Entry · catalog no. 0052
hamfat
/ /ˈhæm.fæt/ /HAM-fat
noun · New Orleans and Chicago jazz circles; carried along the touring and recording circuit · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A second-rate or unschooled musician; a player who learned a handful of tunes, never studied, and stayed exactly where he started. Used inside the trade, by working players, about other working players.
“He was a hamfat fiddler — not terrible, not anything.”
2.
More broadly, a mediocrity of any kind; someone carrying more front than ability.
“Don't send me no hamfats, I need somebody who can read.”
3.
As a modifier, of a band or a night that is ordinary and knows it.
“It was a hamfat outfit, but the people danced.”
Origin & Attribution
The word is older than jazz. Hamfatter was American theatrical slang for a failed actor by the 1870s, and the Century Dictionary of 1889 traced it to a Black song, The Ham-Fat Man, which had circulated in minstrel shows around 1863; the modern ham, for an actor who overplays, is a clipping of it. Black musicians in New Orleans and Chicago carried the term into jazz, where it hardened into a specific insult about craft — Pops Foster and Danny Barker both use it in their memoirs for men who never bothered to get better. The story that it comes from trombonists greasing their slides with ham fat is folk etymology, repeated in print since the 1960s. The theatrical trail is documented; the trombone story is not.
1863
The minstrel song The Ham-Fat Man circulates; the Century Dictionary later names it as the source
1936
The Harlem Hamfats cut Oh! Red for Decca in Chicago — a hit, and a joke at their own expense
1946
Mezz Mezzrow uses hamfats in Really the Blues for players selling an imitation of the real thing
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New Orleans and Chicago jazz circles; carried along the touring and recording circuit · 1930s
Spoken by
Working jazz and blues musicians, New Orleans players especially; earlier, stage and vaudeville performers
$HAMFATThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical152 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1874
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
New York Dispatch, 12 Apr. (earliest ham-fatters citation)
1874
■
The Century Dictionary
1889
■
Harlem Hamfats, Oh! Red (Decca)
1936
■
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues
1946
■
Pops Foster: The Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman
1971
■
+ Cite a sourceDanny Barker, A Life in Jazz
1986
See also