The person quoted in this article[1] from NPR describes the stanzas "Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be handy" as referring to dancing properly with a lady.

Given the era it comes from I can't imagine that there's a sexualized meaning to the words. There was certainly bawdy stuff back then, but from what I've read of the era I don't think it was casually thrown around like it is in today's (US) culture.

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=497026...

I always just took it as "good with", as in "handy with a chainsaw". Though it's old enough that it could mean almost anything—I don't know how far back the "good with" meaning of "handy" goes.

Hold on, let's see what Webster's 1913 says...

2. Skillful in using the hand; dexterous; ready; adroit. "Each is handy in his way." Dryden.

OK, that one seems a bit... vulgar, at worst, and is the sense I took it in, basically.

What I find very funny is sense 4:

4. (Naut.) Easily managed; obedient to the helm; -- said of a vessel.

Might the line have a double-meaning? The obvious one of "knows how to please a woman", but also a near-opposite second reading of "women walk all over him"? Kinda fits with the rest of the song, which reminds me a lot of The Offspring's "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)".

This use of the word 'handy' reminds me of the classic Red Green Show quip: "If women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."

I have always taken this to mean that if you aren't good to look at, you can still make yourself appealing by being good at things. There is a possible double entendre with foreplay, but I never considered this joke to be suggesting unconsensual groping (I think that's the implication being suggested above?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Green_Show#Handyman_Co...

I definitely think it’s a vulgar double-meaning but I think it’s less “women walk over over him” and more “he’s gay”. It’s practically lifted right from The Miller’s Tale where the “dandy” and feminine male boarder is repeatedly described as “handy” and is both clever and literally very handy with his landlady in the “locker room talk” sense. The story ends with the dandy boarder taking a hot iron rod to the butt and the cuckholded landlord, a carpenter who you would expect to be stereotypically “handy”, breaking his hand.

No, because he's handy "with" a lady, not "for" a lady.

"With", as in "among or in the company of", "the girls".

[EDIT] yeah, in context it probably just means handling your partner well while dancing as the surface reading, with a possibly-intended somewhat-vulgar "hur hur hur, if you know what I mean" subtext.

It's saying the ladies like him. That's not gross at all. The pathologizing of heterosexuality seems to have roots in American Protestantism.

I think "handy" may have an ordinary meaning here of "available". Ironically suggesting that women will fall for Yankee Doodle, so he'd best make himself available to their adoring attention.