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

[Mullins, Bill]

I vaguely recall from the news a few (ten??) years back a story about a
small rural town which was lobbying for a new prison to be built,
because of the jobs it would bring.  Someone (a local deejay?), as part
of the lobbying effort, recorded a song and possibly a music video (you
remember those, MTV used to run them) that included the lines:
"Is we is
or is we isn't
gonna get ourselves
a prison?"



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