by Max Décharné
And some bronze kitty with a most able floorshow.
Up in three places and let some pass
And then pull in to port where the cats are breathing natural gas.
Spoken by Cro-Magnon man
IN THE SAME YEAR THAT DR HEPCAT was cutting his debut record, and future Beat writer Jack Kerouac was continuing the jazz-themed road trips across the US in the company of Neil Cassady and Allen Ginsberg which he would later fictionalise as On the Road (1957), Capitol Records in Hollywood issued their own guide to clue-in the squares to be-bop, the new sound in music. Babs Gonzales and Paul Weston’s Boptionary – What Is Bop? (1949) was a small booklet, the core of which was the two-page dictionary of slang words compiled by Gonzales, billed as ‘Professor Bop, Himself’. Terms which would later see service among the beatniks, rockabillies and even hippies surfaced here, such as daddy-o (‘buddy or friend’), gone (‘great’) and crazy (‘out of this world’), alongside others of more venerable vintage, such as scoff (‘to eat’ – which is London slang that appeared in the Swell’s Night Guide of 1846).
Not everyone was impressed. A 1948 Daily Mirror article by Robert Cannell had the following to say about the new trend:
Bebop is the rage among the educated jazz fans’ in the United States. There are, too, bebop hairdos for males (I’m chary of writing men), there are suits of gay checks and unusual cut. And one of the hallmarks of the true bebopcat is a pair of dark glasses, a beret. . . and a goatee beard. They also speak a weird kind of slang which changes so rapidly that not all ‘bebopcats’ can understand each other. . . Musicians playing bebop can ‘float away’ and express themselves in the way that they feel. My only complaint, however, is that they don’t float far enough.
If this sounds like British provincialism in response to swinging new ideas from across the Atlantic, the American press was often saying much the same thing. Novelist and journalist Robert C. Ruark, writing in the Schenectady Gazette in 1949, commented:
Bop, as I understand it, is a kind of musical outrage for which some people profess a fondness. It is played by people who wear goatees and berets. Its language has been compared to that spoken by Cro-Magnon man, obviously the mental equal of the modern bopster. . . . A musician is a‘wig’, and if he’s cool, he’s groovy, which means he’s lop pow, or OK. If one is bugged, he is annoyed by a zoo, or sad-looking chick, or a turkey, or square, or a clown, or a non-hip bopper. Any of the above may be defined as a drag, or just plain awful.
Babs Gonzales himself, who had a band in 1946 called Babs’ Three Bips & A Bop, waited another two decades – in between working briefly for Errol Flynn as a chauffeur – before self-publishing his own thoroughly distinctive autobiography, I, Paid My Dues – Good Times . . . No Bread, A Story of Jazz (1967). From the superfluous comma in the title, via its verso-page declaration, ‘Babs Gonzales – Creator of the Be-Bop Language’, down to the name of his book company, Expubidence (a word of his own invention), this was the fine sound of a man doing things defiantly his own way. Over the course of 160 pages of bop speak, he told the story of his days hanging out with Charlie Parker, who stole his clothes (‘Babs, baby, I’m sorry I downed your threads’), trying to earn lots of money (enough bread to burn a wet mule), dress well (so sharp he’s bleeding) and persuade crooked club promoters to pay him at the end of the evening (give me my bread or I take your head). In an interview for a newspaper called the Baltimore Afro-American, conducted just days before his death in January 1980, Babs had this to say about his use of language:
My thing is that I was brought up in the streets as a rapper whose next meal depended upon a clever turn of the word and I figured I could rap as well as any of these cats could play their horns. So, I started running down my rap on stage and the people dug it.
To modern ears, the sound of a bebop musician and scat singer, born in 1919, using the word rap, around the same time that the earliest hip-hop music such as ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang (1979) was gaining attention, might sound strange, but – leaving aside its appearance in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary two centuries earlier – the word had been current in US black language since at least the early 1960s. In Clarence Major’s Black Slang – A Dictionary of Afro-American Talk (1970), rap was defined as ‘to hold conversation; a long impressive monologue’. Mind you, maybe Babs simply had a fondness for late 19th-century slang words from the North of England, as recorded in Richard Blakeborough’s Wit, Character, Folklore & Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898), which contained the following:
Rap, n. A friendly chat.
Ex. – Cu’ thi waays, an’ lets ’ev a pipe an’ a hit o’ rap.
Rap-off, v. To speak on the spur of the moment.
Raps, n. Gossip, news
You done got hip
Jazz music spread jazz slang across the world, which was then adopted by the Beats, co-opted and modified by 1950s rock’n’rollers and rockabillies, and finally enshrined and mummified in popular culture in the 1960s, as the hippies (itself originally another jazz word) sat around uttering words like groovy and man, and calling their female companions their old lady – all of which were in regular use among 1940s bop musicians.
The story of how that language permeated the popular consciousness can be illustrated simply in song titles. Here, for example, is a short year-by-year journey in jazz and blues recordings, from 1921 to 1945, reflecting some of the hip words of the day:
‘I Want a Jazzy Kiss’, Mamie Smith, 1921
‘Hep’, Mitchell’s Jazz Kings, 1922
‘Oh! Sister, Ain’t That Hot!’, Dolly Kay, 1923
‘How You Gonna Keep Kool?’, The Georgia Melodians, 1924
‘Everything Is Hotsy Totsy Now’, The California Ramblers, 1925
‘Rock, Jenny, Rock’, The Georgia Strutters, 1926
‘Ain’t Love Grand (Don’t Get Funky)’, John Hyman’s Bayou Stompers, 1927
‘Don’t Jive Me’, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, 1928
‘I’m a Front Door Woman with a Back Door Man’, Lillian Glinn, 1929
‘Horse Feathers’, Cliff Jackson & his Krazy Kats, 1930
‘Kicking the Gong Around’, Cab Calloway & His Orchestra, 1931
‘Reefer Man’, Cab Calloway, 1932
‘Swing, You Cats’, Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra, 1933
‘Rock and Roll’, The Boswell Sisters, 1934
‘Boogie Woogie’, Cleo Brown, 1935
‘That Cat Is High’, Tommy Powell & His Hi-De-Ho Boys, 1936
‘Killer Diller’, Benny Goodman & His Orchestra, 1937
‘Stomp It Out, Gate’, Rosetta Howard & The Harlem Hamfats, 1938
‘Jake, What a Shake’, Louis Jordan & The Tympany Five, 1939
‘Jitterbugs Broke It Down’, Ollie Shepard, 1940
‘Are You All Reet?’, Cab Calloway & His Orchestra, 1941
‘You Done Got Hip’, Roosevelt Sykes, 1942
‘Riffette’, Freddie Slack & His Orchestra, 1943
‘Groovy Like A Movie – Let’s Get Groovy’, Bonnie Davis & the Piccadilly Pipers, 1944
‘Bebop’, Dizzy Gillespie, 1945
So, imagine that you were an English schoolboy jazz enthusiast during that era, such as Humphrey Lyttelton, George Melly or Kingsley Amis. By buying these records, reading about them in specialist UK jazz publications such as Melody Maker (established 1926), hearing some of them on the radio or occasionally having the chance to see them in Hollywood films, a working knowledge of contemporary hep slang could be acquired without ever having come within three thousand miles of a Harlem after-hours joint. And today, well-heeled teenage UK hip-hop fans whose backgrounds are public school rather than Public Enemy – or perhaps Straight Outta Compton, but in this case the Berkshire village of that name – similarly learn from songs how to talk in contemporary gangsta rap slang.
Sometimes, of course, Harlem even came to London, as when Cab Calloway and His Orchestra played a residency at the London Palladium in 1934 – following in the wa
ke of visits by Louis Armstrong in 1932 and Duke Ellington in 1933 – where the effect was considerably more awe-inspiring than that produced by a hand-cranked gramophone. Music journalists in the 1970s would speak in hushed tones of the bone-shaking capabilities of Black Sabbath’s PA system, but I once met an elderly gentleman who had the good fortune to have seen one of those Calloway Palladium shows, who gleefully compared the combined power and volume of that orchestra’s swinging massed brass section to that of an airliner taking off above the front stalls. As Cab himself later recalled, ‘people climbed all over the stage and then tried to tear off our clothes as we left the theatre every night’.
That crowd of British jazz fans would have long been familiar with words like reefer and jive. Similarly, as can be seen from the above list, songs mentioning rock and even rock and roll were already an established thing in the inter-war years, so that it was not remotely unusual when the announcer on the 14 January 1939 broadcast of the NBC radio show Camel Caravan told listeners, ‘Look out now, hang on tight, ‘cause here comes Benny Goodman with a real rocker, “King Porter Stomp”’. The phrase horse feathers – an expression meaning rubbish or nonsense – was used as a title by Cliff Jackson and His Krazy Kats for their 78 rpm recording of suitably unhinged ensemble playing and scat singing, two years before the Marx Brothers appeared in their 1932 film of the same name. By the start of the 1940s, jitterbug had become the accepted term both for a new, acrobatic style of jazz dancing, and for the dancers themselves.
The word has stayed rooted in its time, but another slang expression which surfaced around the same time, hip, has stayed the course ever since, across numerous different spheres far removed from music. Likewise, when the Dizzy Gillespie Quartet released a 78 rpm instrumental entitled ‘Bebop’ in 1945, they could not have imagined that not only would it lend its name to an entire style of music, but also, in its shorter form, bop, mutate and spread across successive music genres over successive decades, whether it was the magisterial Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps on their 1956 debut 45 singing the praises of ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, or New York’s finest, The Ramones, on their own debut twenty years later, introducing the world to the ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ (1976). Twelve-year-old glam rock fans saving pocket money to buy a copy of David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ (1972) – which also spoke of hazy cosmic jive – or T Rex’s ‘Jeepster’ (1971), were known to the press as teenyboppers, and Marc Bolan himself as The Bopping Elf.
The new idol of stamping youth
BY THE 1950S, JAZZ had essentially become respectable, now that rock’n’roll was the convenient new whipping boy for the press and moralists. In Britain, it was the same music paper, Melody Maker, which in pre-war times had defended jazz from similar complaints, that now led the charge decrying the supposed new aural menace. This was partly a question of social background; broadly speaking, middle- and upper-class youth often favoured jazz, whereas the rockers and Teddy boys were largely working class, and it wasn’t them who wrote articles for the media. The Queen’s own sister was a high-profile jazz enthusiast, prompting the Melody Maker to memorably observe, in an article deploring any link between that type of music and recreational drug use, ‘Is the public to believe that because Princess Margaret likes jazz she smokes a hokum pipe? Or that Clarence House is an opium den?’
Despite this supposed divide, the language of early rock’n’roll utilised numerous slang words which had been current in popular music for decades. Indeed, as Louis Armstrong said in 1956, when asked by the Daily Express for his opinion of rock’n’roll, ‘it reminds me of some lively old hymn music we used to sing back home when I was a boy. . . there’s a little change here and there, but it’s all about the same’. Despite the seismic shock waves caused by the man Picture Post called ‘Elvis the Pelvis Presley, the New Idol of Stamping Youth, High Priest of the Rock’n’Rollers’, half the bands jumping on the rock bandwagon in Britain were actually composed of former or current jazz musicians looking out for the main chance. Meanwhile skiffle, the home-grown proto-rockabilly music bashed out by teenagers on countless tea chests and washboards from Limehouse to Liverpool, was a direct offshoot of the jazz revival, and took its name from the New Orleans term dating back more than half a century. One of the most successful skiffle 45s, ‘Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O’ – a top ten hit in 1957 for the Vipers Skiffle Group – is a textbook example of how jazz slang persisted into the new era. The band took their name from a 1930s term for marijuana smokers, while the title of the song name-checked two further jazz terms; rock, which dated back in this context to the 1920s, and daddy-o, a hip term of address since the 1940s.
Of the new breed, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, who, along with Jerry Lee Lewis, remained the favourite of the hardcore rockers for decades to come, not only walked the walk, they also very much talked the talk. When not serenading ’Be-Bop-A-Lula’, Gene and the boys were hanging out on ‘Bop Street’ (1956), which opened with a brief interlude of spoken jive (‘Tell me, cat, where’s that di-rection?’) and then launched into a blizzard of hep speak alongside Cliff Gallup’s breathtaking guitar runs. A day earlier, they’d recorded a song called ‘Bluejean Bop’, which their record label promoted with an advert that read, ‘ROCK with Capitol – Just “Dig” This Special Release!’
In the new rock’n’roll universe, men were still cats or hep cats, and women were chicks, dolls or dames, although they, too, could be like the boys, according to Eddie Arnold’s 1954 hillbilly bopper ‘Hep Cat Baby’, about a woman much given to saying real gone and dig this. There were a couple of independent US record labels named Hep, and Carl Perkins sang about having a ‘Jive After Five’ (1958), while Little Richard explained in ‘Slippin’ & Slidin” (1956) that he had done got hip to someone’s jive, and furthermore, his gal was a solid sender. Meanwhile, out on the further shores of rockabilly, David Ray sang ‘Jitterbugging Baby’ (1959), while Larry Terry proclaimed magnificently, and at full volume, that he was undoubtedly a ‘Hep Cat’ (1961). Continuing the jazz language theme among the rockers, there was Boyd Bennett’s ‘The Groovy Age’ (1956), and also Johnnie Shelton & His Rockabillies telling the world about a place called ‘Groovy Joe’s’ (1958). In Memphis, pioneering female rocker, recording engineer and label owner Cordell Jackson wrote and sang about a ‘Bebopper’s Christmas’ (1956), in which a ‘real gone Santa’ comes boppin’ in, and the following year out of North Carolina came Don Hager & the Hot Tots with ‘Bebop Boogie’, whose lyrics also managed to include the words jive and jitterbug. Of course, not everyone in that particular music scene was drawing on jazz words to put their message across: over in Central City, Kentucky, the duo Tag & Effie ploughed their own singular linguistic furrow when they laid down that self-penned classic of hill-country love gone wrong, ‘Baby You Done Flubbed Your Dub With Me’ (1958). Trade paper Billboard gave the latter a favourable review, and, in the same issue, commented approvingly of another fine tune, ‘Looking’, by Texas rockabilly Royce Porter, that it ‘builds and achieves a funky quality’, which certainly suggests that the F word was current in music circles in a variety of contexts before its specific meaning narrowed in the late 1960s.
Hippy hippy shake
THE REVIEW PAGES OF BILLBOARD magazine are useful for charting the emergence of slang words into the US music world, and thus on into general public use, since they covered a wide variety of genres – from jazz, blues, doo-wop, gospel, R&B and swing to hillbilly, country, rock’n’roll, pop and show tunes. For example, in 1949 jazz saxophone player Cecil Payne released a booting rhythm & blues instrumental entitled ‘Hippy Dippy’, which the magazine was pleased to call ‘one of those tenor-bary sax groan-and-moan deals with a big beat and some fresh themes’. The word hippy or hippie, which also surfaced, for instance, in Douglass Wallop’s 1953 hepcat crime novel Night Light, originally just denoted someone who was hip. When Montana rockabilly Chan Romero wrote and sang his superior original version of the song ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ in 1959, the word had no whiff of Merseybeat, let
alone long hair or joss sticks, about it, and as late as 1964 it could be found being used in its original slang sense in a British tabloid newspaper toothpaste advert, to mean the coolest teenager at a party:
Does Your Mouth Say Dreamboat? – You’ve got to be a sweetie with a mouth like this. Just watch yourself reflected in other people’s eyes. The shyest boy will light up like a Roman Candle when you pass by, the toughest hippie of them all will find his cherished rudeness melt. . . So use Gordon Moore’s Cosmetic toothpaste to tint your gums petal pink, polish your teeth to soft-shining brightness.
Within three years, the word appeared several times in its brand-new guise in a news report on the front page of the same paper, when ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn were arrested ‘at a San Francisco “hippie” party’ in the Haight-Ashbury district. ‘There’, the paper informed its readers, ‘the hippies live in squalid communal flats. Many take drugs and believe in free love.’
So, if distinguished dancers from the Royal Ballet – Fonteyn was approaching fifty at the time – could find themselves roped by the press into the hippie phenomenon, the general public might be forgiven a certain amount of confusion regarding the music-derived language spoken by this apparently new and switched-on generation. Luckily, a blizzard of articles in that self-same press was there to offer friendly assistance to the terminally square. ‘Are you confused when you hear statements like “He’s in that Warhol bag?” or “[dance craze] The Jerk is fab” or “The royal family’s gone kinky at last?”,’ wrote Gloria Steinem in a 1965 issue of Life magazine. Her inclusion of words like fab and kinky clearly showed the influence of the so-called British Invasion of bands which had followed in the wake of the initial American success of the Beatles since the beginning of the previous year. ‘If a visiting Englishman referred to your wife as “a gear bird”,’ she continued, ‘would you hit him?’ By way of further clarification, Steinem advised that ‘it is essential to avoid such Old Hat terms as Hip, Bop, Cool, Beat, Beatnik, Cat, Crazy, Fink and Old Hat’. So, apparently, hip was no longer hip, cool had become uncool, and beat and beatnik had taken a beating.