La Grange
by ZZ Top
- 161
- BPM
- A minor
- Key
- 8A
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
ZZ Top took "La Grange" from their 1973 album Tres Hombres, and Bill Ham produced it. The band put it out as a single in January 1974. It got extensive radio play and rose to number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 that June. The single's B-side, "Just Got Paid", came from the second album, Rio Grande Mud.
The title and lyrics point to a brothel on the outskirts of La Grange, Fayette County, Texas, later called the Chicken Ranch. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a Broadway play and film, is about the same place.
The opening groove comes from the boogie blues rhythm John Lee Hooker used in "Boogie Chillen'". In 1992 Bernard Besman, a music publisher with a co-credit on that song, sued the members of ZZ Top, claiming "La Grange" infringed on it. A federal judge dismissed the case in 1995 and ruled that "Boogie Chillen'" was in the public domain. In March 2020 the song returned to the Billboard charts after the release of the documentary ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas.
La Grange runs at 161 BPM, the tempo of footwork, gabber and fast metal. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.49 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 373 ms. It is in A minor, Camelot 8A, which shares its notes with C major and mixes cleanly with D minor and E minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.