Jive talk

Jive talk, also known as Harlem jive or simply Jive, the argot of jazz, jazz jargon, vernacular of the jazz world, slang of jazz, and parlance of hip^[1] is an African-American Vernacular English slang or vocabulary that developed in Harlem, where "jive" (jazz) was played and was adopted more widely in African-American society, peaking in the 1940s.

In 1938, jazz bandleader and singer Cab Calloway published the first dictionary by an African-American, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which became the official jive language reference book of the New York Public Library.^[2][3] In 1939, Calloway published an accompanying book titled Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau, which instructed readers how to apply the words and phrases from the dictionary. He released several editions until 1944, the last being The New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive.^[4] Poet Lemn Sissay observed that "Cab Calloway was taking ownership of language for a people who, just a few generations before, had their own languages taken away."^[5]

H. L. Mencken in The American Language however defined jive as "an amalgam of Negro-slang from Harlem and the argots of drug addicts and the pettier sort of criminals, with occasional additions from the Broadway gossip columns and the high school campus".^[6]

Dan Burley's book Original Handbook of Harlem Jive was compiled and published in 1944 at the suggestion of Harlem poet Langston Hughes.^[7]

In 1953, Albert Lavada Durst published the Jives of Dr. Hep Cat,^[8] a collection of rhymes compiled when he was at KVET in Austin, where he did late night R&B. Besides referring to the music scene, much of the argot related to drugs, such as marijuana. Mezz Mezzrow gave this sample:

Second Cat: Hey Mezzie, lay some of that hard-cuttin' mess on me. I'm short of a deuce of blips but I'll straighten you later.
Mezzrow: Righteous, gizz, you're a poor boy but a good boy—now don't come up crummy.
Second Cat: Never no crummy, chummy. I'm gonna lay a drape under the trey of knockers for Tenth Street and I'll be on the scene, wearin' the green.^[9]