Woe betide the middle-aged person who greets a teenager with a breezy “Hello fam”, or who describes something as “lit” in any other context than a roaring log fire. Such use of slang is the lexical equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb: mortifying to the young person forced to witness it.
But the facepalm is not always deserved. Some slang terms are older than the teenager realises, older even than the embarrassing adult appropriating them.
An example is “bop”. It is used today among the youth to denote a good song: not a super-lit stormer, which would be a “banger”, but rather the sort of track you want to listen to on repeat, as in “That new Billie Eilish song is a real bop.” Its origins lie in jazz — more specifically, a song from 80 years ago.
“’Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)” was released at the start of 1939. It was written by trumpeter Melvin “Sy” Oliver and trombonist James “Trummy” Young, who played in Jimmie Lunceford and His Orchestra, the house band in Harlem’s Cotton Club. Sung by Young, it was a hit for Lunceford. Another version, also a hit, was recorded by Chick Webb and His Orchestra the following month with the great Ella Fitzgerald on vocals.
These twin records came out at the height of the big band era when jazz orchestras in dancehalls on either side of the Atlantic played swing music for jitterbugging dancers. Lunceford’s version was adopted as the soundtrack for a dance called the “shim sham”, a version of the lindy hop involving an intricate array of synchronised steps.
The song’s sound is classic swing, all blaring brass and contagious rhythms. The lyrics are about a wise-to-the-jive parent — a father in Lunceford’s version, a mother in Fitzgerald’s — handing down life lessons to their child, like a hepcat Polonius spieling about being true to thine own self. The Fitzgerald version ends with a sublime passage of scatting from the singer, punctuated with a flourish by an ensemble chant: “That’s what gets results, rebop!”
According to the jazz historian Barry Ulanov, this cheery exclamation marked “the first appearance of the first accredited name” of a new type of modern jazz. “Bebop” or “bop”, as it later became known, developed out of swing and rose to prominence in the 1940s. Chick Webb, the drumming bandleader of the Chick Webb orchestra, influenced bebop drummers such as Kenny Clarke, who played with Ella Fitzgerald after Webb’s death in the summer of 1939. (Webb’s last words were jazzman-cool: “I’m sorry, but I gotta go.”)
Where the mingled terms “rebop”, “bebop” and “bop” came from is unclear. They may have derived from the nonsense words of scatting, the improvisatory form of vocalising at which Fitzgerald excelled. There is the odd “bebop” in the lyrics of jazz records dating back to 1928. Fitzgerald cried “rebop!” at the end of a 1937 song with Chick Webb and His Orchestra, “There’s Frost on the Moon”. But it was in 1939 that it caught on as a slang term, initiated by its appearance in her version of “’Tain’t What You Do”.
The song entered the Great American Songbook. Ella Mae Morse, a former big band singer, did a “swinging pop” version in 1953 with an orchestra led by Nelson Riddle. Cleo Laine’s deft 1957 rendition has the tang of nocturnal London, a siren call from a smoky Soho cellar dive. Other covers reimagined the song as rockabilly (Jim Dale in 1958) and burlesque (Julie London in 1961).
Its best interpretation, the one closest to the message of doing things your own way, comes from the unlikely source of Fun Boy Three. An offshoot from ska revivalists The Specials, they turned it into a new wave pop hit in 1982. Renamed “It Ain’t What You Do…”, the song is monotonous and irresistible at the same time, with a faux-voodoo beat and Bananarama on backing vocals doing a deliberately cursory adaptation of Fitzgerald’s gleeful scatting.
Instead of a cry of “rebop!”, Fun Boy Three’s version ends with the sound of the tape being abruptly rewound, as though to take us back to the beginning. Here we find the looped logic of the bop, in the modern sense of the word. Go back to the start and play again. Bop, then re-bop.
What are your memories of ‘’Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Firefly Entertainment; Verve Reissues; Flat Five Records; Rock & Roll Classics; P&R; Music Manager; Limitless Int. Recordings; Chrysalis Records
Picture credit: William Gottlieb/Redferns