Characters who like hot jazz

If I'm going to talk about hipsters, I think it's appropriate that I give the original ones a mention.

The first hipsters were all about jazz.

'For Characters who Don't Dig Jive Talk' - a glossary from the inside cover of Harry "the Hipster" Gibson's Boogie Woogie in Blue (image curtsey of hyzercreek)

It was the 40s. There was War going on in the whole world, for the second time. It ended in 1945. The men who came back had seen the world, and the women who'd stayed home had all been working jobs. The first real computers were being invented, and TV was still new. There were slinkies, and Tupperware, Fantasia, and high-waisted wide-legged long-coat zoot suits. There was racial division, and class division, and uncertainty.

At first, they called themselves "hepcats." "Hep" meant someone who was extremely knowledgeable about, and really rather fond of, jazz. It seems a jazz pianist - Harry "the Hipster" Gibson - is credited with the shift of hepcat to hipster, simply by inclusion in a short glossary that supplemented his 1944 album Boogie Woogie in Blue.*

Hipsters were Characters Who Like Hot Jazz.

1940s hipsters styled their lives around jazz culture. Jazz was changing. It was diverging from the path of popular music, becoming more exploratory and edgy, and sometimes becoming (I'll never take the name seriously) bebob. The image of the culture and music was increasingly alternative, converging with black culture, and certainly not for the higher classes. It - for hipsters - was dress, drugs, jargon, sarcasm, spontaneity, self-imposed destitution, and sex.

So was Harry "the Hipster" Gibson indeed The Hipster? The original? Who knows. ** He certainly knew hot jazz, and had the dancers to prove it.

They say his music was considered ahead of its time. Apparently his song "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs Murphy's Ovaltine" caused a bit of spleen in the jazz music scene. He did get out three more albums after his 1947 blacklisting - though, perhaps unsurprisingly, his album Harry the Hipster Digs Christmas wasn't a big hit. I'm glad he dug Christmas, though.


* I only ever boogie woogie in blue. Experience has shown me there is no other colour in which one can successfully boogie or woogie, let alone combine the two.
** Someone will.