Black American urban popular music of the 1940s. The word has many meanings in black American usage, and may derive from the Wolof word jev, meaning ‘to talk disparagingly’, a usage it retains in the USA. It is also applied to witty or deceitful speech, to a form of stylized jitterbugging or athletic dancing, and to marijuana. In black American music it was especially applied to the lightweight, rhythmic form of ‘hokum’ blues popular in the 1940s during the swing era. Although the words of jive songs were often insinuating, witty, sophisticated or sly, the music was associated with ‘good times’. Its principal exponent was the much recorded singer and alto saxophonist Louis Jordan, whose You run your mouth and I’ll run my business (1940, Decca), The chick’s too young to fry (1945, Decca ), Let the good times roll (1945, Decca ) and Saturday Night Fish Fry (1949, Bruns.) show a typically extroverted style. Other jive artists included Phil Moore, whose I’m gonna see my baby (1944, Vic.) is a patriotic wartime piece, and the white pianist Harry ‘the Hipster’ Gibson, who made a number of outrageous songs, including Who put the benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine? (1944, Musicraft). Although jive as such declined, it survived as a vein in the rhythm-and-blues idiom, particularly through the recordings of Wynonie Harris, for example Grandma plays the numbers (1948, King) and Bloodshot Eyes (1951, King).
D. Burnley: Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (New York, 1944)
C. Calloway: The New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary (New York, 1944)
L. Shelley: Hepcats: Jive Talk Dictionary (Derby, CT, 1945)
D. Dalby: ‘Americanisms that may once have been Africanisms’, The Times (19 July 1969)
C. Gillett: The Sound of the City (New York, 1970, 2/1972)
PAUL OLIVER