Hokum

Hokum is a particular song type of American blues music—a humorous song which uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make sexual innuendos. This trope goes back to early blues recordings and is used from time to time in modern American blues and blues rock.

An example of hokum lyrics is this sample from "Meat Balls", by Lil Johnson, recorded about 1937:

Got out late last night, in the rain and sleet
Tryin' to find a butcher that grind my meat
Yes I'm lookin' for a butcher
He must be long and tall
If he want to grind my meat
'Cause I'm wild about my meat balls.

In a general sense, hokum was a style of comedic farce, spoken, sung and spoofed, while masked in both risqué innuendo and "tomfoolery". It is one of the many legacies and techniques of 19th century blackface minstrelsy. Like so many other elements of the minstrel show, stereotypes of racial, ethnic and sexual fools were the stock in trade of hokum. Hokum was stagecraft, gags and routines for embracing farce. It was so broad that there was no mistaking its ludicrousness. Hokum also encompassed dances like the cakewalk and the buzzard lope in skits that unfolded through spoken narrative and song. W. C. Handy, himself a veteran of a minstrel troupe, remarked that, "Our hokum hooked 'em," meaning that the low comedy snared an audience that stuck around to hear the music. In the days before ragtime, jazz and even hillbilly music and the blues were clearly identified as specific genres, hokum was a component of all-around performing, entertainment that seamlessly mixed monologues, dialogues, dances, music, and humor.

The minstrel show began in Northern cities, primarily in New York's Five Points section, in the 1830s. Minstrelsy was a mélange of Scottish and Irish folk music forms fused with African rhythms and dance. It is difficult to tease out those strands, considering the mixed motives of the showmen who presented the minstrel show and the mixed audience who patronized it. It is said that T. D. Rice invented the buck and wing and the Jim Crow, by imitating the stumbling of an old lame black man, and added numerous steps and shuffles after watching an African American boy improvise a version of an Irish jig in a back alley. Soon, the confusion became so complete that almost any minstrel tune played upon the banjo became known as a jig, regardless of time signatures or lyric accompaniment. Banjo player Joe Ayers told old-time musician and writer Bob Carlin that “the origins of playing Irish jigs on the banjo probably go back to minstrel banjoist Joel Walker Sweeney’s appearances in Dublin in 1844.” Genuine appreciation among white observers for music and dance so clearly (if not purely) African in origin existed then and now. Charles Dickens praised the intricacies of the "lively hero" (believed to be Master Juba) whom he watched in a New York performance in 1842. Many songs that originated in minstrelsy (such as "Camptown Races" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny") are now considered American classics. While it was originally performed by whites costumed in either fanciful "dandy" gear or pauper's rags with their faces covered in burnt cork, or blackface, the minstrels were joined in the 1850s by African-American performers. The dancer William Henry Lane (better known by his stage name Master Juba) and the fiddling dwarf Thomas Dilward were also "corking up" and performing alongside whites in such touring ensembles as the Virginia Minstrels, the Ethiopian Serenaders, and Christy's Minstrels. Minstrel troupes composed entirely of African Americans appeared in the same decade. After the American Civil War, traveling productions like Callender's Georgia Minstrels would rival the white ensembles in fame, while falling short of them in earnings. The difficulties racism presented to African-American entrepreneurs during postwar Reconstruction era made touring a dangerous and precarious livelihood.

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