Jazz, dogies and the Irish

Most of the words that Daniel Cassidy attributes to Irish origins in How the Irish Invented Slang, reviewed here a few days ago, make perfect sense. Large numbers of Irish immigrants sailed to the United States to escape poverty and famine, and most of these settled in eastern urban areas such as New York City and Boston. And so words that sound like they could be urban slang, such as biddy and hokum, seem quite reasonable. But jazz and dogie (as in "Git Along Little Dogies")? How can they be Irish?

Jazz, after all, began in New Orleans, not New York or Boston, and it began with black musicians, not Irish musicians. For years some people thought of jazz as black music. It turns out, as Cassidy explains, jazz (sometimes spelled jaz or jass in the early days) was a name later attached to that form of music, but not by those who performed it. In fact, early jazz stars hated the term and declined to use it themselves. Some preferred calling it ragtime or Negro music. Duke Ellington once said that calling this music jazz was like calling it a "four-letter word." Still the name stuck. But where did it come from?

Cassidy says it comes from the Irish word teas, which is actually pronounced as j'ass or chass, he says. It can mean heat, passion, excitement or ardor, all feelings that might be generated by the music in question. A century ago the word was usually associated with sex, one reason why musicians frowned on the word and why authorities in New Orleans wanted to ban the music. It was Scoop Gleason, an Irish-American baseball writer, who popularized the word jazz in San Francisco. He was writing about baseball, but the word spread and soon became attached to the music that emerged from New Orleans.

And what of the word dogie? Google the words "Irish cowboys" and you will discover that there was a significant presence of Irishmen in the Old West, Billy the Kid among them. There is even a book called How the Irish Won the West. So Irish words certainly could have made their way into western slang.

As for dogie, Cassidy writes it stems from the Irish word dothoigthe, meaning hard to rear, hard to fatten or an orphan calf. An orphan calf would certainly be hard to fatten without a nursing mother. Every large herd in the West must have had some dogies, as well as some Irish cowboys.