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

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 22:27:52 -0400, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>And what is it that's supposed to be "humorous" in this fiction? Its
>content or the fact that it's written in "black dialect"?

That wasn't meant to be a personal evaluation of his work. I was cribbing
from this site: <http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/cohen.html>. I have no
clue why this sort of stuff was considered "humorous" at the time. The
past is a different country, as they say...

Regardless of his attempts at humor through racist caricature, I wonder if
he was picking up on an actual locution he had heard with "Is you is or is
you ain't?" Perhaps this was a common jocular expression that Louis Jordan
then put to song two decades later.

>Did Mr.Cohen live long enough to become familiar with the "Carolina
>Israelite"?

Cohen died in 1959, so he would have been alive for Harry Golden's heyday,
but I don't know if their politics agreed.

>On 6/11/05, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> 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?"
>> -----