Origin of "jazz"--Hickman is unreliable

[Baker, John]

        Well, you've seen the source materials, and I haven't.  But consider
the following:

        1.      In the first instance, a 1919 account seems more likely to
be reliable than a 1938 account, particularly when the author of the 1938
article is eager to emphasize his own role in the popularity of a word so
important that it became the name of an era.  Hickman, in contrast, had no
obvious motivation to make up an essentially neutral story.  Gleeson's
account would have made Hickman's point just as effectively.

        2.      If the term's subsequent popularity and association with
music came from Hickman's orchestra, it seems more likely that they learned
the term from the Seals than from the Bulletin.  Other things being equal,
it seems more likely that the Seals would adopt an internally generated term
than one essentially coined by a sports writer.  Admittedly, the Seals
probably read the sports pages.

        3.      If we do accept Hickman's story and discount Gleeson's, that
does not necessarily mean that "jazz" really was coined on the spot at Boyes
Springs.  "Jazz" could have been a term already in common use among the
Seals, and Hickman simply heard it the first time there.  We're sent back to
jasm/jism, jaser, or the crap-shooting incantation as a source.

        Far from compelling evidence, but enough to make me regard Gleeson's
story with suspicion.  If Hickman's story is correct, then Gleeson's role is
far smaller:  Although he was the first to use "jazz" in print (but he
didn't know that for sure), he didn't coin the word or its baseball meaning
and he had little to do with its popularization.

John Baker

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gerald Cohen [SMTP:gcohen at UMR.EDU]
> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 8:36 PM
> To:   ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject:      Origin of "jazz"--Hickman is unreliable
>
> >At 11:22 AM -0400 10/15/01, Baker, John wrote:
> >        It's also striking that one meaning of jaser is babble of a
> brook.
> >Compare the story, from the 11/9/1919 San Francisco Chronicle and
> referenced
> >in the archives:  "Art Hickman, of the St. Francis orchestra, once said
> that
> >the word jazz originated some time ago when the San Francisco Seals were
> >training at Boyes Springs. One member of the ball-tossing team commented
> on
> >a stream of water bubbling from the side of a bank, casting upon it the
> then
> >unknown word, "jazz" water."  To what extent has jaser been considered as
> >the source for jazz?  Palmerston's use, in this view, might be considered
> a
> >precursor of the modern word.
>
>
>    The central figure in the 1913 "jazz" story was not Art Hickman but
> rather  _S.F. Bulletin_ sportswriter "Scoop" Gleeson.  Gleeson was
> the one who shortly before March 3, 1913  learned of "jazz" as a
> crap-shooting incantation ("Come on, the old jazz") from William
> Slattery, sports editor of the S.F. newspaper, _The Call_. On March
> 3, 1913 Gleeson used "jazz" in print for the first time, in a
> derogatory sense: "...McCarl has been heralded all along the line as
> a 'busher' [i.e., a player with no professional experience], but now
> it develops that his dope is very much to the 'jazz'." "Jazz" here
> means roughly "hot air, baloney," (i.e., having the same reliability
> as a crap-shooting incantation to produce results).
>
>      But starting March 6, 1913, Gleeson reversed himself on this
> pejorative use of "jazz" and repeatedly used it favorably, to mean
> "pep, vim, vigor, fighting spirit."  This use of "jazz" was in effect
> a verbal incantation to Lady luck on behalf of the S.F. Seals (Class
> AA) baseball team. The team had finished next-to-last in 1912, still
> looked weak at the start of spring training in 1913, and Gleeson was
> trying to help the team along by talking up its fighting spirit as
> its means to start winning.
>
>      I have thus far collected all the "jazz" attestations in the
> _S.F. Bulletin_
> from Feb. through June 1913, plus Gleeson's 1938 article "I Remember
> the Birth of Jazz." (_Call-Bulletin, Sept. 3, 1938, pg. 3, col. 1).
> There is no evidence at all here of "jazz" originating from the Boyes
> Springs water.
>
>      Art Hickman was a musician who gave dances for the S.F. Seals
> ballplayers and attended at least some of their practices and games.
> He (or, more generally, his band) was probably the intermediary
> between the 1913ff. baseball term "jazz" and the musical term which
> hit the big time a few years later. But he himself did not like the
> term "jazz" and as a source of the origin of this term he is
> unreliable. Gleeson's writings are the place to turn to.
>
> ---Gerald Cohen