Entry · catalog no. 1131
bust your conk
/ /bʌst jɚ kɑŋk/ /BUHST yur KAHNK
verb phrase · Harlem, New York · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
To apply yourself to a task past the point of comfort — to bear down, strain, and keep going until the thing is finished. The phrase runs off conk, meaning the head or skull, so the literal picture is of splitting your own head open with effort. In Harlem speech of the late 1930s and 1940s it carried several related loads depending on who was talking: to labor to exhaustion, to lose your composure entirely, to fall hard into sleep, or to break out in open delight. All four senses share the same engine — something inside the head giving way under pressure. The work sense is the one Cab Calloway put in his dictionary and the one most often quoted since, but it was the last of the four to reach print, and the emotional senses were circulating first.
“I bust my conk on that arrangement for three nights and the man cut it in one take.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American speech in Harlem and the Black press of the late 1930s, spread through the swing-band circuit. It is not Calloway's coinage, though it is routinely credited to him. The phrase is in Rosetta Howard's 1937 Decca recording of "If You're a Viper" and in the Pittsburgh Courier in July 1938, both before any Calloway edition that can be shown to carry it. Dan Burley, editor at the New York Amsterdam Star-News, was writing it in running prose by February 1943. Calloway recorded the word; he did not invent it, and he never claimed to — his 1944 foreword says plainly that he was setting down speech that already belonged to Harlem.
1937
Rosetta Howard sings it on "If You're a Viper" for Decca
1938
Appears in the Pittsburgh Courier, 23 July
1944
Calloway's dictionary glosses it as working hard
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York · 1930s
Spoken by
Harlem musicians, dancers, and vipers; Black newspaper columnists; swing-band players on the road
$BUSTYOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical89 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1937
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.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Rosetta Howard and the Harlem Hamfats, "If You're a Viper," Decca, 1937
recording · audio
■
Pittsburgh Courier (Pittsburgh, PA), 23 July 1938, p. 11
news · reported
■
Cab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive, 1944; reprinted in Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York, 1976), p. 253
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceMezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York, 1946), p. 218
book · printed
See also