INTRODUCTION
to the All-New, Drape-Shape, Low-Slung, Solid-Sent, Stripped-Down, Hopped-Up & Swingin’ Like a Gate Edition

So anyway, there I was at home getting into executive session with a bottle of redeye and a stack of Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon’s most righteous contributions to the art of wax when the good people from No Exit called up asking for a new expanded edition of this here hipster dictionary. Why not, I thought? After all, it’s the fortieth anniversary of She Said by Hasil Adkins, the fiftieth anniversary of One Bad Stud by the Honey Bears, the sixtieth anniversary of We The Cats Shall Hep Ya by Cab Calloway, the seventieth anniversary of She Done Sold It Out by the Memphis Jug Band and the eightieth anniversary of Anybody Here Want To Try My Cabbage by Maggie Jones – hell, I’d imagine the whole country feels like celebratin’ a little. Who knows, maybe this will be the year that the Post Office will finally get around to issuing a set of Kip Tyler & The Flips commemorative stamps.

What you’ve got here in your biscuit-snatchers is everything that was in the last edition, plus a whole load more entries drawn from similar sources, just in case you’ve run out of fresh things to say to people during the intervening four years. On top of all that there’s a selection of pictures, so you can check out the wig formations of solid cats like Babs Gonzales and Lavada Durst, and cop a squint at Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson climbing sideways up the north face of a piano back in 1947. It may also help to convince a few doubting souls who weren’t sure that books such as the immortal Two Timing Tart by John Davidson actually exist. Here’s a chance to gaze in awe at the cover artwork of the original paperback and give thanks for the existence of such treasures in our godless age.

The purpose of this dictionary, as I attempted to explain last time, is to give solid examples of hep as it was spoken during roughly the first sixty-five years of the 20th century, quoting where possible from the Joes in the know, or the scribblers and dribblers who were setting it down or making it up. By listing the titles of jazz or blues songs which might have been using words like ‘funky’ or ‘jelly roll’ back in the twenties, the aim is to show that these were terms which were certainly in circulation among a section of the community by that time. Frequently, half the fun of this was that the straight world hadn’t a clue what the songs were about, and so an outfit like Harlan Lattimore & His Connie’s Inn Orchestra could get on the radio in 1932 with a double-sided disc called Reefer Man / Chant Of The Weed, safe in the knowledge that the hip fraternity would dig it and those of a cubistic persuasion would be completely oblivious. If that sounds pretty far-fetched in these more enlightened times, don’t forget that as recently as 1972, even though BBC Radio One would regularly ban other records on the grounds of obscenity, they happily played Lou Reed’s A Walk On The Wild Side to death, because no-one in the relevant department had a clue what the phrase ‘giving head’ meant. As far as salacious subject-matter goes, amateur music historians whose record collections start in 1962 often claim that the Beatles were really pushing the boundaries with their line about a girl being a ‘big teaser’ in the song Day Tripper, assuming that all popular songs from previous decades were 100% ‘moon-June’ sappy sentimentality. However, a cursory listen to items like Jimmie Logsdon’s I Got A Rocket In My Pocket (1958) or Margaret Carter’s I Want Plenty Grease In My Frying Pan (1926) would seem to suggest that this view is mistaken, Jack.

If you’re looking for the origins of many of these words and phrases, you’d frequently wind up back in the sleazy back-alleys of London two hundred years ago, in the area around Covent Garden, which is now an upmarket joint for fleecing the tourists, but in those days was so riddled with gin-joints and whorehouses that one of the slang names for a streetwalker was a Covent Garden Nun. Check back to the Daddy-O of slang dictionaries – Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) – and you can find numerous words and phrases then current among London’s criminal fraternity with which 20th century US mobsters were familiar. For instance, Grose defines ‘Fly’ as: ‘Knowing. Aquaint13 ed with another’s meaning or proceeding. The rattling cove is fly; the coachman knows what we are about.’ As for gangster’s molls, a moll in those days was defined simply as a ‘whore’. Similarly, a ‘square’ was always a square: ‘honest, not roguish. A square cove, ie: a man who does not steal.’ Oh yeah, and one of the slang names for a policeman back in 18th century London was a ‘pig’. How times change. Call someone a punk, even in Shakespeare’s day, and you’d be insulting them.

With a lot of the words and phrases in this book, we could play a game of chasing their origins most of the way back to the Norman Conquest, and you could all check in at the orthopaedic ward of your local germsville after having fractured your spine attempting to carry home the 3,000-page volume this here item would have turned into. Then, if times were hard, maybe you could hollow the thing out, live inside it and raise a family. To recap, the examples given - of songs, books and films which use the phrases concerned – are there to pinpoint the fact that these words were in some sort of usage at the time stated, and also to maybe hip you to some fine stuff along the way. Your life may or may not be enhanced by the knowledge that an outfit by the name of Doctor Sausage & His Five Pork Chops were treading the boards back in the 1940s, but they may just realign your wig if you give them the chance.

It’s also worth remembering that there aren’t necessarily any perfect explanations as to how all of these phrases came into being. Take the word ‘hip’ for example. The most commonly-accepted theory is that it comes from the language of 19th century opium dens. You’d lay there stoned out of your gourd for days on end, propped up on one hip, smoking away at your pipe, until after enough years of this healthy lifestyle your hip-joint would start to decay, and your fellow enthusiasts could tell you a mile off from the messed-up way you walked. ‘He’s on the hip, he’s a hip guy.’ ie: he smokes the stuff, he’s one of us. Sounds reasonable, but there are also other conflicting explanations. Mostly, I’ve tried to steer clear of speculation, and just nail the words down to what they were supposed to mean in various contexts. Of course, it was all mostly a game, designed to exclude the squares, and the meanings could change by the week. The hip people knew what they meant by ‘hip’, and if you didn’t dig it, Dad, how unhip was that?

So here’s a revised and illustrated attempt at setting down some of the things you might have heard out of the mouths of wise guys, hoods, dime-a-dance frails, short-con artists, B-girls, snowbirds, hack-jockeys, finger men, hot-rodders, jazz babies, ivory-whippers, flat-top cats, grifters and two-bit porch-climbers. If you’re thinking of taking up any of these professions yourself, or even if you’ve just been wondering what Tom Waits has been going on about all these years with his talk of ‘walking Spanish down the hall’ or going ‘up north for a nickel’s worth’, this might just be the E-Flat Dillinger you’ve been waiting for.

Stay cool, hang loose, admit nothing,

MAX DÉCHARNÉ
Berlin, April 2004