Summary
Highlights
Dubose Heyward, an aristocratic Southern writer, was inspired by Charleston's black and white traditions, basing characters on real individuals from the Charleston market. He researched his novel among neglected Gullah speakers on nearby sea islands, where their unique speech can still be heard today at places like Skinny's joint.
In 1934, Heyward and George Gershwin collaborated on the opera Porgy and Bess, replicating the language of South Carolina's coastal Blacks. This conscious effort mirrored the spontaneous embrace of migrating Black culture in Northern cities, leading to the popularization of "jive talk" – words like "cool," "uptight," and "doing your own thing" – which became standard English, spread by black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller.
The English spoken by aristocratic Southern white families was significantly influenced by Plantation Creole. This claim is often controversial, but the survival of Southern dialect aligns geographically with former Confederate states where slavery was prevalent.
Richard Stoney, a wealthy Southerner with ancestors from the UK, represents families whose estates have English names. Historically, Southern children were often raised by Black nannies, leading to early exposure to and adoption of Plantation Creole, sometimes even as a first language. While boys were often sent away to learn "good English," women, not considered educable in the same way, maintained speech closer to Plantation Creole.
Charles Dickens observed that aristocratic Southern women spoke much like Black individuals, highlighting the significant linguistic overlap. By the 1930s, Charleston's black street life, famed for its improvisational rhyming advertisements, began to carry Southern verbal traditions to Northern cities through music, song, and dance.
Jazz historian Albert Murray explains that jive talk originated in the world of entertainment, favored by those who frequented and imitated entertainers. Known as "hip talk," it reflected the jargon of music, stage, nightclubs, and sports, disseminated primarily by popular entertainers.