Entry · catalog no. 1305
whooping
/ /ˈhupɪŋ/ /HOO-ping
noun, verb · Black Protestant America — Southern in root, carried north by the Great Migration; Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal alike · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
The metered, pitched, breath-punctuated delivery a Black preacher moves into at the climax of a sermon, usually over organ; a learned craft with recognized melodic formulas, not simply raised volume.
“He taught for twenty minutes, tuned up for two, and then he whooped and the building came apart.”
2.
To preach in that manner.
“That young man can teach, but he cannot whoop, and the mothers of the church have noticed.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American Protestant preaching, formed in the nineteenth century out of enslaved and post-Emancipation folk practice in the South and carried nationally by the Great Migration and by the 1920s race-record market. Preachers describe an internal sequence — ordinary speech, then tuning up, then the whoop, then celebration — and the practice crosses Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal lines rather than belonging to any one of them. The claim repeated most often, that whooping descends from West African griots, has no documented transmission chain behind it and is folk etymology. The opposite dismissal, that it is mere emotionalism or a minstrel residue, was a live twentieth-century argument inside Black churches and should be reported as that argument rather than as a fact about origin. Hooping is a common spelling in church usage and is not an error.
1926
Rev. J. M. Gates records for Columbia in Atlanta on April 24; the recorded-sermon market opens and the practice reaches a national audience
1970
Bruce Rosenberg's The Art of the American Folk Preacher gives the chanted sermon its first sustained academic analysis
1987
Jon Michael Spencer's Sacred Symphony publishes musical transcriptions of the chanted sermon
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Black Protestant America — Southern in root, carried north by the Great Migration; Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal alike · 1920s
Spoken by
Black preachers and the congregations that answer them; the craft is taught, imitated, and judged
$WHOOPIThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring100 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
71/100
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Rev. J. M. Gates — "Death's Black Train Is Coming" — Columbia 14145-D · rec. 24 Apr 1926
Recorded in Atlanta before his Mount Calvary Baptist congregation; sold more than 35,000 copies within months. Gates cut over 200 sermons and accounts for roughly a quarter of all recorded sermons issued before 1943
■
Jon Michael Spencer — Sacred Symphony: The Chanted Sermon of the Black Preacher — book, Greenwood · 1987
About 100 musical transcriptions; foreword by William C. Turner Jr.
■
Martha Simmons — "Whooping: The Musicality of African American Preaching Past and Present," in Preaching with Sacred Fire — book, W. W. Norton · 2010
The best source using whooping itself as the headword
■
+ Cite a sourceGerald L. Davis — I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know — book, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press · 1985
A study of the performed African American sermon as structured composition
See also