Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone single cover
Pat Boone, I’m in Love with You, from Pat Boone’s private collection and archives © to the owners
In a music and film career spanning over 70 years, Tennessean performer Pat Boone has made the history of American rock ‘n’ roll right from the early 1950s, well before The Beatles came into play.
His Speedy Gonzales song about the Fastest Mouse in all of Mexico was released in 1962, sold over 2 million copies globally, topped charts everywhere, and has been a worldwide hit for decades up to this day, after surviving some ridiculous criticism and cancel culture hysteria in 2020.
At the time, Pat Boone himself reacted by telling Fox News: “Hey, how stupid must you be to think a cartoon mouse is a bad influence? Is Mickey an insult to other rodents? Goofy to slow dogs? The Road Runner to Wile (Coyotes)? Elmer Fudd to hunters? Let’s be truly concerned about jobless people, hungry children, maimed veterans and war widows, and leave the few harmless things we can still laugh about alone; let grandma and the three little pigs win once in a while – c’mon!”
He also confirmed that the song Speedy Gonzales is still a favourite of his Hispanic fans, and that he gets asked to perform it every time he goes to South America.
Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone
Besides his famous belter, Pat Boone has also had a long string of other notable achievements: he got 6 number-one hits in America out of 25 singles that all reached the top 20 of the US singles charts. He holds a world record for having had at least one single in the US charts for 220 consecutive weeks. He starred in 27 films, had a television show in the 1950s, released 80 studio albums and 78 compilations as of 2026, shared the stage with Elvis Presley, and came up with a lucrative idea to make money out of The Beatles in America.
Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone cd cover
He is still the most recorded single artist in American history; in fact, Frank Sinatra recorded 1500 lyrics, Bing Crosby made 2000 tunes and Pat Boone has recorded more than 2300 separate songs across 7 genres of music – and counting; his record Can’t We Get Along from song he wrote in 1992 when the Los Angeles riots erupted was repurposed in 2021 by the runner-up of The Voice in the US, Wendy Moten and – in the same year – Mr Boone recorded a male version of Enya’s Only Time.
In recent times, he has been involved in plenty of cultural activities, including a podcast called The Pat Boone Hour on SiriusXM ‘50 Gold, the auction event for the Talisman of Napoleon – an object of art once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte which was discovered close to Waterloo in 1938 – and the 2024 biopic Reagan about the life of President Ronald Reagan who was a close friend of his.
Pat Boone is in today for an interview about his extraordinary life and the legacy of his work.
Pat Boone Bienvenido in Mexico, early 1960s, from Pat Boone’s private collection and archive, © to the owners
Pat, why are you called Pat when your real name is Charles Eugene?
Pat Boone at a Savvy Chic Event © to the owners
You’re right, you’ve done your homework! My parents expected a girl; I was the first, and there was no amniocentesis, and they’d already named her Patricia. So when I was born, on closer inspection, they realised “Wait a minute, this is not a girl”- as it was noticeable, and so they named me after my two grandfathers Charles and Eugene, and they kept calling me Pat anyway. My wife [Shirley Boone, who passed away in 2019] looked up at the meanings of words in names, and she found out that my last name, Boone, originally did not have an E at the end of it. And Boon without an E at the end is an Anglo-Saxon word for blessing: “The king granted a boon to the subjects…” And so my
Pat Boone and his late wife Shirley © to the owners
full name Charles Eugene Boone means wellborn man of blessing. But I’ve always been called Pat anyway. And I always have to explain it, and on my birth certificate, there was Charles Eugene Boone, but it causes problems with security at airports, and so I have to write Charles Eugene in parentheses and then Pat, you know, just to put Pat in there, too. So that’s the explanation. My parents expected a girl. And I turned out to be a boy. So they named me Pat!
How do you feel about the Speedy Gonzales song?
Speedy Gonzales by Pat Boone CD cover
It is such a captivating, fun, rhythmic, memorable song! This is the story: I was in the Philippines, I was appearing at the Araneta Coliseum, I think I performed 10 shows for 240,000 people in total, in eight days, and one night I had a late-night respite, and I went with somebody to a nightclub, like a little supper club where other entertainers hung out after their gigs. And there this guy got up and sang this song, Speedy Gonzales, and I said, “What is that?!” They said, “It’s an American artist, David Dante on RCA, is that a hit in America, is that number one?” And I was like, no, we don’t know anything about it. Well, it was so captivating that I had him sing it twice, and then I had to get up and sing some of mine as well, but I brought the 45 RPM record home, and I eventually got Randy [Wood, the record producer] to let me record it about a year later. And as soon as Speedy Gonzales hit the charts, it went to number one quicker than any record I’ve ever had. And it’s just so contagious. Elton John confessed to me that he borrowed the la la la la la la la la la for his Crocodile Rock practice. He looked at me sheepishly and said, “I thought I was afraid you were gonna sue me”, and I was like, “Really? What a compliment! You took on something from one of my records!” So yeah, Crocodile Rock and Speedy Gonzales are related!
In 2020, Speedy Gonzales was made a target of criticism. How far do you think cancel culture will be taken?
The Speedy Gonzales film, 1955, © to the owners
They’ll take it as long as decent-minded people let it happen. A long ago, I read a book called You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) [by Frederick Charles Schwarz] and to do what they say and exactly what they’re gonna do: they’re gonna first take over the education of the young, which is happening now in America. They’re changing all of our history books, they’re tearing down the monuments to our foundations and the creators of our nation. They’re making it very hard to ever quote the Bible in any way, as they call it hate speech, because it contradicts the culture that they’re committed to. These people, some unwittingly, are committed to this because they make it sound appealing. But it is corrupted, I call it demonic. The United States Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, so we know that our freedoms and liberties and the rights that we have as human beings come not from the government; they come from our Creator. But these people are absolutely committed to taking away all considerations of God, or what we think of as morality, in terms of equality: everybody the same, and big governments that will tell you what you can have and what you can do and what you can’t do. One of our founders, President Thomas Jefferson, said: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have”. And that’s what we’re facing, we’re being swept along by the forces that are really anti-God, anti-morality, anti-sanity – I mean, when you have men with moustaches and beards, competing with women in women’s sports by claiming they’re women and going into the women’s locker rooms, even in schools – and pity the poor girls that happen to be in there when these guys professing to be girls come in and rape them. I mean, this is happening. And it’s a sign of the times, of our losing our way, morally. So you ask the question “What’s going to cause it to cease?” That is up to only right-minded, sensible, rational people standing up and saying “Enough, we’re not going to take this anymore, we’re going to go back to rock-solid, foundational principles of humanity, and divinity as well”.
What do you think of the current state of the film and music industries?
Pat Boone © to the owners
I find most of the current trends to be really reprehensible anyway – yes, there’s still good stuff, and I have to single out certain performers, but most of it is garbage. Several years ago, the Academy Awards couldn’t find anything better than a song called Hard Out There for a Pimp to be chosen as Best Movie Song of the Year [the song from the movie Hustle & Flow is from DJay featuring Shug and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2006]. So they couldn’t find anything better to call the Song of the Year Hard Out There for a Pimp, about someone who is selling women’s bodies. A famous female performer was asked to perform some years ago at the Super Bowl halftime show, and was going to do a pole dance wearing almost no clothes, and this is for millions and millions of people and teenagers tuning in to watch the football game. And the Grammy Awards became so decadent that they looked like riots; they did shows with rappers singing and burning a car on stage, and celebrated it with music. I think it’s like Rembrandt doing graffiti on a bathroom wall; it’s not worthy of his art, it’s not really even being called art. It’s being done by artists, good musicians, and good singers, but it’s stuff that’s highly unworthy of their talent.
What achievements are you most proud of?
Pat Boone’s family © to the owners
Well, obviously, my family, because that is an achievement that occurred in the middle of, and in some ways, as a result of my career. We had four daughters, who are only less than four years apart, all born separately, by the time we were 23, and I graduated from college at 23 with four children, four little girls. From 1957 to 1960, I had a big television show, The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom and I was the youngest guy ever to have his own musical variety show with the great singers coming on as my guests every week, and in the summertime, I was making movies as a break from TV, and then I was taking my courses at Columbia University in New York where I graduated Magna cum Laude in 1958, and I was on the cover of TV Guide with my cap
The Pat Boone Family Act © to the owners
and gown, and there’s a picture of my wife and my four little girls. I should have been perhaps… neutered, or fined, or something, for inflicting this on my wife, but she was a perfectly willing accomplice to have four children in less than four years. And then, when they were all becoming teenagers, I created The Pat Boone Family Show with my wife and my four daughters joining me on stage. And no other pop act ever did this, to bring his family into his shows as his live stage performing act. Singing together, they became a singing group as good as any singing girls’ group you can imagine, and they stayed at home until they were married. So that to me is my greatest accomplishment. Then, of course, I am proud of my 2300 songs and the record I hold in the record business of being in the charts for 220 consecutive weeks. I think the closest to that is Elton John with 157 weeks.
Do you remember the first time you heard one of your songs playing on the radio?
The first time it happened to me was during my second record Ain’t That a Shame. I was going into a taxi cab across New York, it was late summer, during the night, and I saw a car full of teenagers waiting at a red light, and my taxi pulled up next to that car. They had the radio on, they were hearing my record Ain’t That a Shame, and they were just jumping up and down and singing Oh, you made me cry when you said goodbye, and I melted. I thought, “Whoa, that’s what this record business is like!” I wanted to say, “Hey, kids, that’s me!”, but I didn’t. But the feeling of hearing these kids spontaneously so excited about something that I did in a studio is a feeling that I’ve never gotten enough of, really,
How did you first meet Elvis Presley? What was he like?
Elvis Presley & Pat Boone on TV Parade in 1956, © to the owners
People today have no recall at all and no awareness that Elvis and I matched each other hit after hit for the rest of the 1950s. I had 41 chart records, and he had 40, but I had an 11-month head start on him. We were two friendly rival Tennessee boys, and of course, that continued until he passed. Also, Elvis and I didn’t get a Grammy in those times because we preceded the Grammys. Elvis and I, and our big hits, were all before the Grammys started in 1959, and so well, we had Grammys, but they were not on TV. Anyway, when Elvis and I first met, it was my opening act in Cleveland, in October of 1955. Nobody knew who he was; they only knew who I was because I’d had three records that year that were a million sellers. Elvis had only made one record at the time, which was a bluegrass country song called Blue Moon of Kentucky, which he did in what we call a rockabilly style, but had not caught on yet, so the kids didn’t know who he was yet. I met him backstage when he came in from Shreveport, Louisiana, and I said, “Hi Elvis, I’m Pat Boone!” And he said, “Nice to meet you”, and I said, “ The sock hop DJ Bill Randle says he thinks maybe some big things may be ahead of it”, and he said, “I don’t know, but I hope so”. And he leaned back against the wall, and his buddies, his guitar player and bass player, Bill Black and Scotty Moore, sort of closed in around him. And I could tell he was shy and maybe scared, because he was going to face about 600 kids who didn’t know who he was. He did his song Blue Moon of Kentucky in his way, which was not rock ‘n’ roll back then. He was wiggling around the stage, strumming his guitar. And the audience liked him, but then again, they didn’t know who he was. Then he did his rhythm and blues thing, which worked out well and sold to the audience, and then they wanted more, but it was all he had, so he left. And then I was introduced, and because I was currently the teen idol at the moment, I got all the screams from the girls and l lip-synced my three records, and when I came off, he was gone.
Years later, you and Elvis Presley became friends.
Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, Rockin’ Rivals by Passport International ©
About two-and-a-half years later, we were both renting homes in Bel Air whilst making movies at 20th Century Fox, and we got reacquainted. And I said, “Elvis, that first time we met there in Cleveland that night, I was a bit worried. You seemed shy, it’s like you were nervous”. And he replied, “Well, I didn’t know how to talk to you, man, you were a star!” And I was like “Me?! A star? I had been recording since March 1955 and it was just October 1955!” And he was like “Yes, but you were on the charts and I didn’t know how to talk to you”. So this just showed what a nice young man from Memphis, Tennessee, he was. And I was trying to be a nice young man from Nashville, Tennessee. So we were Tennesseans, and we were buddies for all the years of his life, and we met for the last time at an airport in Memphis. I patted him on his stomach and asked, “Do you carry the money with you here?”, and he said, “Oh, I’ve been eating too much off in Las Vegas”. That was the last month of his life. And then he said, “Where are you going?”, and I was like “Orlando”, so he said I was going the wrong way. He turned to his buddy and said, “He’s always going the wrong way”. He was just kidding. He repeated that I was always going the wrong way, and my last statement to him was “Well, Elvis, it depends on where you’re coming from”. That was the last thing we said. A month later, he was gone.
Is there a favourite memory from your time with Elvis Presley you would like to share?
There were many. But when he opened at the International Hilton in 1969, he hadn’t been performing live for two or three years, as he was just making movies. Everybody was curious about how it was going to be when he would be back on stage and perform live with a full orchestra, his singers and his gospel quartet. And I went over to Las Vegas to be there that night, and then he was phenomenal. And I went up to see him in the penthouse, he took me back into the big walk-in closet, just he and I, so we could talk a minute alone, and he said: “I wish I could go to the church as you do”. And I said, “You can, why don’t you go?”, and he was like “Oh, I can’t do it, man, I make a big distraction, the kids want my autographs, and I would be taking the attention away from the minister”. And I said, “Don’t you think it happens to me when I go to a church that is not where I’m normally going? I just tell the kids who want my autograph to wait outside after church”. But Elvis said, “No, I can’t do that, I just think it’d be a big distraction, and they’d be looking at me”, and I asked, “Aren’t you used to people looking at you? Let them see that you’re here for the same reason they are, and they’ll leave you alone, and so when they take your autographs to school, the others will be like where did you get this? Elvis Presley, or Pat Boone, was at the church, so can we come? Let it be an outreach, you know?” But he said no, he was just socially uncomfortable. He said he would have liked to talk to Oral Roberts, a minister who was always on television, and I so said, “Let me give you a clue. Your name is Elvis Presley. You get on a phone call with the Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you said your name and that you’d like to talk to Roberts, and in 40 seconds he’ll be on the phone!” But he was like “Oh no, I can’t do this”. He was not comfortable making an approach to somebody else, so I called Oral Roberts for him and he flew out to Las Vegas and had a great session with him. And what Roberts told me later was: “This man is spiritually hungry. He grew up in churches just like you did, with his family, his parents. And he’s never in a church anymore, and he’s surrounded by guys who are leading him into all kinds of other Eastern types of religions and self-realisation and all these things. And there’s a curiosity in his search for spiritual moorings, but not what he’s familiar with. And he misses the Bible and the church songs”. That’s why he began to sing church songs in his shows, and why he recorded the albums that won him a posthumous Grammy. But yeah, you asked about the most memorable and precious moment, I think it was then when I could share something like that with Elvis and encourage him to stay on that serious spiritual search that he was on.
What is the biggest difference in music between yesterday and today?
Pat Boone © to the owners
Today, music is sort of imploding on itself. Whatever has a breakthrough appeal, everybody else has to do things that sound like that and borrow from the success of this other thing that was maybe original when it first happened. I’m not condemning it, but I’m just saying it’s the way it goes. Back then, rock ‘n’ roll was so lively and musical and, like most trends, it started to cave in on itself. The music industry is very repetitive and imitative, and so things that stand out are something different. Groups like Coldplay are like no other group, and very hard to define, really. But when The Beatles came along, there was such a vibe, they were so vivacious, they were so spontaneous, so happy and so energetic, they weren’t copying anybody. Now they do. They do their versions of rock ‘n’ roll songs that they liked and that influenced them. Of course, The Beatles were borrowing from the R&B artists, they were picking up on their songs and some of their flavour, but with an energy that was so spontaneous, and didn’t seem imitative. But then what happens in rock ‘n’ roll, and in almost any other kind of music, and even other kinds of art, is that people start imitating what’s successful, and they start trying to make things that sound like what is successful. And meanwhile, after a while, the ones that were originally successful sound like they’re imitating themselves; it gets to have a sameness to it. But The Beatles – and I use them as an example – were constantly exploring other new things.
In the 1960s, you purchased a licence to make a portrait of The Beatles, and you made money selling Beatles memorabilia in the United States.
The Beatles 1964 portrait by Leo Jansen © to the owners
Ah, The Beatles! Goodness, I first heard them when their record From Me To You came out in 1963. I love that song. When The Beatles came to this country, they were suddenly selling all the records, and all of us other artists were scrambling to try to keep our record sales alive. And so I got in touch with Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager, and I said, “I have an idea, I want to have a painter to paint beautiful oil paintings, single portraits of each of The Beatles and then a group portrait of all four, and I need a licence”. And he said, “Hey, great idea”. And so I signed the contract, and he gave me the right to do it, and I had this painter painting these beautiful single solo portraits of each of the guys, and then a group portrait. And I sold those in Sears [an American chain of department stores] stores in the States, and I made more money selling Beatles’ pictures that year than from my own records!
Did you ever meet The Beatles?
I did. I have pictures of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – and I think also one of Paul wearing Pat Boone Fanclub buttons, as when they came to the States, they wanted people to know that they were aware of what was happening in America, and thankfully, I was still very popular at that point, having my own hit records. And so they proudly wore Pat Boone Fanclub buttons! So yes, when they came to do their first shows in America, and they were at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, I and my family were in the front row. We actually brought 300 people from all over the country to those first two concerts: when they bought a Beatles picture, there was a number tag, and their name and address were on it, and so we drew 300 names, and we got in touch with the people and flew them to Las Vegas to The Beatles’ concert! So, some two or three hours before they did the show, I went backstage to visit the four guys, and my daughter Laurey sat on Ringo’s lap, my daughter Cherry was talking to John, and Linda was talking to George Harrison. And then, of course, I was talking to Paul. And he said, “You know, our manager Brian put out our names and faces on a lot of crap, but we like these pictures that you painted, because they’re very flattering. We like them”. When I went to Liverpool eventually for singing and concerts, I went to The Cavern Club, where they first made their first success, and those pictures that we had painted are on display. And yes, so we were friendly, I was in business with them. I’d like to say that we had more communication, but we didn’t. I liked Paul very much because he kept his marriage together, and his family was very important to him. I guess maybe eventually so to George, and John and Yoko. But you know, it was a turbulent life they were living, and I knew what that was like. But I felt like Paul and I had more in common, maybe, than I would have had with any of the others, though I had great admiration for all of them.
In 1966, you travelled to Italy to perform at the Sanremo Music Festival. How was the experience?
Mai, Mai, Mai, Valentina by Pat Boone and Giorgio Gaber, 1966
My manager let me go there to sing three new Italian songs in Italian and compete with the Italians, with an estimated 100 million people seeing it live. I was a fool to do that. It went well because one of my three songs, a song called Mai, Mai, Mai, Valentina became a big hit that year. I think the other song was Volare [he refers to Nel blu dipinto di blu by Domenico Modugno], but I’m not sure my recollection is right, and I remember Quando Quando Quando by Tony Renis. The Sanremo Music Festival was very good, but it was also so nerve-wrackin,g though, because the writers wanted me to perform their songs well because of the competition, and I tried to learn these three Italian songs, but we were about an hour before the show went live and I was trying to remember but I didn’t know what all the words mean. So I said, “Where’s the teleprompter?”, and they were like, “Well, there’s no teleprompter”. And then I was like, “No teleprompter? I need the words on the teleprompter. I need to have them. Because that’s in Italian. I had to know that there was no teleprompter! Well, are there cue cards? Can I have cue cards? At least?” But they said, “No, no cue cards”. And so I had to write some of the words that I knew I was going to have a lot of trouble remembering on my hand. But I was so nervous that my hand sweated, and it just took a bunch of black ink all around. And so I did the best I could, but I’m sure that the writers of the songs were not happy with me. It was a terrifying experience because of having no cue cards or a teleprompter. I still have a favourite memory from that trip, though, and it’s when I went from Sanremo to Modena to buy a Ferrari called Superamerica Sports Car and have it shipped home. A fantastic car. And so I called to make an appointment to be there in Modena to take possession of the car so, for tax reasons, it would have come to America as a used car that I took possession of up in Italy. Enzo Ferrari in person was going to be there, so he invited me to have lunch with him, and so I had lunch with Enzo Ferrari in the upper room where all the designs of future models were being laid out, and they were designing future Ferraris. And so he said, “Do you have children?” And I said, “Yes, I’ve got four daughters”. And he replied: “Oh, so you don’t want a Superamerica, you want a Ferrari 2+2 with four doors”. And I said, “No, Mr Ferrari, this is not for my daughters, this is for me, I want a Superamerica Sports Car”, but
The ex-Pat Boone 1966 Ferrari 330GT series II 2+2 © to the owners
he was like “No, no. I’ll take you for a drive”. So Enzo Ferrari took me for a drive in this new model, 4-door Ferrari 2+2, saying, “This is what you want for your children”, and so I eventually bought a car I didn’t want! I bought the 4-door Ferrari 2+2. I never bought the Superamerica! This 2+2 had air horns that played April Love: if you press the button, it would play April Love in the air horns and well, that was fun for a while, but it was still a 4-door car and it looked like, I think, a Chevrolet Corvette, it didn’t look like a Ferrari, and so I sold my Ferrari that I didn’t like to Tommy Smothers of the comedic duo Smothers Brothers. So the car may not be in this house, but for me, for car aficionados, to know that Pat Boone took a test drive with Enzo Ferrari himself driving the car, then you’ll understand why I bought a car I didn’t want! I found a picture on the internet of Enzo Ferrari showing me the Superamerica and demonstrating that there was no room for my four daughters! That’s a great memory from my time in Italy, even if I eventually got the Ferrari I wanted at a later date; we picked the car up in San Francisco with my wife, we took a train to San Francisco and then drove it down the Pacific Coast Highway in a Superamerica!
Unless stated otherwise, pictures provided were from Pat Boone’s private collection © belongs to their respective owners