Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Sep 27 23:10:21 UTC 2008
So, as the music came north, the name went south. Interesting! Just
goes to show you: you never know.
OT re Wikipedia. Once, I had no respect for that WIP. Whenever I
looked up some subject about which I know much in order to learn more,
I would always be disappointed. The articles contained less than I
already knew, misspellings of the greatest names in the field, stupid
assertions, wild guesses presented as fact, etc., etc.
On the other hand, when I look up subjects about which I know next to
nothing, I'm always amazed by the breadth and depth of knowledge
available.
I just hope that this isn't only because I lack the background to know
the difference.
-Wilson
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 6:24 PM, Baker, John <JMB at stradley.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The most plausible account is that "jazz" was first applied to
> music by Bert Kelly, who was a banjoist with Art Hickman's band at Boies
> Spring. Kelly formed Bert Kelly's Jazz Band in Chicago in 1914 or 1915,
> and by mid-1915 "jazz" was being used interchangeably with "blues" for a
> style of music. Many of the Chicago musicians, and the style of music
> itself, came from New Orleans, so most people supposed, wrongly, that
> the word came from there as well. The Wikipedia article,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word), which is largely written by
> me, discusses the history in more detail.
>
>
> John Baker
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
> Of Wilson Gray
> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2008 5:34 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
>
> Under the historical circumstances, it's surprising that the word has
> ever come to have any association with blacks and/or their music at all!
> How in the world did that come about?
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 5:08 PM, George Thompson
> <george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
>> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------
>>
>> The earliest occurrence in HDAS of "jazz" = "fuck" comes from 1918, an
> entry in a diary kept by John dos Passos, and of course not published
> until years afterwards.
>>
>> I have been supposing that this sense arose because 1) one of the two
> original sense of "jazz" was "vigor", "energy", "enthusiasm" &c, and
> that words meaning vigor, energy, &c. are likely to come to mean sexual
> vigor, enery, &c.; and 2) the dancing that young people did to jazz
> music involved full-body contact and was supposed by the upright to be a
> precursor to fornication. (When some tea-rooms began offering late
> afternoon dance music, there was an outburst of deploration; but one
> family-values faker opined that he didn't mind daylight dancing. so long
> as there was daylight between the dancers.) This 1915 passage surely
> indicates that the word by then also meant "messed up", "bungled", made
> a hash of", or something. Not, however, "fucked up", because if the
> editor of that newspaper thought that that would be an association made
> by his readers, he would not have allowed the word to be printed --
> unless he was tired of newspaper work and ready for a career change.
>>
>> In all of the 1912/1913 passages containing "jazz", the word can
> easily be replaced with "energy" or "nonsense".
>>
>> Boies Spring was the source of "jazz" water -- it was a health resort
> built around a spring of naturally effervescent water, and the 1913
> occurrences of "jazz" nearly all come from accounts of the SF Seals
> baseball teams, during its spring training there or from their regular
> season games. Art Hickman seems to have been the first musician to
> apply the word "jazz" to music, and he was entertainment director at
> Boies Spring during the spring of 1913.
>> I don't have access to the digitized Chronicle. It would be
> interesting to search it for references to Boies Spring, say 1911 to
> 1915. A couple of years after 1913, Hickman was hired to lead a dance
> band at a very fashionable hotel in SF. I have been able to look over a
> society magazine from SF in the mid 1910s, and have seen ads for the
> ball room at this hotel and then for Hickman's band there, but haven't
> yet seen anything using the word "jazz". It would be interesting to
> search for Hicxkman.
>> Given the fact that the Proquest OCR has such a high failure rate in
> turning up what is in fact there, it's possible that searching for Boies
> Spring or Hickman would turn up some stories in fact containing the word
> jazz.
>>
>> As it happens, the only actual contemporary connection now known
> between Hickman and the word "jazz" is from an interview from the late
> 1910s in which he repudiated the word. By then jazz music had become a
> vaudeville and cabaret fad, and jazz musicians posed as purely
> instinctive musicians, everyone in the band playing what sounded good to
> him, the result being a sort of pleasingly energetic cacophony. This
> wasn't what Hickman was about. He and his musicians were highly skilled
> and played very elaborate arrangements. His trademark had become
> compromised.
>>
>> GAT
>>
>> George A. Thompson
>> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Date: Friday, September 26, 2008 11:22 am
>> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>
>>
>>> Ca.1958, I worked with a white man, "Dave Beach, the old Irishman,"
>>> as he styled himself, ca.65 years old, who *always* used "jazz" as a
>>> euphemism for "fuck." Therefore, could the headline mean, possibly,
>>> that
>>>
>>> C. S. Smith Almost _Fucks Up_ Game Cinched by Venice
>>>
>>> Dave was clearly old enough to have learned this meaning of "jazz"
>>> when it was still other than literary. It fell trippingly from his
>>> tongue and he never alternated it with "fuck."
>>>
>>> -Wilson
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Shapiro, Fred
>>> <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
>>> > Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> > Poster: "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
>>> > Subject: Antedating of "Jazz" as Verb
>>> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> > ------------
>>> >
>>> > The recent digitization of the San Francisco Chronicle by ProQuest
>>> does not seem to provide an antedating of the word "jazz." However,
>>> it does antedate my previous discovery of the earliest occurrence of
>>> "jazz" as a verb, in a context that is cryptic but that connects with
>
>>> other early West Coast baseball usages of "jazz" that have been
>>> discovered and are newly incorporated into the OED:
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > jazz, v. (OED 1915)
>>> >
>>> > 1914 _S.F. Chronicle_ 7 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)
>>> (headline) Venice Tigers Step Further Out in Front as Seals Lose C.
>>> S. Smith Almost Jazzes Game Cinched by Venice.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > The body of the article describes reliever C. S. Smith almost
>>> blowing a baseball game against the Oakland Oaks. I don't see the
>>> word "jazz" used in the body of the article, but the body is poorly
>>> OCR'd (the headline is very clear) and I will study it more carefully
>
>>> when I have the time. I guess the usage of "jazz" here seems on its
>>> face to mean "blows, messes up."
>>> >
>>> > Fred Shapiro
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------------------
>>> > Fred R. Shapiro Editor
>>> > Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF
> QUOTATIONS
>>> > Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
>>> > Yale Law School ISBN
> 0300107986
>>> > e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu
>>> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> > -----------------------------------
>
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