by Max Décharné
Here’s a damn’d funk
SHEET MUSIC PLAYED AN IMPORTANT PART in the dissemination of slang terms, but it was the coming of recorded sound in the last decades of the 19th century which enabled songs to reach out across the world in a way which would have been unthinkable in earlier times. Even before the dawn of the 78 rpm disc, wax cylinder recordings helped spread the word, although much of their content consisted of classical or brass band music. The actor Russell Hunting, from West Roxbury, Massachusetts, performed humorous monologues on a series of cylinders in the character of an Irishman named Michael Casey, one of which was called ‘Casey as the Dude in a Street Car’ (early 1890s). The word dude, whose use has multiplied over the years, first surfaced in America in the second half of the 19th century as a term for a dandified man, and there was a teenage gang in New York during the 1870s called the Baxter Street Dudes.
However, it was the dawn of jazz which really opened the floodgates. ‘This is a loose, fast age’, exclaimed humorist Kin Hubbard at the time, ‘an’ at the rate we’re goin’ jazz’ll soon run its course, an’ then watch th’ demand fer decent, unscuffed girls’. Ultra-modern young women with a taste for jazz and nightlife were famously known as flappers, but the term is actually from the 19th century. James Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909) defined a flapper as ‘a very immoral young girl in her early “teens”’, and quoted in turn an 1892 edition of the magazine Notes and Queries, which wrote ‘about the use of the slang word “flapper” as applied to young girls’. They ventured the explanation that a “flapper” is a young wild duck which is unable to fly, hence a little duck of any description, human or otherwise’. Just as England’s Teddy boys pre-dated the arrival of rock’n’roll in the country by several years, the word flapper was in existence long before its starring role in the mythology of the 1920s, a decade which came to be known as the ‘Jazz Age’.
Jazz music had been around in its very earliest forms in the Storyville district of New Orleans since the end of the 19th century, but the name came later, and the music played at that time by pioneers such as cornet player Buddy Bolden was never recorded, so while the exact nature of what they were playing is hard to establish, some of their language survives. For instance, in the year 1900, Bolden frequently performed at Kenna’s Hall, at 1319 Perdido Street, New Orleans, which was known to the regulars as ‘Funky Butt’ Hall, or F B Hall for short, because Bolden’s band had a song entitled ‘Funky Butt’, alongside others of an equally direct persuasion such as ‘If You Don’t Shake, You Don’t Get No Cake’. So, more than half a century before funk became associated with a particular strand of black music, or Life magazine in 1963 could describe renowned black author James Baldwin as occasionally speaking in ‘the funky argot of Harlem’, the word was already known to the gig-going cognoscenti of New Orleans. In the glossary of his influential jazz memoir, Really the Blues (1946), Mezz Mezzrow defined the word funky as ‘smelly, obnoxious’, which is also how it was understood in England in the 17th century, appearing as follows in A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (1699):
Funk, Tobacco Smoak; also a strong Smell or Stink. What a Funk here is! What a thick Smoak of Tobacco is here! Here’s a damn’d Funk, here’s a great Stink.
Funky music, therefore, was down and dirty, the sound of people working up a sweat – either in a smoky club, or else in bed. Of course, anyone sweating through fear has for centuries in England been said to be in a state of funk, as, for example, in Samuel Naylor’s 1845 rhyming translation of Goethe’s version of ‘Reynard the Fox’, which now looks somewhat odd to modern eyes:
Quoth Malkin, ‘Is it quite safe, nunky?
Because I do feel somewhat funky!’
Plant you now, dig you later
EARLY PROTO-JAZZ WAS NOT CONFINED to halls, however. Guitarist ‘Sweet Lovin” Charlie Galloway, who led one of the earliest bands on the scene and who first employed Buddy Bolden as a sideman, apparently also played in the streets, sometimes in what were known as skiffle bands – a term which would later be revived in 1950s Britain. The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band, led by Emile ‘Stalebread’ Lacoume, who were active in New Orleans from the mid-1890s, often played outdoors, working in front of brothels, stores and theatres – anywhere they could gain attention. The band were boys rather than men, seemingly aged ten or eleven in early photographs, and they were also white. Jazz historian Daniel Hardie notes that they ‘inserted yells of hotcha and hi de di or ho de ho, expressions apparently used in songs of the river, into their performances’. All three of these terms survived into the swing era of the 1930s, when jazz went mainstream and could be heard in Hollywood films and on national radio, helped in no small measure by a man who did more than his share to publicise and explain the jazz argot – bandleader, songwriter, vocalist and all-round force of nature Cab Calloway.
Cab performed slang-rich songs such as ‘Minnie the Moocher’ (1931), with its talk of frails (women) kicking the gong around (smoking opium) and a rousing chorus of hi de hi and ho de ho, which prompted his publicists to bill him thereafter as ‘His Hi-de-Hiness of Ho-de-Ho’. Other songs such as ‘(Hep-hep!) The Jumping Jive’ (1939) and ‘We the Cats Shall Hep Ya’ (1945) – the last of which he performed in a 1947 feature film, itself named Hi De Ho – helped place the slang word hep firmly in the jazz public’s consciousness. (By 1955, the word was so familiar to the general public that the writer of the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily Express wrote an article about a jiving cellar which had opened at his old Oxford college, alma mater of various 19th-century politicians, entitled ‘I Can’t See Old Gladstone Getting “Hep”’.)
For those who wanted to delve deeper, Cab Calloway also published his own very popular booklet of slang, The Hep-ster’s Dictionary (1938), which, as the following year’s revised edition explained, gave the lowdown on ‘words and expressions employed by the “hep cats” when they talk their “jive”, as Harlemese is called on Lenox Avenue’. As a result, if you were a square (‘an un-hip person’), an ofay (‘white person’) or even an icky (‘one who is not hip, a stupid person, can’t collar the jive’), salvation was at hand, and you, too, could astonish your equally cubistic friends with your newly acquired language skills. If hungry, you could say ‘I’m gonna knock me [obtain] some food’, when sleepy, ‘I think I’ll cop a nod’, and when leaving a friend, ‘Plant you now, dig you later’. Admittedly, several expressions were hardly jazz coinages – So help me (‘it’s the truth, that’s a fact’) had been used in solemn oaths for centuries at this point – while hep itself pre-dates Calloway by a generation, first surfacing in that jive-talking bastion of middle-class American respectability, the Saturday Evening Post, in 1908 (‘What puzzles me is how you can find anybody left in the world who isn’t hep’). Six years later, over in Portland, Oregon, Jackson and Hellyer’s A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang (1914) gave the following explanation of the origins of the term:
HEP, Noun – Sapiency, understanding. . . Derived from the name of a fabulous detective who operated in Cincinnati, the legend has it, who knew so much about criminality and criminals that his patronymic became a byword for the last thing in wisdom of illicit possibilities.
Whether the history of law enforcement from Ohio was in the mind of a British comic novelist from Guildford at that time is hard to say, but P. G. Wodehouse certainly included the word hep in a novel he wrote around that time, Piccadilly Jim (1917), in which the title character has the following exchange with a woman called Ann:
‘ . . . Jerry Mitchell has told me all!’
Ann was startled.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The word “all,”’ said Jimmy, ‘is slang for “everything.”
You see in me a confidant. In a word, I am hep.’
On the face of it, such a usage by the author whose most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster, are both in their divergent ways archetypal examples of Englishmen might seem unlikely. However, Wodehouse was a
t that time living in New York, writing Broadway musicals with the likes of Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton (including one, in 1917, which took its name from a slang term, Oh Boy!, as admirers of Buddy Holly might be interested to learn). His Jeeves stories made their debut appearance in 1915 in the same magazine which first gave the world hep, the Saturday Evening Post, and indeed, Piccadilly Jim itself was printed by the Post a full year before its hardcover publication.
What a pair of gams!
CAB CALLOWAY’S HEPSTER’S DICTIONARY proved very popular, going through several reprints – the last of which was issued as a promotional item to accompany his appearance in the Hollywood film Sensations of 1945 (1944), in which he sang ‘We the Cats Shall Hep Ya’, and also brandished an outsize book while singing ‘Mr Hepster’s Dictionary’. The latter tune explained that jive talk was now the language used by all the jitterbugs (jazz and swing fans), and clarified, for the benefit of cinema-going squares, the meaning of such terms as hep cat, doghouse (double bass) and twister to the slammer (key to the door).
Once again, this process showed that – just as 16th-century readers of Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones could learn to talk the vagabond talk without ever having met one of the canting crew – you did not have to be rubbing shoulders with the hippest of the hep in some late-night Harlem swing joint in order to pick up the latest jive. Indeed, one classic term listed by Calloway (and much later associated with the Beats) was the word dig, meaning ‘comprehend, understand’, which had gone mainstream in the most public way when included in the Gary Cooper flim Ball of Fire (1941). This is hardly surprising, given that the picture also included Gene Krupa and His Orchestra, and the fact that the entire story was built around a group of decidedly square lexicographers attempting to discover how the hep folk talked, noting down phrases like killer diller along the way. Cooper’s co-star Barbara Stanwyck played a character named Sugar-puss O’Shea, much given to utterances such as ‘What’s buzzin’, cousin?’, while the trailer for the film screamed up-to-the-minute phrases like ‘he’s a solid sender’, ‘in the groove’ and ‘what a pair of gams!’ Not to be outdone, Life magazine made it their ‘Movie of the Week’, and printed a slang glossary for the benefit of readers:
SHOVE IN YOUR CLUTCH – get moving
LOOSE TOOTH – incompetent person
SCREAMING MIMIS – jitters
CUT THE MEKENKES – stop talking nonsense
PATCH MY PANTYWAIST – term of amazement
BLITZ IT – hurry it up
Quite what the residents of London and many other British cities who were then being blitzed made of the latter expression is anyone’s guess, but in among these entries Life also listed dig me?, meaning ‘understand me?’ This was relatively fresh-minted jazz slang, less than a decade old, but now comprehensible to anyone who could afford a cinema ticket or the price of a magazine. Dig has been co-opted by virtually every youth movement and music trend which has since followed, and continues to be used, whether seriously or ironically – a fate which unaccountably seems to have escaped patch my pantywaist.
Pimps, prostitutes and lonesome tramps
IN ADDITION TO THE AVALANCHE of hep-talk available in jazz records of the 1940s, the slang could also be learned from significant publications such as Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944). Burley was a black journalist and magazine editor, who wrote a jive-heavy column called ‘Back Door Stuff’ in the New York Amsterdam News, and also a long-time jazz musician, working with some of the big names of the era. His 1962 obituary in Jet magazine, for which he had been associate editor, memorably described him as ‘the poet laureate of straw-bosses and Southern sheriffs, of cornfield preachers and fifth floor walk-up flats, of barbecued pork and fried chicken, of pimps and prostitutes and lonesome tramps’. In the introduction to his most famous work, Burley himself cast an eye on the future, as follows:
The proponents of Harlem jive talk do not entertain any grandiose illusions about the importance or durability of jive. They do not hope that courses in the lingo will ever be offered at Harvard or Columbia University. Neither do they expect to learn that Mrs. Faunteen-Chauncey of the Mayfair Set addresses her English butler as ‘stud hoss,’ and was called in reply, ‘a sturdy old hen.’
Hoped for or not, the scenario in which jive language is studied on numerous university courses has most definitely arrived with a vengeance. Academics in recent decades have argued among themselves about the precise origins of certain words in the Harlem jive vocabulary, in particular suggested derivations from the Wolof language, brought over in earlier times by slaves. As Jesse Scheidlower of the OED commented in 2004, when dealing with the etymology of the word hip and its near-neighbour, hep:
The idea. . . that hip came from Wolof, a language widely spoken in Senegal and The Gambia, was first advanced, tentatively, in the late 1960s by David Dalby, a scholar of West African languages. The word hipi, meaning ‘to open one’s eyes,’ was the putative source; Dalby also suggested West African sources for the American slang words jive and dig. Over time, Dalby’s proposal was taken as fact by many people, particularly those who wanted to find African origins for English words. Even obvious problems with the etymology – such as the fact that Wolof does not generally use the letter ‘b’ – were ignored. (The word in question is actually spelled xippi.)
Indeed, anyone consulting the many thousands of entries in Pamela Munro and Dieynaba Gaye’s Ay Baati Wolof – A Wolof Dictionary (1997) expecting to find the likes of stud hoss, or any word whatsoever beginning with ‘st’ or ‘h’, would retire disappointed. For what it is worth, if you once again refer to A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (1699), among the various slang terms beginning with ‘h’ you will find the following:
Hip, upon the Hip, at an Advantage in Wrestling or Business.
Nevertheless, although many of the origins of early hep slang remain obscure, the advent of recorded jazz, post-First World War, certain music-related feature films, and then the publication of the first collections of jive talk in the 1930s and 1940s, mean that a fair amount of that speech and its meanings have been preserved.
Jiving in a comin’-on fashion
THE EXTENSIVE GLOSSARY IN MEZZ MEZZROW’S Really the Blues (1946) hipped the squares to musicians’ phrases like cafe sunburn (the habitual pallor acquired in such a nocturnal environment), hipster (‘someone who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert’), moo juice (milk), line your flue (eat) and groovy (‘really good, in the groove, enjoyable’). The last term word, frequently taken to be a classic 1960s coinage, was the hip jazz term of the early 1940s. As Bing Crosby so memorably asked the King Cole Trio during his regular Kraft Music Hall radio show in 1945: ‘Say, is it a solid fact that you guys can beat your chops, lace the boots and knock the licks out groovy as a movie, whilst jiving in a comin’-on fashion?’, to which Nat suavely replied, ‘That is precisely the situation.’ However, as evidence of how far into the mainstream such a term had already spread by then, a 1944 Life magazine article about white twenty-four-year-old fashion designer Betty Betz and her ‘Teen Age Betty’ range of clothing showed her sketching ‘a slick mouse [girl] in a jive suit groovy as a movie’, and commented of another garment, ‘it’s sheer murder, Jackson, and we ain’t clickin’ our teeth when we pass the word that the hems are wide enough to cut a rug’. Whether this met with the approval or comprehension of the magazine’s oldest readers, some of whom would have been born not long after Lincoln’s assassination, is an interesting question.
Bing Crosby and Nat Cole were broadcasting from Sunset and Vine, out in Hollywood, a long way from Harlem, but radio jive also spread down to the segregated South, where deejay Lavada Durst – known as Dr Hepcat – began talkin’ that talk on station KVET out of Austin, Texas, from 1948 all the way through until 1963, with a show called The Rosewood Ramble, As a popular black jockey on a white station, he broke quite a few of the assumed gr
ound rules, and in 1953 he also issued his own booklet of slang, The Jives of Doctor Hepcat, which, instead of just listing individual words, set out a wide selection of fine hepcat dialogues for use in a variety of situations. It helped that Durst himself was a two-fisted, pounding boogie pianist who cut the excellent self-penned record ‘Hattie Green’ for local Austin label Uptown in 1949. In short, he knew the territory, and when it came to describing piano playing, this is what his booklet recommended:
Here’s a cat that lays a group of ivory talking trash and strictly putting down a gang of jive. The situation is much mellow, it’s many fine and understand gates it will tighten your wig.
Although it was written in the early 1950s, the language in The Jives of Doctor Hepcat better reflected the jazz scene of the war years, of jitterbugs, zoot suits and the golden days of boogie woogie: ‘Say, that’s a real crazy combo blowing at the club, you can believe they can put the wheel on any deal, every sound is hip to the tip. When they put up some wild riffs it ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.’ However, other sections of Dr Hepcat’s jive foreshadow some of the language later employed by modern-day rappers, with his talk of musicians who rock the house and of Jacks and Jills from flytime cribs. Here is a prime example of his rhyming hep-speak:
Aces to your places it takes bulling jive
To keep the joints alive.
Like cool, frantic, and dead in the know