[3] The historian Robert Payne described Merman as being dressed in a "black satin skirt, a low-cut red blouse and bangles up her arms" when performing the song which "stopped the play" due to its popularity with the audience.
[4] Ira Gershwin's biographer, Philip Furia, described the song as the first "full-scale rhythmic number" of Girl Crazy which "bowled [the audience] over".
[6] In the musical the song is performed by Frisco Kate, a "floozy" from the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, and the lyrics are resplendent with contemporary slang and guttural consonants.
Furia likened the tale told in the lyrics of "Sam and Delilah" to the story of the late 19th-century American ballad "Frankie and Johnny".
[2] The song refers to Delilah seducing Sam with her hoochie coochie dancing, to rhyme with the slang term "hooch" for illicit alcohol.