By Phil Boas, Arizona Republic | Someday when the cultural moment that many have called “The Great Awokening” is finally, mercifully, over, Americans of all races should fight to give African Americans their word back.
Less than 10 years ago, “woke” was a word so deeply layered with history and meaning it could evoke years of pain suffered by descendants of slaves coming of age in Jim Crow America.
You don’t have to be African American, however, to feel its history. The word woke is seminal to our larger culture in ways most of us have never understood.
It’s one of the great words in American English and it should be preserved in its purest form.
At the moment it is being hijacked by politics – first by white liberals, then by white conservatives.
A battle over ‘woke’ in the Republican Party primary
This week the word “woke” is igniting a family spat within the 2024 Republican primary for president, pitting Donald Trump against his former apprentice, Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis, the Florida governor, uses the word frequently to describe an ideology steeped in identity politics that has taken over our universities, media, large corporations, medicine, arts, entertainment and sports.
Trump argues he doesn’t use the word. “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”
There’s a good chance none of us would know the word today had the Library of Congress not set out in the 1930s to preserve American folk music in the South.
That project took library archivists to Louisiana where they discovered a little-known African American blues singer named Huddie William Ledbetter or “Lead Belly.”
The archivists recorded on aluminum discs Lead Belly and his 12-string guitar, preserving what would become some of the great Blues standards such as “Cotton Fields,” “Goodnight, Irene” and “Rock Island Line.”
‘Woke’ emerges with a song about race and suffering
In Lead Belly’s song “The Scottsboro Boys,” the nine African-American young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, he admonishes his listeners to, “Best stay woke!”
It’s believed to be the first recorded instance of the word.
As Huddie Ledbetter used “woke,” it meant that when you’re a Black person traveling through a deeply racist state such as Alabama, you need to know what you’re dealing with – a highly refined form of evil.
Ledbetter would know. He traveled the byways of Louisiana, Alabama and Texas singing his songs and confronting white bigotry and its violence against Black people.
In a way that history has of surprising us, Lead Belly would become essential to white culture in America and Great Britain. All white people reading this and learning the name Huddie Ledbetter for the first time, should know that they have likely felt his influence, far more than they could have imagined.
The driving rhythms of Lead Belly’s version of “Rock Island Line,” would in the 1950s inspire an early British pop singer named Lonnie Donegan, who adopted the song’s musical style called skiffle, a mash of American folk, blues and jazz.
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Read and learn before you speak the word ‘woke’, using it incorrectly:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fight-over-word-woke-learn-130214988.html
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at
phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Where did the word ‘woke’ come from? Its history will blow you away
Photo: Poster of Lead Belly at the Rusty Nail in Wilmington.
Before You Fight Over the Word ‘woke,’ Learn Its History. It Will Blow You Away
