‘Your Groovy Self’: Watch Nancy Sinatra do something really amazing (with very little effort)
Speedway is a typical lightweight Elvis romp from the 1960s co-starring Nancy Sinatra who plays a sexy IRS agent who comes to audit race car driver Elvis, whose business manager is an idiot addicted to gambling.
Eventually, she succumbs to The King’s charms, natch. There are songs and even a plucky homeless family living in their car. That’s Speedway’s plot in a nutshell.
Carl Ballantine from McHale’s Navy and Gale Gordon, best known as Mr Mooney from The Lucy Show are also part of the cast. One production number, for a song called ‘He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad’, takes place in an IRS office. It’s perfectly dreadful, if entertaining, drivel, but it does have two great numbers in it.
Elsewhere, Elvis does a rocker called ‘Let Yourself Go’ that was released as a single, but flopped, which is a shame, because it’s one of my own personal very top favourite Elvis tracks. I mean, Glenn Danzig must feel the same way, he recorded a credible cover version in 2007.
And then Nancy Sinatra performs a swingin’ little number called ‘Your Groovy Self’, complete with decidedly minimalist mod choreography. It’s also one of her best songs: written and produced by Lee Hazlewood, she’s backed by a brassy configuration of the Wrecking Crew. It’s most certainly one of her best performances on film and the sole track by anyone other than Elvis himself to appear on the soundtrack album to one of his movies.
But first, I interrupt you for two fun facts: First, Speedway was originally written for Sonny and Cher.
Second, take a look at the nightclub: Quentin Tarantino’s set design for Jack Rabbit Slims in Pulp Fiction was inspired by the campy race car decor of the Hangout, where Speedway’s in-crowd mix.
The plot device that gets Nancy to sing is when Carl Ballantine, the maitre’d of the Hangout shines a spotlight on her, and for some arbitrary Elvis-movie logic, she has to “get up and do something.”
Just watch what she does:
For anyone who thinks Nancy Sinatra had no talent, if you still believe that after viewing the above clip, then go fuck yourself. Never has someone done so much with so little! This you have to have in your genes, friends. It cannot be learned.
What’s striking about Nancy’s turn in Speedway is how she doesn’t just hold her own against Elvis, she damn near steals the scene. Sinatra moves with that detached, louche confidence she’d perfected in the Movin’ With Nancy TV special. She’s embodying the whole “mod princess with a sting in her tail” vibe. The choreography might be minimal, but her presence is so self-assured it almost feels like she’s mocking the flimsy mechanics of the film around her. In a movie built as another forgettable Elvis vehicle, Sinatra’s number becomes the moment that feels genuinely alive.
Speedway might be remembered as one of Elvis’ cheesier cinematic detours, but buried inside its neon race-car kitsch are flashes of real cultural gold. Strip away the IRS gags and the hokey plot, and what you’re left with are two pop icons, both at very different stages of their careers, burning through the celluloid with raw charisma. That’s the strange magic of these “lightweight” Elvis flicks: amidst the fluff, you sometimes stumble into moments that feel like pop history unfolding in real time.
And speaking of winning the genetic lottery, watch Elvis’s great number from Speedway, ‘Let Yourself Go’.