"Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa" is a song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and was originally a hit in 1963 for Gene Pitney.

Production

The song's lyrics tell of a traveling man who detours to a romance in a motel and ends up never returning home. The twists of the song's lyrics (the protagonist, just 24 hours from reaching home, falls in love with a woman when he stops driving for the night, leaving his current partner twisting in the wind) are echoed in the music's tonal ambiguity, a common feature of Bacharach's constructivist style. The verse is in G major, with a lydian implication in the melody supported by the supertonic major. At the start of the chorus, an interruption of the expected cadence by the subdominant chord (C major) establishes this as the new tonic, with the remainder of the chorus centered around the submediant, dominant and subdominant chords of this key. A similar interruption at the end of the chorus converts an expected perfect cadence in the new key to a modal cadence back into G major. At the end of the song, a dominant seventh on the tonic resolves as a perfect cadence into a new key to finish the song on the subdominant chord of the principal key (C major as viewed from the perspective of a G major tonality).

Chart performance

Its success in the UK, peaking at #5, enabled Pitney to become an international star. In the US, Pitney's hit peaked at #17 on the 7 December 1963 Hot 100 and #2 on the 6 December 1963 WLS Silver Dollar Survey.

Cover versions

References in popular culture

Influences

Less than two years later, Billy Joe Royal's "Down in the Boondocks" copied part of the arrangement of the tune.