In a new book, the language of the blues is placed under a microscope and tracked all the way back to Africa. TED ANTHONY tries a spoonful.
W.C. Handy, father of the blues, in New York in 1949. (AP Photo)
Muddy Waters in 1977. (AP Photo)
John Lee Hooker in 1997. (AP Photo/Lacy Atkins)
B.B. King, left, and Bo Diddley in 2002. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The blues are about misery. The blues are about hardship. The blues are about loss and love and sweat and bad jobs and sex, sex and more sex.
The blues are also about the evocative, provocative words that describe these parts of life. Never have misery and ecstasy sounded so poetic as they have coming out of the mouths of the Charley Pattons and Robert Johnsons and Blind Lemon Jeffersons of the world.
The words and phrases used in blues songs over the decades are colorful proof of a subculture creating its own language -- and they're intriguing fodder for writer-musician Debra DeSalvo to explore in her new book, "The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu."
"I love the language of the blues," DeSalvo writes. "It leads us back, hand over hand, gripping a rough rope, until we find ourselves looking up at a big creaking ship full of misery that has traveled to the Americas all the way from Africa."
But as African as so many of these words are, each has an indelibly American stamp placed upon it by its travels and travails. Courtesy of DeSalvo's book, here are a few blues terms that made it into the language -- and a few that didn't.
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HOKUM: A "lighthearted subcategory of urban blues" from the 1920s and early 1930s that was informal, upbeat and usually sexually provocative. Example: The 1928 song "It's Tight Like That," by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey. Might be a blend of "hocus-pocus" and "bunkum." These days, it has more of a meaning of "nonsense." Its hip-hop equivalent? Crunk.
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GALLINIPPER: "A particularly fierce large mosquito found in floodwaters." This one, which appeared in a song called "Mosquito Moan" by Blind Lemon Jefferson, obviously didn't make it into our everyday lexicon, though it's poetic and colorful enough to be there: "I got welts all over my neck. Must be those damn gallinippers again."
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FUNK: Long before sundry white boys were exhorted to play that funky music, the word "funk" was kicking around in early blues circles. It comes from the word "lu-funki" in the African language of Ki-Kongo, and it means "bad body odor." According to DeSalvo, it was first used in African-American slang to mean "fear," which might explain why people who are feeling down are in a funk. By the 1960s, it was used in connection with, as DeSalvo puts it, "the scent of hot, sweaty lovemaking." And it's only a short step from that to da noise and da funk being brought in. This one's a classic.
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HOBO COCKTAIL: Walking into a restaurant and asking for a glass of tap water. In the 1940s, folk-blues singer Josh White riffed on a similar theme in one of his class-struggle songs, "One Meat Ball," about a poor man with 15 cents trying to order at a restaurant: "In his dreams he can still hear that call: `You get no bread with one meat ball.'" Today's version? A scrub.
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COOLING BOARD: "A wooden plank used for laying out a corpse so it could be prepared for burial," according to DeSalvo. It's a remnant of a time when death took place in people's midst rather than in a sterile funeral home. In the 1930s, bluesman Blind Willie McTell sang about it: "Don't a man feel bad, when his baby's on the coolin' board."
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CHINCHPAD: Goes back to a Bantu word ("tshitshi") for "little bug." But little bugs -- bedbugs, to be precise -- were plentiful in the cheap hostels frequented by many blues singers, so "chinchpad," some scholars say, became slang for a boarding house infested with insect pests. A far cry from the cribs bragged about in today's music.
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FUZZ: This word for "police," which evokes images of Huggy Bear in "Starsky & Hutch," actually comes from a word for horse in Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal. DeSalvo thinks it's likely that emerged because African slaves saw police patrols riding horses.
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asap editor Ted Anthony is researching the blues as part of a book he is writing on the history of the song "House of the Rising Sun."
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