If you ever plan to motor west

Travel my way, take the highway that’s the best

(photo courtesy of Sheet Music Warehouse)

How many roads get a song written  in their honor? Sure, there’s Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah’s “Lakeshore Drive,” America’s “Ventura Highway” and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” but is there anything even close to “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66?” The Mother Road and its eponymous anthem are practically bound together. With “more than 2,000 miles all the way” and probably more than 2,000 different cover versions, the iconic rhythm and blues tune has become both an American standard and a three-minute travel guide, pointing out different stops along the way from east to west.

And it all started with an actual road trip down the Main Street of America.

Like many before and many after him, Bobby Troup was chasing a dream when he moved to Los Angeles in 1946. Troup, who served as a Marine in World War II, scored a hit song before the war with his big band swing tune “Daddy.” When the war ended and he returned home to Pennsylvania, he decided there was no better place to resume his career as a songwriter than Hollywood.

According to Route 66 historian Michael Wallis, Troup and his wife Cynthia packed into their ‘41 Buick and charted a course for L.A. by way of Chicago. Once in the Windy City, the two hopped on Route 66 and continued west.

The Troups’ trip is detailed in Wallis’ definitive book, “Route 66: The Mother Road,” where Bobby recalled that while on the 10-day odyssey, Cynthia originally suggested he write a song about Route 40. However, when the pair was well on their way down the Mother Road coming out of St. Louis, Cynthia turned to Bobby and whispered, “get your kicks on Route 66.”

The phrase immediately hooked Bobby. At the time, however, he had no idea it would become the de facto theme of the Mother Road.

“I just thought I was writing about a road – not a legend,” Troup told Wallis.

He began piecing the song together in real time as the couple rolled down the highway, sightseeing at places like Missouri’s Meramec Caverns and the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Oklahoma before pushing through a snowstorm in Amarillo, Texas.

The song was only half-finished by the time the couple reached the West Coast, Troup said. Shortly after the two arrived in Los Angeles, they hit the Sunset Strip jazz clubs in search of Bobby’s hero, Nat “King” Cole. After one of Cole’s shows, Troup introduced himself backstage, showing the jazz vocalist several pieces he had composed back in Pennsylvania, and one that he was still working on.

Though “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” was still not complete, Cole knew he had to have it as soon as he heard Troup lay it down on the keys.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip

When you make that California trip

Get your kicks on Route 66

Following their fateful meeting, Troup finished the song, ultimately name-dropping 12 towns that have now become part of the Mother Road’s enduring legacy. In addition to Chicago and Los Angeles, the song spotlights St. Louis; Joplin, Missouri; Oklahoma City (looks mighty pretty); Amarillo; Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; (don’t forget) Winona; Kingman; Barstow; and San Bernardino. Stop in any of these places today, and you’re bound to find a piece of Route 66 memorabilia. From themed signposts, diners and motels to full-fledged museums, each of the cities has embraced a Route 66 identity partly shaped by one couple’s road trip in 1946.

When the song was finished by March 1946, Nat King Cole recorded the first version at Radio Recorders, a studio on Western Avenue in Hollywood that would move to Santa Monica Boulevard – L.A.’s segment of Route 66 – just three years later. With Cole’s effortlessly cool croon, staccato bursts of piano, a propulsive walking bass line and a rollicking, jangly electric guitar solo, the song strolled cheerily down the highway and onto the pop charts. Initially a hit on the “Race Records” charts (later known as R&B), the song also became successful with white audiences at a time when mainstream music was still heavily segregated.

The song enjoyed several other renditions by well-known musicians in the 1940s and ‘50s – Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, Louis Jordan – and with the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck Berry transformed it into a faster, guitar-driven road trip rocker in 1961.

“On the basis of that song, I was able to go out and buy a house and stay in California,” Troup told Wallis. “It became a big hit.”

Troup’s L.A. story didn’t end with Route 66. In true Hollywood fashion, he started acting and found bit parts in “Perry Mason” and “Rawhide” before becoming a television regular as Dr. Joe Early in the ‘70s medical drama “Emergency!”

As Troup built a second career on screen, his most famous composition kept rolling in royalties through the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and into the 21st century. The Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode and John Mayer are just a fraction of the many musicians who have recorded the standard, spanning different instrumentations, tempos and genres. Two versions – by Berry and Mayer – appeared in the 2006 animated film “Cars,” itself a love letter to the iconic highway.

Though Troup died in 1999, the song has lived for 80 years, and is now inseparable from its subject, the world’s most famous highway. What started as a road trip down Route 66 in search of the California dream now represents that same pursuit of freedom and opportunity as much as the road itself.

So next time you find yourself looking for the perfect soundtrack to a cross-country road trip, or maybe even just a drive down the block –

Get your kicks on Route 66