That dirty rat!” In my mind, she positively nails it; “Boots” is for her what “That’s Life” was for Sinatra; a vehicle for her to get out all that negative energy, the resentment over a chaotic era in American life, and turn it into something postive.
Introducing “Boots” in Paris, Fitzgerald says “For the younger generation, we’d like to do our latest recording” - possibly she thought that this being Europe, perhaps part of the French audience had heard the Stateside releases. As it was, the audience must have been scratching their beards and berets. Alas, virtually no one actually heard either of the singles of “Boots” from the Greek Theater and she doesn’t seem to have sung it again after the Paris concert.
It’s too bad: Ella couldn’t have included it alongside the 1938 “Gotta Pebble in My Shoe” (part of the wave of juvenilia she performed in the wake of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”) and her own lyric to the Frank Foster-Count Basie classic “Shiny Stockings” on an LP titled Songs For Lucky Leg Men or even Songs for Leggy Lovers.
LUCKY STRIKE EXTRAS!
These two videos don’t appear to be on the YouTubes, so I thought I would share them with Slouching Towards Birdland readers. (All I ask is that you do what you can to help STB, including taking out a paid subscription or encouraging others to subscribe, hey!)
Here’s “The Moment of Truth” from The Danny Kaye Show, October 5, 1966. This has been on DVD (thank you Bob Bader!) so it’s truly master-level quality.
Here’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'“ from the January 31, 1967, Salle Pleyel concert. Yes, that’s the Ellington band with Jimmy Jones and his Trio, Jones conducting his own excellent arrangement.
Lastly an inquiry to readers: does anybody have a copy of any of the Stateside Ella Fitzgerald releases? I still have yet to actually hear any of that material. Better yet, does anybody have the video from the Greek Theater, September 14, 1967?
Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
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"Boots" was issued as a 45 EP in France on Barclay Records (thanks, Discogs!). There was a German CBS issue too, so they did try to make it a hit in the Old World.