Ragged but Right (pt. 1)

[Jonathan Lighter]

A significant find, Stephen, because the general sense of "jazz" as
"stuff" is not well documented until the '50s.

(HDAS has a bracketed ex. from 1921, in supposed BE, but it's
semantically ambiguous: the "stuff" referred  to is harmonica music.)

JL



On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 8:13 AM, Stephen Goranson <goranson at duke.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Ragged but Right (pt. 1)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It's  hard to keep up with all this jazz, but about a  quote that I think was previously mentioned:
>
> Headline: "I Grab You, Gus!" Grab This and Master it Thoroughly; it is the Latest in; Article Type: News/Opinion
> Paper: Duluth News-Tribune, published as The Sunday News Tribune; Date: 06-22-1913; Volume: 45; Issue: 58; Page: 10; Location: Duluth, Minnesota (Am. Hist. Newsp.)
>
> "Take Frisco, the great slang factory...."Are you jerry to the old jazz" meaning thereby, "Are you hep to the ____" whatever you are supposed to be hep to. "Jazz" stands for whatever you want it to."
>
> Would it be fair to say that this relatively-early explanation is closer to the sense of nonsense (etc.) than to the sense of pep (etc.)?
>
> Stephen Goranson
> http://www.duke.edu/~goranson
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of George Thompson [george.thompson at NYU.EDU]
> Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 10:10 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: [ADS-L] Ragged but Right (pt. 1)
>
> I looked at the following book, to see whether it at all undermined the
> seeming fact that black musicians of the 1900s and early-mid 1910s did not
> call the music they played "jazz".  I wound up reading it with more
> attention than I planned.
>
>
>
> Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff. * Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon
> Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz*.  University Press of
> Mississippi, 2007
>
>
> Indeed, nothing in it suggests that the musicians with these minstrel shows
> used the word "jazz" until after the jazz craze had started in Chicago and
> had been taken up by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
>
> As to whether the bands were playing jazz, whatever they may have called
> it, the authors are of the opinion that they were, but since none of the
> bands were recorded, we will never know.
>
> Most of the documentation of the book is from reports in the *Indianapolis
> Freeman* newspaper, that were supplied to the paper by someone who was
> travelling with the shows.  The reports indicate when shows were formed and
> when they folded.  It seems that the musicians in the show bands were not
> often named; when Abbott & Seroff do give names, I occasionally recognize
> someone who was a sideman in a group in the 1920s, but most of the names I
> do not know.   One show, Tolliver's, wintered in New Orleans,
> 1915-1916.  Ragged
> but Right, p. 134, col. 1  Otherwise, the reports are pretty danged
> general: our comedian has them hooting with laughter, our dancers are
> tearing it up, our singers earn thunderous applause: no jokes quoted or
> sketches described, no hint as to the nature of the dancing, or of the
> songs or music.
>
>
>
> Searching digitized newspapers for early occurrences of the word "jazz" is
> a tiresome business, since the word was spelled several different ways, and
> most of the spellings are easily confused with some other word by an addled
> OCR.
>
> It has just gotten even more tiresome, with a new way of spelling it:
>
>     "Jez Band", Philadelphia Tribune, February 3, 1917  *Ragged but Right,
> p. 174*
>
> GAT
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
>
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