Happy Anniversary: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, “Travellin’ Light”

55 years ago, Cliff Richard and the Shadows – yes, it was so long ago that he was still working with Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris, and Tony Meehan – released the song that would prove to be his final single of the 1950s and his second song to top the charts in the UK.

Written by Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett, the twosome who also composed a song for Richard which would go on to serve as the theme song to one of the greatest British sitcoms of all time (not to mention the single that Richard recorded with the cast of the series), “Travellin’ Light” may have been a hit for Sir Cliff, but it wasn’t originally intended for him. As Steve Turner revealed in Cliff Richard: The Biography – and when we say he revealed it, we mean that even Cliff himself didn’t know this was the case until the book was being put together – Tepper and Bennett “had contributed songs to two of Elvis Presley’s films, Loving You and King Creole, writing them to order from early drafts of the scripts handed out to a pool of songwriters,” and “Travellin’ Light’ had been written in this way for a scene which was subsequently cut from King Creole.”

Still, it’s hard to think of “Travellin’ Light” as one of the King’s castoffs when Cliff managed to take it to the top of the British charts. All told, it’s pretty clear that, no matter for whom the song was originally intended, Cliff Richard and the Shadows made it their own.