[Dixielandjazz] Etymology of Jazz

[G. William Oakley]

A veeeeeerrrryyy clever ploy, Scott. It was a terrific article and you 
hooked me into becoming a member.

Isn't it amazing how dry and mundane reportage has become. Can you 
imagine a contemporary sports reporter using the kind of language 
Gleeson employs. I wonder why he didn't pick up on the Hickman 
connection and tie the word into the music.

Thanks for turning me onto the article.

Best
Bill

Scott Anthony wrote:
> 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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