Origin of "jazz"--Hickman is unreliable

[Baker, John]

        I suppose that I have only myself to blame for making too much of
Art Hickman's comments on the origins of "jazz."  Hickman was a bandleader,
not a scholar.  He gave essentially the same story in the San Francisco
Examiner on October 12, 1919, and the San Francisco Chronicle on November 9,
1919:  He first heard "jazz" applied to the spring water at Boyes Hot
Springs (which Scoop Gleeson seemingly confirmed in the San Francisco
Bulletin on March 14, 1913).  I disregard Hickman's implication that it was
an onomatopoeic coinage, except inasmuch as it shows that he had not heard
the word before.  An indeterminate but probably short amount of time later,
Hickman heard the same term used on the baseball diamond, where it meant
"pep."  These accounts seem entirely plausible and to add almost nothing to
our knowledge of the term.  They are not (contrary to my earlier
suggestions) inconsistent with the theory that Scoop Gleeson himself was the
key propagator of the term - a theory that I regard as unproven.

        To complain that Hickman did not mention Scoop Gleeson's role in the
popularization of "jazz" is a circular argument, because Gleeson's role is
the point of contention.  Nobody, other than Gleeson, mentions Gleeson's
role.  Even Ernest Hopkins, who wrote "In Praise of 'Jazz,' a Futurist Word
Which Has Just Joined the Language" for the Bulletin on April 5, 1913, did
not credit Gleeson.  In fact, Dick Holbrook in 1973 - 1974 wrote that he had
interviewed Hopkins and Hopkins was sure he did not appropriate "jazz" from
Gleeson (who had been instrumental in getting him his job).  Hopkins
variously spells the word "jazz" and "jaz," showing that he was unlikely to
have derived it from a consistent written source.

        Gerald Cohen suggests in his paper that between March 3 and March 6,
1913, Gleeson had a lexical epiphany and reinterpreted "jazz" to be
something very favorable.  It seems far more likely that Gleeson's sources
(whoever they were) corrected his March 3 use.  Gleeson's writing may have
had an important role in popularizing "jazz," but it seems unlikely that
almost everyone in the San Francisco area learned the word from him.

John Baker