page_title: The Yama Yama Man
section_title: Meaning of lyrics
hierarchical_section_title: The Yama Yama Man / Meaning of lyrics
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail from "Pay As You Enter Car Company" stock certificate, 1909.
context_page_description: "The Yama Yama Man" was a comical song for the Broadway show The Three Twins, published in 1908 by M. Witmark & Sons with music by Karl Hoschna and lyrics by Collin Davis. It became popular after Bessie McCoy's animated performance in a satin Pierrot clown costume with floppy gloves and a cone hat. At age 20, she became an overnight sensation on Broadway and was known thereafter as the "Yama Yama Girl"; it became her lifelong theme song. The show ran for 288 performances. The lyrics contain topical references of the era such as street cars and ladies' fashion while the refrain is about a comical bogeyman—the Yama Yama Man—who is "ready to spring out at you unaware". Bessie McCoy's song and dance routine was a standard into the 1930s with a prestigious lineage of imitators including Ada Jones, Marilyn Miller, Irene Castle and Ginger Rogers.
context_section_description: Verse 1 & 2: About the subject of the song. These are the only two verses sung in the play; the remaining four verses were reserved for McCoy's inevitable encores.
  Verse 3: Ladies fashion of the period involved elaborate hats arranged with stuffed birds, feathers, flowers and so on. Bouffant hairstyles, popular at the time, were sometimes made with "hair-rats", which were pads of old hair taken from brushes stuffed into the hairdo to create volume. They were a "dismaying sight to find in the theater seat directly ahead."
  Verse 4: The railroad tycoon Edward H. Harriman ("The Colossus of Roads") had a very public war of succession with Stuyvesant Fish over the Illinois Central Railroad around 1906.
  Verse 5: Right and left ankle or leg. Turn of the century skirts were normally very long and when women lifted their skirts in the street to prevent them from getting dirty, men might catch a glimpse of an ankle or leg underneath. As the 20th century progressed hemlines became progressively shorter.
  Verse 6: This is about the new "Pay-as-you-enter" street cars, where nickels were deposited by passengers in a machine when entering instead of being collected by a conductor. "Traction" was the general term for movement by locomotive car. The following letter to the editor of The New York Times (1909) illustrates:
  It is quite some time since the trial and approval of the "pay-as-you-enter cars," and I fail to see why they have not been introduced on the Broadway line. A strong public sentiment favors these new and up-to-date cars, since they not only gather in the nickels, but they do away with crowding, shoving, jamming, and the abominable nuisance of the conductor, who used to throw people down and step over them in his eagerness to gather the coin that he paid over, or did not pay over, to the car companies.
caption: In 1909, the Pay-As-You-Enter Car Corp issued stock making it quite topical around the time of the song.
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