"Is you is or is you ain't?" (1921)

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU
Sun Jun 12 00:07:48 UTC 2005


Like many of my generation, I was first introduced to Louis Jordan's 1944
hit "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?" via the Tom & Jerry cartoon
"Solid Serenade" (1946). (Jordan cowrote the song, his first million
seller, with Bill Austin.) I came across a much earlier example of "Is you
is or is you ain't" in a 1921 story by Octavus Roy Cohen, a Jewish writer
from South Carolina who wrote humorous black-dialect fiction:

-----
"Less Miserable" by Octavus Roy Cohen
_Chicago Tribune_, Sep. 25, 1921, (Magazine) p. 1/3
"What I asks you straight an' plain: Is you gwine loant me them two
dollars, or ain't you?"
"I ain't said I ain't."
"You ain't said you is."
"I ain't said nothin'."
"Well, I asks: Is you is or is you ain't?"
-----

Cohen wrote a similar exchange in a story the following year:

-----
"Fifty-Fifty Fifty" by Octavus Roy Cohen
_Chicago Tribune_, Nov. 26, 1922, (Magazine) p. 10/1
"But, Maudlin-- ain't we engage'?"
"I ain't said we ain't."
"But you ain't sayin' we is."
"I ain't sayin' nothin'."
"Well," desperately. "Is we is, or is we ain't?"
-----


--Ben Zimmer



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