Crying "Wolof!"

[Wilson Gray]

W:pedia
"A case has been made out for borrowings of many place-names and even
misremembered rhymes, such as "_Here we go looby-loo_ ... " – chiefly from
one of the *Luba* <aw, shit!> varieties – in the USA.[18]"

18. Vass, Winifred Kellersberger, The Bantu-Speaking Heritage of the United
States. Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los
Angeles, 1979.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_languages>

I learned "Here we go _looby-loo_" as the song accompanying the eponymous
line-dance in StL, ca. 1943. My wife learned it in Kingston, NE PA, as
"Here we go _loop-de-loop_," ca. 1953.

In 1962, Gil Hamilton a.k.a. Johnny Thunder, a black R&B singer from
Leesburg, Florida, released a version of the song under the title, "Loop De
Loop," composed by Teddy Vann, a black man from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRvTbveOamo>

And then there's the site, Folklorist, which has the song as an English
folksong, "Looby Lou."

<http://www.folklorist.org/song/Looby_Lou>

And, finally, Music Express Magazine has it as "Here We Go Looby Loo"

<http://www.musicexpressmagazine.com/bin/FolkSongPartnersMA.pdf>

In other words, even the mere suggestion that this song may have some
connection of any kind whatsoever with the Luba people of Africa is so
specious as to be non-distinct from a lie.

The foolish claim that features of black-American culture originating in
black-American culture must necessarily be traceable to some random African
source pulled out of some "scholar's" ass, simply because features of
white-American culture can be traced to a European source, is insultingly
unreal, and I ain't going for it. And that a heap of black Americans, from
academics to the boyz n the 'hood, fervently believe that nothing in
black-American culture can possibly have sprung, fully-formed, from the
mind of black America and not have African roots, because that would mean
that black America, unlike white America, has no cultural history that can
be traced back farther than 1619 and being just like our social "superiors"
is our highest-possible aspiration disgusts me.

-- 

- Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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