Jody calls are military cadences based on the exploits of Jody, an imaginary character blamed for all the things that might go wrong back home while a soldier is deployed, such as losing one’s girlfriend or car. In a master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts graduate student Travis Salley argues that such call-and-response marching songs are largely rooted in the African-American musical tradition. The origin of the Jody character himself is unclear although slang expert David Maurer posited a connection with a character in California prison slang. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Who is “Jody” in Jody Calls?”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Dana Ayer from Oceanside, California.
Hi, Dana. Welcome to the show.
What can we do for you?
I’m interested in the word Jody.
I’m a sociologist, but I used to be in the Army, in the infantry.
And the word Jody is used in two ways.
It’s used as a label for what otherwise might be called marching songs or cadences.
And then it’s also used to refer to a type of individual, the kind of guy who, when you’re off in the Army, steals your girlfriend back in the day when I was in.
Probably nowadays it could also be anybody of any gender who steals your significant other when you’re away in service.
I’m just curious about the history of the word.
Right. So we’re going to talk about the word and not the cadences themselves, really.
Although we should mention the Jody calls, these are the marching songs.
These are the chants.
Sometimes they’re funny.
Sometimes they’re dark.
Sometimes they’re naughty.
But these are what the soldiers or the different military folks use in order to keep time as they’re marching, running, working out, that sort of thing.
But we’re talking about the term, not the activity, right?
Right.
It’s pretty interesting.
Some work has been done on this.
First, I need to mention a thesis that was done by Travis Sally at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2015.
It’s called Sound Off, An Introduction to the Study of American Military Marching Cadences.
And so this is something that I’d only recently seen that I hadn’t noticed the last time Martha and I had talked about this on the show, which was 11 years ago because it hadn’t been published.
But there’s two pieces to this that I want to point out.
Jody is a corruption of Joe the Grinder.
And it comes from African-American folk tradition.
I figured that.
Yeah.
And so Grinder here is a sexual reference.
It refers to a guy who is home making love to your gal.
And it’s not just from the military tradition, but it’s from the prison tradition.
So this is from the folklore of prisoners as well.
And sometimes he’s listed as Joe, J-O-E, space D as a middle initial grinder, or Joe, J-O-E, the grinder as somebody who grinds.
And obviously you can see how immediately that would turn into Jody as a name, J-O-D-Y.
And it pops up in 1940s, but earlier than that, in the 1939, in a song, in a blues song.
And so we have it listed that early.
And there’s some evidence that it pops up in the song of men working in the fields in the South.
Black men working in the fields in the South.
Because it’s all the rhythm thing.
That’s right.
So it comes very distinctly from the tradition of folk songs sung in the fields in the South as you’re working.
So that’s the best evidence that we have.
Now, David Moorer has some evidence, which seems kind of iffy.
I love his work.
He did all kinds of work on mob sling, for example.
A lot of the stuff even now that you see in mob movies comes from David Moorer’s work of literally subscribing to newsletters from mobsters.
They had their own newsletters.
And then publishing that.
So this is the kind of guy that he was.
So even now, a lot of mobster slang in movies.
This is from David Moorer.
But in this particular thing, I’m not sure.
But he believes that it came from a character known as Oolong the Chinese Grind Boy, or Chinese Joe the Grinder,
Which is this fictional Chinese character who was in the folklore of prisons in California,
Who was supposedly at home romancing your gal while you were in prison.
However, he claims it was only orally transmitted,
And it appears in no written literature except in Morrer’s work.
So nobody’s written it down except for Morrer,
And he says he heard it from prisoners.
So we have to take his word for it.
Yeah.
So that makes sense.
It comes out of that kind of common experience that both prisoners and soldiers have of being away from home and not being able to be with loved ones and significant others and everything like that.
And then once you get that rhythmic chanting thing, which is a lot of times probably about that, then it just kind of – the thing referring to Jody becomes known as Jody.
That’s right.
That’s right.
Yeah.
So a lot of the songs were about Jody.
So anyway, just to be clear here for people who are already writing their angry emails,
We’re talking about the word, not the chant.
They have different histories.
The word for the chant met up with the chants after both already existed
And became applied to the chants after their histories were already in play.
Right.
So they don’t coexist.
They meet up somewhere along the way.
Do we know when the marching cadence usage starts off?
The story that’s usually told is Willie Duckworth, a black private station at Fort Slocum, New York, was overheard using it in 1944 by Colonel Bernard Lentz.
And then he spread it throughout the rest of the military.
However, it was already – chants were already being used by black soldiers throughout the military when Duckworth was overheard.
And we have evidence that black soldiers were using chants very similar to the modern cadences in World War I.
There is a song called Take Me Now, which was used by black soldiers in World War I, which is a corruption of a song called Mademoiselle from Armantier, which is an English song based on a French song.
Anyway, so by World War I, these chants were already being used by black soldiers.
Well, that makes sense because a lot of – because of the racial discrimination, blackers were used in quartermaster units and pioneer units that were doing physical labor that wasn’t that different from what they had to do on chain gangs or in work and things like that.
So they kind of bring that tradition in, and then it goes into the larger army.
That’s fascinating.
Yeah, and that’s a super short version. But yeah, like I said, the master’s thesis I mentioned by Travis Salley from 2015 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called Sound Off, An Introduction to the Study of American Military Marching Cadences, really introduces a lot of new information that kind of upsets the Duckworth story that has kind of become this pat story that’s widespread throughout the military.
And a lot of military people will not – well, they won’t stand for the Duckworth story being supplanted.
They just insist the Duckworth story is true, partly because they have pride in it being an African-American origin story.
But the thing is, it’s still an African-American origin story.
It still comes from African-Americans.
It’s just in World War I, not World War II.
Right.
No, and I mean it is – it’s one of those things.
The talent of being able to call a Jody is something that is really appreciated in the military, right?
It’s particularly for for NCOs and for soldiers.
It’s it’s a way of distinguishing yourself. Right.
So it’s kind of it’s kind of related to that same tradition that that that connects up with rap.
Right. Because it’s an oral thing.
Dana, I’m getting the I’m getting the roundup lasso here.
And apparently you and I need to get a room.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
That was that was that was brilliant.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you very much for calling.
Cheers.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye, Dana.
Bye-bye.
It’s such an interesting topic, though.
You know, this punches all my buttons.
I can see that.
This is everything that I do and love.
This is common myths overturned.
This is sociology.
This is anthropology.
This is linguistics.
This is folk history.
This is folklore.
Yeah.
This is people getting credit.
That’s where credit is due.
This is everything right here in this story.
In this one word.
There’s American culture, several different kinds of American culture, all in this one word, Jodi.
Yep.
Right?
And it’s also, there’s something, I love the coarseness of it.
It’s about sex.
Well, speaking of course, when I was a young newspaper reporter, I was assigned to follow a recruit through Fort Knox, through basic training.
And so I would run along with the soldiers in the morning.
And those Jodi cadences, I got to tell you, were filthy.
They were filthy. And sometimes, you know, they would look over and see this woman running with them and change the words.
But when they weren’t paying attention and I was listening, my goodness.
Yeah, I have a couple collections of those.
I understand now that there is formally, at least officially, a tradition to remove the homophobic, racist, sexist, and so forth chants from the official ones that they do.
Although they’re still there, but there’s a movement to remove them.
No kidding.
Well, they were certainly creative and certainly entertaining, the ones I heard.
But wow.
Yeah.
