Entry · catalog no. 3609
blow your wig
/ /ˌbloʊ jɔːr ˈwɪɡ/ /BLOH yur WIG
phrase · Harlem, New York · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
To be carried past self-control by strong feeling — most often delight or amazement, sometimes fury. The wig is the head, and the image is of a lid blowing off. Built on the same figure as blow your top, which Calloway printed in the same list, and cousin to the older Harlem sense of wig as the mind.
“Don't blow your wig — the man said the gig starts at ten, not eight.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem musicians' speech of the mid-to-late 1930s, carried nationally by the Cotton Club bands and the touring circuit. Cab Calloway printed the past-tense form, blew their wigs, in his 1938 Cat-ologue, and the direct form appears in the expanded 1944 edition; Lou Shelly's separate 1945 compilation carries it too, which shows it was current beyond Calloway's own pages. Vintage-slang roundups file it as generic swing-era slang with no author. It is neither generic nor unattributed: it was Black Harlem speech first, and the first man to print it was a Black bandleader who said plainly that he had gathered it from his community rather than coined it.
1938
Calloway prints "blew their wigs" in the first edition of his hepster dictionary
1944
The direct form "blow your wig" appears in the expanded New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1945
Reprinted in Lou Shelly's Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, confirming currency beyond Calloway
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York · 1930s
Spoken by
Black jazz and dance-band musicians, Cotton Club and Savoy regulars, and Harlem club crowds; then swing fans nationally
$BLOWYOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1938
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A Hepster's Dictionary, 1938 — "blew their wigs"
booklet
■
The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive, 6th ed., 1944
booklet
■
+ Cite a sourceLou Shelly, ed., Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, T.W.O. Charles Co., Derby, CT, 1945
book
See also