The curious case of Irving Berlin and the yam
A Hall of Fame songwriter penned a tribute to a root vegetable. Why?
Over the past three years, I’ve established a Sunday-evening tradition. Between the hours of 7 and 9 PM Eastern, I set the coordinates of my Sonos system for WWOZ-FM in New Orleans, one of the world’s great radio stations. For those two hours (at least most weeks), an endearing lady who calls herself the Secretary of Swing takes over the airwaves with The Hep Cat’s Ball, a program that focuses on music of “the big-band era,” here defined as starting roughly in the early 1920s and ending in the late ’40s. The Secretary, whose real name I know but prefer not to reveal because I am pro-mystique in such matters, is blessed with impeccable taste. Every week on her show you’ll hear the giants of the period—Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, Basie, Crosby, Fitzgerald, Holiday, Reinhardt, Cole—but you’ll also hear plenty of excellent music made by artists less familiar to non-aficionados: Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb and Erskine Hawkins, to name only four.
The Secretary has a sly sense of humor, and she delights in searching out and playing the wackiest, most bizarre recordings she can find—a pleasurable task, I’m sure, and not even all that hard given the surfeit of divinely goofy compositions produced by amateur and professional songwriters alike during the Age of Swing. Occasionally, she outdoes herself. In October, she commemorated the 94th anniversary of the 1929 Wall Street crash with what she called “our tribute to the Great Depression.” The half-hour or so that followed began with a peppy number by George Olsen and His Music called “I’m in the Market for You.” It ended with the Comedian Harmonists singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” in German. In between it featured, among many others, a beautifully understated song from Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, “Dusty Skies,” about a farmer forced to leave his land amid the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Put the whole thing together and you had social history of the most entertaining sort, rich in layers of meaning, often hilarious and catchy as hell. The Pearl Harbor Day tribute wasn’t bad either.
Last Sunday evening, I was left (pleasantly) slack-jawed yet again by one of the Secretary’s choices. The group was clearly the Mills Brothers—I’d recognize those dulcet tones anywhere—but they were singing about … yams. As in edible tubers. In the world of this song, there is such a thing as a “yam man,” and the “little step that you’ll see him do with every yam that he sells to you” can be imitated with a dance, which is of course called “doing the yam.” And because no bad pun should be left unused in a tune like this, it’s also referred to as a “yam session.”
That this ridiculous song existed, and that it had been recorded once by a well-known group, was amazing enough. But the Secretary followed it up with a second recording of “The Yam,” this one sung by none other than Fred Astaire with the support of a full swing orchestra, led by Ray Noble. (This is typical Hep Cat’s Ball territory; the Secretary loves doing sets with multiple versions of the same song, especially songs like “The Yam.”) And when the segment was over and it was time for the customary back announcing, the Secretary revealed that the song had in fact been composed by one of the greatest of the Great American Songbook’s contributors, Irving Berlin—he of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Cheek to Cheek” and “Blue Skies” and “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” (And, well, Yip Yip Yaphank.)
I could not resist my deep need for further information and soon commenced Googling. What I discovered: Berlin submitted “The Yam” for the 1938 RKO movie musical Carefree, starring Astaire and his storied dance partner Ginger Rogers … and it’s actually in the movie! (With, it need hardly be added, a fantastic dance sequence choreographed by Astaire and Hermes Pan.) However, Rogers sings most of the song by herself in the film, reportedly because Astaire thought it was too silly for him to sing. Understandable. But if that was what he thought, why did he then record his own version of it? Maybe RKO made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“The Yam” is also a wonderful example of the way songwriters can recycle material. Berlin originally wrote the song in 1931 with completely different lyrics, under the title “Any Love Today.” That version never got recorded, but the version that replaced “Any love today” with “Any yams today” did—at least three times. Go figure. Three years later, the song was revised again with new lyrics promoting the National Defense Savings Program, i.e., U.S. war bonds. Version number three was called “Any Bonds Today?” and its most famous usage was in a 1942 Warner Bros. short propaganda cartoon, in which it was sung by another great American cultural figure, Bugs Bunny. This film is also noteworthy for the rare appearance of Elmer Fudd in his early, portlier guise. (You’ll find “Fat Elmer” in only four other Bugs shorts.)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fadf7a9fc-fbea-4435-a065-9fc04815e1cd.heic)
“Any love today” makes sense. So does “any bonds today.” But “any yams today?” What was Berlin thinking? In case you were wondering, I can assure you that yams play no role whatsoever in the plot of the movie in which you can hear “The Yam.” Except for Berlin’s song, Carefree is also yam-free.
I have so far found no evidence to suggest that Irving Berlin had any great fondness for yams, or even that he thought about them all that much. Indeed, the very lyrics of his song betray a basic ignorance of the vegetable. A reference to “the sweet potatoes that he’ll fry”—he being the yam man—is baldly erroneous. Although they are often confused with each other, yams and sweet potatoes are not the same.
Two further thoughts come to mind. First, Berlin composed nearly all the songs for Carefree within a single weekend. Maybe he was in a state of delirium that prompted visions of yams. Second, as anyone who listens to The Hep Cat’s Ball can tell you, there was a strong market during the Great Depression for laughably absurd songs. It’s possible that Berlin thought giving the yam its own theme à la “Yes! We Have No Bananas” could be a hit with a joy-starved public. He was wrong. But it’s to his lasting credit that he tried. Yams deserve to be represented in a positive light; their reputation still hasn’t completely recovered from what Karen Finley did with them back in the ’80s.
Next time: my favorite albums of 2023.