On this day (October 21) in 1972, Chuck Berry started a two-week run at No. 1 with “My Ding-a-Ling.” He recorded the novelty song during his set at the Lanchester Arts Festival in Coventry, England, in February 1972. The song’s paper-thin double entendres led several radio stations to refuse to play it. One moral crusader in the United Kingdom tried to get the BBC to ban the song.
Berry, a rock-and-roll pioneer, notched several hits in the 1950s. “Maybellene,” “School Days,” and “Rock and Roll Music” were all top 10 hits. He reached No. 2 with “Sweet Little Sixteen” in 1958. He scored two more hits before the end of the decade, but most of his singles failed to make the top 40. Berry saw a brief surge in popularity around 1963, after he spent a year in prison for transporting a minor across state lines for unsavory reasons. Then, in 1972, “My Ding-a-Ling” became his first and only No. 1 on the Hot 100. It was also his final top 10 hit.
Chuck Berry’s Biggest Hit Ruffled Feathers
Chuck Berry had a big hit with “My Ding-a-Ling.” He also courted some controversy with the thin double entendres in the lyrics.
The song opens with the lines “When I was a little bitty boy / My grandmother bought me a cute little toy. / Silver bells hangin’ on a string. / She told me it was my ding-a-ling-a-ling.” The rest of the song includes talking about holding and playing with his ding-a-ling. In the chorus, he invites others to join in the fun.
Many radio stations across the United States refused to play it. Even when it went to No. 1, some stations omitted it from their American Top 40 broadcasts. According to the Guardian, a British “Morals Crusader” named Mary Whitehouse launched a campaign against the song after Berry performed it on Top of the Pops. In her letter to the BBC’s director general, she claimed that a teacher had told her about the horrible impact the song had on her students. “She found a class of small boys with their trousers undone, singing the song and giving it the indecent interpretation of which–in spite of all the hullaballoo–is so obvious,” she wrote. “We trust you will agree with us that it is no part of the function of the BBC to be the vehicle of songs which stimulate this kind of behavior. Indeed, quite the reverse.”
Her campaign was unsuccessful. “My Ding-a-Ling” went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom.
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The post On This Day in 1972, Chuck Berry Was at No. 1 With a Novelty Song Packed With Enough Double Entendres To Spark a Moral Crusade appeared first on American Songwriter.