Origin of "jazz"--Hickman is unreliable

[Baker, John]

        Gerald Cohen has been kind enough to share with me a copy of his
paper, "Jazz Revisited:  On the Origin of the Term," which reprints many of
the original sources.  These show that Art Hickman was indeed reliable, but
that his information was less significant than I had supposed.

        To recap:  Reliable sources agree that the musical term "jazz"
originated in Chicago by 1916,  probably in 1914.  It previously had been a
slang term in San Francisco meaning "pep."  It was first used in print, and
perhaps first used in this sense, in March 1913.  At this time the San
Francisco AAA minor-league baseball team, the Seals, were at Boyes Hot
Springs, California, as were E.T. "Scoop" Gleeson, a sportswriter for the
San Francisco Bulletin, and musician Art Hickman.  Gleeson began using the
term in his writings on March 3, 1913.  Hickman and the Seals were at Boyes
Hot Springs (aka Boyes Springs) at least through March 28, 1913.

        Hickman said that the ballplayers referred to a natural spring as
having "jazz water."  Other sources, including Scoop Gleeson's March 14
article, seem to confirm this story.  However, if the ballplayers really got
"jazz" from Gleeson's writings, there does seem to be time for transmission
from the Bulletin to the ballplayers to Hickman.

        Hickman also said that "jazz water" was the origination of the term.
I take this to mean only that it was previously unfamiliar to Hickman, and
not that it necessarily was in fact an onomatopoeic coinage at Boyes
Springs.  It may be significant, though, that Hickman made no mention of
Gleeson, even though Hickman knew Gleeson and they were both at Boyes
Springs.

        Unless I've overlooked something, no one else credits Gleeson
either.  This, it seems to me, undercuts Gleeson's story that it was a craps
term that he got from another reporter.  This is not an attack on Gleeson's
credibility; memories are imperfect over 25-year periods.  But, just as
Gleeson recalled the events as being in 1912 when they were in fact in 1913,
he may well have been confused as to his source.  Instead, I think that
Gleeson used the term on March 3 and had discussions over the next three
days that showed both that it was a new term to most people and that his
usage did not reflect the commonly accepted meaning.  He then wrote a second
article, on March 6, where he took the trouble to define "jazz" as meaning
"pep."  Since "jazz"  in the alleged but unattested craps context meant
"luck," it seems an unlikely origin.

        Although the Boyes Springs stay is fairly well-documented, the
transition of "jazz" to a musical term is not.  Bert Kelly, who apparently
was not at Boyes Springs but did play with Art Hickman subsequently, said in
a 1957 letter to Variety that he "conceived the idea of using the Far West
slangword 'jazz,' as a name for an original dance band and my original style
of playing a dance rhythm at the College Inn, Chicago, in 1914.  Kelly wrote
that Variety's "representative, Johnny O'Connor, came regularly to The
College Inn at Chicago to hear Bert Kelly's Jazz Band and no doubt must have
written articles about us in Variety."  A competing and perhaps less
plausible story is that promoter Harry James heard the slang term at the
Schiller Cafe in Chicago in 1914 and renamed the Dixieland Band playing
there the Original Dixieland Jass Band.  It would be interesting to see
what, if anything, was written in Variety or other sources in 1914.

John Baker


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Baker, John
> Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 12:54 AM
> To:   'American Dialect Society'
> Subject:      RE: Origin of "jazz"--Hickman is unreliable
>
>       These are strong arguments, and they may well be correct.  Still, a
> few doubts niggle:
>
>       1.      What reason is there to doubt Hickman's word that he first
> heard "jazz" used by the ballplayers at Boyes Springs?  This seems to me
> strong evidence that he got the word from them, not from Gleeson.  It
> seems unlikely that the term could have gone from Gleeson's writings to
> the ballplayers to Hickman while they were still at Boyes Springs.
> Gleeson could have passed on "jazz" to the ballplayers orally, before
> using it in his writings, but there's no evidence of that, as far as I
> know.  The term "jazz" had an even bigger impact on Hickman's career than
> it did on Gleeson's, so he had just as much incentive to remember the
> facts.  And again, his account was 6 years later, Gleeson's was 25.
>
>       2.      Is there any other evidence of a crap-shooting use of
> "jazz"?  (Not in OED; I don't have DARE or RHHDAS, so haven't checked
> them.)
>
>       3.      If Gleeson gave it as much thought as all that, maybe he
> realized what we realized:  If he got the word from the Seals, he had a
> secondary role.  If he got it from any other source, he was the great
> transmitter of jazz to the nation.
>
>       4.      I don't give much weight to Gleeson's contemporaneous
> failure to credit the ballplayers, especially if he didn't know which
> particular one to credit.  How often do most people credit word sources?
> (The practices of linguists shouldn't be the test here.)
>
>       5.      Is Gleeson's account a little too neat?  It answers every
> question except where the crap-shooting use came from (unless you count
> the question of why Gleeson suddenly coined a new usage and made it
> stick).  Hickman's story leaves us almost as ignorant as ever of where the
> word actually arose.  (I assume a pre-existing word, not a new coinage at
> Boyes Springs.  We all have words in the back of our heads that we don't
> use every day, until the occasion arises.)
>
> John Baker
>
>