There are more than a few versions of “Louie Louie” floating around out there. The Wiki puts the number in the hundreds. The song’s first author Richard Berry released the original in 1957, but his was only a regional R&B hit.
Richard Berry and The Pharoahs - Louie Louie [buy]
It took the Kingsmens’ exuberant first-take garage-band run (or is it stumble?) through to propel the song to national fame. And investigation: some worried minds in the country felt the hit single to be obscene, and so they contacted Attorney General Robert Kennedy about the matter and the song was duly investigated by the FBI. After two years of crack detective work, it was declared that the song was “unintelligible at any speed.” Cut to 1969 and we find the song made very intelligible by some members of the Black Panther Party, who did their own bit of creative appropriation by altering the lyrics to their anti-pig rhetorical ends.
piggy wiggy ooh ooh,
i say, you gotta go now,
oink, oink,
bang, bang,
dead pig
You can catch some party members singing this iteration of the lyrics in the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton (about 17 minutes into this clip).
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