Who recorded it first
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
Not a Nancy Sinatra original — a 1966 Cher single on Imperial
Because Quentin Tarantino hung Nancy Sinatra’s reading over the opening credits of Kill Bill: Volume 1, a lot of people met the song as hers. It was Cher’s first: she cut it at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles on 11 February 1966, and Imperial Records issued it as a single on 25 February 1966. It was written by Sonny Bono, then her husband. Far from being an obscure original, Cher’s record went to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became her first million-selling single — the eclipse happened decades later, in a cinema.
The record
Who recorded it first
Released Recorded 11 February 1966 at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles and released as a single by Imperial Records on 25 February 1966. It also appeared on Cher’s second solo album, The Sonny Side of Chér.
Charted A major hit — No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the UK Singles Chart. It was Cher’s first million-selling single.
Hear Cher’s 1966 Imperial single — the original recording, not the Nancy Sinatra version. www.youtube.com · Auto-generated “Cher - Topic” channel; description reads “Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group” with a ℗ 1966 line. Runtime is 2:45 (165 seconds), matching the MusicBrainz recording length of 165.226 seconds for the 1966 recording.How we know
Wikipedia’s article on the song ↗ gives the recording date of 11 February 1966 at Gold Star Studios, the Imperial single release on 25 February 1966, and Cher’s peaks of No. 2 in the US and No. 3 in the UK.
MusicBrainz ↗ holds the Cher recording at 2:45, the length that matches the officially distributed 1966 single audio.
The Wikipedia entry for How Does That Grab You? ↗ places Nancy Sinatra’s version as a track on a Reprise album issued in May 1966 — after Cher’s single was already on the charts.
Songfacts ↗ confirms Sonny Bono’s authorship and records Sinatra’s own account of the Kill Bill revival.
Wikipedia: Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) — recording history and cover versionsKnow more about the original — or think we’ve got it wrong? Add a source →
Fact-check
What people get wrong
The Nancy Sinatra recording is the one most people have heard, and it is easy to assume the famous version is the first one. It is not.
Nancy Sinatra
Her version, arranged by Billy Strange, appeared on the Reprise album How Does That Grab You? in 1966 and became ubiquitous after Kill Bill: Volume 1 used it over the opening credits in 2003.
Cher
Recorded 11 February 1966 at Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, and released as a single by Imperial Records on 25 February 1966. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Sonny Bono
Bono wrote the song and produced Cher’s recording. Neither Cher nor Nancy Sinatra wrote it.
Cher recorded it first, in February 1966. Nancy Sinatra’s is a cover from the same year that a film made famous decades on.
Context
How a No. 2 hit lost its own song
The usual shape of these stories is that a forgotten record got outsold by a famous one. This one is stranger: Cher’s original was not obscure at all. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 3 in the UK, and sold over a million copies. What overtook it was not a bigger hit but a better placement — Nancy Sinatra’s album track, sitting unremarked for decades, was picked by Quentin Tarantino for the opening credits of Kill Bill: Volume 1 in 2003.
That is the whole mechanism. Cher’s version was a radio hit for a season; Sinatra’s became a film’s signature, replayed for a generation that had no memory of the chart. Billy Strange’s spare tremolo guitar arrangement suits a revenge picture in a way that Sonny Bono’s bright 1966 production never could, so the cover reads as definitive to anyone who arrived through the cinema.
The chronology, step by step
- 11 February 1966 — Cher records the song at Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles. Sonny Bono, her husband, wrote it.
- 25 February 1966 — Imperial Records releases it as a single. It reaches No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 in the UK, and becomes Cher’s first million-selling single.
- 1966 — It appears on Cher’s album The Sonny Side of Chér.
- May 1966 — Nancy Sinatra’s version appears on her Reprise album How Does That Grab You?, arranged by Billy Strange. It was not a Hot 100 hit.
- 1966 — Foreign-language versions top charts elsewhere: Sheila’s French recording reaches No. 1 in France in July, Dalida’s Italian version No. 1 in Italy.
- 2003 — Quentin Tarantino uses Sinatra’s recording over the opening credits of Kill Bill: Volume 1, and it becomes the version most listeners know.
- 2005 — UK duo Audio Bullys sample Sinatra’s recording on their electro house track “Shot You Down”; it reaches No. 3 in the UK and No. 20 in Australia.
The original was a million-seller. The cover was a movie.