(But) YESS! we have no bananas. This fact, although somewhat mitigated by the adequate supply of onions, cabbages, tomatoes, is the outstanding musical fact of the hour.
We have no bananas today. Where is the clergyman, college president, banker, lawyer, beggarman, society or labor leader or Congressman who is not thoroughly alive to this unprecedented situation?
But let Frank Silver (who never sold a song before in his life) tell his own story: "I am an American, of Jewish ancestry, with a wife and a young son. About a year ago my little orchestra was playing at a Long Island hotel. To and from the hotel I was wont to stop at a fruit stand owned by a Greek, who began every sentence with 'Yess.' The jingle of his idiom haunted me and my friend Cohn. Finally I wrote this verse and Gohn fitted it with a tune:
"'Yess, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today.
We have stringbeans and onions,
Cabbages and scallions,
And all kinds of fruits, and, say,
We have an old-fashioned tomahto
A Long Island potahto;
But yess, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today!'
"The crazy song has captured the country and a fortune is coming my way."
The scholarly inclined may link this account of genesis with many stories of how other pieces of music were composed. There is, for instance, the Fuga del Gatto of Scarlatti. One day the composer heard a strange series of piano notes. His cat had scampered across the keyboard. The notes were firm in his memory, and he used them as the melody, the theme for a highly learned and intricate composition, a fugue.
The great catchiness of the banana song is to be found partly in the brisk rhythm of the tune, but most in the magic of the phrase, " yes, we have no bananas." The root of the matter here seems to lie in a common grammatical perplexity, a perplexity over which many a person stumbles in common speech. How can you answer in one word, yes or no, to the question: " You have no bananas?" Often you will hear someone stammer "yes-no." The answer might reasonably be: " No, we have no bananas," with a direct logical opposite: " Yes, we have no bananas." But the contradiction in the phrase is ludicrous. A foreigner using it at all times and without distinction, it becomes grotesquely funny, the much more so because it catches at a perplexity in the structure of the language, at a perplexity with which almost every one has had conscious or unconscious experience.