Entry · catalog no. 0273
sweet man
/ /ˈswit mæn/ /SWEET man
noun · Black American — Harlem and the blues circuit · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
A woman's lover — but the word does work that boyfriend does not. It marks a man whose appeal is his looks, his clothes and his charm rather than his labor, and it frequently carries the understanding that the woman is keeping him. The sense runs a spectrum: at one end simply my sweetheart, at the other the man I support, and at the far end a pimp outright. Which sense is live depends entirely on who is speaking.
“She working two jobs and her sweet man ain't worked a day this year.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, 1920s, urban — Harlem and the Black Southern and Midwestern blues circuit, moving north with the Great Migration. Carried by the women blues singers who sang about such men, by Harlem Renaissance novelists documenting the sporting life, and by the milieu itself. Closely related to sweetback. It is regularly flattened into generic flapper-era slang alongside the bee's knees, which erases where it came from.
1925
Ethel Waters records "Sweet Man" for Columbia, issued as 487-D
1928
Claude McKay's Home to Harlem describes the exotic aristocracy of sweetmen
1931
American Speech glosses sweetman in its survey of Black American vocabulary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black American — Harlem and the blues circuit · 1920s
Spoken by
Women blues singers and their audiences; Harlem Renaissance writers; Black urban speakers
$SWEETMThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical101 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
1925
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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By region — how it actually sounds
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Ethel Waters, "Sweet Man" (Columbia 487-D)
1925
■
Claude McKay, Home to Harlem
1928
■
+ Cite a sourceN. Van Patten, "The Vocabulary of the American Negro," American Speech VII:1
1931
See also