Remarks:
This is came out in 1959, one of the first recorded soul songs. The lyrics, though, were controversial. The video above is from “The Ed Sullivan Show” on December 3rd 1967 and shows Billy Preston. Some of the lyrics have been changed.
Raoul Peck, in “I Am Not Your Negro” (2017), juxtaposed this song with Doris Day’s “Should I Surrender?” (1961) while quoting James Baldwin:
“In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, can be summed up in the images of Gary Cooper and Doris Day, two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and face of Ray Charles. And there has never been any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.”
See also:
Lyrics:
[Verse 1]
Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong
Come and love your daddy all night long
Alright now, hey hey, alright
See the girl with the diamond ring
She knows how to shake that thing
Alright now now now, hey hey, hey hey
Tell your mama, tell your pa
I’m gonna send you back to Arkansas
Oh yes, ma’am, you don’t do right, don’t do right
[Bridge]
When you see me in misery
Come on, baby, see about me
Now yeah, alright, alright, ah, play it, boy
[Instrumental break]
[Bridge]
When you see me in misery
Come on, baby, see about me
Now yeah, hey hey, alright
[Verse 2]
See the girl with the red dress on
She can do the Birdland all night long
Yeah yeah, what’d I say, alright
[Chorus]
Well, tell me what’d I say, yeah
Tell me what’d I say right now
Tell me what’d I say
Tell me what’d I say right now
Tell me what’d I say
Tell me what’d I say, yeah
[Post-Chorus]
And I wanna know
Baby, I wanna know right now
And-a I wanna know
And I wanna know right now, yeah
And-a I wanna know
Said I wanna know, yeah
Source: Genius Lyrics.
Abagond 
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