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Current mood:half-asleep
Dat Ol' Jazz How the Irish Invented Jazz By DANIEL CASSIDY
"A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972; 1976)
examples first printing of the word (jazz) in relation to music, The Bulletin,
San Francisco, March 6, 1913, 'Its members trained on ragtime and
jazz.'" (1)
"What is the 'jazz?' Why, it's a little of that 'old life,' the
'gin-i-ker,' the 'pep,' otherwise known as the enthusiasalum" Edward "Scoop"
Gleeson, San Francisco Bulletin, March 6, 1913. (2)
"Spell it Jass, Jas, Jaz, or Jazz nothing can spoil a Jass
band. Some say the Jass band originated in Chicago. Chicago says it came
from San Francisco San Francisco being away across the continent."
Victor Record Review, March 7, 1917 (3)
Born in the slum and dockside streets of the port city of New
Orleans, and at the rural crossroads of American South, and popularized in the
dance halls and cabarets of Chicago in the years before the Great World
War, the roots and origins of the African American music called "Jazz"
have been researched and documented for almost a century in a slew
(slua, a multitude) of scholarly articles, popular magazines, books,
newspapers, plays, radio shows, television documentaries, and Hollywood
films. (4)
Condemned and vilified as a "cultural plague" by the yackin'
(éagcaoin, pron. yeeag-keen, complaining, lamenting) upper-middle class swells
(sóúil, comfortable, wealthy) and cultural gatekeepers of the early
20th century, today at the beginning of the 21st, Jazz music is enshrined
at the highest level of American culture by elite institutions like the
Smithsonian Institute, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
NYC's Lincoln Center, and the American Public Broadcasting Network.
Foundational Jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
Sidney Bechet, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Charles Mingus have
been honored by Presidents, Parliaments, Prime Ministers, Kings, and
Queens.
Jazz music has jazzed up High Society.
But dat ol' woid "Jazz" is still a motherless child..
The Oxford English Dictionary, the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology,
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the American Heritage Dictionary
all agree that the origin of the word Jazz is "not known."
Jazz, n, 1913. American English, a kind of ragtime dance (sic),
perhaps related to earlier jasm, energy, drive (1860) apparently of African
origin...The source of Jazz in English is not known. By 1922 jazz was
applied to the music (sic)...originating among American Blacks. The
meaning of energy, excitement, pep is first recorded in 1913, again perhaps
influenced by the earlier jasm." (5)
Writers, crackpots, and scholars have proposed a mind-boggling
variety of etymologies for the word Jazz: the name of a dancing slave named
"Jasper" the moniker of the mythical musician "Jasbo" Brown;" the French
word "chasse" for the gliding dance step that gave us the American word
"sashay;" the Creole French "jaser," meaning "useless talk;" a New
Orleans perfume called "jasmine;" and the Arabic "jazib," meaning "one who
allures." (6)
John Philip Sousa, the American march composer and band leader
believed the word "Jazz" came into American speech through "Jazzbo," 1890's
Vaudeville slang for the rousing rollick of the finale, when performers
would come back out on stage to gad about and cavort for the audience.
(7)
The birth of the music called "Jazz" within African-American culture
has led others to look for an origin in African languages, such as the
Mandingo "jasi" and the Wolof "yees," meaning to "step out of
character." But, these etymologies have been rejected by American and African
language scholars.
There is no evidence of the words Jass or Jazz in any
African-American slave narratives, oral histories, folk songs, or recorded vernacular
speech, prior to 1913. The late Alan P. Merriam, Professor of
Anthropology, wrote in 1974: "I have never found the word in Africa." (8)
Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford American English
Dictionary, wrote in Slate magazine, in December, 2004: "The African
etymology of jazz was fabricated by a New York press agent in 1917." (9)
The press agent was the glib master of baloney and hoopla, Walter
Kingsley, whose tongue-in-cheek article on the new word Jass: "Whence
Comes Jass?" was published in August 1917 in the NY Sun. Kingsley's phoney
African etymology of Jazz was first exposed as a scam ('s cam, is
crooked, dishonest, a deception) by the writer and researcher Dick
Holbrooke, who reprinted it in full in Storyville jazz magazine in January,
1974. (10)
"Variously spelled Jas, Jass, Jaz, Jazz, Jasz, and Jascz. The word is
African in origin. It is common on the Gold Coast of Africa and in the
hinterland of Cape CastleIn his studies of the creole patois and idiom
of New Orleans Lafcadio Hearn reported the word 'jaz,' meaning to speed
things up was common among blacks of the South and had been applied by
the creoles (sic) as a term to be applied to music of the syncopated
type No doubt the witch doctors and medicine men on the Congo used the
same term at those jungle "parties" when the tom-toms throbbed and their
sturdy warriors gave their pep an extra kick (ed. italics) My own
personal idea of jazz and its origin is told in this stanza by Vachel
Lindsay:' Fat black bucks in a wine barrel roomWith a silk umbrella and the
handle of a broom. Boomlay, Boomlay, Boomlay BOOM.' Lindsay is then
transported to the Congo and its feats and revels and he hears, as I have
heard, a 'thigh bone beating on a tin pan gong.' Mumbo Jumbo is
the god of jazz. Be careful how you write of jazz else he will hoodoo
you." (11)
If so, a hoodoo (uath dubh, pron. hooh dooh, a dark specter, a
malevolent phantom) haunts the slick hack Walter Kingsley's "ground sweat"
(grian suite, sunny site, fig. grave) for writing such racist tripe
(dríb, filth).
Kingsley's faux-linguistic treatment of the word "Jass" has been
quoted in the academic echo chambers by dude (dúd, numbskull) scholars,
historians, lexicographers, and etymologists" galore (go leor, plenty,
abundant, enough.) His facile, literate mullarkey on the word "Jass" was
nothing more than a cute (ciúta, a clever quip, an ingenious trick)
publicity gimmick (camóg, a crooked device; an equivocation, a trick) to
boost his Big Shot (Séad, Seád, pron. "shod," a jewel, fig. a big chief)
client Florenz Ziegfeld's summer musical spectacular Midnight Frolic,
which featured the new hot music called "Jass" on the cool snazzy
(snasach, pron. snassah, elegant) roof of the swank (somhaoineach, pron.
suhwainek, wealthy, profitable) New Amsterdam hotel in midtown Manhattan.
The NY Sun's editors got the joke and Flo Ziegfeld's advertising moolah
(moll óir, pile of gold or money), humorously entitling Kingsley's
piece: Whence Comes Jazz? -- Facts from the Great Authority on the
Subject. (12)
Kingsley's putative source, the writer Lafcadio Hearn, never used the
word "Jazz" or "Jass" or "Jaz" in any of his books, articles, or
letters, a fact confirmed by Richard Holbrooke and Hearn's biographers. But,
the Hearn bunkum (buanchumadh, pron. buan-kumah, perpetual invention,
long made-up tale, fig. a shaggy dog story), and Kingsley's outrageously
racist NY Sun article continues to be cited by American and English
dictionaries. (13)
African-American Musicians' Hatred for the Word "Jazz"
The words "Jass" or "Jazz" were not used by any of the foundational
African-American New Orleans musicians -- from Buddy Bolden and Bunk
Johnson to Joe "King" Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong -- prior
to the release of the first "Jass" record in history: Dixieland Jass
One Step and Livery Stable Blues, in New York City, in March 1917. (14)
Louis Armstrong wrote in 1944: "I moved back home with my mother (in
1918). I was working at Tom Anderson's Cabaret located on
'Rampart...Lots of Big Shots from Lulu White's used to come there...And I was
playing the Cornet. We played all sorts of arrangements T'wasn't called
'Jazz' back there in those days They played a whole lot of Ragtime
music. We called it Dixie Jazz, in the later years." (15)
The influential New Orleans Creole reedman Sidney Bechet, who was a
native speaker of French Creole Vernacular, called the music "ragtime"
all his life. In his autobiography, "Treat It Gentle," Bechet set the
tone for succeeding generations of African American musicians, who have
expressed contempt and even hatred for the name "Jazz" for their music:
"What does Jazz mean to you when I come up behind you: 'Jazz,' I say,
'what does that do to you? That doesn't explain the music." (16)
Bechet wrote: "But let me tell you one thing: Jazz, that's a name the
white people have given to the music (my italics). There's two kinds of
music. There's classic and there's ragtime. When I tell you ragtime,
you can feel it, there's a spirit right in the word...But Jazz Jazz
could mean any damn' thing: high times, screwing, ballroom. It used to
be spelled Jass..." (17)
In 1968, at the height of the Black Nationalist movement, in back to
back newspaper columns by San Francisco music critics Ralph Gleason of
the Chronicle and Philip Elwood of the Examiner, the Chicago bandleader
and drummer "Big Black" got right to the point: "We should kill Jazz,
wipe jazz out...Jazz is not the proper name for anybody's musicThe truth
is that jazz as a word is vulgar and profane and we should tear it down
and then there won't be any jazz clubs, there will be music houses. The
jazz image is a funky image. We ought to get a coffin and have a parade
and bury it....It got the name through sarcasm, through
misunderstanding...and jazz is no title for this music.'"
"They slapped that 'jazz' on the Black man's music to make sure
everyone would treat it as an inferior kind of artistry." (18)
Chico Hamilton was interviewed by Les Tomkins in 1972: "The fact is
music is a multi-billion dollar business now; it's come a long way.
They've got away from using the word jazz, in many cases, and as a matter
of fact, it's not a good word anyway. Originally, it didn't have
anything to do with music. That's Mr. Ellington's bone of contention also,
that it should be called something else." (19)
Duke Ellington said naming African-American music "Jazz" was
equivalent to calling it a "four letter word." At a meeting of the California
Arts Commission in Monterey in the 1960s, when one of the Commission
members said that the word Jazz came from New Orleans, Duke Ellington
said: "They didn't learn it there" Ellington later added, "By and large,
jazz always has been like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter
to associate with. The word 'jazz' has been part of the problem. In the
1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to
call what we were doing 'Negro music.' But it's too late for that now.
This music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other
so far as color is concerned." (20)
In 2003, Pianist and composer Billy Taylor confirmed that the
negative attitude of African American musicians towards the word "Jazz" hasn't
changed since Sidney Bechet's day. He spoke to Ben Wattenberg on the
PBS program Think Tank.
Ben Wattenberg. "Is it true that Ellington never said that he played
Jazz; that's not a word he used?"
Billy Taylor: "He hated the term, as many jazz musicians do. We're
saddled with it. But the music was always called something by someone
that had nothing to do with the music itself. So the (term) ragtime came
from other sources. The term Dixieland, swing, almost all of the
categories that jazz is divided or subdivided into were named by people who
didn't have nothing to do with the music. And all of the musicians hated
the term (my italics) because they felt that the terms were too
confining... So the terms, we're saddled with them. (Duke Ellington) called
Jazz Negro music, because he was trying to write music that reflected the
thoughts and feeling and the expressions and emotions of the African
American race...
...
"Actually (Ellington) was an international musician...jazz was created
by African slaves and it came out of the spiritual, it came out of some
of the work songs...They were not allowed to bring any cultural
supports...as people who were a part of this country. And so that's why
African music is African American, and it's what happened when people of
African descent had to refashion their cultural expressions to fit a new
situation." (21)
II San Francisco "Jazz" 1913
In a series of groundbreaking articles exploring the origin of the
word Jazz, written between 1938 and 1981, the world-class San Francisco
sanasán (vocabularist, etymologist), researcher, archivist, and folklore
collector, Peter Tamony, shocked Jazz scholars when he revealed that
the word "Jazz" burst into print for the first time in the history of the
American language in the spring of 1913, in the sports pages of the San
Francisco Bulletin in the jazzy prose of a natty (néata, neat, dapper)
27 year old San Francisco Irish-American baseball scribe with the
snazzy moniker of "Scoop" Gleeson.
It is a testament to the strength of Peter Tamony's pre-Cyber Age
grassroots scholarship that since the 1938 publication of his first
article on the 1913 birth of the word "jazz" in San Francisco, only one
earlier published example of "jazz" has been discovered by countless
researchers, scouring thousands of published sources with the aid of
computers. In 2004, using an historical newspaper data base and computer search
engine, NYU librarian George Thompson found the word "jazz" in an
anonymously written sports snippet in The Los Angeles Times, published on
April 2, 1912, entitled Ben's Jazz Curve. Curiously, the "jazz" fizzled
out in The L.A. Times after this single appearance. But, less than a
year later, the new word "jazz" sizzled into print in San Francisco
forever. (43)
In a series of "Special Dispatches" written from the San Francisco
Seals baseball team's spring training camp at Boyes Hot Springs, Sonoma
county, forty miles north of the city, and from Recreation Park stadium
in the heart of the old Mission District, sports reporter "Scoop"
Gleeson used the new word "Jazz" more than forty times in March and April,
1913. This hot word "Jazz" soon spread like verbal wildfire to the
Bulletin sports headlines, other reporters, feature stories, and even the
cartoons. (44)
Gleeson's first use of the word "Jazz" was on March 3rd, 1913:
"McCarl has been heralded all along the line as a "busher," but now it all
develops that this dope is very much to the "jazz." (45)
What "Scoop" Gleeson was saying here in early 20th century vernacular
was that local baseball "experts," fans, and sports writers had put out
the skinny" that the new Seals rookie George McCarl was an
inexperienced "bush leaguer," or rural amateur league player. But, all this bad
talk and gossip (dope) was nothing but the "Jazz," meaning a lot of "hot
air" and baloney (béal ónna, pron. bail owny, foolish talk). Young
George McCall, "Scoop" wrote, was an "experienced player" with six years of
professional baseball experience. (46)
Then three days later on March 6th, 1913, under the full page banner
headline: "Seals Return From the Spa to Tackle the Famous White Sox!"
the Bulletin editors gave "Scoop" Gleeson a full front page ballyhoo, a
four paragraph, two column-wide lead, set in boldface type, to define
the hot new word "Jazz" to San Francisco baseball fans.
"Come on, there Professor, string up the big harp and give us all a
tune Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old 'jazz' and
they promise to knock the fans off their feet with their playing.
"What is the 'jazz?' Why, it's a little of that 'old life,' the
'gin-i-ker,' the 'pep,' otherwise known as the enthusiasalum. A grain of
'jazz' and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks.
It's that spirit which makes ordinary players step around like Lajoies
and (Ty) Cobbs
"'Hap' Hogan gave his men a couple of shots of 'near-jazz' last season
and look what happened -- the Tigers became the most ferocious set of
tossers in the league. Now the Seals have happened upon great quantities
of it in the quiet valley of Sonoma and they're setting the countryside
on fire." (47)
What did this hot new word "Jazz" mean to "Scoop" Gleeson in March
1913? The synonyms he used for "Jazz" were "pep," "enthusiasalum," the
"gin-i-ker," and "spirit."
"Pep" is "hot" like pepper, from which it is derived, and is defined
by Roget's Thesaurus as "energy," "spirit," "fire," and "vim." While
Scoop's marvelous invented word "enthusiasalum" showed that the young
"Scoop" Gleeson had linguistic pizzazz. (48)
But what did the mysterious synonym "gin-i-ker" mean? And how were
great quantities of "Jazz" setting the Sonoma countryside on fire?
The answer is Irish.
The "Gin-i-ker" is the phonetic spelling of the Irish word-phrase
"Tine Caor" (pron. jin-i-ker) and means "raging fire and lightning." It is
the gin-i-ker (tine caor, a thunderbolt of fire) that produces "Jazz"
(Teas, pron. jass, heat). (49)
Gin-i-ker
Tine caor (pronounced jin-i-ker)
Raging fire, lightning.
Tine, al. Teine (pron. jin-ih, chin-eh), fire; conflagration,
incandescence; luminosity, flash. (50)
Caor (pron. kayr), a thunderbolt, a meteor, a round mass of flame, a
glowing object. (51)
Jazz is the phonetic spelling of the Irish and Gaelic word Teas,
meaning "heat and highest temperature."
Jazz
Teas (pron. jass or chass)
Heat, warmth, passion, excitement, fervor, ardor, zeal, enthusiasm,
anger, and highest temperature. (52)
The ancient Irish word Teas (pron. jass, heat) was reborn in a 20th
century Irish American gob (cab, pron. cob, mouth) as Jazz: the hottest
American word of the 20th century.
Teas spelled "jazz" by "Scoop" Gleeson holds within it the divine
racket (raic ard, loud ruckus) and clamour (glam mór, great howl) of the
"Jazz" (Teas, pron. jass, heat, passion, excitement) of Irish American
Vernacular and African American Music.
Jazz is always jazzy (teasaí, pron. jassy, hot, exciting, and
passionate).
Jazzy
Teasaí (pron. jassy or chassy), adj.
Hot, warm, passionate, exciting, fervent, enthusiastic, feverish,
angry. (53)
But how does an Irish word spelled Teas, which looks like it sounds
like the English word "tease," become pronounced "Jass" in an Irish or
American puss (pus, a mouth, lips, fig. a face)?
The Jazz (Teas, pron. jass, heat) of the Affricate
"The Rule of Tír" (tír, land, country) states that the Irish word Tír
can be correctly pronounced "jeer, cheer, or tear" in the Irish
language. So, too, the Irish word Teas, meaning "heat," can also be pronounced
"jass" in Ulster and North Mayo, "chass" in Connaught, or "t'ass" in
Munster, the three living dialects of the Irish language.
In Ulster and Connaught Irish, and in the languages of Scots-Gaelic
and Manx, the word Teas, meaning "heat," is pronounced "jass" or "chass"
and is called an affricate, which is a speech sound consisting of a
stop and a fricative articulated at the same point.
The sound of the slender consonant "T" in the Irish word Teas (pron.
"jass" or "chass"), meaning "heat," is created by blocking the air and
then releasing it with friction against the palate. The sound produced
resembles the "J" in the English word "joy" or the "Ch" in "chair."
(54)
The fricative friction of the affricate produces the "heat" of Teas
(pron. "jass" or "chass," heat, highest temperature), which is itself a
word that is in a constant state of "Jazz" both in its meaning and in
the natural physical law embodied in its articulation.
Dig it or not (Tuig é nó ná, pron. dig ay no naa, understand it or
not), Jazz is an Irish and American word with naturally jazzy (teasaí,
pron. "jassy." hot) onomatopoeia.
The Waters of Boyes Hot Springs, California
On March 8th, 1913, "Scoop" Gleeson wrote that the San Francisco
Seals baseball team kept their Jazz in a can. . "Spence the catcher zipped
the old pill around the infield. He opened a can of 'jazz' at the tap
of the gong. Henley the pitcher put a little more of the old 'jazz' on
the pill." (55)
On March 14th, "Scoop" told his readers precisely where to find the
Jazz. It was in the jazzy (hot) waters of Boyes Hot Springs where, he
wrote: "there's "jazz" in the morning dew, "jazz" in the daily bath, and
"jazz" in the natural spring water" (56)
It was the Jazz of the gin-i-ker at the earth's core that caused the
jazzy spring water of Boyes Hot Springs to bubble up and effervesce
with 135 degrees Fahrenheit of natural Jazz.
On a website, almost ninety years later, the Mission Springs Hotel in
Boyes Hot Springs, California, in Sonoma's Valley of the Moon, is still
extolling the heat and healing properties of the natural spring water
on its website: "Paradise found - where Mother Nature has generously
combined health enhancing water and minerals heated to 135 degrees of
perfection, 1,100 feet within the Earth's core."
It is the earth's water in a sizzle that is the hydrothermal womb
where the "old jazz" became "life." (57)
By March 29th, 1913, the San Francisco Seals were a lifeless fizzle;
though Scoop's snazzy prose still had pizzazz. "Scoop" used the hot new
word Jazz more than ten times in this single story. (58)
Under the headline: "Now the Local Players Have Lost the "Jazz" and
Don't Know Where to Find It, "Scoop" lamented: "The poor old Seals have
lost their 'jazz' and don't know where to find it. It's a fact, gentle
reader, that the 'jazz,' the pepper, the old life, has either been lost
or stolen, and that the San Francisco club of today is made up of
'jazzless' Seals.
"There is a chance that the old 'jazz' was sent by parcel post, which
may account for its failure to arrive yesterday
"The Seals pitcher, "Cac" Henley will need a gallon of 'jazz' From
the way the White Sox stacked up, one might have suspected that they were
inoculated with the 'jazz' during their stay in the Valley of the
MoonSuffice it to say that the Seals were without the 'jazz' and they played
in last season's faulty style. .... Manager Del had better send for the
'jazz' wagon -- Quick! Quick! Bring on the old 'jazz!'"
Then on April 10th, 1913, the word "Jazz" brought its Irish American
verbal heat and excitement to the comics for the first time in history.
In a five-column wide Bulletin sports page cartoon headlined: "Justin
Fitzgerald, the Santa Clara Lightning Bolt," the speedy Fitzgerald was
drawn by the cartoonist Breton as the personification of the "gin-i-ker"
with the head of a man and a lightning bolt for a body. (59)
In the cartoon the hapless Seals' infielders lurch and stumble, while
the young slugger (slacaire, a batter) zaps around the bases like a
"blue streak." In the cartoon's foreground, a fan in a slouch hat cracks
to three cronies (comh-róghna, pron cuh-roney, fellow-favorites,
mutual-sweethearts) in the stands: "He's full of the 'old jazz.'"
In the background of the cartoon, beyond the left field fence of
Recreation Park at 15th and Valencia, in the Mission District&..39;s old
"Irishtown" neighborhood, Breton has sketched in the steeple of Mission
Dolores Cathedral and the hills of San Francisco's Twin Peaks.
In the hot spring of 1913, on the eve of a Great World War, there
were thousands of native Irish-speakers and their first-generation
Irish-American children living in the breac-Ghaeltachta parishes and
neighborhoods surrounding the old Seals' stadium. Their old Mission District
spiel (speal, cutting satiric speech) was peppered with the phonetic Jazz
of the Irish language. (60)
In 1920, the U.S. Federal Census recorded hundreds of
breac-Ghaeltachta, containing thousands of Irish speakers in American cities as
geographically diverse as San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Springfield,
Illinois, Butte, Montana, and Portland, Maine. (61)
By mid-April 1913, the word Jazz had become so hot in San Francisco
that Bulletin columnist Ernest Hopkins devoted an entire feature story
to this local verbal phenomenon. Hopkins' jazzy column was a lulu,
illustrated with a cartoon of a dude (dúd, a dolt, a numbskull) in a swell
three-piece suit, presumably Hopkins himself, precariously balancing the
letters J-A-Z-Z on the tip of his middle-class snoot (snua ard, lofty
visage.) (62)
In Praise of "Jazz" A Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the
Language
by Ernest Hopkins, April 5, 1913, S.F. Bulletin
This column is entitled "What's Not in the News" but occasionally a
few things that are in the news leak in. We have been trying for some
time to keep these things out, but hereby acknowledge ourselves powerless
and surrender.
This thing is a word. It has recently become current in the Bulletin
office through some means which we cannot discover but would stop up if
we could. There should be every precaution taken to avoid the
possibility of any more such words leaking in to disturb our vocabulary.
This word is "JAZ." It is also spelt "Jazz," and as they both sound
the same and mean the same, there is no way of settling the controversy.
The office staff is divided into two sharp factions, one of which
upholds the single z and the other the double z. To keep them from coming to
blows much Christianity is required.
"JAZZ" (We change the spelling each time so as not to offend either
faction) can be defined, but it cannot be synonymized. If there were
another word that exactly expressed the meaning of "jaz," "Jazz" would
never have been born. A new word like a new muscle only comes into being
when it has been long needed.
This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word, however, means
something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep,
magnetism, verve, virility, ebulliency, courage, happiness, oh, what's
the use? JAZZ.
Nothing else can express it.
You can go on flinging the new word all over the world, like a boy
with a new jack-knife. It is "jazz" when you run for your train; "jaz"
when you soak an umpire; "Jazz" when you demand a raise; "jaz" when you
hike thirty-five miles of a Sunday; "Jazz" when you simply sit around
and beam so that all who look beam on you. Anything that takes manliness
or effort or energy or activity or strength of soul is "jaz."
We would not have you apprehend that this new word is slang. It is
merely futurist language, which as everybody knows is more than mere
cartooning.
"Jazz" is a nice word, a classic word, easy on the tongue and
pleasant to the ears, profoundly expressive of the idea it conveys - as when
you say a home-run hitter is "full of the old jaz." (Credit Scoop.)
There is and always has been an art of genial strength; to this art we now
give the splendid title of "jazz."
The sheer musical quality of the word, that delightful sound like the
crackling of an electric spark, commends it. It belongs to the class of
onomatopoeia. It was important that this vacancy in our language should
have been filled with a word of proper sound, because "jaz" is a
quality often celebrated in epic poetry, in prizefight stories, in the tale
of action or the meditative sonnet; it is a universal word, and must
appear well in all society.
That is why "pep," which tried to mean the same but never could,
failed; it was a rough-neck from the first, and could not wear evening
clothes. "Jazz" is at home in bar or ballroom; it is a true American.
"(Ernest Hopkins, S.F. Bulletin, April 19, 1913)
Less than a week later, on April 25th, "Scoop" spelled out the Irish
definition of the American word Jazz for his San Francisco readers:
"H.E.A.T. is a staple product of Los Angeles and Manager Dillon must have
had some of it expressed to Oakland for use in the third game. However,
the Seals invoked the aid of "jazz" which keeps equally in hot or cold
weather and were thus able to win out on a 3 to 2 score." (63)
By May 1st "Scoop" Gleeson was writing poems to the elusive "jazz."
The old Wolf sat in the clubhouse door,
Hoping that his team might score.
The game rolled on, but he WOULD not go,
Because he loved those umpires so.
(Help! The old "jazz" is out again!). .(64)
By the end of May 1913 the Seals were 9-13 and totally out of "jazz"
-- in last place. On June 5th, "Scoop" Gleeson blamed the loss of the
old Jazz on an old Irish jinx: "Too long have the Oaks proved to be the
hoodoofor the Seals." (65)
Then on July 7th in another large Breton cartoon on the front page of
the sports section, a distraught father rushes about, frantically
searching for a bottle of "Jazz" water to revive his sick baby (the S.F.
Seals.) But, in store after store, he is unable to find the life-giving
"Jazz" to save his kid (cuid, a chuid, a term of affection, mo chuid, my
darling) (66)
By July 24th, the Seals were truly sick kids and had lost 15 of the
last 16 games. In August, they were in the cellar of the Pacific Coast
League without a drop of "Jazz.". At the end of the 1913 baseball
season, the San Francisco Seals had finished 5th out of 6 teams. (67)
But that "futurist" San Francisco Irish American Vernacular word
"Jazz" was just starting to sizzle into the consciousness and print of
American speech and culture.
In early June, 1913, the San Francisco "Jazz" had already whizzed
east into Indiana. In a feature story entitled "Best Sellers in City
Slang," the Fort Wayne Sentinel reported that the "old jazz" was the "newest
slang term in San Francisco." (68)
By the Fall of 1913, Jazz jumped like an electric spark from the
baseball diamond to the boxing ring. In The Oakland Tribune on October 4th,
the slugger (slacaire, a batter; a mauler, a bruiser) in the story
wasn't a Seal hitting a baseball with a smack (smeach, pron. smack, a
whack) and a wallop (bhuail leadhb, pron. whual lob, a mighty blow), but two
palookas dukin' (tuargain, pron. duargin, hammering, slugging) it out
in the ring: "The Sailor was off his feet last night, although Clabby
handed him shots of the old _-jazz which made the ex-sailor's knees sag."
(69)
The Jazz of Ireland and San Francisco was on its way to becoming the
hottest new word of the 20th century.
Daniel Cassidy is founder and co-director of An Léann Éireannach, the
Irish Studies Program, at New College of California in San Francisco.
Cassidy is an award-winning filmmaker and musician. His research on the
Irish language influence on American vernacular and slang has been
published in the New York Observer ("Decoding the Gangs of New York"),
Ireland's Hot Press magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Lá, the
Irish-language newspaper. His book, The Secret Language of the Crossroad:
How the Irish Invented Slang, will be published by CounterPunch Books in
Spring 2007. Cassidy was born in Brooklyn and lives with his wife Clare
in San Francisco. He can be reached at DanCas1@aol.com
Footnotes (abridged version)
(1) Cited in Peter Tamony, Jazz: The Word, And Its Extension To
Music, JEMF Quarterly, Spring, 1981, p. 10.
(2) Edward "Scoop" Gleeson, San Francisco Bulletin, March 6, 1913,
p.13
(3) Victor Record Review, March 7, 1917; cited in Peter Tamony, Jazz:
The Word, And Its Extension To Music, JEMF Quarterly, Spring, 1981, p.
10.
(4) Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words, ed. Thomas
Brothers, Oxford, 1999, pp. 23-24, 38, 83: "T'wasn't called Jazz back
there in those days," pp. 218-219; Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An
Autobiography, N.Y., 1960, 1978, pp. 1-5; pp. 62-67; Alan Lomax, Mr. Jelly
Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and
"Inventor of Jazz," Berkeley, 1950, 1973, 2001, p. x, pp. 124-126.
(5) Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, Robert K. Barnhart, editor,
1988, USA, p. 551; Oxford Dictionary Online, Oxford Univ. Press, 2005,
http;//dictionary.oed.com, 5/31/2005; "Jazz...origin unknown."
(6) Peter Tamony, Origin of Words, San Francisco Wasp, March 17,
1938, p. 5; Tamony, Jazz, The Word, Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music,
ed. Ralph Gleason, Phillip Elwood, October, 1958, pp. 34-45 ; Tamony,
JEMF Quarterly, Spring, 1981, pp. 9-11; Dick Holbrooke, Our Word Jazz,
Storyville magazine, January, 1974, p. 58.
(7) Tamony, Jazz, The Word, Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music, p
35; OED Online, March 31, 2005,
(8) Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, p. 551; Tammany, Jazz, The
Word, p. 46; Holbrooke, Our Word Jazz p. 58; Fradley H. Garner and Alan P.
Merriam, The Word Jazz, The Jazz Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, March-April,
1960, pp. 39-40. David Meltzer, Writing Jazz, San Francisco, 1996, p. 3,
quoting Eileen Southern on 'Jazzbo Brown' etymology.
(9) Jesse Sheidlower, MSN Slate Magazine Online, , December 11, 2004)
(10) Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, p. 789, "Phony or phoney, adj.
not genuine, fake, sham. 1900American English; perhaps an alteration of
Earlier English slang fawney a gilt brass ring used by swindlers
(1781), borrowed from the Irish fáinne ring."
(11) Holbrooke, Our Word Jazz, Storyville magazine, pp. 5658.
(12) Tamony, JEMF Quarterly, p. 11: "Merriam-Garner materiallays to
rest the alleged Arabic-African roots of the word. It details failoure
to find the word 'jaz' in the literary work of Lafcadio Hearn;
Holbrooke, p. 58, citing Lafcadio Hearn biographers Bisland, Krehbiel, Brenner,
Thomas, Tinker, Hutson, et al.
(13) OED Online, March 31, 2005, quotes the August 1917, Kingsley NY
Sun article and quotes a Dr. Bender, quoted in the NY Times in 1950,
who cites Lafcadio Hearn bogus "Creole dialect" jazz meaning "to hurry
up."
(14) Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words, NY, 1999, pp. 83, 218, 175
(15) Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words, pp. 33, 83. Big Shot: "Seód,
al. seud, [Irish, séad], a jewel, often used figuratively, Hero,
valiant man, chief or warrior." Faclair Gaidhlig Bu Beurla Le Dealbhan,
Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary, Glasgow, 1901, 1994, p. 808; see also
Robert Goffin, Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong, N.Y. 1947,
pp. 109, 111: "(In 1917) Joe Olivershowed Louis a letter from Freddie
Keppard. In it Freddie reported that the new music known as ragtime in
New Orleans was called Jazz in Chicago and it was creating a torm."
(16) Treat It Gentle, An Autobiography, Sidney Bechet, p. 3; Martin
Williams, Jazz Masters of New Orleans, 1967, NY, p. VI )
(17) Bechet, p. 3
(18) Philip Elwood, SF. Examiner-Chronicle, Sunday , November 10, p.
B4/1-2; Ralph Gleason, SF. Chronicle, Nov. 1, 1968, p. 47, col. 7-8.
(19) Transcript of 1972 Interview: Chico Hamilton with Les Tomkins
online
(20) Tamony, JEMF Quarterly, p. 13; Ralph J. Gleason, S.F. Chronicle,
Nov. 1, 1968, p. 47, col. 7-8..
(21) PBS Online, Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, official transcript
of interview with Dr. Billy Taylor, 2003;
(43) ) Peter Tamony, Origin of Words, San Francisco Wasp, March 17,
1938; Tamony, Jazz, The Word, Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music, ed.
Ralph Gleason, Phillip Elwood, October, 1958: Scoop Gleeson 1938 article
"I Remember: The Birth of Jazz" in S.F. Call-Bulletin, Sept,. 3, 1938,
reprinted in full, p. 40; Tamony, JEMF Quarterly, Spring, 1981. NYU
librarian, George Thompson, using a computer search engine discovered one
earlier baseball "jazz" on April 2, 1912 in anonymously written article
in Los Angeles Times, part III, pg. 2: Ben's Jazz Curve. However, the
old "jazz" fizzled in L.A. Times and did not reappear again until
1917-1918.
(44) San Francisco Bulletin newspaper: see especially: March 3, 6, 8,
14, 24, 29, April 2, 9, 10 (also Breton cartoon), 14, 25, May 1, 1913
(45) SF Bulletin, Mar. 3, 1913, p. 13
(46) Dineen, p. 821. Ónna, a., simple, silly.
(47) S.F. Bulletin, March 6, 1913, p. 16, cols. 6-7.
(48) The Original Roget's Thesaurus, 1852, 1965, N.Y., p. 102
(49) Teine caor, al. tine caor: a raging fire, lightning. Dineen, p.
1200.
(50) Teine, Dineen, p. 1200; tine, Ó Dónaill, p 1235; teine, Dwelly,
p. 943.
(51) Caor, Dineen, p. 163, Ó Dónaill, p. 189; caoir, p. 163, caor, p.
165
(52) Teas, Dineen, pp. 1194-95, Ó Dónaill, pp. 1221-22, Dwelly, p.
942. Teas, heat, passion; Irish synonyms: ainmhian, an-suim, díochracht,
díograis, grá, paisean, teasaíocht. Corpas Comhthreomhar
Gaeilge-Béarla, Kevin P. Scannell. 2004:
(53) Teasaí, Dineen, pp. 1194-95, Ó Dónaill, pp. 1221-22, Dwelly, p.
942.
(54) Mícheál Ó Siadhail, Learning Irish, pp. 2-4, Sec. 4, 5, 6. The
realization of the slender consonants varies somewhat from dialect to
dialect; for example [t´] is an affricate [t_] in Ulster, a palatalized
[tj] in Connacht, and an apical postalveolar [t] in Munster.--Eamonn
Mhac an Fhailigh, "The Irish of Erris, Co. Mayo." Notes on affricates: The
slender T and D. Daltaí Boards: The Irish pronunciation rule of the
slender T. The Rule of Tír. Daltaí Board, Padraig, Jan 28, 2005.
http://www.daltai.com/discus/messages/board-topics.html. "Taunt...of
uncertain origin." (Barnhart, p. 1118.)
(55) S.F. Bulletin, March 8, 1913, p. 12
(56) S.F. Bulletin, March 14, 1913, p.20. See also "jazzers."
(57) History of Mission Springs Hotel, Sonoma County, California.
Online:
(58) S.F. Bulletin, March 29, 1913, p. 26. (see also March 14, 1913
(59) S.F. Bulletin, April 10, 1913, p. 14 (see also: April 2, 1913, p.
17.
(60) Fourteenth Census of the United States, San Francisco: Assembly
District 22, see examples: 508 534 Connecticut Street; 605-665
Arkansas Street; Precinct 27, SD4; Dolores Street; Assembly Dist. 25,
Precinct 28, SD4: see 2688, 2690 24th Street,1069-1081 Dolores Street;
Precinct 88, 1061-1065 Dolores St.; Precinct 48-50; Precinct 52; Precinct
150-159.
(61) 14th Census, Kings County, NY (Brooklyn), see examples: ED
910-912 (Greenpoint); 14th Census, Springfield, Illinois see: ED 119-120;
Portland, Maine.
(62) Holbrooke, Storyville, Hopkins' article reprinted, pp. 52-55;
S.F. Bulletin, April 5, 1913, back page number illegible.
(63) S.F. Bulletin, April 25, 1913, p. 19. "Seals SizzleH.E.A.T."
(64) S.F. Bulletin, May 1, 1913, p. 16
(65) S.F. Bulletin, May 1-31, 1913. May 1, 1913, subhead, p, 16.
"Hoodoo, May 29, 1913, "Seals in Last Place."
(66) S.F. Bulletin, July 7, 1913: Breton cartoon: You Could Save Time
by Calling Up the Undertaker First, p. 14.
(67) S.F. Bulletin, July 24, p. 15, Seals Lose 15 of 16 games; July
31, 1913, Seals in "cellar;"
(68) Fort Wayne Sentinel, Box: Best Sellers in City Slang, June 4,
1913, pg. 8, col.5.
(69) Oakland Tribune, October 4th, 1913, pg. 8 (illegible), col. 7.
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