I hope you took the time to study the hepcat jive little dictionary I posted. It was by no means exhaustive but it gives a decent overview and an important one into the jazz mentality.
Hepcat jive appears to have originated in Harlem but has its roots in slavery. When the slaves didn’t want the white people around them to know what they were saying, they switched to a coded lingo or patois. This patois became an argot known as jive which is an alternate name for jazz (e.g. “jive swing”). It was a mixture of black slang, musician-speak, Over time, the coded phrases lost their meaning and jive just became another word for bulls-hit. “Man, don’t jive me!” “Cut out with all that jive, man!” Just ways of saying, “Stop talking nonsense.” “Jive”, in turn, became itself a code word for marijuana.
In Harlem during the height of the jazz phenomenon, the hipsters and jazz cats spoke an almost foreign language:
“Say, dads, lay me out a mezzroll, you know I’m righteous!”
“Ain’t yo T-man, Jeff. Go find Mezz.”
In the above exchange, the first person was asking for a marijuana cigarette or a “mezzroll.” In Harlem, there was once a 2nd-rate jazz musician named Mezz Mezzrow who, although a white Jew, considered himself an honorary black. He lived in a black area, married a black woman and hung out with the bruthas. He played clarinet but wasn’t that good. What he could do that put him the company of the best jazz musicians in Harlem was grow and sell his own marijuana that could damn near blow your head off. Without a doubt, it was the best s-hit out there. If you sold pot (i.e. if you are a T-man), your product was inevitably compared with Mezz’s. His stuff was so special that a joint of had its own name—a mezzroll. He sold his stuff only to other jazz musicians. It was not at all uncommon in those days to hear a T-man tell a customer, “This s-hit here ain’t as good as Mezz but it’s pretty close.” If you heard that then you knew Mezz was in short supply or no one would waste two seconds buying anything else if they could get real Mezz. Saying that you are righteous means that you are good for it. “You can slip him some scratch, man, he’s righteous” means you can lend him money, he’ll pay you back. A “Jeff” is a square, the opposite of a hepcat. So the second dude was telling the first, “I’m not selling any of my mezz pot to a square (and therefore untrustworthy) jerk like you. You want some, go talk to Mezz.” By the way, Cab Calloway’s 1932 number “The Man From Harlem” is about Mezzrow and contains the line, “let’s light up on this weed right here and we’ll get high and forget about everything!”
Indeed, the hepcat jive was fueled by marijuana which was declared illegal in the United States in 1937. Back then, getting caught with pot was a serious offense. Possession of a single joint would get you prison time (this continued through the 60s). So the coded language came in handy and it was constantly changing to thwart the cops who would get hip to the words and phrases. That’s why there are so many different words for marijuana—pot, gage, boo, grass, reefer, joint, roach, tea, etcetera—which is the sacrament of jazz. There are even rumors of serious marijuana jazz cults in Harlem (not so outlandish since marijuana is a sacrament of the Ethiopian Church which constantly gets its monks in trouble with the law enforcement in that country).
Buck Washington - Save The Roach For Me - YouTube
But pot was present in other forms of music back then. I know an old man who played in country and hillbilly bands in 40s and he said they smoked pot in all kinds of ways. One that I’d never heard of before was that they’d put a bunch of pot in a bucket, ignite it, cover the bucket with a blanket and then get under the blanket and start inhaling like mad. The jive and the pot carried over through blues and into rock and roll quite effortlessly.
The Five Keys - Ling Ting Tong - YouTube
Much of the jive is part of our everyday language and yet much it is still quite esoteric. But the fact that we use so much of the jive in our daily conversation demonstrates how thoroughly American society has been “jazzercised.” While the jive developed among the black jazz musicians, the cool white folks were hip to it and both spoke and understood it. Among many young whites, it was a badge of honor to be able to converse in jive. In the clip below featuring singer Ella Mae Morse and pianist Freddie Slack (both white) from 1945 about a jazz/blues club in Detroit, they engage in a bit of hepcat banter and it’s a bit hard to “get a handle on” (that’s hepcat jive too). The lyrics throughout are all jive.
ELLA MAE MORSE ~ HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS ~ 1945 - YouTube
The songs of Johnny Mercer often contained jive that sounds fairly comprehensive to us today because we are so used to it but was quite puzzling to the squares of the 40s and 50s. His lyrics to the jazz classic “Satin Doll” run:
Cigarette holder
Which wigs me
Over her shoulder
She digs me
Out cattin’
Some satin doll
Baby, shall we go
Out skippin’
Careful amigo
You’re flippin’
Speaks Latin
That satin doll
Here the line “Speaks Latin” is code for the jive. She speaks jive—she’s a hepcat.
The great sax man, Eric Dolphy, wrote a piece called “Miss Ann” which was published in 1962, just two years before Dolphy’s untimely death at the ripe old age of 36. While he might have written the number for someone named Ann, in black-American parlance, a Miss Ann is a white woman who looks down her nose at black people. I don’t know how prevalent this term is today but the first time I saw a chart for it (from The Real Book p. 274), it jumped out at me.
Ultimately, an argot exists for a people to mark themselves off from the rest of society. The hippies of the 60s did just that by copping the jive of jazz pretty much lock, stock and barrel. Rap has too. Kids today think the term “homey” is new. So who are the ones who are really out of touch? Although jazz is often seen as dinner jacket music today, it was music on the outer edges of society. Indeed in many ancient cultures, musicians were fringe figures, people barely reputable. Anyone who has ever busked on a street corner knows the truth of this. There the musician rubs elbows with both ordinary people out and about their business as well as bums and prostitutes. The musician partakes a bit of both worlds. Jazz was the original American music of rebellion. And rebel it did.