Abstract
Jive is a living history. It is a language and a movement – both bodily and counter-cultural – which spans the centuries and crosses the continents, and takes us from the Middle Passage to the D-Day landings, from swing and Lindy hop ‘joints a jumpin’’ in Harlem, New York, to zoot-suit retro swing revivals in Herrang, Sweden. In his history of jive, Bill Milkowski refers to jive as a language, ‘like cussing ... a language of emotion: a means of describing how one is affected by certain experiences or situations’ (Milkowski 2001: 20). Like soul and hiphop, jive can be a slang of inclusion, a cockney ebonics, an idiolect marking out a group, fraternal and black – ‘African-American bohemianism’ (Saul 2003: 7) in this case. It is a term said to have been invented in the 1920s by the Chicago-based musician Louis Armstrong, and popularized in the 1930s by Cab Calloway, the ‘Professor of Jive’. ‘Are You Hep to the Jive’ (1940) is – besides ‘Minnie the Moocher’ (1931) and ‘Take the “A” Train’ (1941) – one of Calloway’s signature numbers, one which asks the listener if they are up to date, ‘hip with’ the jive, the dance as well as the latest trends and fashions.1 ‘Jive’ was also a codeword for marijuana on the streets and in the lyrics of many big-band anthems. Calloway published his own Hepster’s Dictionary (Calloway 1944) that defined jive as Harlemese speech for ‘stuff’, as in ‘did you bring the jive’, or as blarney as in ‘He can jive his way into any hep cat’s heart’. Postwar, jive lost this meaning and ‘hep’ fell out of favour as a popular term.