Entry · catalog no. 3601
funky butt
/ /ˈfʌŋ.ki bʌt/ /FUHNG-kee buht
noun · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
The smell of a room full of people who have been dancing close and hard for hours — the heat, the sweat, the funk of a working hall.
“By midnight the place was pure funky butt and nobody was going home.”
2.
The Buddy Bolden number carrying that name, and the low hip-rolling dance done to it.
“He would call funky butt and the whole floor answered him.”
Origin & Attribution
Uptown Black New Orleans, the back-o-town blocks around Perdido Street, in the 1890s and 1900s. Union Sons Hall on Perdido was known in the neighborhood as Funky Butt Hall, after the number cornetist Buddy Bolden played there. Jazz history has spent a century sanitizing this into a fart joke; in the mouths of the people who used it, the word named the honest smell of a packed hall and carried no shame. Bolden is the carrier, not the author — Jelly Roll Morton said plainly that some old honky-tonk people named the tune, and trombonist Willy Cornish also claimed a hand in it. The archive names no single author. Correct one thing that circulates widely: there was no 1907 Bolden composition by this title. Bolden was committed in 1907 and no such copyright exists.
1900
Bolden's band plays the number at Union Sons Hall on Perdido Street, known in the neighborhood as Funky Butt Hall
1938
Jelly Roll Morton records it for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress and credits Bolden
1939
Morton cuts "Buddy Bolden's Blues" commercially for General Records on 16 December
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1900s
Spoken by
Black New Orleanians in the uptown dance halls — Bolden's audience, and the musicians who carried the tune after him
$FUNKYBThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical126 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1900
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
■
Jelly Roll Morton, Library of Congress recordings by Alan Lomax, 1938
field recording
■
Jelly Roll Morton, "Buddy Bolden's Blues," General Records, recorded 16 December 1939
record
■
+ Cite a sourceDonald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, Louisiana State University Press, 1978
book
See also