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I tuned into SiriusXM satellite radio the other day just in time to hear a record that was one of the biggest, and least likely, hits of the 1940s: "Rum and Coca-Cola," in which the Andrews Sisters sing about prostitution.
The song is all about soldiers and sailors stationed in Trinidad during the war and having rather too good a time. They’re drinking “rum and Coca-Cola” with the locals, both mothers and daughters, who are “working for the Yankee dollar.”
Comedian Morey Amsterdam was also working for the Yankee dollar, and then some. The short sidekick to Dick Van Dyke in his eponymous show had been part of a USO show that traveled to Trinidad in the early to mid-1940s. Never let it be said that Amsterdam didn’t have an ear for a good tune — he heard the original version of the song on the island and brought it back to the United States — just that his showbiz ethics were about what one could have expected from somebody with showbiz ethics. When Amsterdam presented the music for “Rum and Coca-Cola” to a publishing house in New York, it was his name on the music as lyricist.