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

[Wilson Gray]

On Jun 12, 2005, at 1:12 AM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

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>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Is you is or is you ain't?" (1921)
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> 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...

That's true.

>
> 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.

It's certainly not impossible that an expression could live for twenty
years. I know the expression only as the title of a song. I've never
heard it used in natural speech, but that could be mere coincidence.
The expression, "ripping and running," which I first heard from my
grandparents, who were born in the 19th century, is still in use,
today. Literally. I heard it used by a black woman on today's Maury
Show. Ob the other hand, Jordan simply could have made up the phrase
independently.

>
>> 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.

You never know.

-Wilson Gray

>
>> 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?"
>>> -----
>