Songfacts®:

• The songwriters Bob Hilliard and Carl Sigman wrote this for a special musical show at the legendary New York nightspot The Copacabana. When The Copa turned down the song, Hilliard and Sigman used it in a Broadway stage revue called Angel in the Wings, which ran for 308 performances at the Coronet Theater from 1947-48. In the show, it was performed by Elaine Stritch. Louis Prima had a Top 10 hit with the song, but it was the comic actor Danny Kaye, with the Andrews Sisters, who took it to the top of the charts with a winning call and-response rendition.
• In The Carl Sigman Songbook, Sigman's son Michael calls this song, "a humorous satire of modern society. Telling what today we'd call the politically incorrect tale of the happy native who doesn't want anything to do with the 'advantages' of modern life, its famous refrain goes, 'Bongo, bongo, bongo I don't want to leave the congo/Oh no no no no no/Bingle, bangle, bungle I'm so happy in the jungle/I refuse to go.'"