When Nat King Cole recorded Route 66 in early 1946, nobody quite knew what to make of it. Cole was a jazz pianist who sang, and while he’d had some success, he hadn’t yet broken through to the mainstream white audience that eventually made him one of the biggest stars in American music. The song was a novelty item, more or less — a list of towns set to a shuffle. Nobody predicted what would happen to it.
What happened was that the song became a genuine hit on multiple charts simultaneously, crossing the racial segregation of the era’s music industry in a way that almost nothing else managed at the time. White families driving Route 66 in their new postwar cars heard it on the radio and felt it as their own. Black families heard Cole’s voice, unmistakably sophisticated and joyful, and felt the same.
The song reached England, where it was heard by a generation of teenagers who had never driven anything, let alone a highway across America, but who were deeply susceptible to the mythology of the American West. When the Rolling Stones covered it in 1964, they’d been listening to Cole’s version for years.
Cole never drove Route 66 himself in the years he was most famous — he traveled by plane and train, partly because the informal but pervasive system of racial segregation that governed American travel in the 1940s and 1950s made road travel genuinely dangerous for Black Americans in many parts of the country.
There’s an irony in that, which the song does nothing to acknowledge. The mother road was not equally available to everyone who loved it. But the song was, and that mattered too.
We are offering licences for ROUTE 66® Beer in specific territories. An invitation to others to become part of this story. To carry a piece of the road with them and to contribute to the story. We will share a percentage of royalties with Route 66 associations to keep the story alive.
The journey continues. This story is brought to you by ROUTE 66® BEER. Find us at ROUTE66BEER.COM
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