Entry · catalog no. 4325
pops
/ /pɒps/ /POPS
noun · Harlem and the jazz circuit · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A salutation for any adult male, used without regard to age, rank, or acquaintance. Calloway's own gloss is the precise one: salutation for all males. It solves the problem of not knowing or not remembering a man's name, and it does it warmly.
“What's the matter with you, pops; you sure look beat about the gills.”
Origin & Attribution
Black jazz culture, Harlem and the touring circuit, by the late 1930s. Be exact about what is Black here, because the loose version is easy to check and wrong. Pop as an address to an older man is general English and old — Green's runs it back to an 1885 Sydney Bulletin, Josiah Flynt in 1899, Philadelphia's Sporting Life in 1889. Pops meaning one's father is in J. M. Barrie in 1928. None of that is African American. What is African American is the narrower and stranger thing: the -s form used as a universal salutation to any man whatever his age, which is a different function from hey, old-timer. Green's tags only that sense as originally US Black, and its earliest citation is Calloway's own band record of 1939. Dan Burley, the Amsterdam News columnist, has it independently in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive in 1944. Louis Armstrong is the reason it stuck: he called men he had just met pops, and it came back on him hard enough to become his own name for life.
1939
Calloway's orchestra records the spoken line on Vocalion 5126
1944
Calloway's glossary: salutation for all males
2009
Terry Teachout titles his Armstrong biography Pops
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the jazz circuit · 1930s
Spoken by
Jazz musicians and Harlem speakers; the father sense went general
$POPSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady87 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
1939
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
■
Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary, 6th ed. — glossary · 1944
researched
■
"For the Last Time I Cried Over You" — Cab Calloway & His Orchestra, Vocalion 5126 — song · 1939
song
■
Black Jargon in White America, David Claerbaut, p. 76 — scholarship · 1972
book
■
+ Cite a sourceRunnin' Down Some Lines, Edith Folb, p. 250 — scholarship · 1980
book
See also