That Song about Pawpaws & Those Other Pawpaw Songs

Most people, if they've been introduced to the pawpaw, have had their introduction through the song "Paw Paw Patch" aka "Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch." This song is taught sometimes in schools, even outside of the pawpaw's home range. Even pretty far outside the pawpaw's home range, as indicated by the fact that the government of Utah has posted an online lesson plan, with the song and accompanying activities, for teaching elementary school students about the pawpaw. Find the sheet music and lesson plan here. (Actually, the lesson plan doesn't give much detail on the fruit itself; I think it's more focused on teaching children to put things in a basket.) If you're feeling like a sloth bear and don't want to look at the lesson plan, you can take just a quick glance at this most famous song about pawpaws below. (Click to enlarge if you want.)

Beyond the most famous song about pawpaws, there are a few others that people often recall when they hear about a fruit called the pawpaw. In Disney's The Jungle Book (1967), there's a song called "Bare Necessities" that has the sloth bear Baloo singing to the orphaned boy Mowgli:

Now when you pick a pawpaw

Or a prickly pear

And you prick a raw paw

Next time beware

Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw

When you pick a pear

Try to use the claw

But you don't need to use the claw

When you pick a pear of the big pawpaw

Have I given you a clue?

The bare necessities of life will come to you

They'll come to you!

This song offers a fairly bizarre set of confusions about pawpaws specifically and fruit and geography more generally. First off, it's set in India, so one would expect that the pawpaw Baloo refers to would be the papaya (confusingly, to US-based pawpaw boosters, the papaya is sometimes referred to by the term pawpaw). So again, given that the story is set in India, one would at first think the "pawpaw" of the song is a papaya. But then the song continues and conflates the "pawpaw" with the "prickly pear," which is of course a cactus (and cactuses are native only to the Americas). So...maybe the rest of the movie is set in India, but this particular song is set in America? 

Here's Baloo going after the prickly pear while singing about the pawpaw

Given that the prickly pear reference gets us back to America, it's no longer necessary that the pawpaw Baloo sings about be a papaya. Since both the pawpaw (Asimina triloba) and the papaya are native to America, it's really a coin toss as to which "pawpaw" Baloo is referring. The "big pawpaw" Baloo picks later isn't really a match for either the pawpaw or the papaya. But given the message of the song, Baloo is probably not worried about which pawpaw he's talking about. (The papaya is native to the Americas but has been naturalized in the tropics all over the world, and Baloo doesn't worry about that either.)

Moving along to one last song, I'm including the sheet music for one that was written and performed in England in the 1910s. As you'll see, if you read the lyrics (click to enlarge), the song is set in the tropics, so the papaya would at first seem to be the most likely referent for the fruit mentioned in the song's title. That's fair. But I'll just say that the lyrics for the song were written by a US author whose family had roots in Virginia, which has a very fine pawpaw scene. And so, what we have here may be a case of the pawpaw (Asimina triloba) being transplanted, by means of a song written and performed in London, to Africa.