Hokum
Encyclopedia
Hokum is a particular song type of American blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 music - a humorous song which uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make sexual innuendos. This trope goes back to early blues recordings, and is seen from time to time in modern American blues and blues-rock
Blues-rock
Blues rock is a hybrid musical genre combining bluesy improvisations over the 12-bar blues and extended boogie jams with rock and roll styles. The core of the blues rock sound is created by the electric guitar, piano, bass guitar and drum kit, with the electric guitar usually amplified through a...

.

An example of hokum lyrics is this sample from "Meat Balls", by Lil Johnson
Lil Johnson (blues singer)
Lil Johnson was an African American singer, who recorded bawdy blues and hokum songs in the 1920s and 1930s....

, recorded about 1937,
"Got out late last night, in the rain and sleet
Tryin' to find a butcher that grind my meat
Yes I'm lookin' for a butcher
He must be long and tall
If he want to grind my meat
'Cause I'm wild about my meat balls."


Technique

In a general sense, hokum was a style of comedic farce, spoken, sung and spoofed, while masked in both risqué innuendo and "tomfoolery". It is one of the many legacies and techniques of 19th century blackface
Blackface
Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

 Minstrelsy. Like so many other elements of the Minstrel Show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

, stereotypes of racial, ethnic and sexual fools were the stock in trade of hokum. Hokum was stagecraft, gags and routines for embracing farce. It was so broad that there was no mistaking its ludicrousness. Hokum also encompassed dances like the cakewalk
Cakewalk
The Cakewalk dance was developed from a "Prize Walk" done in the days of slavery, generally at get-togethers on plantations in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around"...

 and the buzzard lope
Buzzard lope
The Buzzard Lope is a popular southern States dance dating from the 1890s, included in Minstrel Show repertoire, alongside the cakewalk and juba dance...

 in skits that unfolded through spoken narrative and song. W.C. Handy, himself a veteran of a minstrel troupe, remarked that, "Our hokum hooked 'em," meaning that the low comedy
Low comedy
Low comedy is a type of comedy characterized by "horseplay", slapstick or farce. Examples include somebody throwing a custard pie in another's face. This definition has also expanded to include lewd types of comedy that rely on physical jokes, for example, the wedgie.- History :This type of comedy...

 snared an audience that stuck around to hear the music. In the days before ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...

, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 or even hillbilly music or the blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 were clearly identified as specific genres, hokum was a component of "all around" performing, entertainment that seamlessly mixed monologues, dialogues, dances, music, and humor.

Minstrel show origins

The Minstrel Show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

 began in Northern cities, primarily in New York's Five Points
Five Points, Manhattan
Five Points was a neighborhood in central lower Manhattan in New York City. The neighborhood was generally defined as being bound by Centre Street in the west, The Bowery in the east, Canal Street in the north and Park Row in the south...

 section, in the 1830s. Minstrelsy was a mélange of Scottish and Irish folk music forms fused with African rhythms and dance. It is difficult to tease out those strands, considering the mixed motives of the showmen who presented the Minstrel Show, and the mixed audience who patronized it. It is said that T. D. Rice invented the ‘Buck and Wing’, as well as the ‘Jim Crow’, by imitating the stumbling of an old lame black man, and added numerous steps and shuffles, after watching an African American boy improvise a version of an Irish jig in a back alley. Soon, the confusion became so complete that almost any minstrel tune played upon the banjo became known as a jig, regardless of time signatures or lyric accompaniment. Banjo player Joe Ayers told old time musician and writer Bob Carlin that “the origins of playing Irish jigs on the banjo probably go back to minstrel banjoist Joel Walker Sweeney’s appearances in Dublin in 1844.” Genuine appreciation among White observers for music and dance so clearly (if not purely) African in origin existed then and now. Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 praised the intricacies of the "lively hero" (believed to be Master Juba
Master Juba
Master Juba was an African American dancer active in the 1840s. He was one of the first black performers in the United States to play onstage for white audiences and the only one of the era to tour with a white minstrel group...

) who he watched in a New York performance in 1842. Many songs that originated in Minstrelsy (such as "Camptown Races
Camptown Races
Gwine to Run All Night, or De Camptown Races is a minstrel song by Stephen Foster . It was probably composed in Cincinnati in 1849, according to Richard Jackson, and published by F. D. Benteen of Baltimore, Maryland, in February 1850...

" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
"Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" is a song which was written by James A. Bland , an African American minstrel who wrote over 700 folk songs...

") are now considered American classics. While it was originally performed by Whites costumed in either fanciful "dandy
Dandy
A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self...

" gear or pauper's rags with their faces covered in burnt cork or blackface
Blackface
Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

, the minstrels were joined in the 1850s by Black African American performers. The dancer, William Henry Lane (better known by his stage name Master Juba), and the fiddling dwarf Thomas Dilward
Thomas Dilward
Thomas Dilward , also known by the stage name Japanese Tommy, was an African American dwarf who performed in the blackface minstrel show.-References:...

 were also "corking up" and performing alongside Whites in such touring ensembles as the Virginia Minstrels, the Ethiopian Serenaders, and Christy's Minstrels. Minstrel troupes composed entirely by African Americans appeared in the same decade. After the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

, traveling productions like Callender's Georgia Minstrels would rival the White ensembles in fame, while falling short of them in earnings. The difficulties racism presented to any African American entrepreneurs during postwar Reconstruction made touring a dangerous and precarious livelihood.

Subversion and confrontation

Although mainly Northern in origin, many Minstrel Shows, Black or White, celebrated "Dixieland" and presented a loose concoction of "Negro Melodies" and "Plantation Songs" infused with slapstick
Slapstick
Slapstick is a type of comedy involving exaggerated violence and activities which may exceed the boundaries of common sense.- Origins :The phrase comes from the batacchio or bataccio — called the 'slap stick' in English — a club-like object composed of two wooden slats used in Commedia dell'arte...

, word play
Word play
Word play or wordplay is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement...

, skits, pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...

s, dance, and stock characters. The hierarchies of the social order were satirized, but seldom challenged. While hokum mocked the propriety of "polite" society, the presumptions and pretensions of the parodists were simultaneous targets of the humor. "Darkies" dancing the cakewalk
Cakewalk
The Cakewalk dance was developed from a "Prize Walk" done in the days of slavery, generally at get-togethers on plantations in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around"...

 might mimic the elite cotillion
Cotillion
In American usage, a cotillion is a formal ball and social gathering, often the venue for presenting débutantes during the débutante season – usually May through December. Cotillions are also used as classes to teach social etiquette, respect and common morals for the younger ages with the...

 dance styles of wealthy Southern whites, but their exaggerated high stepping exuberance was judged all the funnier for its ineptitude. Nonetheless, styles of song and dance that began as inversion
Inversion (music)
In music theory, the word inversion has several meanings. There are inverted chords, inverted melodies, inverted intervals, and inverted voices...

s of the social structure were adopted among the upper echelons of society, often without a trace of self consciousness.

Social insults were more overt. As the underclass being ridiculed shifted shapes, the racist lampoons and blackface burlesques sometimes gave way to other conflations, such as the stage Irishman
Stage Irish
Stage Irish is a stereotyped portrayal of Irish people once common in plays. The term refers to an exaggerated or caricatured portrayal of supposed Irish characteristics in speech and behaviour...

 Paddy, drunken and belligerent, a cruel caricature often in blackface himself. Political nativism
Nativism (politics)
Nativism favors the interests of certain established inhabitants of an area or nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. It may also include the re-establishment or perpetuation of such individuals or their culture....

 and xenophobia
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...

 encouraged similar mean-spirited responses to the perceived threats of the time. After 1848, when the first substantial influx of Chinese immigrants began seeking their fortunes in the California Gold Rush
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands , and Latin America, who were the first to start flocking to...

, "Chink
Chink
Chink, chinki, chinky or chinkie is a pejorative term referring mainly to a person of Chinese ethnicity but sometimes generalized to refer to any person of East Asian descent...

" characters joined the minstrel walkaround
Walkaround
A walkaround was a dance from the blackface minstrel shows of the 19th century. The walkaround began in the 1840s as a dance for one performer, but by the 1850s, many dancers or the entire troupe participated...

. Hokum enjoyed the license to be outrageous, since the clowning was purportedly "all in fun".

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the hierarchy of social mores that sanctioned stereotyping came increasingly under attack. W. E. B. Du Bois's book the Souls of Black Folk linked the subjective self appraisal of African Americans to their struggle with pejorative stereotyping in his essays about "double consciousness
Double consciousness
Double consciousness, in its contemporary sense, is a term coined by W. E. B. Du Bois. The term is used to describe an individual whose identity is divided into several facets...

". This inner conflict was central to the African American experience, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”. Anticipating social psychology, DuBois had identified a whole sphere of comparative attitudes that allowed for the reinterpretation of the black "mask". While black minstrel performers were once seen as the degraded victims of a racist spectacle, subsequent commentators could now celebrate these culture bearers for creating a subversive space for the advancement of their art and aesthetic. African American minstrels, Karen Sotiropoulos observed, "did not just attempt to hook audiences with hokum; they subverted and manipulated stereotypes as they struggled to present black identity." This critical perspective has the performers looking over the jeering crowd into the eyes of sympathetic conspirators, and giving them a wink to signal their mutual confidence.

Artistic dilemma

Race and sex were the pole stars of hokum, with booze and the law defining loose boundaries. Transgression was a given. How performers navigated through these waters varied from artist to artist. High and low culture had yet to converge as mainstream or popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...

. The convergence of performance styles, from different races that Minstrelsy and by extension hokum represented, helped to define a central, ongoing tension in American culture. The cycle of rejection, accommodation, appropriation and authentication was set in motion. The infantilized and grotesque enactments and racist and misogynistic content caused many better educated observers of the day to dismiss both the Minstrel Show and hokum as simply vulgar. Some of the white artists, whose contributions to minstrelsy are most valued today, struggled to rise above its cruder forms in their lifetimes. Stephen Foster
Stephen Foster
Stephen Collins Foster , known as the "father of American music", was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century...

 composed for years in obscurity, while the minstrel troupe leader Edwin P. Christy claimed credit for his songs. By 1852, Foster still wanted the pride of authorship, but wrote to Christy,

“I had the intention of omitting my name on my Ethiopian songs, owing to the prejudice against them by some, which might injure my reputation as a writer of another style of music. But I find that by my efforts, I have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some of that order.”

The same contradictions and ambiguities were endured by African-Americans like the composer James A. Bland
James A. Bland
James Alan Bland , also known as Jimmy Bland, was an African American musician and song writer.-Biography:...

, the actor Sam Lucas
Sam Lucas
Sam Lucas was an African American actor, comedian, singer, and songwriter. His career began in blackface minstrelsy, but he later became one of the first African Americans to branch into more serious drama, with roles in seminal works such as The Creole Show and A Trip to Coontown...

, and the bandleader James Reese Europe
James Reese Europe
James Reese Europe was an American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, arranger, and composer. He was the leading figure on the African American music scene of New York City in the 1910s.-Biography:...

. The classically trained African-American composer Will Marion Cook
Will Marion Cook
William Mercer Cook , better known as Will Marion Cook, was an African American composer and violinist from the United States. Cook was a student of Antonín Dvořák and performed for King George V among others...

, who toured throughout the United States and gave a command performance for King George V
George V of the United Kingdom
George V was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 through the First World War until his death in 1936....

 in England, struggled to raise his music to a public perception of distinction and merit, but was thwarted by marketing that distinguished author and music only by skin color.

Cook wrote what he called "real Negro melodies" and what he envisioned as "opera." He sought to market the syncopated sounds emanating from black expressive culture, but his compositions would be sold as "coon songs" suitable for variety stages. Cook's music fits most comfortably in the genre now known as "ragtime," but at the turn of the century, critics used the terms "ragtime" and "coon song" interchangeably. Like minstrelsy, the "coon song craze" sold racist stereotypes to mass audiences. Not unlike African-American minstrel performers, black songwriters capitulated in varying degrees to white racist expectation to market their music.


The use of dialect or faux African American (or even Irish) speech patterns also caused many minstrel compositions to be lumped into categories with interchangeable "coon song
Coon song
Coon songs were a genre of music popular in the United States and around the English-speaking world from 1880 to 1920, that presented a racist and stereotyped image of blacks.-Rise and fall from popularity:...

" connotations. "Wake Nicodemus," published in 1864 by Henry Clay Work
Henry Clay Work
Henry Clay Work was an American composer and songwriter.-Biography:He was born in Middletown, Connecticut, to Alanson and Amelia Work. His father opposed slavery, and Work was himself an active abolitionist and Union supporter...

, in Chicago, could neatly fit into the modern definition of a "protest song", and his later hits such as "Marching Through Georgia" identified his strong abolitionist convictions (his father was famous as a stalwart supporter of the "Underground Railroad
Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,...

"). Yet many of his songs were minstrel show staples. His compositions were widely performed by the Christy's Minstrels in particular who appreciated compositions such as "Kingdom Coming". This song was "full of bright, good sense and comical situations in its 'darkey' dialect", as the publisher and songwriter George Frederick Root described it in his autobiography "The Story of A Musical Life".

There is no glossing over the fact that most "coon songs" reveled in ridicule. The reception of "coon songs", however, was by no means uniform. White performers embraced the "coon song craze" as it suited them. The North Carolina Piedmont pioneer Charlie Poole was an acrobatic jokester with a banjo beating out a "barbaric twang", but he did not perform the "coon songs" he covered in black
Black
Black is the color of objects that do not emit or reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum; they absorb all such frequencies of light...

 dialect or in blackface. Poole preferred to hone his own identity and style. While his comedy marked him as "hokum", his music was drawn from the "hillbilly
Hillbilly
Hillbilly is a term referring to certain people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas of the United States, primarily Appalachia but also the Ozarks. Owing to its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term is frequently considered derogatory, and so is usually offensive to those Americans of...

" polyglot of Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century...

, marches, blues, Appalachian Scots Irish old time fiddle
Fiddle
The term fiddle may refer to any bowed string musical instrument, most often the violin. It is also a colloquial term for the instrument used by players in all genres, including classical music...

 tunes, two-step
Two-step (dance move)
The two-step is a step found in many folk dances, and in various other dances. It seems to take its name from the 19th century dance related to the Polka....

s, early vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

, Civil War chestnuts, event songs, murder ballad
Murder ballad
Murder ballads are a sub-genre of the traditional ballad form, the lyrics of which form a narrative describing the events of a murder, often including the lead-up and/or aftermath...

s and the rest of the mix, with the minstrel
Minstrel
A minstrel was a medieval European bard who performed songs whose lyrics told stories of distant places or of existing or imaginary historical events. Although minstrels created their own tales, often they would memorize and embellish the works of others. Frequently they were retained by royalty...

 tunes another important source.

Hokum in early blues

After the First World War, the fledgling record industry split hokum off from its Minstrel Show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

 or vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 context to market it as a musical genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

, 'the hokum blues'. Early practitioners surfaced among the Memphis, Tennessee jug bands heard in Beale Street
Beale Street
Beale Street is a street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, which runs from the Mississippi River to East Street, a distance of approximately . It is a significant location in the city's history, as well as in the history of the blues. Today, the blues clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street are...

's saloons and bordellos. The light-hearted and humorous jug bands like Will Shade
Will Shade
Will Shade was an African American Memphis blues musician, best known for his membership in the Memphis Jug Band. Shade was commonly called Son Brimmer, a nickname from his grandmother Annie Brimmer, because "son" is short for "grandson"...

's Memphis Jug Band
Memphis Jug Band
The Memphis Jug Band was an American musical group in the late 1920s and early to mid 1930s. The band featured harmonicas, violins, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, backed by washboards, kazoo, and jugs blown to supply the bass; they played in a variety of musical styles...

 and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers played good time, upbeat music on assorted instruments, such as spoons, washboards, fiddles, triangles, harmonicas, and banjos, all anchored by bass notes blown into the mouth of an empty jug. Their blues was rife with popular influences of the time, and had none of the grit and plaintive "purity" of the nearby Delta blues
Delta blues
The Delta blues is one of the earliest styles of blues music. It originated in the Mississippi Delta, a region of the United States that stretches from Memphis, Tennessee in the north to Vicksburg, Mississippi in the south, Helena, Arkansas in the west to the Yazoo River on the east. The...

. Cannon's classic composition "Walk Right In", originally recorded for Victor in 1930, resurfaced as a Number One hit 33 years later, when the Rooftop Singers recorded it during the Folk Revival
American folk music revival
The American folk music revival was a phenomenon in the United States that began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob...

 in New York's Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...

, and a jug band
Jug band
A Jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of traditional and home-made instruments. These home-made instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making of sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, stovepipe and comb & tissue paper...

 boom ensued once more.

Hokum blues lyrics specifically poked fun at all manner of sexual practices, preferences, and eroticized domestic arrangements. Compositions such as "Banana In Your Fruit Basket", written by Bo Carter
Bo Carter
Armenter "Bo Carter" Chatmon was an American early blues musician. He was a member of the Mississippi Sheiks in concerts, and on a few of their recordings...

 of the Mississippi Sheiks
Mississippi Sheiks
The Mississippi Sheiks were a popular and influential guitar and fiddle group of the 1930s. They were notable mostly for playing country blues, but were adept at many styles of United States popular music of the time, and their records were bought by both black and white audiences.In 2004, they...

, used thinly veiled allusions, which typically employed food and animals as metaphors in a lusty manner worthy of Chaucer. The hilariously sexy lyric content usually steered clear of subtlety. "Bo Carter was a master of the single entendre," remarked the Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues
Piedmont blues refers primarily to a guitar style, the Piedmont fingerstyle, which is characterized by a fingerpicking approach in which a regular, alternating thumb bass string rhythmic pattern supports a syncopated melody using the treble strings generally picked with the fore-finger,...

 guitar master "Bowling Green" John Cephas at Chip Schutte's annual guitar camp. The bottleneck guitarist
Slide guitar
Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide refers to the motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides: the necks of glass bottles...

 Tampa Red
Tampa Red
Tampa Red , born Hudson Woodbridge but known from childhood as Hudson Whittaker, was an American Chicago blues musician....

 was accompanied by Thomas A. Dorsey
Thomas A. Dorsey
Thomas Andrew Dorsey was known as "the father of black gospel music" and was at one time so closely associated with the field that songs written in the new style were sometimes known as "dorseys." Earlier in his life he was a leading blues pianist known as Georgia Tom.As formulated by Dorsey,...

 (performing as "Barrelhouse Tom" or "Georgia Tom") playing piano when the two recorded "It's Tight Like That" for the Vocalion label in 1928. The song went over so well that the two bluesmen teamed up and became known as The Hokum Boys. Both previously performed in the band of the Mother of the Blues Ma Rainey
Ma Rainey
Ma Rainey was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues....

, who had traveled the vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 circuits with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels as a girl, later taking Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was an American blues singer.Sometimes referred to as The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s...

 under her wing. The Hokum Boys recorded over 60 bawdy blues songs by 1932, most of them penned by Dorsey, who later picked up his Bible and became the founding father of black gospel
Gospel music
Gospel music is music that is written to express either personal, spiritual or a communal belief regarding Christian life, as well as to give a Christian alternative to mainstream secular music....

. Dorsey characterized his hokum legacy as "deep moanin', low-down blues, that's all I could say!"

Hokum in early country music

While hokum surfaces in early blues music most frequently, there was some significant crossover culturally. When the Chattanooga based "brother duet" The Allen Brothers
The Allen Brothers
The Allen Brothers were an American country music duo popular in the 1920s and 1930s...

 recorded a hit version of "Salty Dog Blues" refashioned as "Bow Wow Blues" in 1927 for Columbia
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...

's 15,000 - numbered "Old Time" series, the label rushed out several new releases to capitalize on their success, but mistakenly issued these on the 14,000 series instead.
In fact, the Allen Brothers were so adept at performing white blues that in 1927, Columbia mistakenly released their "Laughin' and Cryin' Blues" in the "race" series instead of the "old-time" series. (Not seeing the humor in it, the Allens sued and promptly moved to the Victor label.)


Early black string bands like the Dallas String Band with Coley Jones recorded the tune "Hokum Blues" on December 8, 1928 in Dallas, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

, and featured mandolin
Mandolin
A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family . It descends from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. The mandolin soundboard comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single...

 instrumentation. They have been identified both as proto bluesmen and as an early Texas country
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...

 band, and were likely selling to both Black and White audiences. Both Blind Lemon Jefferson
Blind Lemon Jefferson
"Blind" Lemon Jefferson was an American blues singer and guitarist from Texas. He was one of the most popular blues singers of the 1920s, and has been titled "Father of the Texas Blues"....

 and T-Bone Walker
T-Bone Walker
Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker was a critically acclaimed American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who was one of the most influential pioneers and innovators of the jump blues and electric blues sound. He is the first musician recorded playing blues with the...

 played in the Dallas String Band at various times. Milton Brown
Milton Brown
Milton Brown was an American band leader and vocalist who co-founded the genre of Western swing. His band was the first to fuse hillbilly hokum, jazz, and pop together into a unique, distinctly American hybrid, thus giving him the nickname, "Father of Western Swing"...

 and his Musical Brownies, the seminal white Texas swing band, recorded a hokum tune with scat lyrics in the early 1930s, "Garbage Man Blues", which was originally known by the title the jazz composer Luis Russell
Luis Russell
Luis Russell was a jazz pianist and bandleader.Luis Carl Russell was born on Careening Cay, near Bocas del Toro, Panama, in a family of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. His father was a music teacher, and young Luis learned to play violin, guitar, trombone, and piano...

 gave it, "The Call of the Freaks". Bob Wills
Bob Wills
James Robert Wills , better known as Bob Wills, was an American Western Swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader, considered by music authorities as the co-founder of Western Swing and universally known as the pioneering King of Western Swing.Bob Wills' name will forever be associated with...

, who had performed in blackface
Blackface
Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

 as a young man, liberally used comic asides, whoops, and jive talk when directing his famous Texas Playboys. The Hoosier Hotshots, Bob Skyles and the Skyrockets, and other novelty song artists concentrated on the comedic aspects, but for many up and coming White country musicians like Emmet Miller, Clayton McMichen
Clayton McMichen
Clayton McMichen was an American fiddler and country musician.-Biography:Born in Allatoona, Georgia, McMichen learned to play the fiddle from his father and uncle. He moved to Atlanta with his family in 1913, working as an automobile mechanic. While there, he entered and won several competitions...

 and Jimmie Rodgers
Jimmie Rodgers (country singer)
James Charles Rodgers , known as Jimmie Rodgers, was an American country singer in the early 20th century known most widely for his rhythmic yodeling...

, the ribald lyrics were beside the point. Hokum for these white rounders in the South and Southwest was synonymous with jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

, and the "hot" syncopation
Syncopation
In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...

s and blue note
Blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note sung or played at a slightly lower pitch than that of the major scale for expressive purposes. Typically the alteration is a semitone or less, but this varies among performers and genres. Country blues, in particular, features wide variations from the...

s were a naughty pleasure in themselves. The lap steel guitar
Lap steel guitar
The lap steel guitar is a type of steel guitar, an instrument derived from and similar to the guitar. The player changes pitch by pressing a metal or glass bar against the strings instead of by pressing strings against the fingerboard....

 player Cliff Carlisle
Cliff Carlisle
Cliff Carlisle was an American country and blues singer. Carlisle was a yodeler and was a pioneer in the use of the Hawaiian steel guitar in country music.-Biography:...

, who was half of another "brother duet", is credited with refining the Blue Yodel
Blue Yodel
The Blue Yodel songs are a series of thirteen songs written and recorded by Jimmie Rodgers during the period from 1927 to his death in May 1933. The songs were based on the 12-bar blues format and featured Rodgers’ trademark yodel refrains. The lyrics often had a risqué quality with “a macho,...

 song style after Jimmie Rodgers
Jimmie Rodgers (country singer)
James Charles Rodgers , known as Jimmie Rodgers, was an American country singer in the early 20th century known most widely for his rhythmic yodeling...

 became the first country music
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...

 superstar
Superstar
A superstar is a widely acclaimed celebrity.Superstar or superstars may also refer to:-People:* Warhol Superstar, associates of Andy Warhol* WWE Superstar, the term used to refer to entertainers from the WWE...

 by recording over a dozen blue yodels. Carlisle wrote and recorded many hokum tunes and gave them titles such as "Tom Cat Blues", "Shanghai Rooster Yodel" and "That Nasty Swing". He marketed himself as a "Hillbilly", a "Cowboy", a "Hawaiian" or a "Straight" bluesman (meaning presumably, "Black") depending on whom he was playing for and where he played.

The radio "barn dances" of the 1920s and 1930s interspersed hokum in their variety show broadcasts. The first blackface comedians at the WSM
WSM (AM)
WSM is the callsign of a 50,000 watt AM radio station located in Nashville, Tennessee. Operating at 650 kHz, its clear channel signal can reach much of North America and various countries, especially late at night...

 Grand Ole Opry
Grand Ole Opry
The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly country music stage concert in Nashville, Tennessee, that has presented the biggest stars of that genre since 1925. It is also among the longest-running broadcasts in history since its beginnings as a one-hour radio "barn dance" on WSM-AM...

 were Lee Roy "Lasses" White and his partner, Lee Davis "Honey" Wilds, starring in the Friday night shows. White was a veteran of several minstrel troupes, including one organized by William George "Honeyboy" Evans, and another led by Al G. Field, who also employed Emmett Miller
Emmett Miller
Emmett Miller was an American minstrel show performer and recording artist known for his falsetto, yodel-like voice. Little-remembered today, Miller was a major influence on many country music singers, including Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Milton Brown, Tommy Duncan, and Merle Haggard...

. By 1920, White was leading his own outfit, the All Star Minstrels. Lasses and Honey joined the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1932. When Lasses moved on to Hollywood in 1936 to play the role of a silver screen cowboy sidekick, Honey Wilds stayed on in Nashville, corking up and playing blues on his ukulele with his new partner Jam-Up (first played by Tom Woods, and subsequently by Bunny Biggs). Wilds organized the first Grand Ole Opry-endorsed tent show in 1940. For the next decade, he ran the touring show, with Jam-Up and Honey as the headliners. Pulling a forty foot trailer behind a four door Pontiac, and followed by eight to ten trucks, Wilds took the tent show from town to town, hurrying back to Nashville on Saturdays to do his Opry radio appearances. Many country musicians, like Uncle Dave Macon
Uncle Dave Macon
Uncle Dave Macon , born David Harrison Macon—also known as "The Dixie Dewdrop"—was an American banjo player, singer, songwriter, and comedian...

, Bill Monroe
Bill Monroe
William Smith Monroe was an American musician who created the style of music known as bluegrass, which takes its name from his band, the "Blue Grass Boys," named for Monroe's home state of Kentucky. Monroe's performing career spanned 60 years as a singer, instrumentalist, composer and bandleader...

, Eddy Arnold
Eddy Arnold
Richard Edward Arnold , known professionally as Eddy Arnold, was an American country music singer who performed for six decades. He was a so-called Nashville sound innovator of the late 1950s, and scored 147 songs on the Billboard country music charts, second only to George Jones. He sold more...

, Stringbean and Roy Acuff
Roy Acuff
Roy Claxton Acuff was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the King of Country Music, Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the star singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful.Acuff...

, toured with the Wilds' tent shows from April through Labor Day. As Honey Wilds' son David told No Depression magazine's co-editor Grant Alden:


Music was a part of their act, but they were comedians. They would sing comedic songs, a la Homer and Jethro
Homer and Jethro
Homer and Jethro were the stage names of American country music duo Henry D. Haynes and Kenneth C. Burns , popular from the 1940s through the 1960s on radio and television for their satirical versions of popular songs...

. They would add odd lyrics to existing songs, or write songs that were intended to be comedic. They were out there to come onstage, do five minutes of jokes, sing a song, do five minutes of jokes, sing another song and say, "Thank you, good night," as their segment of the Grand Ole Opry
Grand Ole Opry
The Grand Ole Opry is a weekly country music stage concert in Nashville, Tennessee, that has presented the biggest stars of that genre since 1925. It is also among the longest-running broadcasts in history since its beginnings as a one-hour radio "barn dance" on WSM-AM...

. Almost every country band during that time had some guy who dressed funny, wore a goofy hat, and typically played slide guitar.

Legacy

Although the sexual content of hokum is generally playful by modern standards, early recordings were marginalized for both sexual "suggestiveness" and "trashy" appeal, but still flourished in niche markets outside the mainstream. "Jim Crow" segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...

 was still the norm in much of the United States, and racial, ethnic and class bias was embedded in the popular entertainment of the time. Prurience was seen as more antisocial than prejudice
Prejudice
Prejudice is making a judgment or assumption about someone or something before having enough knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy, or "judging a book by its cover"...

. Record companies were more concerned about selling records than stigmatizing artists and minority audiences. Modern audiences might be offended by the packaged exploitation
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...

 these stock caricatures offered, but in early 20th century America, it paid for performers to play the fool. Audiences were left on their own to interpret whether they themselves were sharing the joke or were the butts of it. While "race" musicians traded in "coon songs" crafted for commercial consumption by catering to White prejudice, "hillbilly" musicians were similarly marketed as "rubes" and "hayseeds". Class distinctions bolstered these portrayals of gullible rural folk and witless southerners
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...

. Assimilation
Cultural assimilation
Cultural assimilation is a socio-political response to demographic multi-ethnicity that supports or promotes the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture. The term assimilation is often used with regard to immigrants and various ethnic groups who have settled in a new land. New...

 of African Americans and cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of...

 of their artistic and cultural creations were not yet equated by the emerging entertainment industry with racism and bigotry.
The eventual success of African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...

 musical productions on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 like Eubie Blake
Eubie Blake
James Hubert Blake was an American composer, lyricist, and pianist of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, Blake and long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, one of the first Broadway musicals to be written and directed by African Americans...

 and Noble Sissle
Noble Sissle
Noble Sissle was an American jazz composer, lyricist, bandleader, singer and playwright.-Early life:...

's "Shuffle Along" in 1921, helped to usher in the Swing Jazz era. This was accompanied by a new sense of sophistication that eventually disdained hokum as backward, insipid, and perhaps most damningly, corny. Audiences began to change their perceptions of authentic "Negro
Negro
The word Negro is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not...

" artistry. White comedians like Frank Tinney and singers like Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter...

 (nicknamed "Banjo Eyes") continued to work successfully in blackface on Broadway. They even branched out into vaudeville-based sensations like the Ziegfeld Follies
Ziegfeld Follies
The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. They became a radio program in 1932 and 1936 as The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air....

 and the emerging film industry, but cross racial comedy became increasingly out of fashion, especially onstage. On the other hand, it is impossible to imagine that the success of comics such as Pigmeat Markham
Pigmeat Markham
Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham was an African-American entertainer. Though best known as a comedian, Markham was also a singer, dancer, and actor...

 or Damon Wayans
Damon Wayans
Damon Kyle Wayans is an American stand-up comedian, writer and actor, one of the Wayans brothers.-Early life:Wayans was born in New York City, New York, the son of Elvira, a homemaker and social worker, and Howell Wayans, a supermarket manager...

, or bandleaders like Cab Calloway
Cab Calloway
Cabell "Cab" Calloway III was an American jazz singer and bandleader. He was strongly associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City where he was a regular performer....

 or Louis Jordan
Louis Jordan
Louis Thomas Jordan was a pioneering American jazz, blues and rhythm & blues musician, songwriter and bandleader who enjoyed his greatest popularity from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "The King of the Jukebox", Jordan was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the...

 does not owe some debt to hokum. White performers have thoroughly absorbed the lessons of hokum as well, with the "top banana" Harry Steppe
Harry Steppe
Harry Steppe Harry Steppe Harry Steppe (born Abraham Stepner, March 16, 1888 – November 22, 1934 was a Jewish-American actor, musical comedy performer, headliner comedian, writer, librettist, director and producer, who toured North America working in Vaudeville and Burlesque. Steppe performed at...

, singers like Louis Prima
Louis Prima
Louis Prima was a Sicilian American singer, actor, songwriter, and trumpeter. Prima rode the musical trends of his time, starting with his seven-piece New Orleans style jazz band in the 1920s, then successively leading a swing combo in the 1930s, a big band in the 1940s, a Vegas lounge act in the...

 and Leon Redbone
Leon Redbone
Leon Redbone is a singer and guitarist specializing in interpretations of early 20th-century music, including jazz and blues standards and Tin Pan Alley classics....

 or comedian Jeff Foxworthy
Jeff Foxworthy
Jeffrey Marshall "Jeff" Foxworthy is an American comedian, television and radio personality and author. He is a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, a comedy troupe which also comprises Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall and Ron White. Known for his "you might be a redneck" one-liners, Foxworthy...

 being prime examples. Offstage it is by no means extinct either, or only practiced by members of one race parodying another race. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a New Orleans Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras
The terms "Mardi Gras" , "Mardi Gras season", and "Carnival season", in English, refer to events of the Carnival celebrations, beginning on or after Epiphany and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday...

 krewe
Krewe
A krewe is an organization that puts on a parade and or a ball for the Carnival season. The term is best known for its association with New Orleans Mardi Gras, but is also used in other Carnival celebrations around the Gulf of Mexico, such as the Gasparilla Pirate Festival in Tampa, Florida, and...

 has marched on Fat Tuesday since 1900 dressed in raggedy clothes and grass skirts with their faces blackened. Zulu is now the largest predominantly African American organization marching in the annual Carnival celebration. While the Minstrel Show
Minstrel show
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

, burlesque
Burlesque
Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...

, vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

, variety
Variety show
A variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is an entertainment made up of a variety of acts, especially musical performances and sketch comedy, and normally introduced by a compère or host. Other types of acts include magic, animal and circus acts, acrobatics, juggling...

, and the medicine show
Medicine show
Medicine shows were traveling horse and wagon teams which peddled "miracle cure" medications and other products between various entertainment acts. Their precise origins unknown, medicine shows were common in the 19th century United States...

 have left the scene, hokum is still here.

Rural stereotypes continued to be fair game. Consider the phenomenal success of the syndicated television program "Hee Haw
Hee Haw
Hee Haw is an American television variety show featuring country music and humor with fictional rural Kornfield Kounty as a backdrop. It aired on CBS-TV from 1969–1971 before a 20-year run in local syndication. The show was inspired by Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the major difference being...

", which was produced from 1969 until 1992. Writer Dale Cockrell has called this a minstrel show in "rube-face". It featured country music stars, curvaceous comediennes, and banjo
Banjo
In the 1830s Sweeney became the first white man to play the banjo on stage. His version of the instrument replaced the gourd with a drum-like sound box and included four full-length strings alongside a short fifth-string. There is no proof, however, that Sweeney invented either innovation. This new...

 playing bumpkins whose pickin' and grinnin' picked on city slickers
City Slicker
City slicker is an idiomatic expression for someone accustomed to a city or urban lifestyle and unsuited to life in the country. The term was typically used as a term of derision by rural Americans who regarded them with amusement...

 and grinned at the buxom All Jugs Band. The rapid fire one liners, Laugh-In rapid cross cutting, animations of barnyard animals, hayseed humor and continuous parade of country
Country
A country is a region legally identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with a previously...

, bluegrass
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...

, and gospel
Gospel
A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...

 performers appealed to an untapped demographic that was older and more rural than the young, urban "hip" audience broadcasters were routinely cultivating. It is still in syndication today, and is one of the most successful syndicated programs ever. Admirers of hokum warmed to its slyness and the seeming innocence that provided a context for simplistic shenanigans. In the rural south in particular, hokum held on. Cast members like Stringbean and Grandpa Jones
Grandpa Jones
Louis Marshall Jones , known professionally as Grandpa Jones, was an American banjo player and "old time" country and gospel music singer...

 were quite familiar with hokum (and blackface
Blackface
Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

 as well), and if bands named the "Clodhoppers" or the "Cut Ups" and other country cousins of this comedic form are fewer in number today, their presence is still a clue to the country and western, bluegrass
Bluegrass music
Bluegrass music is a form of American roots music, and a sub-genre of country music. It has mixed roots in Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish traditional music...

, and string band tradition of mixing stage antics, broad parodies and sexual allusions with music.

Examples of hokum

  • "Bow Wow Blues" - The Allen Brothers
    The Allen Brothers
    The Allen Brothers were an American country music duo popular in the 1920s and 1930s...

    , 1926
  • "It's Tight Like That" - Tampa Red
    Tampa Red
    Tampa Red , born Hudson Woodbridge but known from childhood as Hudson Whittaker, was an American Chicago blues musician....

     and Georgia Tom, 1928
  • "The Duck's Yas-Yas-Yas
    The Duck's Yas-Yas-Yas
    "The Duck's Yas-Yas-Yas" or "The Duck's Yas Yas Yas" is a hokum jazz-blues song, originally recorded by James "Stump" Johnson, but the most well known version was recorded by Oliver Cobb and his Rhythm Kings....

    " - James "Stump" Johnson
    James "Stump" Johnson
    James "Stump" Johnson was an American blues pianist and singer from St. Louis.-Biography:James "Stump" Johnson was the brother of Jesse Johnson, "a prominent black business man," who around 1909 had moved the family from Clarksville, Tennessee, to St. Louis, where he ran a music store and was a...

    , 1928
  • "I Had to Give Up Gym" - The Hokum Boys, 1929
  • "Please Warm My Weiner" - Bo Carter
    Bo Carter
    Armenter "Bo Carter" Chatmon was an American early blues musician. He was a member of the Mississippi Sheiks in concerts, and on a few of their recordings...

    , 1930
  • "Let Me Play with Your Yo-Yo" - Blind Willie McTell
    Blind Willie McTell
    Blind Willie McTell , was an influential Piedmont and ragtime blues singer and guitarist. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues, although, unlike his contemporaries, he used exclusively a twelve-string guitar...

    , 1933
  • "The Coldest Stuff in Town" - Whistling Bob Howe & Frankie Griggs, 1935
  • "Trucking My Blues Away" - Blind Boy Fuller
    Blind Boy Fuller
    Blind Boy Fuller was an American blues guitarist and vocalist. He was one of the most popular of the recorded Piedmont blues artists with rural Black Americans, a group that also included Blind Blake, Josh White, and Buddy Moss.-Life and career:Fulton Allen was born in Wadesboro, North Carolina,...

    , 1936
  • "They're Red Hot
    They're Red Hot
    "They're Red Hot" is a song originally performed and written by blues musician Robert Johnson. Notably, it is one of very few songs recorded by the bluesman that is not based around twelve bar blues. It is based on a common ragtime chord progression...

    " - Robert Johnson, 1937
  • "Meat Balls" - Lil Johnson
    Lil Johnson (blues singer)
    Lil Johnson was an African American singer, who recorded bawdy blues and hokum songs in the 1920s and 1930s....

    , probably 1937
  • "Southern Whoopee Song" - The Anglin Brothers, 1938
  • "Sixty Minute Man
    Sixty Minute Man
    "Sixty Minute Man" is a rhythm and blues record released in 1951 by The Dominoes. It was written by Billy Ward and Rose Marks and was one of the first R&B hit records to cross over to become a pop hit on the pop charts...

    " - The Dominoes, 1951
  • "Big 10-Inch Record" - Bull Moose Jackson
    Bull Moose Jackson
    Benjamin Clarence "Bull Moose" Jackson was an American blues and rhythm and blues singer and saxophonist, who was most successful in the late 1940s.-Career:...

    , 1952
  • "Hesitation Blues" - Reverend Gary Davis
    Reverend Gary Davis
    Reverend Gary Davis, also Blind Gary Davis, was an American blues and gospel singer and guitarist, who was also proficient on the banjo and harmonica...

    , circa 1965
  • "She Loves My Automobile" - ZZ Top
    ZZ Top
    ZZ Top is an American rock band, sometimes referred to as "That Little Ol' Band from Texas". Their style, which is rooted in blues-based boogie rock, has come to incorporate elements of arena, southern, and boogie rock. The band, from Houston Texas, formed in 1969...

    , 1979
  • "Tube Snake Boogie" - ZZ Top
    ZZ Top
    ZZ Top is an American rock band, sometimes referred to as "That Little Ol' Band from Texas". Their style, which is rooted in blues-based boogie rock, has come to incorporate elements of arena, southern, and boogie rock. The band, from Houston Texas, formed in 1969...

    , 1981

Hokum compilations

  • Please Warm My Weiner - Yazoo L-1043 (cover art by Robert Crumb
    Robert Crumb
    Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...

    ) (1992)
  • Hokum: Blues and Rags (1929-1930) - Document 5392 (1995)
  • Hokum Blues: 1924-1929 - Document 5370 (1995)
  • Raunchy Business: Hot Nuts & Lollypops - Sony
    Sony
    , commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

     (1991)
  • Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon: The Ultimate Rude Blues Collection - (2004)
  • Take It Out Too Deep: Rufus & Ben Quillian (Blue Harmony Boys)(1929-30)
  • Vintage Sex Songs - Primo 6077 (2008)

Other collections containing hokum

  • Traditional Country Music Makers, Vol. 20 - Memphis Yodel - Magnet MRCD 020 (Cliff Carlisle and other artists)
  • White Country Blues, 1926-1938: A Lighter Shade Of Blue - Sony (1993)
  • Booze And The Blues (Legacy Roots N' Blues series) - Sony (1996)
  • Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937 - Old Hat Records CD-1005 (2005)

Sources

  • The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois (Penguin Classics, New York: Penguin Books
    Penguin Books
    Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

    , reprinted April 1996) ISBN 0-14-018998-X.
  • Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake by Robert Kimball and William Bolsom (The Viking Press, New York, 1973)
  • Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America by Karen Sotiropoulos (Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...

    , 2006)
  • Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World by Dale Cockrell (Cambridge University Press
    Cambridge University Press
    Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...

    , 1997)
  • The Story of a Musical Life: An Autobiography by George F. Root (Cincinnati: The John Church Co.
    John Church Company
    The John Church Company was a 19th-century American publishing company that specialized in sheet music. They had offices in Cincinnati, Ohio; New York, New York; and Chicago, Illinois. The company published the works of John Philip Sousa, Dan Emmett, and other composers.The company was bought out...

    , 1891; reprinted by AMS Press, Inc, New York, NY in 1973, ISBN 0-404-07205-4)
  • We’ll Understand It Better By and By - Pioneering African American Gospel Composers edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Wade In The Water Series" (Smithsonian Institution
    Smithsonian Institution
    The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

     Press, Washington, DC, 1993)
  • Black Gospel: An Illustrated History of the Gospel Sound by Vic Broughton (Blandford Press, New York, 1985)
  • Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches, 2001, Little, Brown, USA, ISBN 0-316-89507-5 on Emmett Miller
    Emmett Miller
    Emmett Miller was an American minstrel show performer and recording artist known for his falsetto, yodel-like voice. Little-remembered today, Miller was a major influence on many country music singers, including Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Milton Brown, Tommy Duncan, and Merle Haggard...

  • A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry by Charles K. Wolfe (The Country Music Foundation Press and the Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, TN, 1999)
  • Bluegrass Breakdown : The Making of the Old Southern Sound by Robert Cantwell (The University of Illinois Press
    University of Illinois Press
    The University of Illinois Press , is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic projects...

    , Chicago, 1984, Reprinted 2003)
  • It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon (Pocket Books, Simon and Shuster, New York, NY, 1995)
  • Stephen Foster: America's Troubadour by John Tasker Howard, (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1934, 2nd edition, 1953)
  • The Encyclopedia of Country Music edited by Paul Kingsbury (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998)
  • Minstrel Banjo Style by various artists, liner notes, Rounder Records
    Rounder Records
    Rounder Records, originally of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but now based in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a record label founded in 1970 by Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton-Levy, while all three were still university students...

     ROUN0321, 1994
  • You Ain't Talkin' To Me: Charlie Poole And The Roots Of Country Music liner notes by Henry Sapoznik, Columbia Legacy Recordings C3K 92780, 2005
  • Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937 liner notes by Marshall Wyatt, Old Hat Records CD-1005 (2005)
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK