Entry · catalog no. 8901
growl
/ /ɡɹaʊl/ /GROWL
noun / verb · New York City (Harlem) and wider jazz centers · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
A harsh, vocal-sounding tone coaxed from a trumpet or trombone, usually with a plunger mute and a hum or rasp in the player's throat, used by Black jazz players for blues feeling and to imitate the human voice.
“The whole band went quiet so the trumpet could growl through the last chorus.”
2.
To play in this manner; Cab Calloway's 1938 list glosses the noun as vibrant notes from a trumpet.
“He growled his way through the blues and the dancers hollered back.”
Origin & Attribution
The technique grew out of Black jazz in New Orleans and New York in the early 1920s, when brass players imitated the voice with plunger mutes and throat sounds. Trumpeter Bubber Miley made it a signature sound with Duke Ellington's Washingtonians on records such as East St. Louis Toodle-Oo (1926-27), and trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton carried it on. Cab Calloway printed growl as a headword in his Hepster's Dictionary in 1938, the earliest dated printing of the word in this sense verified here; the 1926-27 records document the sound, not the term in print. Credit for first playing it is contested. The word later spread into general jazz, blues and R&B vocabulary.
1926
Ellington's Washingtonians record East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, featuring Bubber Miley's plunger growl
1938
Cab Calloway prints 'growl' in Hepster's Dictionary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
New York City (Harlem) and wider jazz centers · 1920s
Spoken by
Black jazz brass players and bandleaders, then jazz writers and fans
$GROWLThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
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.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive (1938), entry 'Growl'
book
■
+ Cite a sourceDuke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra, 'East St. Louis Toodle-Oo' (Vocalion, 1926; Columbia, 1927)
song
See also