Hit Boots (1970)

Performer: Boots Randolph                                    Composers: Various
Album US Chart Position: #157                              Label: Monument Records
Producer: Fred Foster                                             Arranger/Conductor: Bill Walker

Though it might seem odd, this album is one of the most important musical experiences of my life. When I was in the fifth grade in 1972, band teachers from the high school came down to find out who wanted to play musical instruments and get them started. I can clearly remember thinking that being in band must be about the stupidest thing someone could ever do. I had absolutely no interest in playing music and other kids like me wound up singing with one of the grade school teachers while the band kids practiced. That summer--it must have been during the Fourth of July week--my family went up to the lake and the first day there I got a scorching burn on my shoulders from the water. The next day I had to stay in the trailer lying on my stomach after my mom put some kind of lotion on my back. That year she and my dad had purchased a cassette tape deck and mom joined the Columbia Record Club. After listening to them over and over that week, I can remember with crystal clarity every one of her six selections, one of which happened to be Hit Boots by Boots Randolph. I had obviously never heard of him, but in listening to this album I became mesmerized by the sound of his saxophone. The next year at school, when the band instructors came around again, I tried out for the sax and only the sax. If I couldn’t play that instrument I didn’t want to play at all. The rest, as they say, is history.

Though the album was released in 1970 the hits are those from the previous couple of years, some of which I was vaguely familiar with from television, and some I was not. Label owner Fred Foster is listed as producer, though it’s difficult to know how much work he did on the actual sound. Arranger and conductor Bill Walker was a European who had moved to Nashville in 1964. His arrangements do a nice job of emulating some of what made the songs hits, many with the kind of vocal chorus that owes a debt to Mitch Miller and was ubiquitous in country music for several decades. The album begins with the 1968 hit by Mary Hopkins, “Those Were the Days,” complete with strings and wordless vocals. Next up is the Credence Clearwater’s “Proud Mary,” which went to number two in 1969, and “Both Sides Now,” by Joni Mitchell from the same year. This is followed by a medley of “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” the signature song from the Broadway musical Hair, which my folks also owned the soundtrack album to. Two Burt Bacharach songs end the first side of the LP, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” written for Dionne Warwick in 1968 and “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” by B.J. Thomas from the soundtrack to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Simon and Garfunkel hit “Bridge over Trouble Water” opens side two, and the rest I didn’t really know at the time.

Monument Records was formed, appropriately enough, in Washington D.C. by Fred Foster in 1958. After some success in the Baltimore area, Foster moved the label to Nashville and recorded a wide variety of music, including country. Being from Kentucky, Boots Randolph naturally gravitated to Nashville after a long running engagement in Decatur, Illinois. Initially a session man, his first big success at Monument was in 1963 with “Yakety Sax,” a number he co-wrote with Spider Rich that was based on King Curtis’s saxophone solo in the Coaster’s 1958 song “Yakety Yak.” From then on Randolph supplemented his studio work by recording instrumental albums of hit songs or themes like religious or country music. I haven’t been able to find any information on the musicians who played on the album, as they were simply anonymous session musicians working in Nashville at the time. Randolph had a husky tenor sound, and in a couple of spots he showed that he had some decent jazz chops, but instead chose to work in the easy listening category. He had steady employment as a session musician, appearing on songs by Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Brenda Lee, and was a regular sideman for Chet Atkins. Hit Boots is not for everyone, reaching only 157 on the album charts in 1970, but it was so important to me as an inspiration for becoming a musician that it will always be one of my favorite albums of the seventies.