Mungo Jerry Mungo Jerry Mungo Jerry are a British rock group who experienced their greatest success in the early 1970s, with a changing line-up that has always been fronted by Ray Dorset. The group's name was inspired by the poem "Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer", from T. S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". The group's biggest hit was "In the Summertime". They had nine charting singles in the UK, including two number ones, and five top 20 hits in South Africa. Mungo Jerry came to prominence in 1970 after their performance at the Hollywood Festival at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, on 23 May, which
T. S. Eliot went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture. Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his