R&B Singer Richard Berry was on a package tour that included a salsa band when he heard a song that grabbed his ear: Rene Touzet's 'Loco Cha Cha,'. The progression in the opening and bridge was a total earworm, so he copped it and wrote a song of his own. Calypso was big at the time so he wrote some quasi-West Indian lyrics about a homesick sailor and a rock and roll standard was born. →[More:]

Because of it's simple structure, the song became popular with early 60's garage bands, especially in the Pacific Northwest. It was covered ably by Rockin' Robin Roberts and The Wailers and Paul Revere & the Raiders (among many others) before falling into the hands of an outfit called the Kingsmen. The vocal mike was mounted in the ceiling of the studio, making Joe Ely's singing hopelessly garbled, leading moral guardians of the time to conclude that the lyrics were obscene (my mom says that her Catholic high school forbade the song to be played at school dances). The FBI was even called in. But the controversy drove the record to the top of the charts (the unbeliveable catchiness didn't hurt either). The song has become one of the most covered tunes of all time, reborn as girl-group pop, torch-singing, soul, semi-Cajun blues rock, back to salsa again, punk and thrash metal*. And why not? If "Like A Rolling Stone," is great rock and roll at it's most successfully ambitious and sophisticated, this is rock and roll at it's most succesfully crude, primitive, raw and obnoxious.

Oddly, when the Kingsmen's version broke big, 'sophisticated tastes leaned towards ersatz 'folk' music of the Kingston Trio/Pete Seeger variety, and the audience for that music would often trot out this song as proof that rock and roll was nothing more than crass greasy kids stuff. The story behind the song reveals that it was the rock and rollers, not the folkies who were the torch carriers for the oral tradition that the folkies held so dear.

For further elucidation, read this book.

*and the covers I've uploaded only scratch the surface. look here for more, and here for a list including 'spin-off' songs, of which there were plenty.