"Honky-Tonk" and "Barrelhouse"
By Dan Wilson
Dick Bueschel said:
>What is the meaning, and origin, of "honky-tonk?" Dictionaries
>and argot collections say it is a type of music, low class and
>all that.
>Baloney! The music they are talking about is "ragtime." But
>what's the origin? I can't find it anywhere, but I propose that
>it is a phrase coined by the itinerant piano playing "Professors"
>who went from saloon to saloon in cutting contests, and who were
>actually playing New York made and sold Tonk pianos in honky
>bars, assuming the word Honky (meaning white) is that old. Any
>thoughts?
In the late 1940s a number of American blues players came to London and I remember what they said about this. It's actually a player-piano reference. There were two bars in Chicago which ca. 1911 in place of coin pianos had do-it-yourself Tonk upright players with a stack of tattered ragtime rolls, which the exclusively white clientele played far too fast. This struck the black community as irresistibly comic: "Man, you should hear that Honky-Tonk music !" (And, I understood, "honky" means white from (prominent) "honker" ?)
This very day, I've had this from Usenet on "barrelhouse piano":
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Article: 25534 of rec.music.makers.piano
From: psycow@aol.com (PSYCOW)
Subject: Re: what is barrelhouse piano?
Date: 29 Jan 1997 16:51:27 GMT
Barrelhouse developed in particular during the clear-cutting of the southeastern forests...the lumber companies would literally build the railroad track as they cut, inching their way into the virgin wilderness.
The crews that worked on the tracks and cut the trees were pretty much out in the middle of nowhere for months at a time. They used to roll a piano in on a flatbed and set up a makeshift bar using planks laid across barrels. Thus the name and some of the earliest historical incidences of the genre.
Michael Parrish
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Dan Wilson |
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