Nagasaki

"Nagasaki" is a 1928 jazz song composed by Harry Warren with lyrics by Mort Dixon, which became a popular Tin Pan Alley hit. The silly, bawdy lyrics have only the vaguest relation to the Japanese port city of Nagasaki; part of the humor is realising that the speaker obviously knows very little about the place and is just making it up. It was one of a series of U.S. novelty songs set in "exotic" locations popular in the era, starting with Albert Von Tilzer's 1919 hit "Oh By Jingo!"; "Nagasaki" even makes reference to the genre's prototype in the lyrics. Even more directly, the song "On the Isle of Wicki Wacki Woo" was written by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn in 1923.