Great Googly Moogly

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, who’s this?

My name’s Lisa Coleman. I’m calling from Chesapeake, Virginia.

Hi, Lisa.

What can I do for you?

I’m so interested in your show all the time, and I was thinking about my father and this crazy term that he used to use all the time. John Coleman, who’s known by the chief down in Hatteras Harbor Marina, and he used to say, good googly moogly, all the time.

Really?

I wonder, what is that? Is it a fishing term? What was going on when he was saying that? What was happening around him?

Oh, well, he would always say it if things were good, like it was a big fish, good googly moogly, or it was a big sail at the marina, like good googly moogly, a term of excitement, I guess. So I don’t know. I just had me wondering where on earth a term like that would have come from the last time I listened to you all.

Yeah, it’s an expression of surprise or delight or emphasis sometimes. There are a lot of different forms of this because it’s mostly passed orally. It’s the kind of thing you hear and then you repeat because emphatic expressions often behave that way. And that particular form of it, Great Googly Moogly, we see for sure has affixed itself into American English by 1960. And there’s some history of it in the 1950s.

But before it was Googly Moogly, we’ll just leave off the Great for a second, it was Googa Mooga. And the Guga Mooga goes back to a whole bunch of R&B and bluesy songs that came out on a wide variety of records in the 1950s. So there was a, for example, in 1953, there was a B-side by a group called The Magic Tones. And the title of the song was Good Guga Mooga. And it is super interesting.

And then not long after 1956, there was a song called Stranded in the Jungle. Now, three versions of that song were recorded in that year, but one of the versions of the song, they inserted the phrase, great googly moogly. So the song is about somebody waking up and realizing that he’s in a pot and being cooked alive by cannibals who are going to eat him. So he says when he realizes, great googly moogly, I got to get out of here, and he gets out of there.

If we go back a little further than these songs, though, there are three black DJs who were on the air around the country who are usually given credit, depending on who favors them, for popularizing the term. And we don’t know with certainty who coined it, but they are Maurice Hot Rod Holbert, who was in Memphis and Baltimore. They were Jocko Henderson, who was in New York City. And Ramon Bruce, who started in Newark, New Jersey, and then went to San Francisco.

I think that Howard Holbert was probably the guy who used it. And so you can actually find examples of their on-air patter kind of repeated in a variety of industry newsletters from the era and industry magazine stuff. They had that whole – you’ve seen it in movies like where they recreate the 1950s. The last doggy guy is doing this and he’s like that. They were doing that. And this really kind of caught on and other people kind of, you know, nicked their lines or stole their gags and took their jokes and their catchphrases and moved it around the country.

Misty.

Right?

Well, he was a child of the 50s and born in 1940. So that was it.

Thank you so much for the discovery.

Yeah, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it. It’s always nice to have those linguistic heirlooms, huh?

Yes, it is.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.