The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

July 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Culture, Entertainment 

Every Sunday, The Soundtrack Of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular forty years ago, around the time Richard Nixon ran for, and was elected, President.

WOLLY BULLY (DOMINGO SAMUDIO) performed by SAM THE SHAM AND THE PHARAOHS

LOUIE LOUIE (ROBERT BERRY) performed by THE KINGSMEN

Along with the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie”, “Wooly Bully” was the go-to song for every frat party and freshman mixer for most of the 1960s and ’70s. They shared maddeningly catchy melodies based on chords that could be counted on fewer than the fingers of one hand. They also shared an uncanny ability to epater the bourgeois and get themselves banned — which, of course, made them all the more irresistible to their intended audiences.

“Wooly Bully” was a huge hit. Although it fell one place short of reaching #1, it stayed high on Billboard’s Hot 100 for more than three months; the magazine named it “1965’s Record of the Year” and it sold more than three million copies worldwide.

The lyrics were almost as unintelligible as they were surreally nonsensical. These two qualities led some listeners to believe (and, undoubtedly, as many more to hope) that, because rock and roll was involved, something very unsavory indeed must be going on, and that the song should be banned — which it was by many radio stations.

The basic story apparently involves two young women —Matty and Hatty— having unrelated conversations about the American bison and about the importance of not being an “L-seven” (a square — referring to the fact that if you form the number seven with one hand and the letter “L” with the other, joining your hands will produce a square ) by mastering popular dance steps.

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.
Had two big horns and a wooly jaw.
Wooly bully, wooly bully.
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.
Hatty told Matty, “Let’s don’t take no chance.
Let’s not be L-seven, come and learn to dance.”
Wooly bully, wooly bully
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.
Matty told Hatty, “That’s the thing to do.
Get you someone really to pull the wool with you.”
Wooly bully, wooly bully.
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.

Domingo Samudio, the song’s composer and performer, was born in Dallas to Spanish-speaking parents from Mexico. He joined the Navy and lived in Panama for several years before returning to University of Texas in Arlington in 1962 to study music history.

He dropped out of college and started playing with a band that was renamed Sam (for his nickname) the Sham (because his casual and comic style of performance was called “shamming”). And as he explained, “We got the rest of the name from the movie The Ten Commandments. Old Ramses, the King of Egypt, looked pretty cool, so we decided to become The Pharaohs.”

After some unsuccessful early attempts, the band planned to cut a record in the summer of 1964 with a song that used the words “hully gully” in the lyrics. When the record company said it didn’t want that phrase used, Sam substituted the name of his cat —Wooly Bully— and the rest became history. The opening count down — uno, dos, one, two, tres, quarto — emerged as part of the shamming that went on during the recording session.

A letter from a concerned parent to Attorney General Robert Kennedy led to an FBI investigation of the lyrical content of the Kingsmen’s song “Louie Louie”. This is what J. Edgar Hoover’s gumshoes had to work with:

Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go

Fine little girl waits for me
Catch a ship across the sea
Sail that ship about, all alone
Never know if I make it home

CHORUS

Three nights and days I sail the sea
Think of girl, constantly
On that ship, I dream she’s there
I smell the rose in her hair.

CHORUS

Okay, let’s give it to ‘em, right now!

See Jamaica, the moon above
It won’t be long, me see me love
Take her in my arms again
Tell her I’ll never leave again

CHORUS

Let’s take it on outta here now
Let’s go!!

There is a school of thought that at :58:59 of the recording the drummer accidentally hit his sticks together and uttered, on the acetate, a word that even in 2008 can’t be spoken over network TV. Maybe; maybe not. Interested readers can make up their own minds based on the evidence. Subsequent versions left little or nothing to the imagination, but watching The Kingsmen on a contemporary clip it’s hard to imagine such cleancut young men saying anything so subversive.

The song had been written and recorded in 1955 by Robert Berry. It is a calypso-style ballad about a patron —a sailor— telling a bartender (the titular “Louie”) about the girl he left behind in Jamaica and how he plans to go see her.

There is no question that other versions took the otherwise anodyne lyrics in distinctly raunchy directions. And it appears that the song was actually banned from being played in Indiana by Governor Matthew Welsh.

An official 120-page FBI report was issued; its contents pretty much amounted to a smorgasbord of the real and imagined filth complainants found in the various versions of the lyrics. The conclusion was reached and reported that, because the lyrics of the Kingsmen’s Ur version could not be understood, they could not be offensive. Case closed. But the legend (and the lure) of “Louie Louie” as the ultimate bad boy song of an otherwise uptight generation persisted — and persists.

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