Entry · catalog no. 6114
rusty dusty
/ /ˈrʌsti ˈdʌsti/ /RUSS-tee DUSS-tee
noun · Black American — Kansas City and New York blues circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
The buttocks, particularly as the part of a person that has been sitting too long. Used almost always with a possessive and usually in the imperative — the accusation of laziness is built into the word.
“Get your rusty dusty up off that couch and come help me.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, rising through the Kansas City and New York big-band blues circuit of the early 1940s and carried into wide circulation by Count Basie's orchestra with the Oklahoma-born blues shouter Jimmy Rushing. It is built by rhyming reduplication, the way a great deal of Black American slang is built: rusty from disuse, dusty from sitting still. General-slang references routinely file it as undifferentiated jitterbug or 1940s slang, which strips the word of the community that made it.
1942
Count Basie and His Orchestra record "Rusty Dusty Blues," vocal by Jimmy Rushing, issued on Columbia 36675
1948
Zora Neale Hurston writes "shake your rusty-dusty" in Seraph on the Suwanee
1953
The phrase surfaces in white-authored crime fiction, marking its crossover out of Black speech
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black American — Kansas City and New York blues circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Big-band blues singers and their audiences; Black Southern and Midwestern speakers; later general American slang
$RUSTYDThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
52/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Count Basie and His Orchestra, "Rusty Dusty Blues" (Columbia 36675)
1942
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee
1948
See also