Banned Songs: My Ding-a-Ling

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When I started this countdown someone mentioned this one. One of the most obvious songs on the list of songs that were banned by some radio stations. With terrible shame I present today’s song. My Ding-a-Ling - Chuck Berry What’s the shame? This — THIS — was Chuck Berry’s only #1 song. And this is a rerun from the “songs you didn’t know were covers” countdowns. Yep, this was a cover. It originated with Dave Bartholomew (who wrote “I Hear You Knockin’”) on King Records in 1952. Back then they were called “party records,” and there wasn’t any chance of them getting on the radio. They were played at parties (hence, the name), not in “respectable” places. Fast forward twenty years and Chuck does the song on a live album, recorded in London. He’d already recorded it in the studio in 1970 but didn’t give a thought to releasing it as a single. Ah, but the live version in 1972 was released as a single. Oh, the outrage! Hey, you Whitehouse Ha-ha, charade you are! (Pink Floyd, “Pigs [Three Different Ones]”) Yes, Mary Whitehouse, the Jerry Falwell of England, tried to get the song banned there. She failed. In contrast, many stations in America DID refuse to play the song. (I think, of our two top 40 stations in Louisville that I knew about at the time, WAKY would play it and WKLO would not. I was still heavily into Buck Owens at the time so I might have that backwards.) So…ban the song on the radio, and people run out and buy the 45. It ended up at #1 (which probably made stations who carried American Top 40 AND wouldn’t play the song cringe every week). “This little song, it ain’t so sad,” Berry said in the live version. Well, it is kind of sad that this was Berry’s only chart topper, after a career that gave us “Johnny B. Goode,” “Back in the USA,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” and “The Promised Land.” Oh, well. My Ding-a-Ling Written by Dave Bartholomew Recorded by Chuck Berry From The London Chuck Berry Sessions, 1972 Reason banned: double entendre Once I was swimming across Turtle Creek: