[Dixielandjazz] Etymology of Jazz

Mon Jun 8 10:01:55 PDT 2009

There is an article by etymologist Dan Cassidy that we published in "The San 
Francisco Cricket" the quarterly publication of the San Francisco 
Traditional Jazz Foundation of which I am the editor. I would put the link 
to it here, but I'd rather have you go to the website and get it directly - 
maybe catch some new members!

At any rate, go to www.sftradjazz.org , click on the "Articles" button in 
the top row. This will take you to a handy table of the available free back 
issues of the Cricket. The Dan Cassidy Jazz article is #31 Spring 2006.

Scott Anthony

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "G. William Oakley" <gwilliamoakley at wispertel.net>
To: <santh at comcast.net>
Cc: "Dixieland Jazz Mailing List" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 8:56 AM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Etymology of Jazz

G. William Oakley writes...

> A recent thread on DJML discussed the origins of the word Jazz. I have
> just finished reading /Word Myths, Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends
> /by David Wilton. In the book Wilton devotes a section to the
> etymology of the word jazz.
>

> He discusses many of the popular misconceptions of the word which I
> won’t go into here but gets to the point as follows:
>
> With all of these incorrect hypotheses, folkloric tales and errors can
> we even know the true origin of /jazz/? The answer is yes. The true
> origin of the word was first put forward by San Francisco etymologist
> Peter Tamony in 1938. It has been discussed in several major reference
> works, including H.L. Mencken’s /The American Language. /And recent
> research by etymologists Gerald Cohen, Barry Popik, and David Shulman
> have conclusively demonstrated Tamony’s original hypothesis to be correct.
>
> Mencken succinctly summarizes Tamony’s hypothesis in his 1948
> Supplement 2 to /The American Language./
>
>     Tamony says that jazz was introduced to San Francisco in 1913 by
>     William (Spike) Slattery, sports editor of the Call, and
>     propagated by a band leader named Art Hickman. It reached Chicago
>     by 1915 but was not heard of in New York until a year later….[In a
>     note:] Slattery, according to Tamony borrowed it from the
>     vocabulary of crap-shooters and used it “as a synonym for ginger
>     and pep,” but it was soon used to designate Hickman’s music, much
>     to Hickman’s disgust.”
>
> Backing up Tamony’s hypothesis, one of the first known uses of the
> word /jazz/ appears in a march 3, 1913, baseball article in The San
> Francisco Call Bulletin by E. T. ‘Scoop’ Gleeson:
>
>     McCarl has been heralded all along the line as a “busher,” but now
>     it develops that this dope is very much to the ”jazz.”
>
> Three days later, Gleeson writes:
>
>     Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old “jazz” and
>     [the San Francisco Seals] 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 “old gin-i-ker,” the “pep,” otherwise known as the
>     enthusiasalum [sic]. A grain of “jazz” and you feel like going out
>     and eating your way through Twin Peaks. The team which speeded
>     into town this morning comes pretty close to representing the pick
>     of the army. Its members have trained on ragtime and “jazz” and
>     manager Dell Howard says there is no stopping them.
>
> Gleeson used /jazz/ in his baseball articles throughout the month of
> March 1913. Decades later, in 1938, Gleeson recalls the origin of /jazz/:
>
>     Similarly the very word “jazz” itself came into general usage at
>     the same time. We were all seated around the dinner table at Boyes
>     Springs, Sonoma County, the Seals spring training site, and
>     William (Spike) Slattery, then sports editor of The Call, spoke
>     about something being the “jazz,” or the old “gin-iker fizz.”
>     Spike had picked up the expression in a crap game. Whenever one of
>     the players rolled the dice he would shout, “come on, the old
>     jazz.” For the next week we gave “jazz” a great play in all our
>     stories. And when Hickman’s orchestra swung into action for the
>     evening’s dances, it was natural to find it included as “the
>     jazziest tune tooters in all of the Valley of the Moon.”
>
> Gleeson’s use…of jazziest to describe Hickman’s music is apparently in
> the sense of peppiest, and does not denote the style of music – that
> would come later.
>
> Art Hickman is the key figure in developing the musical sense of jazz
> from the pep, vigor sense. In 1913 he was hired to put together a band
> for the Seal’s entertainment during spring training. Another
> frequenter of the Seal’s training camp was James Woods, manager of the
> St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. After seeing Hickman at Boyes
> Springs, Woods gave him a regular job at the St. Francis, a gig that
> made Hickman one of the top orchestra leaders in the country. The
> word, popular among the Seals and their cadre of accompanying
> sportswriters, became associated with Hickman’s ragtime music,
> evidently to Hickman’s dismay.
>
> In 1914, Bert Kelly, a musician in Hickman’s orchestra, moved east and
> started his own dance band in Chicago. In a 1957 letter to Variety,
> Kelly claims to be the first to use /jazz /to denote a style of music.
> While this claim cannot be verified, it seems likely. The first use of
> the term in print to mean the style of music is from 1916.
>
> So jazz began life as a San Francisco sportswriter’s term…, [then] was
> applied to the ragtime music of Art Hickman…, traveled east with
> musicians until it eventually became associated with the new style of
> music coming out of New Orleans.
>

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