Entry · catalog no. 2410
hot foot powder
/ /ˌhɑt ˈfʊt ˈpaʊdɚ/ /HOT-fut POW-dur
noun · Deep South and the Mississippi Delta, carried north to Chicago and Detroit with the Great Migration · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A prepared powder — commonly red and black pepper, chili, salt and sulphur, sometimes with graveyard dirt or ground wasp nest — sprinkled into a person's footprints, across a doorstep they will cross, or slipped into their shoes, so that they grow restless, leave, and do not come back. It works on the logic of foot-track magic: what touches the track touches the person. It was used against a rival, an abusive spouse, a bad tenant or landlord, an informant, or anyone whose departure a client needed, and it is meant to expel rather than to kill.
“She swore somebody put hot foot powder on her steps, because that man had not sat still in her house for a month.”
Origin & Attribution
A preparation of African American hoodoo, descended from West and Central African foot-track magic carried through slavery and rebuilt with North American herbs, minerals and animal parts. Zora Neale Hurston printed the name in Hoodoo in America, in the Journal of American Folk-Lore in 1931, in a New Orleans prescription instructing the worker to mix the hot foot powders with moving powders and sprinkle them where an enemy is sure to walk and press them underfoot, or else get them into the shoes. Harry Middleton Hyatt collected many hot foot recipes and methods from informants between 1936 and 1940. Robert Johnson carried it into recorded music with Hell Hound on My Trail, cut in Dallas on 20 June 1937 and issued by Vocalion that September, whose verse names the powder sprinkled around his door. Katrina Hazzard-Donald has argued that the branded hot foot powder of spiritual-supply commerce is a later commercial form of an older folk working, a distinction worth keeping rather than collapsing. Correct the usual framing: this is documented technique inside a Black American spiritual tradition, not a prank powder and not Hollywood voodoo.
1931
Hurston prints hot foot powders in a New Orleans prescription in the Journal of American Folk-Lore
1937
Robert Johnson records Hell Hound on My Trail in Dallas on 20 June; Vocalion issues it that September
1936
Hyatt begins collecting hot foot recipes and methods across the South, fieldwork running to 1940
2013
Hazzard-Donald's Mojo Workin distinguishes the commercial powder from older foot-track work
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Deep South and the Mississippi Delta, carried north to Chicago and Detroit with the Great Migration · 1930s
Spoken by
Rootworkers and their clients; blues singers; Black spiritual-supply merchants
$HOTFOOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady95 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1931
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
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Hoodoo in America, The Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 44, no. 174 (October–December 1931); hot foot powders at p. 347
book
■
Robert Johnson, Hell Hound on My Trail, recorded Dallas, Texas, 20 June 1937; released on Vocalion, September 1937
record
■
Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo–Conjuration–Witchcraft–Rootwork, 5 vols. (1970–1978); fieldwork 1936–1940
oral history
■
+ Cite a sourceKatrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin: The Old African American Hoodoo System (University of Illinois Press, 2013)
book
See also