If you grew up with oldies radio, “Wake Up Little Susie” sounds about as dangerous as a church picnic. Two minutes of jangling guitars, angelic harmonies and a worried boyfriend trying to get his girl home before her parents wake up.
Yet in 1957 the Everly Brothers watched this seemingly harmless single yanked from Boston radio playlists for being too “suggestive,” even as it rocketed to the top of the national charts and later into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
A sweet little record that sounded scandalous in 1957
The song came from Nashville husband-and-wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the same writers behind much of the Everlys’ early catalog. The brothers cut it in Nashville in mid August 1957, and Cadence Records rushed it out as a single on September 2 that year.
The plot could not be simpler. A high school boy and his girlfriend Susie go to the movies, fall asleep during a dull film, and wake up at four in the morning, hours past her ten o’clock curfew. The rest of the lyric is pure teenage panic: how to sneak home, what to tell her parents, how to protect their good names.
There is no heavy breathing, no backseat groping, not even a kiss on the cheek written into the song. What you hear instead is reputational terror: “our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot” is about as explicit as it gets, and even that is really about gossip, not sex.
Teen harmony, adult panic
By the time “Wake Up Little Susie” hit the airwaves, the Everlys were already redefining what rock and roll could sound like. Their Appalachian-rooted close harmonies over chugging acoustic guitars paved the way for acts from the Beatles to Simon and Garfunkel, and on October 14, 1957 the song became their first No. 1 single on the American pop charts.
They would soon repeat that trick with “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” another Bryant composition that topped multiple Billboard charts and still turns up today in lists of the greatest dream-themed songs ever recorded. In other words, the brothers were wholesome, bankable hitmakers long before anyone tried to paint them as corrupters of youth.
Still, “Wake Up Little Susie” managed to set off alarms. The Boston Archdiocese, wielding enormous cultural influence at the time, pushed local stations to pull the record, arguing that its story of an unsupervised teen couple out all night was morally unacceptable. The single nonetheless topped the Billboard pop and Cash Box charts, spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the country chart, later landed on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list and eventually entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.
How a drive-in date became “too suggestive”
To modern ears the outrage sounds almost comical, but Boston had a long habit of treating anything that hinted at sex as a public threat. Historian Neil Miller’s account of the city’s Watch and Ward Society shows how “Banned in Boston” became a badge slapped on books, plays and movies that ran afoul of self-appointed moral guardians from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth in Banned in Boston.
Into that climate walked a record about a boy and girl who accidentally fall asleep at what listeners assumed was a drive-in. Lines about the movie being over at four o’clock and the couple being “in trouble deep” were enough for some programmers to interpret the song as code for premarital sex and ban it from their playlists.
The irony is that the writers had already toned the lyric down. Boudleaux Bryant originally drafted a line about Susie’s furious father – “he’ll kill me like as not” – but Felice pushed for a safer verse about the movie “wasn’t so hot” and having hardly any plot, fearing the first version sounded too much like the couple had actually slept together, according to accounts of the 1957 Nashville recording session.
“There’s nothing sleazy or off color in there”: the Everlys clap back
From the brothers’ perspective, the whole uproar said more about the censors than about the song. Don Everly later recalled the phone call when he learned about the ban: “They called and said it had been banned in Boston,” he said, adding that the controversy came from what people “read into” the lyric rather than anything they had actually sung, insisting there was “nothing sleazy or off color” in it.
Nearly three decades after the furor, the Everlys finally brought “Wake Up Little Susie” back to the scene of the crime. Playing Boston Common in 1986, Don introduced it with a sly grin as “a song that was banned in this city in 1957” and pointed out how absurdly harmless it now sounded to local fans.
Phil Everly was just as bemused. Looking back in the 1980s he noted that the record had actually been banned from many stations, simply because adults thought the idea of two teenagers accidentally being out together into the “wee hours” was too racy, even though the brothers themselves never imagined anyone could object, as he recalled in a later interview.
Banned in Boston: a moral crusade that backfired
By the time “Wake Up Little Susie” arrived, the phrase “Banned in Boston” already carried a lurid kind of glamour. Even local commentators now look back on the Catholic hierarchy’s decision to pressure several Boston stations into banning the song as pure overkill that only made it seem hotter than it really was, as recounted in retrospectives on the ban.
In practical terms the ban did almost nothing to stop the record. Outside a handful of tightly policed markets it stayed in heavy rotation, and the whiff of scandal arguably gave the Everlys – squeaky clean country boys in matching suits – a veneer of danger that teen listeners loved.
Here is how the whole saga unfolded in real time:
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| Mid August 1957 | Everly Brothers record “Wake Up Little Susie” in Nashville. |
| September 2, 1957 | Single released by Cadence Records. |
| October 14, 1957 | Song reaches No. 1 on the U.S. pop charts. |
| Late 1957 | Boston Catholic authorities pressure local radio stations to ban the record. |
| 1986 | Everly Brothers perform the once-banned song on Boston Common, joking about the old ban. |
Why “Wake Up Little Susie” feels so innocent now
Part of what makes the Boston ban fascinating today is how mild the record sounds next to modern pop. Within just a few years American TV audiences were already outraged by Elvis Presley grinding through “Hound Dog” on national television, proof that adults were panicking less about lyrics and more about the sight of teenage desire breaking loose in public, a pattern noted even in modern roundups of the most memorable oldies performances.
Against that backdrop, the Everlys almost seem like choirboys. Their harmonies are pure, the guitars are acoustic, and the worst thing that happens in “Wake Up Little Susie” is that two kids nod off at a boring movie and risk a talking-to from their parents. The scandal lived not in the grooves but in the imaginations of anxious adults who could not stand the idea of unsupervised youth culture at all.
Legacy of a tiny morality play
In the end, “Wake Up Little Susie” survives as more than a catchy oldies staple. It is a miniature morality play about how a community’s fear of teenage sexuality can turn innocent mishaps into imagined sin, and how censorship tends to say more about the censors than about the art. The fact that a 2-minute country-rockabilly single could be banned in Boston and canonized as a classic should make us eye every new moral panic a little more skeptically.
