Etymology of "Ska"

[Wilson Gray]

On Jun 10, 2005, at 1:49 PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

>
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Etymology of "Ska"
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> 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)

As it was here, reaching no.2 in 1964. The singer herself appeared on
Dick Clark's American Bandstand.

-Wilson Gray

>  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
>