One of the most unusual novelty songs has to be the 1967 hit “Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out)” by the Hombres. Here is a sample verse, chosen almost at random: “Saw a man walkin’ upside down / My T.V.’s on the blink / Made Galileo look like a Boy Scout / Sorry ’bout that, let it all hang out”. Not only that; but, as I originally put it in Wikipedia (naturally, the keepers of the Wikipedia universe took out some of the best wording): “The spoken-word introduction – ‘A preachment, dear friend, you are about to receive on John Barleycorn, Nicotine and the Temptations of Eve’ – goes all the way back to 1947, when it served to introduce a song that was every bit as strange for its era as this one was in 1967: ‘Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women’ by Red Ingle and His Natural Seven.”
(March 2013)
