Songfacts®:

• Don Covay wrote a lot of songs about dancing, including "Pony Time" (a hit for Chubby Checker in 1961) and "The Popeye Waddle." "Sookie Sookie" follows in that tradition, with Covay imploring us to let it all hang out (we're assuming on the dance floor). "Sookie" is a nonsense word, but if you say it over and over, it makes a good rhythm to dance to.
• Dances mentioned in the lyric: the Baltimore jig and the boomerang. That second one refers to one of Covay's other dance songs: "The Boomerang."
• Covay was recording for Atlantic Records at this time. As they did with many of their artists, they sent Covay to Memphis to record at Stax Records, where the house band was top-notch. Covay wrote "Sookie Sookie" there with Stax guitarist Steve Cropper.
  
  Being on Atlantic was a boon for Covay: the label had Aretha Franklin cover two of his songs: "See Saw" and "Chain Of Fools."
• A 1968 cover by Steppenwolf is the first song on their first album. They issued it as a single, but it went nowhere. Their next single, "Born To Be Wild," did much better.
  
  The Steppenwolf version ended up being used by some radio stations as background music for promos and commercials, so their record company released it again as the B-side of "Magic Carpet Ride," the band's other big hit.
• The Smashing Pumpkins performed "Sookie Sookie" live on August 25, 1990, at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago, Illinois. The performance can be seen on the bonus DVD that came with the 2011 reissue of Gish. Their frontman Billy Corgan introduces the song saying, "Alright, this is another of them motherf--kin' covers that we can't seem to shake off, like a f--king cancerous disease," before sarcastically adding, "oh yea, crank it up." During the song's ending metal jam, he can be heard saying, "This is horrible! It's terrible."