Despite the fact that I was a pretty sports-averse youth, growing up in the eighties and nineties, it was basically impossible to avoid having a Saturday morning run-in or two with pro wrestling. The WWF came on right after cartoons, and, like a mosquito to a bug-zapper, you just couldn’t help but find yourself, like it or not, sucked in by the bloviating, vein-popping, pile driving, yelling-and screaming phenomenon.

A strong contender for pro wrestling’s Shouter-in-Chief at the time was Jimmy “The Mouth of the South” Hart. Hart, a Jackson Mississippi native, is famous for being the bullhorn-toting manager for the likes of Hulk Hogan, Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase, King Kong Bundy and The Honky Tonk Man among several others. Hart’s Wikipedia page indicates that he was named Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s Manager of the Year in 1987, an award he won again in 1994, facts of which I never thought I would be in possession.
 

Jimmy Hart and Hulk Hogan taking tan to a ‘whole nutha level.’
 
Amazingly however, before he was the “Mouth of the South,” Jimmy Hart lived a life of a different sort, still in the entertainment industry, but as a singer for a modish band of garage rockers called The Gentrys who scored a top five hit in 1965 with “Keep on Dancing,” a cover of a 1963 recording by the Avantis. And, as many of you may already be aware, the band was pretty damned good.

More after the jump…