Can You Speak Jive? Postmortem

Researching jive was a lot different than I imagined when I wrote down my idea a few months ago. There were two angles to go at jive with during research, as jive is a silly language, but still actually has deep roots. Both sides are interesting, but it was difficult to combine the two viewpoints coherently into a well-flowing article. Since jive was a 1940’s thing and started from a generally underserved population, there really is not that much information around about jive. The best way to research was to look through the two books by Calloway and Burley.

When you look around for jive information it is hard to find accurate information about the language, as most of the results are either clips from “Airplane!” which really is a great movie, or about the jive swing dance, which is named after the dialect. Another fun fact is that when you look for images related to jive, all that comes up is fruit. I don’t know why, but it’s true.

The part about jive that interested me the most is that it is still used today and that a lot of their words are getting brought back into language by the Millennials and Gen-Z today. I didn’t expect to see slang that is used a lot today be from the 1940s. That fits into the prediction I made of “Gangbusters” being on the road to making a comeback. It’s a fun word to say and I’ve started hearing it around more.

One more thing I researched a lot about but never found a great place to put in the article is why New York is called “The Big Apple”. The nickname came from jive as well. In the New York area, the rewards for winners at the horse racetracks were big apples. New York had a very strong horse racing scene, so people from across the country would go to New York for a chance at the big apples. The word was first picked up by reporter John Fitzgerald in the 1920s when he heard African American stablehands from New Orleans talking about it. At about the same time, the Harlem jazz singers starting calling New York, their home, “The Big Apple”, in their music, and it caught on. I thought it was just a city marketing stunt, which it was in the 1970s, but jive was the source.

Overall, jive was very interesting and worth studying. There is a big lack of information about it, which made becoming more of an expert a lot more gratifying. Feel free to contact me and let me know what you think, I would be happy to hear your opinions.