Bessie McCoy

Bessie McCoy, born Elizabeth Genevieve McEvoy on May 17, 1888, was an American actress and vaudeville entertainer whose Broadway career spanned from 1903 to 1919. Most sources record her birth year as 1888, though census records suggest 1884. She was born into an Irish immigrant family in New York City.

McCoy's introduction to performance came through her family. Her mother remarried Billy McCoy, and the couple formed a vaudeville clog-dancing act billed as McCoy and McEvoy. McCoy and her sister Nellie first took to the stage together as chorus girls in their teens. When her sister fell ill, McCoy continued performing as a solo act.

Her career advanced through a series of Broadway musicals, and she achieved a significant breakthrough with the play The Echo. It was the 1908 production of Three Twins, however, that defined her public identity. In that show she performed the song-and-dance number "The Yama Yama Man," which became a signature routine and earned her the lasting nickname "The Yama Yama Girl." The performance combined a lazy, husky vocal style with acrobatic dancing, and McCoy executed the routine dressed in a clown's pajama suit and a fool's cap topped with a puff ball.

In 1910, McCoy married war correspondent Richard Harding Davis and retired from the stage, residing with him at their Connecticut estate. Following Davis's death from a heart attack in 1916, she returned to theatre and vaudeville work under the name Bessie McCoy Davis. She subsequently starred in Miss 1917 and appeared in the revues The Greenwich Village Follies and Morris Gest's Midnight Whirl, among other productions.

McCoy fell ill during the 1920s and retired to France with her daughter. She died suddenly on August 16, 1931, in Bayonne, France, following an emergency intestinal operation.