Etymology of "Ska"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:39:43 -0400, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>The OED's first citation is Sept. 1964.  The following provides earlier
>evidence as well as an explanation of the etymology:
>
>"The 'Ska' hits London --but they call it Blue Beat ... Towards the end
>of the fifties the Jamaicans got keen on rhythm and blues, particularly a
>record called 'No More Doggin' sung by Roscoe Gordon.  They got hold of
>this beat, cheered it up a bit, added some cute lyrics and called it Ska
>-- an onomatopoeic word for the sound the guitar made.  From 1959 onwards
>this was all the rage.  We called it Blue Beat here [London, England]
>because of the label it was issued on."
>        Article by Maureen Cleave, Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 17
>Mar. 1964, page 7

I just recently came across that article too but was disappointed to see
that the first recoverable mention of "ska" in the _Gleaner_ was actually
from a British source-- Maureen Cleave's article is reprinted from the
_Daily Express_. (Cleave would forever be remembered for an interview she
conducted for the _Evening Standard_ two years later, when John Lennon
told her the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus".)

Unfortunately, the _Gleaner_ at the time seems to have been directed at
Jamaica's slender white minority, so it apparently missed the first five
years of the ska "rage". It wasn't until ska had become popular in England
(Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" was a huge hit there) that the _Gleaner_
took notice.  The next appearance of "ska" in the paper was less than a
week after Cleave's article on Mar. 23, when Minister of Development and
Welfare (and future Prime Minister) Edward Seaga announced that two US
music promoters were coming to hear "the 'Jamaican Ska' music which
originated in Western Kingston and is now breaking through in England as a
National craze."  By May the government was promoting ska as "the National
Sound" of Jamaica, and numerous ska bands were touring the US and the UK.


--Ben Zimmer