Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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C H I C K
The Wolof word jigen described an attractive young woman who was hipi, or hip,
meaning she had her eyes open and knew what was going on. By the 1920s, jigen
young woman. 98
Songs:
- T-Bone Walker (Aaron Thibeaux Walker)
- Al Duncan
C H IN C H, C H IN C H-BU G, C H IN C HPA D
The Bantu word tshishi means any kind of small bug or insect. Bantu people were taken
from their North Kongo and Angola homelands to South Carolina in huge numbers after
1730, as the slave trade penetrated beyond the Senegambia region deeper into Africa. The
Bantu were brought to South Carolina to work the fields, so they became intimately
acquainted with a particular bug known for destroying Southern crops. They called it
tshishi, which in English became chinch or chinch-bug.
Chinches are black, with white wings folded on their backs, and are about a fifth of an
inch long. They are considered big pests in the South, where they destroy corn, wheat,
and barley crops by inserting their slim beaks into the plants and sucking out the juices.
They rarely bite or sting humans.
Some scholars have said that chinch is another word for bedbug, and that therefore a
chinchpad is a rooming house or hotel infested with bedbugs. 99 That is contradicted,
Oh, that must have been a bedbug, baby
behind chinchpad.
Songs:
- Blind Lemon Jefferson (Lemon Jefferson)
- Blind Lemon Jefferson
- Joe Evans
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