My Ding-a-Ling by Chuck Berry (1972)

The man who wrote Johnny B. Goode, Maybellene and Roll Over Beethoven, the songwriter the Rolling Stones and the Beatles spent their early careers imitating, topped the American charts exactly once, in October 1972, with a live sing-along about his "ding-a-ling". Berry did not write it. Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino's producer, recorded the original in 1952, and Berry had been playing his own version for years before a recording from Coventry, England, ended up on a live album and then, improbably, at number one on both sides of the Atlantic.

The song's whole engine is the pretence. Nobody in the room believes the toy story for a second, and the recording captures a crowd of thousands cheerfully singing the word back at him, like a church choir that has misread the hymn sheet on purpose. That is the joke and the entire content: four minutes of audience participation in a euphemism everyone understands.

Its afterlife is a footnote in censorship history. The British campaigner Mary Whitehouse tried to have the BBC ban it, arguing that schoolboys were singing it with their trousers undone, which if anything confirmed that the euphemism was not fooling anybody, least of all Mary Whitehouse. About 1,900 people a month still look up the lyrics, which for a four-word chorus suggests they are checking the verses for the toy.