Hootenanny

[Beverly Flanigan]

Yes, this was how we used the term in the '60s too.  But shindig?  Wasn't
that disco?

At 05:09 PM 3/7/2005, you wrote:
>So widespread was it that there was a short-lived TV series of that name
>about 1965.  Each week it featured a folk-music concert from a different
>college campus.
>
>If memory serves, it was replaced by "Shindig," which featured babes
>dancing in cages.
>
>JL
>
>sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: sagehen
>Subject: Re: Hootenanny
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >Another sense, that no-one's mentioned so far, is known in the UK from
> the New
> >Year TV party "Jools' Annual Hootenanny". Jools Holland is a jazz pianist, a
> >raconteur and definitely someone to be seen with, and he hosts this annual
> >broadcast musical gathering from about 11am until 1am every 31 December - 1
> >January; fashionable people are invited and interviewed by him, and play /
> >sing their music if they are musicians.
> >
> >Before this ADS-L thread I had never come across the word except in Jools'
> >context, and so assumed that it must mean something noisy / raucous / joyful
> >(onomatopoeia from 'hoot' and from the number of syllables and different
> >vowels
> >in the word, I suppose). But if there are more Google hits for
> >'thingumajig'-like meanings, perhaps Jools calls it that because it
> >doesn't fit
> >comfortably into any other definition, so he doesn't really know *what* to
> >call
> >it?
> >
> >Damien Hall
> >University of Pennsylvania
>~~~~~~~~
>The other use of "hoot(e)nanny," more like the one you cite, and which I
>didn't learn until I was in college in the late 40s, was for a
>singalong--usually folk, labor, political kinds of music. Pete Seeger
>might have presided over this sort of event: don't really remember. I
>think that usage was fairly widespread.
>A. Murie
>
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