"Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa" is a song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and was originally a hit in 1963 for Gene Pitney.
[2][3] The song's lyrics tell of a traveling man who detours to a romance in a motel and ends up never returning home.
[4] The twists of the song's lyrics (the protagonist, just 24 hours from reaching home, falls in love with a woman when he stops driving for the night, leaving his current partner twisting in the wind) are echoed in the music's tonal ambiguity, a common feature of Bacharach's constructivist style.
At the end of the song, a dominant seventh on the tonic resolves as a perfect cadence into a new key to finish the song on the subdominant chord of the principal key (C major as viewed from the perspective of a G major tonality).
[8] Less than two years later, Billy Joe Royal's "Down in the Boondocks" copied part of the arrangement of the tune.