Entry · catalog no. 1205
hide-beater
/ /ˈhaɪd ˌbiːtər/ /HYDE-bee-tuhr
noun · Harlem and the Black press circuit; New York and Pittsburgh, carried nationally by Black weeklies and the touring band trade · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A drummer, especially one working in a swing band. The word rests on the older jazz shop-term hide for a drum, from the calfskin heads stretched over the shells, so a hide-beater is literally a man who beats the skins. In print it almost always carried admiration rather than mockery: bandleaders and columnists used it the way sportswriters used slugger, as a compliment to a player with power and time. It ran alongside the synonym skin-beater and the variant hide-pusher, and speakers switched among them freely without any shift in meaning.
“That little hide-beater up at the Savoy had the whole floor moving before the first chorus was out.”
Origin & Attribution
The term belongs to Black swing musicians and the Black press that covered them, in the years just before and during the Second World War. It is built on jazz hide, meaning drums, which is itself documented in New York music journalism by 1938. The trail for hide-beater runs through the Pittsburgh Courier, which used it of Chick Webb in August 1938, and through the People's Voice in Harlem, which used it of a drummer with Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans in March 1942; Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary carried it as an entry. It is often credited to Calloway personally, and that is wrong: Calloway said in his own 1944 foreword that the words were gathered from every source and that many first reached print in Billy Rowe's Pittsburgh Courier column, The Notebook. Calloway was the compiler and the amplifier, not the coiner.
1938
Pittsburgh Courier calls Chick Webb the ace hide-beater of the Universe
1942
Harlem's People's Voice applies it to a drummer with Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans
1944
Listed in the sixth edition of Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the Black press circuit; New York and Pittsburgh, carried nationally by Black weeklies and the touring band trade · 1930s
Spoken by
Black swing musicians, band boys, dance-hall regulars, and the Black newspaper columnists who covered them
$HIDEBEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
42/100
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
■
Pittsburgh Courier (Pittsburgh, PA), 6 August 1938, p. 11, col. 1; quoted with citation in Green's Dictionary of Slang, entry hide, n.
newspaper · printed
■
People's Voice (New York), Solid Meddlin column, 14 March 1942, p. 33, col. 1; quoted with citation in Green's Dictionary of Slang, entry hide, n.
newspaper · printed
■
Cab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive, sixth edition, New York, 1944, entry Hide-beater
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceJonathon Green, Green's Dictionary of Slang, digital edition, entry hide, n., compound hide-beater
reference · online
See also