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.
 

Jimmy Hart, fourth from the left in the Gentrys
 
So by way of juxtaposition, and to demonstrate the rather dramatic transformation of Mr. Hart, let’s take a look first at an example of some wrestling madness from 1993 wherein Hart appears with Hulk Hogan and Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake. Beefcake, in case you weren’t aware, used to hold down his opponents and give them a haircut of defeat when they lost. Apparently, Hart himself had his ears lowered by Beefcake at one point, but through one of the bizarre, salacious plot twists only to be found in the often sense-deprived landscape of the World Wrestling Foundation, Hart had made pals with Beefcake and was managing Hogan and the Barber of the Apocalypse alike in anticipation of Wrestlemania IX at the time of the clip below:
 

They’ll be trying to drink their own sweat to survive, brother.
 
Now, by comparison, here’s a clip of The Gentrys lip-synching to their tune “Spread it on Thick” from the 1967 beach-sploitation flick It’s a Bikini World (on which The Animals also make an appearance). I believe that Hart is the vocalist on the left of the two standing at the top of the stage.

The Gentrys do “Spread it on Thick” from 1967’s It’s a Bikini World

After the group broke up for a period, Hart reformed the Gentrys in 1969 as the band’s lead vocalist and they released a record on the Sun imprint. On it, they do a surprisingly great, organ-infused job with Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.”  Here’s a flyer for the single showing a decidedly different side of Jimmy Hart:
 

 
Here’s what their version sounds like with Hart on vocals:

 
Hart apparently never stopped making music, even recording an album with The Hulkster himself in 1995 called “Hulk Rules” that I’m betting sounds nothing like the Gentrys.