Editor Ira is here today to get the Harlem Globetrotters theme song stuck in your head as he traces its unique history through the years.

Becoming a sports anthem is both one of the best and worst things that can happen to a song. On the one hand, the musicians' artistry becomes intertwined in the culture in a way that few pop cultural artifacts are, and they likely make a pretty good haul on licensing fees to boot. On the other hand, it becomes impossible for most people to separate the song from its sporting context. "Sirius" by the Alan Parsons Project will always be the Chicago Bulls intro song. You can't discuss the White Stripes' legacy without mentioning stadiums roaring along with "Seven Nation Army." How long has it been since anyone's heard "Sweet Caroline" without mentally filling in that awful "Bom-bom-bom" chant that everyone does at sporting events?

Every now and then, though, a sports anthem comes along that outlives the fame of anyone involved with its production and becomes a universal signifier of something bigger. Today we're talking about a recording that is arguably more closely connected to a sports franchise than any other: "Sweet Georgia Brown" by Brother Bones and His Shadows, otherwise known as "that Harlem Globetrotters song with the whistling."

Digging into the history of "Sweet Georgia Brown" requires reaching back into the Great American Songbook. It was written in 1925 as a collaboration between lyricist Kenneth Casey, bandleader Ben Bernie, and composer Maceo Pinkard. All three of those fellows have interesting stories in their own right — Bernie was a major star of the early radio era and Casey was one of the first child stars in U.S. cinema — but Pinkard is especially fascinating as a pioneer of Black pop music.

Born in 1897 in Bluefield, West Virginia, Pinkard proved to be a gifted composer at an early age. He penned the blues standard "I'm Goin' Back Home" in 1915, within a year of graduating high school. He continued cranking out hits throughout the 1920s, including oft-recorded numbers such as "Sugar," "Rose of Washington Square," and "Them There Eyes," a staple for Billie Holiday and a century's worth of jazz singers. Pinkard also led a touring orchestra, composed a stage revue called "Liza," and is thought to be the first Black owner of a music publishing company in the U.S.

Of all Pinkard's successes, none had longer legs than "Sweet Georgia Brown," although the version you know best is quite a departure from its original form. While it's more commonly played as an instrumental nowadays, the original lyrics sing the praises of Georgia Brown, "a new gal in town" who "all the fellas just rave about." Her name was inspired by Bernie's friendship with Georgia state representative Dr. George Thaddeus Brown, who had just named his infant daughter after his home state.

Ben Bernie topped the charts with the original recording of "Sweet Georgia Brown" in 1925, and Bing Crosby's cover hit No. 2 in 1932. Since then, it's become a standard in the pop and jazz songbooks. It's been covered by everyone from Cab Calloway to Carol Burnett to Sarah Vaughan to Louis Jordan (feat. George Raft) to Jerry Lee Lewis to Ray Charles to the pre-fame Beatles to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. A Tribe Called Quest turned it into a hip-hop sample. Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft sang a Polish/scat version in a World War II comedy.

But none of those is the rendition that's been playing in your head since you started reading this. That iconic whistling version is a 1949 recording by Brother Bones and His Shadows. "Brother Bones" was the stage name of Freeman Davis. Born in 1902 in Montgomery, Alabama, Davis came to music through his work as a shoe shiner in California. Competition for customers was stiff in the shoeshine game, so it paid to have a hook. Davis became proficient at both whistling and playing the bones — a percussion instrument consisting of two pieces of wood or bone clacked together rapidly — and started performing under the moniker of Whistling Sam.

Davis got his big break in his late 40s, when he was supposedly discovered by the owner of the independent Tempo record label while performing in a Los Angeles Chinese restaurant. ("Supposedly" because most of the surviving information about this song's recording seems to be anecdotal at best.) Freeman, who by now had adopted his Brother Bones pseudonym, was invited to a recording session at Tempo. He laid down four tracks, accompanied by a tenor saxophonist whose name is lost to history and an organist named Herb Kern.

Kern's performance on this track would itself be worthy of a separate Friday Know-It-All installment, because he plays an instrument called the Novachord. The Novachord is a product of the Hammond company that's regarded as the first commercially available electronic synthesizer. It was a major failure when it launched in 1939, selling a little more than 1,000 units before being pulled from the market. As a result, it didn't turn up on many of the era's recordings and remains a hugely obscure instrument to this day. Tempo, though, had carved out a weird little niche as a leading purveyor of Novachord music, with organist Herb Kern and Novachordist Lloyd Sloop serving as a de facto house band.

Brother Bones, Herb Kern, and Tempo all hit their commercial peak in 1949, when their recording of "Sweet Georgia Brown" became a surprise radio hit. (Poor Lloyd Sloop was apparently not present at the recording and thus had to listen to his partner take the lead on the biggest hit ever to feature his signature instrument.) The song's lasting impact came three years later, when the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team started using it as their warm-up music. Something about the weird dexterity of Brother Bones' whistling, the spare clatter of his percussion, and the eerie gurgle of Kern's synth just seemed to match the energy of the Globetrotters' irreverent approach to American sports culture.

As the Globetrotters' unique blend of basketball, clowning, and acrobatics gained an ever-widening audience in the era of television, so did "Sweet Georgia Brown." The two quickly became inseparable in the minds of multiple generations of sporting entertainment fans. The team still features it prominently in all of their performances and most of their commercials 72 years later. Players have appeared in recent videos reimagining it as an acapella number, a Snoop Dogg remix, and a violin hip-hop track. (It somehow wasn't used as the theme song for the Globetrotters' 1970s cartoon, which would be a crime if the actual theme wasn't such a sweet jam.)

Both Maceo Pinkard and Brother Bones lived to see their song take on its peculiar new fame, passing in 1962 and 1974, respectively. Bones never had another hit record, but he recorded a number of other fantastic tracks that are collected on the excellent 2005 compilation "Globetrottin' with Bones," most of which similarly spotlight Freeman Davis' skill with bones and whistling.

Maybe "Sweet Georgia Brown" didn't follow the most obvious trajectory to arena-anthem immortality, but it's hard to imagine a song that's more indelibly ingrained in American sports culture. That's not a half-bad legacy for a fortysomething musician with a strange talent, an obscure organist with an even stranger instrument, an L.A. novelty record label, and a multi-talented songwriting pioneer from the infancy of commercial radio.