"Let's Not Be L-7" means "let's not be squares"

For all parents of teens, tweens, and weens who complain that the kids' music these days is lacking in substance, I remind you that we once thought Domingo Samudio was rather profound, fifty-some years ago.

Domingo is 82 years old now and we never knew him by that name, anyway. He was well known in 1965 and forgotten by 1967 under the name "Sam The Sham" as he performed with his band The Pharoahs.

Sam was born in Dallas to parents of Mexican descent, and in high school was in a band with Trini Lopez, with whom he grew up in the "Little Mexico" section of Dallas. Trini had hit records with "If I Had A Hammer" and "Lemon Tree," and played Pedro Jiminez in "The Dirty Dozen," which is universally regarded as one of the two greatest movies of all time by every single person alive.

Stardom came later for Sam, and followed a six-year Navy stint and some time spent working the carnival circuit before catching on with a bar band called Andy Anderson and the Nightriders. When Andy left, Sam took over, renaming the band and dressing them like characters in the movie "The Ten Commandments." Sam felt that Ramses was a sharp-dressed king, so he named the rest of the group "The Pharoahs."

With a recording contract on the XL label, the band was in the recording studio and began fooling around with songs based on the current dance craze The Hully Gully. They couldn't very well steal that dance, so Sam made up The Wooly Bully, with lyrics that spoke to an entire generation, all over the world:

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.
Had two big horns and a wooly jaw.
Wooly bully, wooly bully.
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.
Hatty told Matty, "Let's don't take no chance.
Let's not be L-seven, come and learn to dance."
Wooly bully, wooly bully
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.
Matty told Hatty, "That's the thing to do.
Get you someone really to pull the wool with you."
Wooly bully, wooly bully.
Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.

It made a big hit record in 1965, voted Record of the Year in Billboard magazine, and there were two lesser hits that year ("JuJu Hand" and "Ring Dang Doo") before, as so often happens in the world of arts, the rest of the band quit working for Sam and he had to hire all-new Pharoahs.  1966 brought the hit "Little Red Riding Hood" and then, oblivion...until 1982, when the movie "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" gave "Wooly Bully" another day in the sunshine . Then began a period of Sam's life that saw him working as an interpreter in Mexico, a sailor/deck hand on commercial vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, and a gospel preacher.

There was a time when music was fun and didn't have to mean anything so profound. No one ever found out what a wooly bully was, and maybe that's better. It's still a catchy tune, and will become an earwig if you listen just once!

But consider this: when "Fast Times" came out, they danced to the song at their prom, and the song was 16 years old and considered quaint and classic. The movie itself is now 37 years old! All right, Hamilton!