"Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa" | ||||
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Single by Gene Pitney | ||||
from the album Blue Gene | ||||
B-side | "Lonely Night Dreams (Of Far Away Arms)" | |||
Released | 1963 | |||
Genre | Pop | |||
Length | 2:52 | |||
Label | Musicor | |||
Songwriter(s) | Burt Bacharach, Hal David | |||
Producer(s) | Aaron Schroeder, Wally Gold | |||
Gene Pitney singles chronology | ||||
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"Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa" is a song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David which was a hit for Gene Pitney. Its success in the UK enabled Pitney to become an international star. In the US, Pitney peaked at #17 on the pop chart.
The song is notable for its 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 centred 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).