Entry · catalog no. 1207
lead sheet
/ /ˈliːd ˌʃiːt/ /LEED-sheet
noun · Harlem and the Black swing-band circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A topcoat: a light outer coat, the kind worn in fall or a mild winter. The figure is drawn straight from the bandstand. In a working orchestra the lead sheet is the one thin page carrying just the melody line, as against the thick bound stack of a full arrangement, so a coat with no weight to it got named after the flimsiest paper on the stand. Because the joke depends on the contrast, the word almost always travelled with its opposite number, orchestration, meaning a heavy overcoat, and speakers used the pair to grade the weather without ever naming a temperature.
“It ain't cold enough for the full orchestration — I'll trilly on out in the lead sheet.”
2.
In its literal music-trade sense, a single sheet of manuscript giving the melody and lyric of a tune without the harmony or the parts for other instruments. This is the source of the slang, not a separate development, and it remains ordinary professional vocabulary today wherever songs are pitched, copyrighted or taught.
“Bring the lead sheet to the date and we will head-arrange the rest of it.”
Origin & Attribution
This is working musicians' shop talk turned inside out, from Harlem and the Black swing-band circuit of the early 1940s. It is recorded in Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary and in Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, both 1944, and Green's Dictionary of Slang classes it as Black American usage. The clearest account of why the word means what it means comes from Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe's Really the Blues in 1946, which spells out the thin-page-against-thick-arrangement logic and shows the term in live speech rather than only defined on a list. Calloway is regularly given credit for terms like this one; he compiled and circulated them, and stated plainly in his 1944 foreword that the vocabulary was gathered from many hands and that much of it had already appeared in Billy Rowe's Pittsburgh Courier column.
1944
Entered in the sixth edition of Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary as a topcoat
1944
Also carried in Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
1946
Used in running speech, and explained, in Mezzrow and Wolfe's Really the Blues
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the Black swing-band circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Black musicians and the Harlem hep-cat set; anyone who spent time around a bandstand
$LEADSHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
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
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive, sixth edition, New York, 1944, entry Lead sheet; reprinted in Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1976, p. 257
book · printed
■
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues, Random House, New York, 1946, p. 217 and appended jive glossary
book · printed
■
Dan Burley, Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, privately published, New York, 1944
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceJonathon Green, Green's Dictionary of Slang, digital edition, entry lead sheet, n.
reference · online
See also