Tequilaobit: Danny Flores

There are few people who are lucky enough to build a career on one word; much less a career which ran for four decades. Danny Flores, who has died at the age of 77, managed the feat.

In 1957, Flores came up with a saxaphone riff which he kicked around with songwriting partner Dave Burgess. Licked into shape, Flores hit upon the idea of a single, shouted lyric to punctuate the tune - "Tequila" - and changed his life. The tune took a while to hit, not being recorded until 1958, and only then as a b-side for a Champs song, but something in the song (or perhaps Burgess' delivery of the order) hooked, and by the end of the decade the tune had become a hit in its own right, and Flores had a grammy to show for his inspiration. He would happily spend much of the next forty years yelling the word, perhaps making him the only person to ever have got richer from a repeated bar order.

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