Nelly beans don t burn on the grill

Well, I got to reading about Ja’Net Dubois when her passing was in the news. And lo and behold, her life held the secret to the mystery of the fish and the beans.

Dubois acted on Broadway in the early 1960s and then moved to television, and she was also a singer and a songwriter. In ’74 she took on the “drop-in neighbor” role of Wilona Woods in Norman Lear’s comedy series Good Times. Which paid well enough, but left Dubois with time on her hands.

So one day she runs into Lear on the set and buttonholes him, asking if there’s anything else he’s working on that she could get involved with creatively. Long story short, he lets on he’s got a new series that needs a theme song, and she promises to have one on his desk by the following week.

Now according to Dubois, Lear didn’t tell her he was spinning off The Jeffersons from All in the Family, just that he had a new series about a guy with a cleaning business. But in 1974 All in the Family was the top rated show on American television, and it’s hard to imagine that any TV actor in the US — especially one working for Lear — didn’t know that George Jefferson owned a dry cleaners. I strongly suspect Ja’Net put two and two together on that one.

Thing was, though, Dubois had gone through her own experience of “movin’ up.” Raised in Brooklyn, she had literally managed to move herself and her mother to the East Side through her success as a singer and actress. So she ended up writing about herself. And of course, the song fit like a glove with Lear’s new series.

What I got wrong about “fish don’t fry in the kitchen, beans don’t burn on the grill” was that I didn’t connect it to the lines that came before. In my defense, it does lead off the bridge, so I’ll count it as an honest mistake. In any case, I heard it as some sort of truism, like “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. So it seemed to make no sense.

But Ja’Net’s story revealed that it was about how her own life changed when she moved up. It was about her new home, “a deluxe apartment in the sky” that didn’t smell like fried fish and burnt beans.

But that still leaves the problem of the grill. Who cooks beans on a grill?

As soon as I realized what the first part meant, I knew immediately what the second part meant, because I’d lived it myself. She wasn’t talking about an outdoor grill. No, she meant something like a short order grill with a flat top, the kind I flipped burgers on for years, but made for home — one of these things, commonly called a hotplate:

Top 18 nelly beans don t burn on the grill