Entry · catalog no. 4201
pig meat
/ /ˈpɪɡ ˌmiːt/ /PIG-meet
noun · Mississippi Valley and the blues South · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
A young person considered sexually desirable, most often a young woman or girl, sometimes a young man. Blunt about age in a way later slang is not; a substantial share of the recorded uses mean someone underage.
“Look heah, papa, you don't treat pigmeat the way you should.”
2.
Sex itself, and by extension the genitals.
“How I love his young pig meat.”
3.
A woman judged promiscuous; in the 1930s prison lexicons, a woman working as a prostitute.
“They had her down in the book as pigmeat and never asked her name.”
Origin & Attribution
Not Harlem, though Hurston's 1942 Harlem glossary is where most people meet the word. The earliest datable use is a Chicago race record — Ardell Bragg's "Pig Meat Blues," Paramount 12398, cut around the turn of October 1926 with Tiny Parham at the piano and advertised in the Chicago Defender that November. The word's home is the blues circuit of the Mississippi Valley and the South; it rode north with the Migration into the Chicago studios and the Harlem press. Harlem received it. Harlem did not coin it. The comedian Dewey Markham carried it into the mainstream sideways, taking his stage name from a routine in which he declared himself Sweet Poppa Pigmeat.
1926
First record: Ardell Bragg cuts "Pig Meat Blues" in Chicago
1941
Memphis Minnie records "Pig Meat on the Line"; the Pittsburgh Courier glosses it in a jive column
1942
Hurston's Harlem glossary sands it down to "young girl"
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Mississippi Valley and the blues South · 1920s
Spoken by
Southern and Mississippi Valley blues performers and audiences; Chicago and Harlem recording and press circuits
$PIGMEAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded100 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
20/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1926
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
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New Orleans, LA
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Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
"Pig Meat Blues" — Ardell Bragg, Paramount 12398 — song · 1926
song
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"Pig Meat on the Line" — Memphis Minnie, OKeh 06505 — song · 1941
song
■
Pittsburgh Courier — newspaper · 24 May 1941
researched
■
"Story in Harlem Slang" glossary, Zora Neale Hurston — 1942
reference
■
+ Cite a sourceLawd Today, Richard Wright — novel · 1965 (set in the 1930s)
book
See also