Boston radio station WMEX disc jockey Jim Connors was credited with a gold record for discovering the song and pushing it to #1 over the airwaves and amongst his peers in the United States.

The song tells of how the singer received a toy consisting of "silver bells hanging on a string" from his grandmother, who calls them his "ding-a-ling".

According to the song he plays with it in school holding on to it in dangerous situations like falling while climbing the garden wall, and swimming across a creek infested with snapping turtles.

From the second verse onward, the lyrics consistently exercise the double entendre in that a penis could just as easily be substituted for the toy bells and the song would still make sense.

[4] Whitehouse wrote to the BBC's Director General claiming that "one teacher told us of how she found a class of small boys with their trousers undone, singing the song and giving it the indecent interpretation which—in spite of all the hullabaloo—is so obvious... We trust you will agree with us that it is no part of the function of the BBC to be the vehicle of songs which stimulate this kind of behaviour—indeed quite the reverse.

[7] For a re-run of American Top 40, some stations like WOGL in Philadelphia, replaced the song with an optional extra when it aired a rerun of a November 18, 1972, broadcast of AT40 (where it ranked at #14)[8] on December 6, 2008.