Cynthia Troup’s role in “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66”

The story behind the now-iconic song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” is Bobby Troup and his wife, Cynthia Troup, were traveling west on that highway to California in 1946 when she came up with the line “Get your kicks on Route 66.”

Bobby Troup finished the rest of the song, pitched it to Nat King Cole, and it’s become one of the most-covered songs in pop-music history.

A video from the Women on the Mother Road project by filmmaker Katrina Parks contains an interview with the one of the Troups’ daughters, Cynnie. The gist is Cynthia Troup had more to do with the success of Bobby Troup than most people know.

The video’s settings don’t allow embedding on this site, but you can watch it here.

Cynnie said her mother should have been Bobby’s manager. She’s the one who urged Bobby to get his teeth fixed before performing in California. She’s the one who got him gigs in piano bars on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles once they arrived in the Golden State. In short, she encouraged him during his budding show-business career.

Cynthia and Bobby divorced in 1955 after 13 years of marriage.

Songwriting credits can get a little tricky. Having an idea alone for a song isn’t enough, usually, to earn a credit. But in retrospect, Cynthia Troup probably should have received partial songwriting credit for “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” instead of her husband entirely because the line is so catchy. Even one-third credit would have meant hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in royalties over the decades.

Nowadays, there’s little doubt a savvy music-industry lawyer would have gotten such a partial-credit settlement for her. But this still was in the early days of the pop-music industry, when publishers and record companies were a lot more fast and loose with such matters.

It makes one wonder whether such a lawyer might watch this video and try press for some overdue royalties for Cynthia’s children and grandchildren.

(Hat tip to Anthony Reichardt; screen-capture image of Cynthia Troup along Route 66)

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