Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
Baker, John
JMB at STRADLEY.COM
Sat Sep 27 22:24:05 UTC 2008
The most plausible account is that "jazz" was first applied to
music by Bert Kelly, who was a banjoist with Art Hickman's band at Boies
Spring. Kelly formed Bert Kelly's Jazz Band in Chicago in 1914 or 1915,
and by mid-1915 "jazz" was being used interchangeably with "blues" for a
style of music. Many of the Chicago musicians, and the style of music
itself, came from New Orleans, so most people supposed, wrongly, that
the word came from there as well. The Wikipedia article,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word), which is largely written by
me, discusses the history in more detail.
John Baker
-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Wilson Gray
Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 5:34 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
Under the historical circumstances, it's surprising that the word has
ever come to have any association with blacks and/or their music at all!
How in the world did that come about?
-Wilson
On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 5:08 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> The earliest occurrence in HDAS of "jazz" = "fuck" comes from 1918, an
entry in a diary kept by John dos Passos, and of course not published
until years afterwards.
>
> I have been supposing that this sense arose because 1) one of the two
original sense of "jazz" was "vigor", "energy", "enthusiasm" &c, and
that words meaning vigor, energy, &c. are likely to come to mean sexual
vigor, enery, &c.; and 2) the dancing that young people did to jazz
music involved full-body contact and was supposed by the upright to be a
precursor to fornication. (When some tea-rooms began offering late
afternoon dance music, there was an outburst of deploration; but one
family-values faker opined that he didn't mind daylight dancing. so long
as there was daylight between the dancers.) This 1915 passage surely
indicates that the word by then also meant "messed up", "bungled", made
a hash of", or something. Not, however, "fucked up", because if the
editor of that newspaper thought that that would be an association made
by his readers, he would not have allowed the word to be printed --
unless he was tired of newspaper work and ready for a career change.
>
> In all of the 1912/1913 passages containing "jazz", the word can
easily be replaced with "energy" or "nonsense".
>
> Boies Spring was the source of "jazz" water -- it was a health resort
built around a spring of naturally effervescent water, and the 1913
occurrences of "jazz" nearly all come from accounts of the SF Seals
baseball teams, during its spring training there or from their regular
season games. Art Hickman seems to have been the first musician to
apply the word "jazz" to music, and he was entertainment director at
Boies Spring during the spring of 1913.
> I don't have access to the digitized Chronicle. It would be
interesting to search it for references to Boies Spring, say 1911 to
1915. A couple of years after 1913, Hickman was hired to lead a dance
band at a very fashionable hotel in SF. I have been able to look over a
society magazine from SF in the mid 1910s, and have seen ads for the
ball room at this hotel and then for Hickman's band there, but haven't
yet seen anything using the word "jazz". It would be interesting to
search for Hicxkman.
> Given the fact that the Proquest OCR has such a high failure rate in
turning up what is in fact there, it's possible that searching for Boies
Spring or Hickman would turn up some stories in fact containing the word
jazz.
>
> As it happens, the only actual contemporary connection now known
between Hickman and the word "jazz" is from an interview from the late
1910s in which he repudiated the word. By then jazz music had become a
vaudeville and cabaret fad, and jazz musicians posed as purely
instinctive musicians, everyone in the band playing what sounded good to
him, the result being a sort of pleasingly energetic cacophony. This
wasn't what Hickman was about. He and his musicians were highly skilled
and played very elaborate arrangements. His trademark had become
compromised.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Date: Friday, September 26, 2008 11:22 am
> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
>> Ca.1958, I worked with a white man, "Dave Beach, the old Irishman,"
>> as he styled himself, ca.65 years old, who *always* used "jazz" as a
>> euphemism for "fuck." Therefore, could the headline mean, possibly,
>> that
>>
>> C. S. Smith Almost _Fucks Up_ Game Cinched by Venice
>>
>> Dave was clearly old enough to have learned this meaning of "jazz"
>> when it was still other than literary. It fell trippingly from his
>> tongue and he never alternated it with "fuck."
>>
>> -Wilson
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Shapiro, Fred
>> <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
>> wrote:
>> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
-----------------------
>> > Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> > Poster: "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
>> > Subject: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
>> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > ------------
>> >
>> > The recent digitization of the San Francisco Chronicle by ProQuest
>> does not seem to provide an antedating of the word "jazz." However,
>> it does antedate my previous discovery of the earliest occurrence of
>> "jazz" as a verb, in a context that is cryptic but that connects with
>> other early West Coast baseball usages of "jazz" that have been
>> discovered and are newly incorporated into the OED:
>> >
>> >
>> > jazz, v. (OED 1915)
>> >
>> > 1914 _S.F. Chronicle_ 7 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
>> (headline) Venice Tigers Step Further Out in Front as Seals Lose C.
>> S. Smith Almost Jazzes Game Cinched by Venice.
>> >
>> >
>> > The body of the article describes reliever C. S. Smith almost
>> blowing a baseball game against the Oakland Oaks. I don't see the
>> word "jazz" used in the body of the article, but the body is poorly
>> OCR'd (the headline is very clear) and I will study it more carefully
>> when I have the time. I guess the usage of "jazz" here seems on its
>> face to mean "blows, messes up."
>> >
>> > Fred Shapiro
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------
>> > Fred R. Shapiro Editor
>> > Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF
QUOTATIONS
>> > Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
>> > Yale Law School ISBN
0300107986
>> > e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu
>> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > -----------------------------------
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