Song of the Day 7/20: Chuck Berry, “My Ding-a-Ling”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, demonstrating the keen judgment she’s known for, used the occasion of a congressional hearing to show nude pictures of Hunter Biden to the public. The collective reaction has been what texters express as “SMH.”

She’s apparently unaware that those texters, and everyone else under the age of 40, routinely send such photos to each other, so good luck making a federal case out of it. If Americans are still prudish about sex, they show it not with outrage but with titters of sophomoric laughter, and they’ve been that way for a long time now.

This song, for example, topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, Chuck Berry’s only No. 1 single. Some radio stations wouldn’t play it, and it was the subject of a censorship campaign in the UK, were it also reached No. 1. The publicity probably helped, because the song wasn’t funny by the second time you heard it.

Though Berry claimed to have written the novelty tune, it was 20 years old when he recorded it. Dave Bartholomew, the New Orleans trumpeter and bandleader who made a star of Fats Domino and co-wrote scads of early rock ‘n’ roll classics – “Ain’t That a Shame,” “I Hear You Knockin’,” “Blueberry Hill” – wrote and recorded it in 1952. Berry did a substantial rewrite of the lyrics, but the double entendres, if not the song, remain the same.