Let’s Turkey Trot – Little Eva (1963)

Description

Additional information about this, Little Eva vinyl art.

Little Eva – The Artist

Eva Narcissus Boyd (1943 – 2003), known by the stage name of Little Eva, was an American pop singer. Although some sources claim that her stage name was inspired by a character from the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she stated in an interview that she was named after her aunt, which prompted her family to call her “Little Eva.” As a teenager, she worked as a maid and earned extra money as a babysitter for songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin. They saw Little Evas singing potential and wrote ‘The Locomotion’ which became her biggest hit. The Locomotion was later covered by Kylie Minogue in the eighties.

Let’s Turkey Trot – The Song

Let’s Turkey Trot is a popular song written by Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller. It was recorded by Little Eva and was released as her third single for the Dimension label. The record features girl group The Cookies on background vocals, with the Cookies’ lead Earl-Jean McCrea getting some solo lines. The song’s title is a reference to the turkey trot dance step, a step that was only briefly popular fifty years before the song was released; the song is played at a tempo much slower than the one used for the dance in its heyday. Little Eva’s “Let’s Turkey Trot” was used in the film Easy Rider, but it was omitted from the soundtrack album.

The turkey trot was a dance made popular in the early 1900s. The Turkey Trot was done to fast ragtime music popular in the decade from 1900 to 1910 such as Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. Driven largely by youth counterculture of the time, the turkey trot fad quickly fell out of favour as the foxtrot, a much more conservative dance step based on the waltz, rose to popularity in 1914. The basic step consisted of four hopping steps sideways with the feet well apart, first on one leg, then the other with a characteristic rise on the ball of the foot, followed by a drop upon the heel. The dance was embellished with scissor-like flicks of the feet and fast trotting actions with abrupt stops.

The Turkey – The Shape

The turkey is a large bird in the genus Meleagris, which is native to the Americas. Males of both turkey species have a distinctive fleshy wattle or protuberance that hangs from the top of the beak (called a snood). They are among the largest birds in their ranges. As in many galliformes, the male is larger and much more colourful than the female. The species Meleagris gallopavo is used by humans for their meat. Compared to wild turkeys, domestic turkeys are selectively bred to grow larger in size for their meat. Americans and the British often eat turkey on special occasions such as at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

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