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Other meanings of “ramalama”

Last fact-checked 2026-11-02

Beyond the two songs, “ramalama” is mostly a sound with a history.

A vocable: sound as music

A vocable is an utterance that is not a word, such as “la la la” or “dum dee dum”. Wikipedia notes that such non-lexical vocables are common in music, and that scat singing is essentially all vocables. “Rama lama ding dong” and “Ramalama (Bang Bang)” both work this way: the sounds carry rhythm and mood, not dictionary meaning.

The doo-wop “ram” joke

Barry Mann’s 1961 song “Who Put the Bomp” asks who put the “ram” in the “rama lama ding dong”. Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” plays on the same line, according to Wikipedia. So “the ram” is a long-running wink at doo-wop syllables. More on the Edsels page.

“Shama Lama Ding Dong”

A similar-sounding but separate song from the film Animal House. See the comparison.

Looking for the AI tool?

“RamaLama” is also the name of an unrelated open-source command-line tool for running AI models; its home is ramalama.ai. The name RAMALAMA is registered as a trademark by Red Hat LLC for software (per Trademarkia). This site is not about that tool.

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