"Rastus" < "Jazz Means Happy and Loose Like" (1917)

Charles Doyle cdoyle at UGA.EDU
Thu Dec 6 21:37:07 UTC 2007


My mother, a high-school English teacher who prided herself of speaking "proper" (Southern) English, always studiously gave the initial syllable as unstressed [l@]!

I wasn't venturing an assessment of the frequency of the names Leroy and Tyrone among black men of different generations but just identifying names that seem stereotypically to have been assigned the protagonists in the racist jokes, as the jokes evolved over the decades. Of course, there's no RULE--just a tendency (Germans in jokes are Hans, Frenchmen are Pierre, etc.). I haven't encountered a joke in oral tradtion about a character named Rastus in, maybe, 30 or 35 years.

--Charlie
____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 16:17:26 -0500
>From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>Subject: Re: "Rastus" < "Jazz Means Happy and Loose Like" (1917)

>
>Charles Doyle writes:
>
>... "Leroy" (pronounced with the first syllable, [li] ...
>
>Is that the way that you meant to express your comment, Charlie? you appear to imply that there may exist more than one way to pronounce "Leroy." Is there one? For true?
>
>Over the course of the years, I've known any number of Leroys and
>Tyrones, not to mention Willies, Orlandos, Rufuses, and an annoying
>number of guys surnamed "Washington" and named "George." Once, I even
>thought that I knew a "Teedo." However, my mother, whose command of BE
>is superior to mine, she not having lived outside of the Deep South
>till she was thirty-ish, straightened me out. The guy's name was
>really "Theodore." To paraphrase Chester A. Riley, "What a
>disappointin' development that was!" There are any number of guys
>named "Theodore," but there was only one Teedo. Sigh! "Marion" is also
>a common name for men. Down in Texas, there was Marion "Jap" Jones.
>Unfortunately, I don't know how he came by his nickname. In Saint
>Louis, there was the legendary, movie-star-handsome Marion Timms
>(spelled "Thames"). His name was legend because he was the only guy in
>high school who claimed to be a cunnilinguist "It tastes like shrimp,"
>he told us. (Back in those days, oral sex was so taboo that black guys
>didn't even claim to have gotten brain and here Marion was, claiming
>to have *given* brain and *not* claiming to have gotten any. The stud
>was a champion! A bad motherfucker! With nuts the size of muskmelons!
>He was a god! "Taboo! Motherfuck a taboo! I'm not as bad as I can be.
>I'm as bad as I wona be!")
>
>-Wilson
>
>On Dec 4, 2007 8:13 AM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>>
>> It is my impresssion/recollection that sometime around the late 1950s, "Rastus" as the prototypical name for the black male protagonist in racist jokes started alternating with "Leroy" (pronounced with the first syllable, [li], stressed), and now he is often "Tyrone." Perhaps the changes parallel the progress of the character from the plantation to the 'hood.
>>
>> --Charlie

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