Entry · catalog no. 0054
sweetback
/ /ˈswiːt.bæk/ /SWEET-bak
noun · Mississippi Delta and the Deep South; Chicago, New Orleans, Harlem · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
A man who lives on money and food supplied by women, trading charm, looks and sex for support instead of working.
“He hadn't picked cotton in six years — that's a sweetback.”
2.
By extension, a ladies' man; a man women pursue. Carries admiration and contempt in about equal measure, depending on who is speaking.
“Sweetbacks kept a chain of women and never had to choose.”
3.
In criminal argot, a pimp — a harder and narrower sense, recorded alongside mack.
“The old underworld vocabularies list sweetback right in among the pimp words.”
Origin & Attribution
Sweetback comes out of Black working-class life in the Deep South and the Migration cities, and it sits thickest in the blues and in Harlem Renaissance fiction of the late 1920s. Claude McKay put it in the mouths of Harlem characters in Home to Harlem in 1928, and Mary Dixon sang it on All Around Mama for Columbia in 1929. Big Bill Broonzy later described the type to the folklorist William Ferris directly: men who never saw daylight, ate from a pan their woman carried out to them, and wore Stetsons and diamonds bought with somebody else's wages. Most people today meet the word only through Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 film, which is the tail of it, not the head — the term was already more than forty years old in print when he picked it up.
1928
Claude McKay uses sweet-back in Home to Harlem
1929
Mary Dixon records All Around Mama for Columbia, with a sweetback who wants cash before love
1971
Melvin Van Peebles releases Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, carrying the word to a new generation
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Mississippi Delta and the Deep South; Chicago, New Orleans, Harlem · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Southerners and migrants; blues musicians and their audiences; Harlem writers
$SWEETBThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant98 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1928
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Claude McKay, Home to Harlem
1928
■
Mary Dixon, All Around Mama, Columbia 14442-D
1929
■
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan
1930
■
Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll
1941
■
Big Bill Broonzy, quoted in William Ferris, Blues from the Delta
1970
■
+ Cite a sourceMelvin Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
1971
See also