Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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H O B O C O C K T A I L
When you walk into a café or restaurant and ask for a glass
requesting a hobo cocktail. Hobo cocktail is not actually part of the hobo slang lexicon;
jive talk that originated among African Americans during the swing
era (1930s-1940s).
H O K U M
A lighthearted subcategory of urban blues called hokum was popular in the late 1920s
and early 1930s. Hokum songs were uptempo, funny, and on the raw and raunchy side.
sex, drugs, or some illicit comb
composers also opened the first black gospel music publishing company and wrote some
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foolish
to Buncombe. 226
Guitarist Ta
Tampa Red, whose real name was Hudson Whittaker,
was born in Smithville, Georgia in 1904. He was orphaned at a young age and moved to
Tampa to live with his grandparents. Red worked the vaudeville circuit until he moved to
Chicago in the mid-1920s, where he teamed up with blues and jazz pianist Dorsey, who
had been pursuing his own pet project- writing and selling sheet music for the bluesified
church music
As a young man, Dorsey had suffered from crippling depression and suicidal thoughts.
According to People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Dorsey claimed
his depression was cured by Bishop H. H. Daley, w
no reason for you to be looking so poorly and feeling so badly. The Lord has too much
227
Haley then reportedly pulled a live snake from
Dorsey was never afflicted by depression again, and he was moved to devote his musical
abilities to serving God. At the time, though, the established African American churches
mirrored white practices, with choirs singing the sacred compositions of Bach, Mozart,
Mendelssohn, and the like. The blues were banned.
228
After his first wife
died in childbirth, along with his son, Dorsey wrote the now-famous gospel song
106