"I'm Just Wild About Harry" is a song written in 1921 with lyrics by Noble Sissle and music by Eubie Blake for the Broadway show Shuffle Along.

[7] Blake and Sissle met F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles for the first time at a fundraising benefit for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1920.

[7] The resulting show adapted plot and characters from Miller and Aubrey's Vaudeville comic sketches with music by Blake and Sissle.

[7] Although the music of Shuffle Along was new to the public, only three compositions were actually written for the production: "I'm Just Wild About Harry", "Bandana Days", and "Love Will Find A Way".

[7] "If anything approaching a love duet was introduced in a musical comedy, it had to be broadly burlesqued," recalled black poet and lyricist James Weldon Johnson.

[7] Sissle and Blake risked the public's rejection by shedding most of the racial stereotypes that had been the norm for theatrical performances.

[7] The overall plot concerns a mayoral race in all-black Jimtown where two dishonest grocery store owners vie for political office.

[8] Shuffle Along was a significant theatrical success that "ended more than a decade of systematic exclusion of blacks from the Broadway stage".

[7][13] The show overcame financial straits and a poor location to become "the first all-black musical to enjoy a long run and be treated as more than an oddity.

Influential critics like Alan Dale, George Jean Nathan, and Heywood Broun were highly enthusiastic.

[9][14] Noble Sissle's 1937 recording for the Victory label altered the original tone considerably in order to showcase the talents of clarinetist Sidney Bechet.

Judy Garland sang the piece as one of several songs in a minstrel show in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical Babes in Arms (1939).

[16][17] It was sung by Priscilla Lane in the American 1939 gangster drama, The Roaring Twenties, starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

[10] In season 4, episode 6 of the historical drama series, Downton Abbey, jazz bandleader Jack Ross sings the song at a surprise birthday party for the Earl of Grantham.