Entry · catalog no. 7629
easy rider
/ /ˈizi ˈraɪdər/ /EE-zee RY-der
noun · Southern United States · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
In the blues, a lover — the sweetheart whose loving comes easy, sometimes a kept man living off a working woman, always the one being sung about when the singer's bed is empty.
“She sang all night about her easy rider gone.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Southern blues vernacular of the 1910s and '20s, carried orally before Ma Rainey fixed it on record with See See Rider Blues (1924). The phrase threaded through decades of blues verses and stayed the genre's shorthand for a lover.
1924
Ma Rainey records See See Rider Blues for Paramount, Louis Armstrong on cornet
1943
Wee Bea Booze's See See Rider Blues tops the race records chart
1969
Hollywood lifts the phrase for the film Easy Rider
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Southern United States · 1920s
Spoken by
Black blues singers and their audiences, South and northern cities
$EASYRIThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded102 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1924
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Ma Rainey, See See Rider Blues (Paramount)
1924
■
+ Cite a sourceWee Bea Booze, See See Rider Blues (Decca)
1943
See also