To Go Juking Around

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, this is Alan from Columbia. Hi, Alan. Columbia where?

Columbia, South Carolina. Well, what can we do for you, Alan? So I called in. When I was younger, my grandparents, they actually lived next door to me. They would stop by or way before cell phones, so there was no texting, stop by and they’d like anybody want to go juking. And all of us in my family, grandkids, would jump at that. For us, juking just kind of meant we want to go. We’re not real purpose on what we’re doing. We’re going to kind of shop, kind of look. We’ll always probably get something to eat, but we’re just going to hang out juking around. And so it’s become a normal thing that I say now to my kids and in my family, but I realize that we might be the only family that says that because I’ve said it to other people before and they looked at me like I was crazy.

Oh, I love it. It’s such a connection to history here. Wait, wait until you hear this, Alan. Juking. So for your family, it was just kind of about running errands, going hither and yon, maybe aimlessly, but still kind of spending time together.

That’s right.

Yeah. But it connects to the same juke that is in jukebox. It’s the same, it’s got the same root. And they both go back to juke, often spelled J-U-K-E or J-O-O-K, which was kind of a, well, the writer Zora Neale Hurston described a juke as a place where they sing, dance, gamble, love, and compose blues songs, incidentally. And she wrote that in 1935.

And so a juke is kind of like an all-in-one bar, dance joint, food joint, grill, roadhouse kind of situation. Just a place to go to drink and dance and eat and have fun.

And even older than that, there’s a really strong chance that this word juke comes from West African languages because originally it was an African-American term. And so there are words related to living wickedly in a couple of West African languages that are very similar to juke in their pronunciation. And they may have come over with the enslaved people and hung about and were used. This term was particularly relevant in Georgia and Florida. And actually, Zora Neale Hurston’s description comes from a place, a juke in North Florida. And you will find that that kind of was the jumping off point from where it left black American culture to white American culture and entered the mainstream.

And so people write about juking. Tennessee Williams, in 1957, in his play Orpheus Descending, he wrote, I want you to go juking with me. That’s writing and stopping to drink and dance and writing some more and stopping to drink and dance again. And after a while, you just stop to drink. And sometimes you stop drinking, go to a tourist cabin with your girl. But anyway, so you’ve got kind of a more, how shall we put this, a less wicked version of juking going on in your family.

A little tamer.

A little tamer.

But it’s got the tradition there.

Oh, that’s amazing.

Yeah, I figured it, I’d only heard jukebox before, so I figured they were probably some type of connection.

Yeah.

Well, I appreciate that.

Yeah, thank you so much for the question, Alan.

Absolutely.

Yep, it’s just a good family term. It’s nice to kind of know where it’s come from.

Yep, it’s fantastic. Keep using it. Spread it to the next generation.

Most definitely. My kids know what it means.

Very good.

Excellent.

Take care now, Alan.

All right, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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