Top Ten Banned Songs: Wake Up Little Susie (#3)

Tweet

Before a nice day that hopefully the morning rain will help by keeping the temps down I’ll give you another one of those songs that is great but didn’t seem that way to wrinkly-nosed censors, who wrinkled their noses at it and said “nope.” Sing along! #3: Wake Up Little Susie - Everly Brothers Linda? Yes. You said the Everlys were okay for country music, so here you go! I have to hand it to Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the writers of this song: the lyrics almost seem as if they knew it would get banned! “What are we gonna tell our friends when they say ‘ooh-la-la’?” The story is simple. It’s a boring movie, and a boy and his date fall asleep. They wake up and it’s 4 AM. It’s all innocent but they know that everyone is going to think the worst. Well, everyone did. A number of radio stations didn’t believe the kids actually fell asleep in a boring movie and this song was “in trouble deep.” It’s one of those weird things about people who are looking for something wrong with something, y’know? “Oh, that song doesn’t mean what the lyrics say it means. It’s evil. We must remove it from our airwaves.” At least the song survived. The people who railed against it? Don’t know about them. A post-script: the murder victim in Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” is named “little Susie” after this song. Zevon worked with the Everly Brothers as their piano player and arranger in the early 1970s. Wake Up Little Susie Written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant Recorded by the Everly Brothers Released as a single, 1957 Reason banned: perceived sexual innuendo Our goose is cooked: