‘Wake Up Little Susie’: The most innocent song to ever banned from radio
“Wake up, little Susie”, the Everly Brothers sang on their 1957 song of the same name. “Wake up, we’ve both been sound asleep / wake up, little Susie, and weep / The movie’s over, it’s four o’clock, and we’re in trouble deep”.
Those lyrics don’t sound controversial at all, do they? Actually, the song would get the Everly Brothers in deeper trouble than they’d know. “Well, what are we gonna tell your mama? What are we gonna tell your pa? What are we gonna tell our friends when they say, ‘Ooh la la,’” they crooned in the next verse.
Scandalous, right? And we’re not talking about how contrived those “and weep” / “trouble deep” and “your pa” / “ooh la la” rhymes are.
The United States of America is supposed to be the land of free speech. In fact, freedom of speech is enshrined and protected in the very First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite that, the country has a history absolutely hilariously filled with rather extreme censorship.
Through the early part of the 20th century, the US government had formed the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) to hound anybody out of public life who was too left-leaning, communist or, therefore, anti-American. At the same time, Hollywood was famously suffering under the strictures of the Hays Code. Nudity was not allowed, nor were profane language, narcotic use, ridicule of the clergy, extramarital affairs or (specifically) white slavery.
While there has historically been a clamour to ban certain books (a trend that is, worryingly, on the rise again), something similar has also happened through the years on the radio, as well.
Billie Holiday’s historic, powerful and monumentally impacting ‘Strange Fruit’ found itself banned from many radio stations in America owing to its morbid and racially charged imagery, while Cole Porter’s ‘Love for Sale’ was widely banned for its explicit depiction of prostitution.
Elvis Presley was almost banned from the nation’s TV screens in the 1950s because of his gyrating hips, while plenty of his contemporaries couldn’t get radio play with him dominating the charts as, pretty much, the only accepted rock act. That was before the ever more absurd authorities began cracking down on perceived vulgarity and obscenities in songs, too.
In 1954, Rosemary Clooney’s version of ‘Mambo Italiano’ was banned from being played on the WABC Radio Station in New York, as executives were worried that the Italian lyrics in the song, which they couldn’t understand, were vulgar or suggestive. Clooney’s label, Columbia Records, had to step in with an official statement procured by a Catholic priest who confirmed the lyrics were harmless.
Two years earlier in Boston, the seemingly innocent ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ by Jimmy Boyd was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. It was then subsequently banned from radio on the grounds that the lyrics invoked and conflated the riqué act of kissing and the holy Christmas Day. Not to mention fears that the song was glorifying adultery.
Then, in 1957, it was the religious sect in Boston, once more, which led to The Everly Brothers’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ being banned from the radio, as well.
Though the song simply tells a story about a young couple who fall asleep in their seats while on a date at the movies and miss their 10pm curfew for getting home, the church, which had huge sway on the cultural world at the time, thought it was too suggestive. Quite what they thought was being suggested, you’ll have to decide for yourself, but the crooning brothers made it clear that the narrative was not one with untoward undertones.
The ban may have kept the track from being played on the radio stations of Boston, but it couldn’t curtail the curiosity of the general public, who bought enough copies of the single to send it all the way to number one across almost every single chart that year.
