Wooly Bully

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Wooly Bully is the title of a nonsense song that became a million seller in 1965 in the version of Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs .

History of origin

Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs was a band from Texas dressed in pseudo-Arabic robes with a turban under the leadership of Domingo 'Sam' Samudio. In 1964 they drove to Memphis for recordings , where they recorded some songs for various record companies.

When the band in September 1964, 'Sam' Samudios composition Hully Gully in the studio of Sun Records came, it was made clear that this phrase could not be used because there was already Dance song titles with the same name from the year the 1959th Samudio spontaneously decided to replace the name of his cat, titled the song Wooly Bully ("woolly buffalo", or "woolly tormentor") and adapted the text of the first verse accordingly. Counting in Tex-Mex slang was just as spontaneous . “ Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro ” could be heard on the first take , but not on the other two takes. Samudio wanted to have it cut out, but producer Stan Kesler left the first take in its recorded form.

The text is as nonsense as the title; it is about a dialogue between a certain "Hattie" and "Matty" about the American bison and the need to be able to dance skillfully. A simple organ riff on a Farfisa supports the rhythm of the song, which is based on a 12-bar blues sequence, while the solo of the tenor saxophone in C major by Paul “Butch” Gibson is the actual characteristic of the piece. David A. Martin (bass guitar / vocals), Ray Stinnet (guitar) and Jerry Patterson (drums) also took part in the recording. Ain't Gonna Move (composed by Stacy Davidson and producer Stan Kesler) was selected as the B-side and was initially released as the XL 906 in late 1964.

success

Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs - Wooly Bully

The record was just as unresponsive as the previous single. It was not until MGM Records acquired the master tape and re-released the single in February 1965 as MGM K 13322 that the trade press and the public reacted. Some radio stations, however, did not play Wooly Bully because they found the difficult-to-understand text suspicious because of ambiguous words. Upon its release, it ranked second on Billboard's Pope Parade, selling two million copies in the US and one million worldwide. That made it the best-selling single of 1965, and Billboard named it the best single of the year. The song was the first American million seller during the British invasion of beat bands in 1965. While the title was only listed at number eleven in Great Britain, it reached second place in Germany. It received a gold record and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list of the 500 songs that made the most of rock and roll. He was honored with a BMI award. In the 1987 resulting Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket the song is included in the soundtrack. A total of 51 cover versions of the song are registered. There are also German versions of Rudolf Rock & die Schocker from 1978 and Schmitti from 2006 under the respective title Wooly Bully - Volle Pulle . In addition, the song has been translated into various languages, there is a Khmer version by Ros Sereysothea, a Dutch version by André van Duin ( Stoele Stoele ) and also an Iranian version - Atal Matal by Zinguala Ha.

Trivia

Wooly Bully is one of the songs with interrogators , also called Agathe Bauer songs , in which a German text can be mistakenly heard from a foreign language. Here the last sentence in the intro before the actual song sounds like "Walter, close the door".

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph Murrells: Million Selling Records. From the 1900s to the 1980s. New York 1985, ISBN 0-668-06459-5 , p. 213.
  2. ↑ Billboard Magazine, September 25, 1965, p. 6 . Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  3. ^ Cover info entry by Wooly Bully . Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  4. ↑ Schmitti from Kall with Mickie Krause and Tim Toupet on CD . Article in Rundblick Schleiden, December 21, 2007. Accessed October 21, 2012.
  5. ↑ Author unknown - “Translating” Wooly Bully in 1960s Southeast Asia (no year) [1] at Wordpress
  6. ↑ hitparade.ch , the funniest interrogators in music history