In American English, I recognize the expression "nothing to get hung up about" as an idiom meaning, "nothing to worry about." Based on some googling, it seems like in British English the phrase "nothing to get hung about" is an expression too, which makes sense because of the Beatles lyric in "Strawberry Fields Forever" (released 1967):
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever
So I have a two-part question. Was nothing to get hung about an expression in BrE prior to John Lennon's use in the song?
Is there any relation to the AmE expression nothing to get hung up about?
Update: Since the expressions do seem to have appeared around the time as the song according to Ngram, I'd be especially interested if anyone can find sources that offer evidence for or against a Beatles connection. Is the popularity of the phrases "to get hung up about" / "to get hung up on" / "to get hung about" a result of Lennon's lyric, or an unrelated evolution of the term "hangup," as suggested by Peter Shor in the comments?
Best Answer
Lennon deliberately chose to obfuscate the meaning of his signature song, even the title Strawberry Fields Forever was, in its day, controversial and ambiguous. Lennon simply took the name from a Salvation Army children's home in Liverpool called Strawberry Field (singular) which existed until 2005. The site has now been closed since 2011.
According to Wikipedia, Lennon's iconic lyric was inspired by a childhood memory
In other words, the young John Lennon knew full well he couldn't be arrested or given the death penalty for playing on the premises. The death penalty in the UK was suspended in 1965, one year after the last two men had been hanged in Britain, and five years after The Beatles had already been formed. The verb hang, when it refers to being killed by means of a rope tied to one's neck, is regular but it is not uncommon for native speakers (and in some dialects, I suppose) to use the irregular past tense hung in speech and in writing.
In fact, in verse two an even more obscure lyric, whose meaning never really caught on, is the following.
Does the tree refer back to hanging, or as John Lennon asserted in 1980 to his feelings of alienation, and “Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius — ‘I mean it must be high or low,’ ”
The origin of ‘get hung about’
As the OP and Xann have both stated, get hung about was not recorded in print before 1967.
However, the noun hang-up, also spelled hangup, meaning: a preoccupation, fixation, or psychological block; complex is first attested 1959, from notion of being suspended in one place. (Etymonline).
Cambridge Dictionaries lists hung up, and be hung up on sth: to be extremely interested in or worried by a particular subject and spend an unreasonably large amount of time thinking about it; Collins also has hung up, but mentions also hang about: to waste time; loiter, and the American expression, not care a hang about. Meanwhile, Oxford Dictionaries list the following entries under hang (US): not care (or give) a hang, and hang around. In the standard English dictionary, the second and third meanings of hung up about/on are supplied: Emotionally confused or disturbed, and Obsessed with or worried about
Unfortunately, the online dictionary fails to mention its earliest appearance in print, so turn we must to Etymonline, which states
The earliest instance of ‘to get hung about’ that I found on Google Books is dated 1969 [source], which was clearly inspired by the Beatles lyric
References
Dictionary.com: hang-up
The Beatles Bible.com: Strawberry Fields Forever
Wikipedia: Strawberry Field (the orphanage)