[Ads-l] Possible Further Antedating of "Woke" and "Stay Woke"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I recall reading or hearing the phrase "wake up and stay woke" in the
radical early '70s.

That suggests that Fred's 1934 ex. is indeed relevant, though in
neither case does "woke" carry the overt, specifically political sense
that it's acquired in recent years from frequent repetition.

JL

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 11:04 AM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In today's Washington Post:
>
> ---
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/21/wokeism-republicans-liberals/
> Some credit blues singer Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter for helping to
> popularize the term ["woke"] in his 1938 protest song, "The Scottsboro
> Boys," in which he urges Black America to "stay woke" to social and
> political injustice as well as physical violence.
> ---
>
> That links to a Nov. 12, 2021 article from The Root:
>
> https://www.theroot.com/weaponizing-woke-an-brief-history-of-white-definitions-1848031729
> "I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down through
> there," Lead Belly said of Alabama. "Just stay woke. Keep your eyes open."
>
> The recording in question appears on the 2015 compilation _Lead Belly: The
> Smithsonian Folkways Collection_. Lead Belly doesn't say "Just stay woke"
> as part of the song lyrics, but in response to an interviewer (likely Alan
> Lomax) after performing the song:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrXfkPViFIE&t=266s
> (relevant bit starts at 4:26)
>
> According to the booklet accompanying the collection, Lead Belly debuted
> the song "Scottsboro Boys" in Aug. 1937, but the Folkways recording was
> made on Aug. 23, 1940:
>
> https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/SFW40201.pdf
> (p. 34)
>
> I don't know if there's any evidence of Lead Belly using "(just) stay woke"
> before 1940.
>
> --bgz
>
> On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 1:11 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> > woke (OED 1962), stay woke (OED 1972)
> >
> > 1934 Indianapolis Star 18 Mar. 3/4 (Newspapers.com)  The otherwise good
> > citizens who shirk their voting duty share the responsibility for our bad
> > politics and the grafts, wastes and misgovernment flowing therefrom. If
> > they will wake up and "stay woke," these first causes of the political
> > evils which have messed up our government affairs can be largely removed.
> >
> > NOTE: The citation above has a different context from the African-American
> > / jazz idiom that I have previously traced back to 1956. It is possible
> > that this 1934 occurrence is an independent or coincidental coinage.
> > Nonetheless, it closely matches the political meaning of the present-day
> > usage.
> >
> > Fred Shapiro
> >
> >
> >
>
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