Everybody had heard the story, and most of it was wrong. The legend said that Carole King was playing piano at home one day when the babysitter, doing chores nearby, started dancing to the music — and that this spontaneous shimmy became the Loco-Motion. King herself dismantled the tale in an interview with National Public Radio shortly after the singer’s death: there was no dance, and no dusting. What actually happened in 1962 is better. A song written for one artist was turned down, handed to the teenager who looked after the writers’ daughter, and released as a demo that was too good to re-record. It went to number one, invented its dance afterwards, and then — uniquely in pop history — went on to conquer the charts in three different decades, in three different voices.
Written for Dee Dee Sharp, Who Said No
By 1962, Gerry Goffin and Carole King were the star team at Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music, the Brill Building hit factory where young writers composed to order at upright pianos. The couple — married, barely out of their teens, and already responsible for Will You Love Me Tomorrow — were asked for a follow-up dance record for Dee Dee Sharp, the Philadelphia singer who had ridden Mashed Potato Time up the charts. Goffin’s lyric and King’s music offered a brand-new dance, the Loco-Motion, complete with instructions: swing your hips, jump up, jump back, make a chugga-chugga motion like a railroad train.
Sharp passed. It was one of the great misjudgements of the era — though an understandable one, since the song was little more than a beat, a chant and a grin. But a demo had been made, and the girl singing the demo worked in the Goffins’ house.
The Babysitter Sings
Eva Boyd had come north from North Carolina and been introduced to Goffin and King by The Cookies, the girl group who recorded many of the couple’s demos. The writers liked her voice, hired her to mind their young daughter — and then put her in front of a microphone. When Sharp turned The Loco-Motion down, the demo became the record. Renamed Little Eva, Boyd fronted a track produced by Goffin, with King herself audible in the backing vocals, and it was issued in June 1962 as the very first release on Kirshner’s new Dimension Records label. Collectors still argue over the record’s two pressings — one with handclaps driving the verses, one without — a reminder that the “master” was never fussed over, because nobody at Dimension thought they were manufacturing a standard. They thought they were manufacturing a dance craze with a shelf life of one summer.
The record topped the Billboard Hot 100 that summer — Billboard ranked it the seventh most successful American single of 1962 — and reached number two in Britain, where it had to fight off a simultaneous cover by the Vernons Girls, whose rush-released version stalled at number forty-seven. A decade later the original re-entered the UK chart and climbed to number eleven all over again. One measure of how thoroughly the record colonised its moment: the only known footage of Little Eva performing the song comes from a March 1965 appearance on the television show Shindig!, three years after the hit, and the recording was still being placed in films four decades later, turning up in David Lynch’s Inland Empire in 2006.
There is even a respectable body of opinion that the voice on the record is not Boyd’s at all. The celebrated New York disc jockey Dan Ingram maintained that the original Loco-Motion was sung by King herself, and Pete Waterman — who would later produce the song’s third hit incarnation — has said the same. King, who is unquestionably present in the backing vocals, never claimed the lead; the credit, and the mystery, remain Little Eva’s. The famous dance had to be invented after the fact — once the song was a hit, Boyd created the arm-pumping, train-like routine audiences expected, and performed it for the rest of her career. Another piece of lore needs correcting too: Boyd did not receive a one-off fifty dollars for a number one record. Fifty dollars was her weekly wage during her hit-making years — itself a raise of fifteen dollars on what the Goffins had paid her as a nanny. She never owned her recordings, and when the hits stopped she drifted back to North Carolina, to menial jobs and welfare, until the oldies circuit rediscovered her in 1987. She died in 2003, the year King gave that NPR interview setting the record straight.
The Song That Refused to Stay in 1962
Most dance-craze records die with their craze. The Loco-Motion instead became one of the very few songs in chart history to reach the American top three in three separate decades, each time by a different artist. In 1974, Grand Funk Railroad — then among the biggest rock bands in the country — cut it after producer Todd Rundgren heard guitarist Mark Farner singing it in the studio. Their stomping hard-rock version, all layered harmonies and heavy drums, spent two weeks at number one in May 1974, topping the Canadian chart as well and reaching the top five in Australia. John Lennon, surveying the hits of that year, singled it out: “I like ‘Loco-Motion’ — thought that was a great record.” The Grand Funk recording proved nearly as durable as the original, licensing its way into Japanese advertising campaigns for the technology company SoftBank decades later, where the pop group SMAP sang along with it on national television. It made Goffin and King only the second songwriting team in the two-acts-one-song club; fittingly, the first song ever to top the US chart by two different acts had also been theirs, Go Away Little Girl.
The song even survived disco. In 1979 the studio group Ritz cut a version that spent seven non-consecutive weeks at number one in New Zealand in 1980 and ended the year as that country’s most successful single — an unlikely antipodean coronation for a Brill Building hand-me-down. King, meanwhile, had a top-forty hit of her own from the same nostalgic project that produced her Locomotion: Pearls reached number forty-four on the album chart, and its single One Fine Day — another Goffin and King evergreen — climbed to number twelve.
The third coming belonged to Kylie Minogue. Her Locomotion began as an impromptu performance at an Australian rules football charity event with her fellow Neighbours cast members in 1987, and became her debut single: seven weeks at number one in Australia, one of the biggest-selling Australian singles of the decade. London’s Stock Aitken Waterman team re-recorded it for the world in 1988 — quietly swapping the lyric’s “railroad train” for “railway train” along the way — and placed it in the Dudley Moore film Arthur 2: On the Rocks. The new version reached number two in Britain, where its first-week entry was at the time the highest UK chart debut ever by a female artist, and number three in the United States, still Minogue’s highest-charting American single; in Canada it topped The Record’s chart outright. In France, Sylvie Vartan had already taken a French version, Le Loco-motion, to number one back in 1962. King, meanwhile, eventually reclaimed her own song, recording it as Locomotion on her 1980 album Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King, her fond look back at the catalogue the industry had once insisted she was not the right voice for.
Even the children’s market eventually took a ride. In 2000 the British girl group Atomic Kitten recorded the song for the end credits of the film Thomas and the Magic Railroad — the little engine and the Loco-Motion, a pairing Goffin and King could hardly have foreseen in 1962, and proof of how completely the record had passed into the common property of pop. Few copyrights have been worked so hard by so many generations, in so many styles, without wearing out.
A Demo That Became a Standard
Rolling Stone placed Little Eva’s recording at number 359 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and in 2016 the record was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. But the statistics only frame the real achievement. The Loco-Motion was product — a dance instruction song written to order in a songwriting factory, demoed by the help, and thrown away by its intended singer. Goffin and King’s craft turned that product into something indestructible: a melody sturdy enough to survive girl-group pop, arena rock and Stock Aitken Waterman hi-NRG, and a lyric so simple that three generations could learn the steps from the record itself. Carole King spent the 1970s proving she was an artist. The Loco-Motion is the reminder of what she had been before that: quite possibly the most reliable hit-maker in America, whose throwaway demo for the babysitter is still, sixty years on, doing its chugga-chugga motion like a railroad train.