Entry · catalog no. 7309
patting juba
/ /ˈpæt.ɪŋ ˈdʒuː.bə/ /PAT-ing JOO-buh
noun · US South (Lowcountry) · 1700s
✓ Verified
1.
Making percussion with the body: slapping the thighs, chest, arms, and hands and stamping the feet in interlocking rhythm. Later called hambone. Born when enslavers banned drums, it kept African polyrhythm alive on the body itself.
“With the drums taken away, they kept the beat patting juba on their own knees.”
Origin & Attribution
Enslaved African Americans, drawn from Kongo dance traditions carried to the South Carolina Lowcountry by the mid-1700s. After slaveholders banned drums — fearing they carried coded messages — patting juba preserved African rhythm using the body. It fed directly into the ring shout, tap, the Charleston, and hambone.
1740s
Kongo-rooted juba reaches the Carolina Lowcountry
1853
Solomon Northup describes patting juba in Twelve Years a Slave
1900s
Lives on as hambone and in step traditions
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
US South (Lowcountry) · 1700s
Spoken by
Enslaved and later Black Southern communities
$PATTINThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady286 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1740
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.
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New Orleans, LA
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Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave — book · 1853
book
■
+ Cite a sourceEncyclopædia Britannica, "juba dance" — reference
reference
See also