Entry · catalog no. 4240
early black
/ /ˈɜrli blæk/ /UR-lee BLAK
noun · Harlem / jazz circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Evening; nightfall, named from the vantage of people whose day starts when the sun goes down.
“Catch me at the early black, not a minute before.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive of the swing era, in which musicians and night-shift workers renamed the clock to fit their own hours. The vocabulary builds on two roots — black for night, bright for day — and runs in matched pairs: early black for evening, early bright for morning. Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary glosses it plainly as evening. The words were not his inventions; his own foreword credits the Black press, naming Billy Rowe's Pittsburgh Courier column The Notebook among his sources, so the term belongs to the entertainers and night people who spoke it. One correction to the record: the edition whose text can be confirmed is the sixth, 1944. The date 1939 attached to the most-copied online transcription is wrong, and the reposts have carried the error for years.
1938
First edition of Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1944
Sixth edition glosses early black as evening
1950s
Jive vocabulary gives way to bebop-era slang
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem / jazz circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Swing-era musicians, Harlem hipsters, night-shift people
$EARLYBThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
25/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
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
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, The Hepster's Dictionary (6th ed.)
1944
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston, Glossary of Harlem Slang, The American Mercury (companion jive lexicon)
1942
See also