Jerry in Lutherville, Maryland, was reading a 2018 biography of Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm, that mentions a group in the 1930s that were described as hipsters or hepsters. In the 1930s, the word hipster applied to a jazz aficionado who was in the know about all the cool places to be. Years later, the term hipster came to apply to others who were similarly in the know about such cutting-edge culture as as the best beer, the coolest clothes, the best podcasts. The term hippie, which denotes “a member of the counterculture,” probably derives from this word, as do hip and hep, which describe someone “in the know.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A 1930s Hipster”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, Martha. This is Jerry from Lutherville, Maryland, which is part of the metropolitan area around Baltimore.
Hi, Jerry. Welcome to the show. What’s up?
Well, I have a question. I have a two-part question.
The first part is about the word hipster. I associate the word hipster with maybe the last 10 or 15 years in our culture. I always have a visual image of a guy with trim little hats, beards, skinny pants that drink exotic coffee. They also have an attitude that they know something that we should also know, but they are not going to tell us.
Before hipsters, I thought there were beatniks, which, you know, wore different hats. Then I read a recent and great biography about Nelson Algren, the author who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. In the chapters covering the late 30s of Algren’s career, he was briefly involved with a man called Lawrence Fallon, who led a group called the Fallonites.
Fallon described his group as hipsters in artistic revolt against the establishment. I was very surprised to see the word hipster being used in the late 30s.
And then the second part of the question came up, which is, what is hip all about? How do we associate a joint near our center of gravity with being culturally aware?
So tell us more about the Fallonites. What kind of hipsters were they?
They were actually pretty violent and drunkards. They were part of the sort of proletarian writers that were around in the 30s. They were actually pretty uneducated. Mostly they got together after complaining about their jobs or not having jobs through the 30s. And they did a lot of drinking and they got into a lot of fights.
When was that book written?
This book was written in 2018. It’s a great book. It’s written by a guy called Colin Asher.
Colin Asher. So is Asher using the word hipster or is Algren using the word hipster?
The guy Fallon was quoted by Asher as using the word hipster.
All right. So it isn’t a surprise to find the word hipster in the 1930s. What surprises me is that there isn’t more in your description about jazz, because a hipster in the 1930s was really an aficionado of jazz. It was about African-American nightclubs and swinging and hepcats and people in the know who knew where to go for the good time and who knew what musicians could really send you and really knock you out. Who knew about the best smoky rooms where to get the good vibes, that sort of thing.
So you can find hipsters being talked about as early as 1930s, mid-1930s for sure. And I’m sure it’s older than that, but it was very African-American. Shows up in New York newspapers and small African-American newspapers and descriptions of nightclubs and descriptions of nights out and music and reviews of touring musicians and bands and that sort of thing. And it kind of moved on from there, and even still being used in the 1960s, and it is where eventually we get the word hippie probably does eventually come from hipster later.
And then it kind of fell out of use in the 1970s and 1980s until it was resurrected in the early 2000s, maybe a little later in the 2000s, to refer to somebody else who, you said something earlier that I want to applaud, which is somebody who seems to know something that nobody else does, because that was the thing about the hipsters. They seem to have this special knowledge about jazz.
There was a description I saw that I want to share with you from 1940. Describing a hipster, it says, everybody doesn’t study music, but through some unknown intuition, the younger set has become musically smart, and whether it understands the technical points or not, knows it’s good. And I think that’s kind of what you were saying about the modern hipster as well.
They seem to know a thing about fashion and hairstyles and beer and the right whiskey and axe throwing and fixie bicycles and that sort of stuff and quality denim and good flannel and books and literature and the correct podcasts and just this whole set of things that the rest of us just are behind on, right?
Yeah. The word hip comes from jazz. I imagine that that would have something to do with dancing or rhythm. So the word hip often spelled, by the way, hipster was often spelled hepster, H-E-P, and hip, H-I-P, was often spelled H-E-P. So there’s some confusion about the origin of it, but it is generally believed by word historians that it was originally a pun about somebody who could really swing their hips and move. And a lot of the earlier mentions of hipsters do refer to great jazz dancers, people who could just swing their hips in a beautiful way to the rhythms of the music. So yeah, we do believe it’s directly related hips.
Now there is a very false myth that I want to debunk here that has to do with the Wolof language and that it came from the Wolof language of Africa. It does not come from the Wolof language of Africa. That is incorrect. So just to debunk that and stop that email cold.
Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense.
So is there a connection to beatniks also for music?
Yeah, beatniks, yeah. So the nick suffix comes from the Eastern European culture, probably through Yiddish into English, and nick means a person who is a aficionado of something, so it’s an aficionado of the beat, and so it’s a beat poet, so beat poetry.
Yeah, that’s very cool. Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.
Okay, thank you.
Bye.
Thanks, Jerry.
Bye.
