"Right on"

[Wilson Gray]

On Nov 10, 2004, at 12:42 PM, Jonathon Green wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathon Green <slang at ABECEDARY.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "Right on"
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> --------
>
> It's certainly in the 1968 edition of _Current Slang_ III:2, subtitled
> 'The Slang of Watts'. I think Jesse might be being a trifle
> restrictive; I
> definitely recall being very well aware of the term in mid-late 1969,
> certainly in the context of working on the London 'underground press',
> albeit at that stage for the short-lived UK edition of a still
> relatively
> radical Rolling Stone. In other words, we were far, both lit. and fig.,
>  from the Black Panthers.  We probably picked it up through the old UPS
> (the Underground Press Syndicate, via which all such papers circulated
> material).
>
> Jonathon Green
>

I'm with Jonathon on this one. The phrase, "right on," occurs in the
play (there was a musical version starring Muhammad Ali and staged in
San Francisco; I'm talking about the original play, which was staged in
Los Angeles), "Big-Time Buck White," starring nobody that anybody ever
heard of. I'm not sure when the play was written - I saw it in 1968 -
but it was definitely in print by 1969 (published by Black Cat Books, a
subsidiary of Grove Press). And, given that the author is Joseph Dolan
Tuotti, judging by his name, it's also rather unlikely that he was a
Panther.

Historical note. For the record, the Black Panthers did not have a
serious presence in Watts or in any other section of Los Angeles. The
greater Los Angeles area was the territory of the US(A) - the United
Slaves (of America). "Whe'evuh we *ah*, US *is*!" [I've always loved
this slogan for the way that it puns on the grammar of "Negro
dialect."] Maulana Ron Karenga, the Huey Newton of US, was, the last I
heard, a professor of sociology at the State University of California,
Long Beach. Huey Newton, of course, is dead.

-Wilson Gray