"My Ding-a-Ling" was originally recorded by Dave Bartholomew in 1952 for King Records. When Bartholomew moved to Imperial Records, he re-recorded the song under the new title, "Little Girl Sing Ting-a-Ling". In 1954, the Bees on Imperial released a version entitled "Toy Bell". Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts recorded it in 1961,[2] and it was part of their live act for many years. Berry recorded a version called "My Tambourine" in 1968, but the version which topped the charts was recorded live during the Lanchester Arts Festival at the Locarno ballroom in Coventry, England, on 3 February 1972 by the Pye Mobile Recording Unit, engineered by Alan Perkins, where Berry – backed by the Roy Young Band – topped a bill that also included Slade, George Carlin, Billy Preston and Pink Floyd. Boston radio station WMEXdisc jockey Jim Connors was credited with a gold record for discovering the song and pushing it to #1 over the airwaves and amongst his peers in the United States. Billboard ranked it as the No. 15 song for 1972.
The song tells of how the singer received a toy consisting of "silver bells hanging on a string" from his grandmother, who calls them his "ding-a-ling". According to the song, he plays with it in school, and holds on to it in dangerous situations like falling after climbing the garden wall, and swimming across a creek infested with snapping turtles. From the second verse onward, the lyrics consistently exercise the double entendre in that a penis could just as easily be substituted for the toy bells and the song would still make sense.[3]
The lyrics with their sly tone and innuendo (and the enthusiasm of Berry and the audience) caused many radio stations to refuse to play it. British morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse tried unsuccessfully to get the song banned.[4] Whitehouse wrote to the BBC's Director General, claiming that "...one teacher told us of how she found a class of small boys with their trousers undone, singing the song and giving it the indecent interpretation which—in spite of all the hullabaloo—is so obvious ... 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 behaviour—indeed quite the reverse."[5]
InIcons of Rock, Scott Schinder calls the song "a sophomoric, double-entendre-laden ode to masturbation".[6]Robert Christgau remarked that the song "permitted a lot of twelve-year-olds new insight into the moribund concept of 'dirty'".[7]
For a re-run of American Top 40, some stations, such as WOGLinPhiladelphia, replaced the song with an optional extra when it aired a rerun of a November 18, 1972 broadcast of AT40 (where it ranked at #14)[8] on December 6, 2008. Among other stations, most Clear Channel-owned radio stations to whom the AT40 1970s rebroadcasts were contracted did not air the rebroadcast that same weekend, although it was because they were playing Christmas music and not because of the controversy. Even back in 1972, some stations would refuse to play the song on AT40, even when it reached number one.
The controversy was lampooned in The Simpsons episode "Lisa's Pony", in which a Springfield Elementary School student attempts to sing the song during the school's talent show. He barely finishes the first line of the refrain before an irate Principal Skinner pushes him off the stage, angrily proclaiming "This act is over!"[9][10]
^Christgau, Robert (1988). "Chuck Berry". In Anthony Decurtis; James Henke (eds.). The RollingStone : The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music. New York: Random House. pp. 60–66. ISBN0679737286.
