MM
The first question I have is kind of just a general question, you know, which is- I wanted to know what you thought the function of slang was in a culture.

TD
Is that the first question?

MM
Yes, that's the question.

TD
The major function of slang is to establish an identity, to, through speech, to let us know which tribe we're in. I'm using cool words and if you understand them, we're in the same tribe. We might be surfers, we might be surfers on a particular beach, we might be surfers from a particular town on a certain beach, we might be young people, we might be prisoners. . . whatever. It is telling us within a culture we are part of a group that's all the same.

There are other obvious ways that we establish those lines: dress, hairstyle, music we listen to, but speech is a very, very important part and slang does that. Slang serves a couple of other functions. It establishes station, so even within the group if I'm using certainly words,that means I am very cool. If I can use them well, it establishes station. Slang also can fill in the blanks in an awkward situation, or a potentially awk-ward situation.. Hello, goodbye. . . if instead of having to think of what I'm going to say, I'm automatically gonna say 'What's up?' or 'Sup?' or 'What's takin chicken?' from the 1930's,--a greeting. Those social situations can be a little sticky and if I have some-thing that's almost a litany to use, it establishes station, it gets me through that situation and it tells me we're all in the same tribe.

MM
It occurs to me also, when you describe it this way, like when you compare it to a hairstyle or clothing, or things like that, but it's also --- my first thought is that well, it's a very powerful process then.

TD
Much more powerful than either hair or clothes, because you can dress the part and look the part, but if you can't talk it, forget it. And it seems that we are, as a species, we are---well, we let it happen-we are wired for slang. Every generation that comes along. There's almost an imperative to create language. An example would be slang words over the 20th century for a marijuana cigarette. In the 20's it was called a twist; perfectly good word. A great slang word and figured in from the twisting of the papers. In the 30's that turned into a reefer. Perfectly good word. Then another generation comes along and thinks it's the first generation ever to smoke marijuana and they'll call it a joint; then somebody else, the next generation will call it a dubie, and then they'll call it a blunt or a jay, or whatever. There really is an imperative within us as a species to be inventive with language. It really comes from the core of who we are.

MM
Would you say also that, like teenagers who come from a really nice home where people loved them, there's an imperative to rebel, which helps define them; and thet's what you're saying?

TD
Yes, right. It may be, there're different degrees of subversion within slang and that's generational and based on demographics. But it always, since 1920's at least, the first generation that really saw itself as "the younger generation" ---post WWI, the decade of the flapper. At least since then, every generation has had it's own slang, from the nicest, in the nicest of places, from the nicest of homes. It serves a function of establishing us as, this is who we are. We are young people now and these are the words that we use.

MM
Here's another sort of general question: why -I mean I know you love slang ---why is it such a vibrant and alive thing? It's so much, you know, if somebody sort of gives a rhetorical speech, even a politician, you can go "ohhh uhnnn." But if you hear slang or you hear someone who's speaking it, you're ears perk up.

TD
Slang well spoken. I think that with conventional, standard English, there are a couple of exceptions to it ---great religious oratory, especially Black preachers. Without using slang can have the real rhythm of slang and the rhythm of the streets there. But slang by definition, because it's expressing defiance on some level, subversion on some level, assertion or identity. . . it rings. And it can be awfully boring, if misused, like profanity can be very boring, but you listen to Red Foxx or Richard Pryor or George Carlin with profanity and it's poetry, it's Lord Bryon. It's beautiful. It has something to do with the skill of the orator. But it comes from a really interesting place --on some level, of defiance and assertion.

MM
This isn't even on my list, but when you say those kind of things I - my first impulse is to say, it almost feels like a democratic kind of process.

TD
Well, Carl Sandburg has a wonderful quote, "slang is the language we use when we roll up our sleeves and go to work." Yeah. Whitman loved slang. Whitman wrote with great passion for exactly that reason, that it is a very democratic-small d - dynamic. It doesn't really-it crosses class, it can cross race. Generally won't cross age groups that much, but it's usual age group specific.

MM
So that's a delineator then?

TD
Often. Although there are words that prove the rule. The word 'cool' would be the greatest exception of the 20th century. Coined in its current sense in '47 or '48, and never lost, never missed a beat. Every generation that's come since '47-'48 have loved the word, and still do.

MM
Now is it, does slang stay with - do baby boomers retain the same thesaurus or syllabus or whatever you call it. . . .

TD
The idiom? Generally the language we use in our wonder years, as we come of age, is the slang that we will carry with us. Now there's a phenomenon going on now of, catch phrases wouldn't be the perfect word for it, but little sound bites or sound clips from Seinfield or Friends or "yada, yada, yada, you go girl." Those -"show me the money" - they work their way into conversation at a really annoying level. But I think generally language we acquire, the slang we acquire as young people, is our idiom. You know you sound pretty goofy when you're using somebody else's slang when we, the boomers, are tying to use language of hip hop. It doesn't sound good. It's not ours. You know, ours was ours. We can sound very dated; you know certain words - I don't know anybody of our generation that will admit to having used the word 'groovy' but we did. And that's a word that sounds very funny to the younger generation. They'll actually use it to mock us. Some words sound dated but we still use them.

MM
Yeah. When we interviewed Studs Turkel two weeks ago, three weeks ago, he said that one of the things that was impressive when Lord Buckley would come on stage - he played in this place called the Gate of Horns, very hip place. He'd play late at night, you know, one, two, three in the morning, and all the hipsters would be there. Heavy-lidded with their girlfriends, also heavy-lidded on something or other, looking so cool; and this old man would come on stage and they'd say 'Who is this knucklehead?' you know. And within five minutes or so, they had, they'd drop their mouths open and their eyes were wide and they were, he said, they were wowed by this old timer who was so much hipper than they were, and somehow or other got it across to them.

TD
The language that Lord Buckley used was the language of his youth though. I think he picked up a little from bebop, but the language that he carried through the '50's was language of the '20's, was jazz musicians of the '20's. So that sort of goes back to your earlier question of the idiom, do we carry the idiom from our youth with us.

One of the reasons that Lord Buckley was so authentic was that he used the language of his youth, of the 1920's. He picked up a little bit of bebop, from the '40's, but really the language that he was bringing to people in nightclubs in the '40's and '50's was language of the 1920's. New Orleans, then it made its way up to Chicago with Black jazz musicians. And that is the bedrock of 20th century slang, is right there: Black jazz musicians, New Orleans, eventually Chicago. And he had it. He had it from the source and he was going to out-hip anybody because he was the real thing; he had been there; he had heard it; that's how it came into him.

MM
Let's see, well this is maybe a question that - In one of Buckley's introductions, I think an introductions to the Hip Gan about Ghandi, he refers to the language, what he calls the American Beauty Negro which was his name for the slang the he incorporated into his routines. And he said that, you know, that this goes way back to the plantations, to when slaves were working and didn't want the master to become hip to what they were saying. And I was just wondering if you, do you see the antecedents to his language going way, way back?

TD
Probably. The trouble is that when you get to the 19th century, there's not very good records of the way slaves and former slaves actual spoke. There's a lot of dialect fiction from the 1870's, 1880's, and how good an ear Joel Chandler Harris had when he was writing the Brer Rabbit, you know, it's anybody's guess. But I think that it is almost certainly so. You had oppression of a scale never before or since seen in America with slavery, and oppression is a wonderful breeding ground for slang, as a gesture of resistance towards the oppression. The slang of oppressed people, be they African Americans, be they immigrants, be they gays, be they prisoners, is the most vibrant slang. So you had that---you also had different languages melting, West African generally, but a lot of different languages melting. And the word "hip" very likely came from a West African language. A word in the Wolof language "hipi" meaning eyes open; most likely a word that showed up in the slaves from Senegal in South Carolina in the 1800's, though it doesn't show up in print until the 20th century. But I think that that certainly carried through. I mean jazz musicians did not create it. And jazz musicians had an ear for life, and for language, and - you know, there is no way to know for sure what slaves or former slaves sounded like when they spoke, because there's no recordings, or very few recordings. We rely on dialect fiction written by White men trying to catch it. We really don't know, but if you do a retrograde analysis, it's almost certain is true. That the jazz musicians in New Orleans in 1910 didn't make up this language. They heard it. And where did they hear it? They heard it in the fields, they heard it in the South, in the cities. They had an ear.

There is no way to know for certain how slaves or former slaves spoke. Very few recordings of former slaves, obviously no recordings of slaves. Most of the way that they spoke was recorded in dialect fiction of the 19th century, written by white men visiting the South or living in the South, and how good their ear was, who knows. But Buckley is almost certainly right about that, because the jazz musicians of New Orleans [1910-1915] didn't create a language, they were lightening rods for it. They were taking it and passing it through. They had an ear for music, they had an ear for language---just passing it through.

MM
Wonderful. The other idea that occurred to me with the idea of the coded language---the plantation codes---was that the hipsters were in a sense, not nearly in the same need for secrecy, but that they, because their world dealt with drugs, because their world dealt with maybe things on the edge of the law, that there was some need for secrecy there, too.

TD
There was, but I think that, with a few exceptions, slang doesn't last very long that way. Prisoners have language but prison guards figure it out pretty quickly. Criminals have language; cops figure it out pretty quickly. Cops and prison guards can't use it, but they can understand it.

But with hipsters I think that it was more, not so much a wall against the man understanding what they were saying, but more of a cultural wall, saying this is us, this is our ghetto, this is our shtetl, here. This is who we are; this binds us, our music binds us, our poetry binds us. The way we live, the paintings we like bind us and our language binds us. And it certainly was not particularly accessible to the outside world. By the time you hit the '60's that's different, because it was a very inclusive movement in the '60's and a very broad and general and boring slang. Where you could ---very vague, anything could mean anything. But in the '50's, late '40's and '50's, I think that it was really more of a protection. Not so much from discovery. Oh that was an element, but more to bind the group.

MM
Most of the language that Buckley used came from the '20's you say?

TD
Yes. You can see the direct ties into the '20's. The '20's it was just getting out of the black musicians to the white musicians. And I think that Buckley probably picked it up even before most white musicians did, in the mid-'30's when swing hit and the big bands got put together, and the white bands had the great success. The language by then had moved to the white jazz musicians, but Buckley already had it. And what he carried forward into the '40's and '50's was the pure thing. It was the pure thing. He did pick up some words from the bebop movement of the late '40's, but I think that he really, his idiom was the '20's.

MM
Interesting. Did he take liberties with those languages? Did he alter things or change the meaning of things?

TD
Part of hip semantics were things he made up himself. Clearly. But I don't think that jazz musicians in New Orleans in the 1920's referred to Abraham Lincoln as Lanky Linc, was that it? But he took the rhythm and the meter and the pacing and would adapt it. I don't think he took liberties, he just took it further. But at the core was a vocabulary that came from them and the pacing, the rhythm, the music of the language was pure.

MM
How about in entertainment, did he have antecedents? I mean were there, are there people that came before---I mean there was Cool MoDee, there was Ron DMC, before -

TD
No. He had no, and I don't think he's really had successors either. Before Lord Buckley there was dialect humor. Ah, the Marx brothers started off as dialect humor, either German or Yiddish; they could do both, with an Italian thrown in: Chico Marx. And Harpo originally was an Irish character. But there was dialect humor in Vaudeville. But that's not what he was. I mean he had some of that grounding, he took that language and he wasn't making fun of it. He was just running with it and letting it carry him, and that's very different than anything that came before him. I mean there have been great voices in the 20th century; other than Lord Buckley, but not the same. Lenny Bruce was a great voice; Richard Pryor is a great voice; George Carlin is a great voice; preachers have been great voices, there have been ----Phil Rizzuto maybe a great voice, you know. Baseball announcers have great voices, but nothing like Lord Buckley.

MM
What about Cab Calloway?

TD
Cab Calloway, in the 1930's and 1940's actually published little handouts, small dictionaries, beginning in 1939. The Cab Calloway catalog and it ended in 1944 with the hipsters dictionary, where you wrote away to Cab Calloway at United Artists and they sent you these little dictionaries. He sang songs where he preached jive. He was authentic but there was a touch of self-promotion there, a little too self-conscious about the language. Ah, Lord Buckley didn't teach it, he lived it. He didn't reduce it to a dictionary, he spoke it and you absorbed it. But Cab Calloway certainly is a very important conduit for slang in the 1930's and early 1940's, but I think in terms of lasting impact, he's nothing compared to what Lord Buckley did.

MM
How about, could you cite the people that you think that Buckley has, I mean you can see him in their work?

TD
Well, one of the great mysteries is how slang moves over time, over geography and over time. And we know that words were used in 1930's, fell into - got discarded for awhile then showed up in the 1960's again. Groovy would be a wonderful example of a word that was very big in the 1940's, first popped up in '37 or '38, bug in the '40's, by 1946 was dead. Then shot up twenty years later.

One of the great mysteries is how does that happen, that a word comes, goes, then comes back. And I think that there are missing land bridges along the way. I think that Lord Buckley is the land bridge, the missing link, of the 20th century; because if you listen to the AM disc jockeys of the 1960's, who were the voice of the young people in that decade, more so than the FM underground. The AM disc jockeys, late '50's -early '60's, they were heavily inspired, directly and indirectly, by Lord Buckley. Several months before he died, Wolfman Jack gave an interview about Lord Buckley, saying that when he was 18 years old he walked into a record store in Brooklyn and Lord Buckley was playing. He said "That's it-that's what I want to be." Bought the records, listened to them, tried to get the cadence, tried to get the pacing, tried to get the pitch, tried to get the vocabulary. In fact thought that Lord Buckley had made up the language, and in fact he was just a convert for it. And Wolfman Jack laid it all on Lord Buckley. And I suspect that you would find that in many of the disc jockeys of the 1960's, and that brought language through for another twenty or thirty years. Then hip hop comes along, and discovers a language. And what language is discovering is the language of Lord Buckley. The language of Cab Calloway, the language of Louie Armstrong. They're using the vocabulary that would be largely understood by Lord Buckley, by Cab Calloway, by Louie Armstrong. Without knowing it. But I think that you can honestly say that Lord Buckley took language from the '20's to the '80's. He was the land bridge that kept it going through a tremendous influence on disc jockeys in the '60's.

MM
You have a real glean in your eye when you talk about that.

TD
Well, we're talking about the AM disc jockeys in the 1960's and that's a happy spot thinking of that language. It's something that can't be quantified, can't be measured. What he did with the language, but he influenced the people, influenced millions. And millions of people didn't listen to him in the 1960's but they listened to people who had been schooled by the Lord. And he gave us the speech.

MM
Go ye forth.

TD
Yes.

MM
You know I've covered my questions. Anything, observations that you'd like to make, or things that I may have missed?

TD
Actually, when I was talking about the '60's I didn't mention this and see if you want to cut it in or not. You know when you're talking about the 1960's, we know about Wolfman Jack and the influence Lord Buckley had on him. I grew up in Philadelphia where the voice of AM radio in the 1960's was Hy Lit. Like most of the disc jockeys of the 2nd generation of rock and roll, he was white, but spoke with the spirit and cadence of the urban black experience. With riffs of "enough said, Ted", "time to split the scene and leave it clean", that type of riff. And in 1968 he published a dictionary, "the Hit Lit Unbelievable Dictionary of Hip Words for Groovy People", and in it, peppered throughout it, you will find words and phrases that could come from nowhere but Lord Buckley: 'Hipsters, flipsters, finger poppin daddies, knock me your lobes.' No one else in the world ever said that; that was Lord Buckley stringing together the language. And people listened to him, mimicked him, grew and carried it on.

MM
It's quite amazing. I know one more question, which is: every ethnic group, every class of people, other ways you could subdivide the whole culture, have come up with slang, haven't they? There's Mexican slang, Finnish slang, there's one legged Ethiopian slang, I mean there's probably one for everybody, right? Why is it that black slang is such a force? I mean if I was to say that if there was a slang in the United States that is really powerful and really influential, horizontally, over lots of things, it seems to be Black slang. I mean what's that all about?

TD
Yes. Fashion and music. Ah, $64,000 question. But that has been the case since 1937. Since 1937, a slightly arbitrary date, but since the 1930's black slang, black English vernacular, African American English vernacular has defined to an amazing degree, American slang, especially American youth slang. In the '30's it was jive that carried through the '40's. In the 1950's slang got a little flat in mainstream American, as rock and roll was coming out, but within hipsters and beats it was all jive. They were using black slang to find the 1960's. It was all black slang. 1970's there were a few other influences, but since hip hop hit in the early '80's, everywhere is Black slang.

MM
Why? I mean why is this?

TD
It's cool. Why is it cool? Well, because oppression creates the most vibrant slang and who is more oppressed than Blacks? The Native Americans are, but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of slang coming out of reservations. But oppression is a great, great catalyst for slang. Slang becomes not only the tie that binds us, but becomes a gesture of resistance. A way of striking back. And mainstream America admires that defiance and that resistance, co-ops it and then you'll see the language moving further an further out sometimes to get away from that co-opting. But I think it's because oppression is a great catalyst for slang, for language.

MM
Would you say then that a subtext for Buckley's message or his presentation was that , I mean that he was saying that this is in a sense, . .I don't know how to articulate this. Is maybe an underlying message in Buckley's - I mean he chooses to use his language specifically - is a subtext in that this is what you're talking about.

TD
Yes. Who he was speaking to. There are also, there are outcasts and outlaws and there are voluntary, there are people who are voluntarily oppressed: bohemians and beats, certainly. When you walk away from society and make your own rules and live your own life, that's who is listening to them. People who are oppressed, not in the same sense that blacks are oppressed, but certainly frowned upon and disparaged by the dominant culture; and the language of the truly oppressed rings true to those who are voluntarily exposing themselves to oppression, and who are - their eyes are open and their ears are open because of the choices they have made in their lives to hearing and seeing things that they wouldn't see if they'd stayed safely ensconced in dominant culture.. Pretty philosophical, huh?

MM
Yea, yea. Roger, question?

RM
I just wondered if Lord Buckley had anything that would be remembered 20 years from now? - like - that will continue to grow and gain. . .

TD
I think so, because anyone who hears him is changed. They've heard a voice. It's one of the great, great voices of the 20th century. And not just a speaker, but a voice. And what an odd vehicle for - what an odd conduit, you know, a - most people think he's an Englishman! But, you know, he's an odd carrier, but a perfect one, at that.

MM
Well, Tom, thank you.