A Very Suggestive Name

Song 300: The week the playlist can introduce you to Peter Gunn by Henry Mancini, who also wrote the song. This track follows last week’s Pink Cadillac by Bruce Springsteen as a way to provide some context for my statement that the Springsteen cut probably owes its inspiration to this one from Mancini, and it very likely won’t take more than a few seconds to make the connection clear. This song was the theme music for the TV show of the same name, and the record appeared in 1959 as the opening track of the album The Music from Peter Gunn. I know that as a kid I never watched the Peter Gunn TV show because our antenna didn’t pick up NBC, but I did manage to hear this song many times, quite possibly in the form of the Ray Anthony version or the Duane Eddy model, since they both scored hits with this piece around the turn of the ‘60s. While much of Mancini’s work found its inspiration in jazz, and garnered its audience from the easy listening segment of the dial, this cut clearly owes its roots to rock and roll, and nearly 6 decades after it first hit the airwaves, it can still get my feet tapping to the beat pretty quickly, and I would bet that Bruce feels the same way.