Yes! We Have No Bananas

DESCRIPTION: "There's a fruit store down our street, It's run by a Greek... When you ask for anything, he never answers, 'No'; He just yesses you to death,and as he takes your dough, he tells you., 'Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today."
AUTHOR: Frank Silver and Irving Cohn (source: FolkSongAndMusicHall)
EARLIEST DATE: 1923 (sundry recordings)
KEYWORDS: food humorous nonballad
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
FolkSongAndMusicHall, "Yes we have no bananas"
DT, NOBANAN*
Roud #32786
RECORDINGS:
Billy Jones. "Yes! We Have No Bananas" (Vocalion 14579, 1923)
Billy Murray and Orchestra, "Yes! We Have No Bananas" (Victor 19068)
The Two Gilbers, "Yes! We Have No Bananas" (Reval G7980)
NOTES [668 words]: There are a few claims that this song is traditional (hence its Roud number), though it seems likely all the minor field collections were learned from recordings. I wouldn't have included it for its own sake, were it not for the fact that it was used as a basis for so many travesty songs. An example would be Eric Bogle's "Little Gomez," which ends with a "Yes, we have no chihuahuas" gag.
Much more serious -- and the reason I decided to include this song in the Index -- is the Honda Point Disaster of September 8, 1923. A formation of fourteen destroyers was sailing from San Francisco to San Diego on a practice cruise. It was a dark, foggy night, with unusual currents; the navigator of the lead ship could only locate the ships by dead reckoning or radio directional bearings -- and he ignored the latter, and trusted his own dead reckoning, and steered the flotilla straight on the rocks at Honda Point. Seven ships went aground in some way or other, with the loss of 23 lives
Although all seven ships were too damaged to be worth salvaging, by far the worst affected was the Young, the third ship in the formation. Her hull was torn open on the starboard side; she listed 90 degrees on that side and sank. The waters were fairly shallow, so a small section of the port side stayed above water, but between waves and tides, it was almost impossible for the men to stay atop her. (Of the 23 men lost in the disaster, twenty would be from the Young. Given the number of men on most of the ships at this time, that probably represents about a sixth to a fifth of her crew. The engineering crew was particularly hard-hit; the list on pp. 228-229 of Lockwood/Adamson lists twelve firemen and an engineman among the dead.
As they clung to the side of the wreck that night, one of the men started singing "Yes, we have no bananas." The crew quickly changed that to "Yes, we have no destroyers, We have no destroyers today" (Lockwood/Adamson, p. 62). One hopes that that helped them survive the cold and misery.
There are also a number of books with titles that start wtih "Yes, We Have No...." It's clearly a cultural phenomenon.
Incidentally, the Greek grocer's refusal to use the word "no" is not some peculiar trait of Greek speakers; modern Greek has a perfectly good word οχι, "ochi," meaning "no." It's just a quirk of this particular fellow.
It's also worth reminding people, who these days can find almost anything in any grocery store any day of the year because of selective breeding and imports from other hemispheres, that it used to be that fruits and vegetables had actual seasons. There were times when you couldn't get bananas -- or strawberries, or tomatoes, or anything else that couldn't keep for a year.
Gardner, p. 346, estimates that this was the fifth most popular song in America in 1923, peaking at #1 in July 1923 (#1 for the year being Irving Berlin's "That Old Gang of Mine"). It seems to be far better remembered than most of the pop songs of that year, however.
Spaeth, who in several places makes rather disparaging comments about this song, on p. 437 says this:
"The title phrase of Yes! We Have No Bananas was the purported utterance of an actual Greek fruit-dealer, and its absurd mixture of positive and negative threw most listeners into hysterics. Musically, as this writer has often points out, the song has a most distinguished background, for its chorus melody was borrowed, consciously or unconsciously, from Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, the finish of My Bonnie, I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls (the middle strain), and Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party (by way of Cole Porter's An Old-Fashioned Garden). It makes an amusing trick to sing the original words whenever possible, creating this extraordinary text: "Hallelujah, Bananas! Oh, bring back by Bonnie to me. I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls -- the kind that you seldom see. I was seeing Nellie home, to an old-fashioned garden, but, Hallelujah, Bananas! Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me!" - RBW
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