Nancy & Lee

When crafting recorded music, contrast should always be considered a key element. Lee Hazlewood knew this all too well when he mashed his gravel-textured baritone scratch against the amber honeyed inflections of sultry chanteuse Nancy Sinatra. By 1968 the daughter of Frank Sinatra had already cut a hit with the Hazelwood-penned “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” and had co-starred alongside Peter Fonda in Roger Corman’s film The Wild Angels, so right from the opening cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” the unlikely duo had turned a popular lovers lament into a counterculture dirge, inadvertently making Sonny & Cher look like Hollywood kooks. “Summer Wine” is a Hazlewood original where a gripping cowboy narrative trimmed in Nashville countrypolitan production perfectly blends with cool baroque-pop arrangements. “Storybook Children” plays on Sinatra’s wide-eyed whimsy, but not nearly as well as her part as the mythological Phaedra in Hazlewood’s psychedelic magnum-opus “Some Velvet Morning,” a kaleidoscopic call-and-response between the two that set the duet bar higher than anything that preceded it.