[1][2] It became popular after Bessie McCoy's animated performance in a satin Pierrot clown costume with floppy gloves and a cone hat.

Bessie McCoy's song and dance routine was a standard into the 1930s with a prestigious lineage of imitators including Ada Jones, Marilyn Miller, Irene Castle and Ginger Rogers.

[4] Nell Brinkley, who saw McCoy perform, described her thus: she swings on her heel and leaps away into a wild fantastic headlong dance—the dance of a crazy king's clown, half girl, half wild boy, heady with the wine of the Spring air at twilight … The black satin of her bloomers fills like sails, and they ripple and flatten against her body.

Her hair flies in loose flax around her face, and her face is a vivid white candle flame in the yellow aureole of her hair … Her feet might be bounding white balls carrying her body with them in their tireless, leaping flight.

She circles madly around the boards, touching lightly and rebounding from the jutting points of the painted mock scenery, like an imprisoned moth, or an elf hunting for some lost thing and fearful of being caught.

When The Three Twins was rehearsing in Chicago, prior to first opening, Karl Hoschna, the composer, was asked to furnish a "pajama man song".

Gus Sohlke, the stage director, happened to pass a toy store and saw in the window a doll built out of triangles.

Quickly Davis set to work to write a lyric around the title and that night Sohlke and Hoschna locked themselves in a room with Bessie McCoy and rehearsed the Yama song and dance for five hours.

[12] Irene's mother would take her around to Broadway producers auditioning her talent using the Yama routine, but with little success.

[4] Both Koko and Bessie McCoy wore clothing of loose black material, with three large white pom-poms in front and a white-trimmed neck frill.

Segal apparently released the album due to his popularity doing same on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.