"Hootenanny": More of Its Past

Abstract

ARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS in her delightful short story Cocks Must Crow has the Widow Tippet chastise the fat, talkative Florida cracker Quincey Dover: You was likely a good woman oncet, she said. You know what you are now? You're nothing but a big old fat hoot-nanny.' Mrs. Rawlings, whose home was in Cross Creek, an out-of-the-way village in central Florida, has left an accurate and faithful record of the people of this rural Florida scene, with their picturesque speech patterns and their colorful regionalisms. The ADD records similar radio usage dating from 1941 : horsefaced old hootenanny. An article by Tamony presents an excellent analysis of the development of the word hootenanny to its current usage.2 However, it does not include several meanings once apparently common and used in different contexts. Tamony writes: Actually, hootenanny had been an Americanism with a variety of denotations for several decades. It may be termed an Indefinite American Word .... Four or five decades ago hootenanny bore general and special meanings which varied throughout the country ... ., To many of the inhabitants of southern Ohio the word carried the meaning suggested in the two quotations from Mrs. Rawlings's fiction: 'a stupid person, a kind of clod.' The inference was uncomplimentary, suggesting a lack of urbanity. It is interesting to conjecture how the word took on this derisive meaning and how, many years later, in the West it came to have an entirely different frame of reference. The word seems to have been used in this pejorative sense in agricultural areas in and around Cincinnati. this section one former resident of a small Ohio village about forty miles from the Ohio River said: knew the word in my childhood, having been reared in a rural community. Hootenanny was a description of a person who was clumsy, 'hillbillyish,' much more rural than the rural inhabitants of our small village of Winchester. I often have wondered how the word changed from the way I remember its being used to its present usage in folk singing. An informant reared in Troy, Ohio, north of Dayton in western Ohio, explained, In my family we always referred to the Yosts next door as 'those