The History Of The Hoochie Coochie Dance (including information about The Song "Ham Fat Man")

MindsiMedia Home, March 6, 2019

Here's a 19th century film clip from Edison studios in it a young dancer named Ella Lola performs a period "Oriental" dance (commonly known as a belly dance) with some Turkish styling. She performs distinctive  hoochie coochie dance movements that include shoulder shimmies with pelvic movements and several foot patterns, side traveling movements with pelvic circles, a slow pelvic circle and a front pelvic lock, and paddle turns with various arm gestures. Her dance costume consists of a two-layered skirt to the knee, a hip belt with fringe, a chemise-like shirt under a fitted vest, several layers of necklaces and front decoration, white stockings, white--perhaps ballet--shoes, and a glittering fitted cap.

Background on the dancer provided by dance ethnologist Michelle Forner, 5/22/96. From the New York clipper, 4/19/02, p. 167: Ella Lola was born Sept. 2, 1883, in Boston, and made her first appearance as a dancer at the age of eleven years, and by her clever work has steadily come to the fore, until now she takes rank among the best in her class. She has been featured at various times with road companies, and has met with success at the leading vaudeville houses through the country. CREATED/PUBLISHED Apparently filmed in Thomas Edison's "Black Maria" studio in West Orange, New Jersey in 1898. Music is “Bazar” by Lobo Loco downloaded from FreeMusicArchive. You can find more music by them here. http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lob...

And here's a link to an interesting post on Edison's films. http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article...

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I reformatted this video summary to enhance its readability.

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series on the Hoochie Coochie Dance.

This post showcases a 19th century film clip of what is now called "the Hoochie Coochie dance".

This post also presents a long excerpt from a 2016 blog post written by Peter Jensen Brown. Peter Jensen Brown's blog post presents some history about what is now called "the Hoochie Coochie dance". I'm particularly interested in portions of that blog post that provides information about early forms of that dance name and portions of that post that provides information about and lyrics for the African American song "The Ham Fat Man".

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/09/examples-of-childrens-recreational.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. That post presents some examples of English language children's recreational rhymes that include a reference to the "Hoochie Coochie dance".

The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes,

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Thomas Edison for this film and thanks to Ella Lola, the dancer who is featured in this film.
Thanks to Peter Jensen Brown and all those who are quoted in this post.

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THE HISTORY OF THE HOOCHIE KOOCHIE DANCE   
From https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2016/07/part-ii-history-and-etymology-of.html#:~:text=The%20exotic%2C%20erotic%20form%20of,dance%E2%80%9D%20or%20danse%20du%20ventre The History and Etymology of the "Hoochie-Coochie" Dance.

Peter Jensen Brown,  July 8, 2016

Part II - the History and Etymology of the "Hoochie-Coochie" Dance
..."The exotic, erotic form of dancing popularized at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 would only later become known as the “coochie-coochie” or “hoochie-coochie.”.  When the dance rose to prominence three years earlier, at the Paris World’s Fair, the dance was generally referred to as the “stomach dance” or danse du ventre (French for dance of the stomach).  During the six-month run of the Chicago fair, the dance was generally referred to as, danse du ventre, “mussle dance,” “stomach dance” or the “Midway dance.”

 About one year before the Chicago World’s Fair, a dancer named “Avita” (or “Vita”), an Italian-American dancer who was educated in a convent in France, introduced a dance called the “Kouta-Kouta” in a Broadway play about a man who inherited his uncle’s harem when the uncle (as it turned out) faked his own death to avoid facing his first wife.  Avita said she learned the dance in India from a Rajah’s favorite dancer.  The dance may not have been precisely the same as a belly dance, but it was considered just as risqué, and was lumped together with the other exotic dances that shocked and titillated American audiences.

Shortly after the fair closed, and occasionally during the fair, the name, “Kouta-Kouta” (or the like), became widely associated with Midway dances at the fair.  The name “Coochie-Coochie” first appeared in print about one year after the fair closed; apparently derived from “Kouta-Kouta” under the influence of the expressions, “kutchy, kutchy” and “hootchy, kootchy, kootchy,” which had been popular song lyrics from as early as 1863.  The transition from “Coochie-Coochie” to “Hoochie-coochie” may have been further influenced by a linguistic template favoring rhyming reduplication expressions that begin with “H”, like “helter skelter,” hocus pocus,” and “hodge podge”[i]; and earlier such dancing girl-related expressions like, “hurdy gurdy,” “honky tonk” and “hula-hula,” all of which were in use before “hoochie coochie.”

The dancer named “Little Egypt,” who frequently gets credit for popularizing the dance at the fair, first appears in the written record within weeks after the fair closed.  It is possible that she danced at the fair, but if she did, she did not appear to achieve any degree of notoriety.  She did not become famous, or infamous, until taking her clothes off at a bachelor party thrown for one of P. T. Barnum’s grandsons in 1896.

(See Part I: The "Kouta-Kouta" and the "Coochie-Coochie - a History and Etymology of the "Hoochie-Coochie" Dance.)

[...]

The “kouta-kouta” (by that name) was still being performed in Washington DC[v] and Pittsburg[vi] during 1895.

In late-1894 and again in 1896, two newspapers in Washington DC referred to the dance with an apparently transitional form of the word, midway between “Kouta-Kouta” and “Coochie-Coochie”:

The kutcha-kutcha dance, which was put on with the Reily & Wood show at Kernan's Theater, Monday night, was stopped yesterday by Mr. Kernan, who was much displeased with it.

Washington Post, December 5, 1894, page 6.[vii]

[...]

But by late-1896, the expression “Coochie-Coochie,” which first appeared as early as late-1894, had almost completely erased “Kouta-Kouta,” and “Hoochie-Coochie” was starting to make inroads.

Coochie-Coochie

The earliest example of “coochie-coochie” (or the like) that I could find, in the sense of an exotic, erotic dance, is from a fair in New Jersey; on the other side of New York City from White Plains, where the “kouta-kouta” was still in use:

VICE AND VLUGARITY AT A FAIR.

UNWORTHY FEATURES OF THE SOMERSET COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SHOW

Somerville, N. J., Sept. 13 (Special). – “Come, gents, walk right up and see the ‘Couchee-Couchee Dance.’ For gents only, remember; no ladies allowed.”

New York Tribune, September 14, 1894, page 5.

In February of 1895, a high-society “French Ball” in New York City featured a woman in a skin-tight, flesh-colored body suit, a high-kicker, a “hula-hula” dancer and the “coochie-coochie.”  The police were on hand to stop any funny business.  A reporter was on hand to chronicle the madness.  And the band played “snatches from the coochie coochie,” suggesting that the song, “Poor Little Country Maid” may already have been known

[…]

The “coochie coochee” music played at the masked ball may have been the popular song, “The Streets of Cairo; or The Poor Little Country Maid,” a song about a naïve young country girl who loses her innocence at the fair and gets a job, appearing “each night, in abbreviated clothes.”

The lyrics featured the now familiar expression, “kutchy, kutchy”:

She never saw the Streets of Cairo,
On the Midway she had never strayed,
She never saw the kutchy, kutchy,
Poor little country maid.[viii]

The now-familiar melody is now played in every cartoon ever made with a snake charmer or a Middle Eastern dancing girl.  I think I learned the tune in the second grade; it went something like this: “There’s a place in France, where the Ladies wear no pants, but the men don’t care, ‘cause they wear no underwear.”  Andy Bernard sang it on "The Office" (with slightly different lyrics); and Dan Quinn recorded the original version of the song in 1895.

The same tune was published separately in 1895 as an instrumental called, “Kutchy Kutchy, or the Midway Dance.”

The iconic first five notes of the song (da-da-dah dah dah) are said to be identical to a French dancing song, “Colin Prend Sa Hotte,” which “appears in a French songbook from 1719”; and which, in turn, is nearly identical to “an Algerian or Arabic melody known as Kradoutja . . . popular in France since 1600.”[ix]

The melody had also been associated with exotic dancers during the Chicago World’s Fair.  The theme appears in the “Persian Dancers” section of Gustav Luders’ 1893 composition, “An Afternoon in Midway Plaisance”[x]; beginning in the fourth measure.

It may be only a coincidence, but the fact that the original title of the “kouta-kouta” dance melody was apparently “Kradoutja” in France makes me wonder.  Is “Kouta” a corruption of “Kradoutja”?  I don’t know, and there’s no other suggestion that it is.  But still, the fact that exotic, Middle Eastern dance forms were a hit in Paris before they came to the United States, and that they knew the melody as “Kradoutja,” makes me wonder. 

Of course, I do not know how well known “Kradoutja” was in France, or whether it was popularly associated with Middle Eastern dance there, so the jury is still out.  French linguists – a little help please.  But the first use of the expression, “Kouta-Kouta,” by the dancer “Avita,” who said that she learned the dance in India, may be a more likely explanation for the origin of “hoochie coochie,” as applied to the dance. (See Part I).

By 1896, when Thomas Edison took time off from working on his nickel-a-view X-ray machine to film an exotic dancer doing the “coochie-coochie,” the expression “kouta-kouta” was nearly extinct:

New York, March 29. – Thomas A. Edison ceased experimenting with X-rays today just long enough to see some Coochee-Coochee dancers photographed for exhibition in his kinetoscope.  Then he went back to his Crookes tubes and stayed at work all night, for his wife was away.

The wizard has almost completed another nickel-in-the-slot machine.  You put your hand in a box containing X-rays and a fluorescent screen.  Drop in a nickel and see the bones of your hand.

 The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu, Hawaii), April 20, 1896, page 1.

Through the magic of Youtube – you can still see Edison’s Coochee-Coochee dancers (note, I do not vouch for the dates or titles; these are early images – but the dates, titles and places may be wrong):

Black Maria, Hoochie Coochie (1894) Thomas A. Edison
Fatima’s Coochee-Coochee Dance – Edison - 1896
Little Egypt (Fatima Djemille) 1896 Edison
Edison Dancer Ella Lola – Turkish Dancer (1898)

The expression, “coochie-coochie” had a brief run of dominance, but “hoochie-coochie” was not far behind.

Hoochie-Coochie

One of the earliest examples of “hoochie-coochie” I could find date to 1896, in the title of another song about the fair, “When I Do the Hoochy Coochy in de Sky.”  The lyrics refer several attractions from the World’s Fair and reflect the casually racist language of the day (“coon” and “nig”) – and again with the X-rays:

They’ll turn the X-rays on me when the music plays,
So dat ev’ry one can see into the dance,
I’m goin’ to do the coochy seven thousand diff’rent ways,
And I’ll knock the Midway people in a trance.
Oh, I have got a big balloon
With a seat for ev’ry coon,
So now ev’ry nig must either go or die;
Don’t you listen to strange rumors,
but go buy a pair of “bloomers,”
For to do the hoochy coochy in the sky![xi]

In 1904, The Colored American (a newspaper based in Washington DC) called the songwriter, Gussie L. Davis, “[t]he most famous Negro composer of popular songs”; so it is not immediately clear whether they lyrics pandered to white attitudes and tastes, or reflected common black usage of the time.

Music historian, Charles Kennedy, in his essay, “When Cairo Met Main Street” (included in the book, Music and Culture in America, 1861-1918), places the expression, “hoochie coochie” (the dance) at Surf Avenue, Coney Island, in 1895 [xii]; which, if true, would make the expression older than the song, but still younger than “Kouta-Kouta” and “Coochie-Coochie.”

[UPDATE: September 4, 2017] The expression, "Hoochie Coochie," does, in fact, pre-date 1896.  It appeared in an account of the Great Southern Fair in November 1895:

After this [mock-wedding] ceremony the Hoochie coochie dance too place in the theatre.  This dance shows strange skill in the manipulation of all the muscles of the body, but its descriptino does not come within the bounds of propriety.  It is a credit to the managers of our North Carolina Fair that the Hoochie coochie was stopped, and I understand the Georgia legislature has passed a law against it, to take effect after the fair.

The Washington Gazette (Washington, North Carolina), November 14, 1895, page 2. [End Update]

Charles Kennedy also postulated that “hoochy coochy,” in the context of the song, did not refer to the then popular dance, but harkened back to an early meaning related to the lyric, “hoochee koochee koochee,” in the song, “The Ham Fat Man,” a staple of minstrel shows in the 1860s. [xiii]  I am inclined to disagree.  The song’s exhortation to “buy a pair of ‘bloomers,’ [f]or to do the hoochy coochy in the sky,” is a clear allusion to purchasing a loose-fitting pair of “harem pants,” now perhaps better known as “Hammer” pants (as in M. C. Hammer); precisely the types of pants someone might wear to do a “hoochie-coochie” dance.

But that is not to say that there is no connection between “hoochie-coochie” and “The Ham Fat Man.”  The transition from “Kouta-Kouta” to “Coochie-Coochie” and “Hoochie-Coochie” may have been influenced by a general familiarity with the old Ham-Fat lyrics; and perhaps to more recent popular songs of the 1880s, like “Kutchy, Kutchy My Baby” (1884) and “Kutchy, Kutchy Coo!” (1888).

[…]

If “Kutchy, Kutchy” was kissy-face, baby-talk nonsense in the 1880s, it may have been just rhyming, kissy-face nonsense in the 1860s, when “hootchy, cootchy, cootchy” is first attested – in the lyrics of “The Ham Fat Man.”

The Ham Fat Man

Both “hoochie-coochie” (derived from “coochie coochie”) and “coochie-coochie” (an altered form of kouta-kouta) may have been derived, at least in part, from a general familiarity with what was then a decades-old song lyric, “hootchy, kootchy, kootchy, I’m the Ham Fat Man.”  “The Ham Fat Man” was a staple of black-face minstrelsy in the 1860s, but is best known today as the inspiration for the word “hamfatter,” later shortened to “ham,” meaning a bad actor.

The earliest reference I could find to the song is in a report of a military construction battalion of free black workers erecting the defenses around Baltimore during the American Civil War:

[...]

At the time, the song was only a few years old.  The earliest indication of the song that I’ve found is an instruction to sing the early Civil War song, “The Union Man” (published in 1861) to the tune of “The Ham Fat Man.”[xiv]

Although Baltimore’s construction battalion is quoted as having sung, “Coochee, Coochee, Coochee,” other published versions of the song, and later reminiscences of the song, generally recite the lyric, “hoochy, koochy, koochy” (or equivalent).[xv]  Alternate versions of the song, however, used “rooksey, cooksey, cooksey[xvi] or “roochy coochy coochy.”[xvii]

The song, or performers who sang the song, seem to have been wildly popular for a time; with several rival performers claiming to be the “original” “Ham Fat Man.”  But by 1865, the song had already overstayed its welcome…

[…]

By 1903, with many of the old-time blackface performers dying away, the song may have reached such a level of obscurity that the origin of the term “hamfatter” (bad actor) was not widely known.  An old-timer explained the origins of the term for a new generation:

Perhaps from the giving away of ham at Pastor’s the impression may prevail that that’s just how the term ‘hamfatter’ for a bad performer originated but this is not so.

The expression is an old minstrel term and came from the refrain of a song and dance which goes something like this: ‘Ham fat, ham fat, smoking in the pan.’  This song became popular, and the performers and later the public caught up the term.  When a minstrel or a variety actor appeared and he was not up to the standard they used to yell at him, ‘Ham fat, ham fat, smoking in the pan.’  And this was abbreviated until poor actors were known as ‘hamfatters.’

The Rock Island Argus (Rock Island, Illinois), June 13, 1902 (reprint from the New York Sun).

Ham Fat Men

The “Ham Fat Man” was more than just a character in a minstrel show; he was based on an actual occupation.  Other occupations were also subject to parody by the minstrels.  One song book of the period[xix], for example, has songs about, “The Soap Fat Man” (another name for the “ham fat man”), “The Stage Driver,” “The Pop-Corn Man,” “The Charcoal Man,” “The Rat-Catcher’s Daughter,” “The Shop Gals,” and “The Candle Maker’s Daughter.”

Not long since a class of traders called “soap fat men” used to go from house to house exchanging soap for the refuse fat accumulated by housewifes.

The Democrat (London), Volume 2, Number 23, December 5, 1885, page 178.

Soap-fat men, or ham-fat men, were at the low end of the food chain.  Ham-fat men went door to door collecting leftover ham and bacon grease for delivery to a soap boiler.  The soap boiler, in turn, made soap and tallow candles to be sold or traded back to the households donating the fat.  A nostalgic piece from 1920 described the business as practiced in one neighborhood in Washington DC:

Who remembers the soap factory on the banks of Rock Creek at the terminus of Twenty-fifth and U streets, where you could take a quart bucket of grease and get a long bar of common soap, good for family washing, household scrubbing, etc?

The Washington Times (Washington DC), May 23, 1920, page 16.

A description of a poor neighborhood in which a quack doctor treated patients at the police station in the early 1800s lumps “soap-fat men” in with a number of other lowly trades:

These, however, were the aristocrats of my practice; the bulk of my patients were soap-fat men, rag-pickers, oystermen, hose-house bummers, and worse, with other and nameless trades, men and women, white, black, or mulatto.

The Century, volume 59, number 15, page 114.

[…]

But the “Ham Fat Man” did have one advantage; he had an opportunity to meet all of the women, cooks and kitchen staff in the neighborhood.  Like the milk man of later generations, the “Ham-Fat Man” of song was a sort of neighborhood lothario; precisely the kind of man who might be the “someone in the kitchen with Dinah,” another staple of minstrel performances.

The Lyrics

The various versions of “The Ham-Fat Man” and “The Soap Fat Man” that I have seen, involve a relationship with someone on his fat-collection route.  In “The Soap Fat Man,” which does not appear to be the same song, although it relates to a similar character, he seduces an “old maid” who is “fifty-six with a face of tan”; takes her to a “lager bier” garden; convinces her lend him $10 to open his own beer garden; and then absconds with the funds; as “he’d a wife and seven children, had the soap fat man.”

Two versions of “The Ham-Fat Man” may also offer a peek into social conditions that led to the development of so-called, “Soul Food;” traditional foods associated with African-American culture in the South.  Although some features of soul food relate back to grains and vegetables brought over from Africa, other elements of soul food reflect the practice of slave “owners” feeding their captive workers as cheaply as possible.  Slaves had to make do with what were considered less desirable “greens,” as well as less desirable cuts of meat.  The “Ham-Fat” Man is satisfied with the fat of the ham; who needs veal, venison, chicken, hare or lamb:

Oh! good-ev'n to you, white folks,
I'm glad to see you all,
I'm right from ole Virginny,
Which some people say will fall;
You may talk about ole massa,
But he am just de man,
To make de n[-words] happy
Wid de ham-fat man.

Chorus.

Ham-fat, ham-fat, zig a zig a zam,
Ham-fat, ham-fat frying in de pan;
Oh! roll into de kitchen fast, boys, as you can,
Oh! rooksey, cooksey, cooksey, I'm de ham-fat man.

Ole missus she's up stair
A-eating bread and honey;
Massa's in de store
A-counting ob his money;
But Susan's in de kitchen
Frying at de ham,
And saving all de gravy
For de ham-fat man.-Chorus.

Some n[-words] likes de mutton,
Puddin', cakes and jam;
Some like veal and venison,
Chicken, hare and lamb.
But of all dese birds and beastesses
Dat plow the raging main,
Dey're not to be compared
To gravy in de pan - Chorus.

In this version, his relationship with Susan seems to be a good one; she saves her “gravy” and “ham fat” just for him, in what may be a mildly naughty sexual suggestion.

In another version, the “Ham Fat Man” is jealous of his rivals; and his “yaller gal’s” loyalty may be suspect:

When wittels am so plenty, oh! I bound to get my fill;
I know a pretty yaller gal, and I lover her to kill,
If any n[-word] fools wid her, I’ll tan him if I can,
A Hoochee, Koochee, Koochee, says the Hamfat man.

A third version of the song involves a more brazen cheater, who leaves town with an Asian man:

White folks attention, and listen to my song
I’ll sing to you a ditty and it won’t detain you long
It’s all about a pretty girl, whose name was Sara Ann
And she fell deep in love with the ham fat man.

Ham fat, soap fat, candle fat or lard,
Ham fat, cat fat, or any other man,
Jump into the kitchen as quick as you can,
With my roochee, coochee, coochee, the ham fat man.

Now the ham fat man, he couldn't stand the press
For every day she wanted to buy a new dress
His money it was gone and the faithless Sara Ann
She hooked it off to Bathurst with a Chinaman

Elements of the second and third versions point to another early influence on the song; a traditional Irish song called, “The Cuckoo’s Nest.”  Both versions are about a woman who is, or may be, unfaithful, and the third version, from Australia, is said to be sung to the tune of “The Cuckoo’s Nest.”

The connection is plausible.  Although a musicologist might see it differently, you can make your own judgment.  Listen to the Australian version here* – and compare it to this version of “The Ham Fat Man” melody; there is a marked similarity, particularly in the chorus, which begins in the second line:

[…]

Summary

The expression, “hoochie, coochie, coochie,” dates to at least the early 1860s, as an apparently nonsense lyric in the popular minstrel song, “The Ham Fat Man.”  The expression may have been influenced by an older, melodically and rhythmically similar song, “The Cuckoo’s Nest.”  It may also have been understood as a kissing sound (as it would be later in the popular songs, “Kutchy, Kutchy, My Baby,” and “Kutchy, Kutchy, Coo!”), since the ham-fat man of the song generally had some sort of sumpin’-sumpin’ going on with someone.

The “Eastern” dance style popularized at the Paris World’s Fair in 1889 and Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 is not known to have been called the “coochie-coochie” or “hoochie-coochie” until a year or two after the fair closed.  The dancer, “Avita” (or “Vita”) introduced the “Kouta-Kouta” dance on Broadway in 1892, in the harem scene of the play, Elysium.  She claims to have learned the dance in India, where the word, “Kouta” is known to have been the name of a “quick style of dance” as early as 1858.  Avita toured the United States for at least a year, performing the “Kouta-Kouta” in New York, Indianapolis, and Washington DC, before taking the dance to London in early 1894, just a few months after the Chicago World’s Fair closed.

The dance name, “Kouta-Kouta, became associated, generally, with dancing at the Chicago World’s Fair before it closed in October, 1893.  By mid-1894, the “Kouta-Kouta” had made news in all corners of the country, usually in association with dancers said to have performed at the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World’s Fair.  The name, “Coochie-Coochie,” first appeared in association with the dance in late-1894; and the name, “Hoochie-Coochie,” appeared about one year later.  By the end of 1896, the names, “Coochie-Coochie” and “Hoochie-Coochie” had nearly erased Avita’s “Kouta-Kouta” from the popular lexicon."
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*The word "here" in that article leads to this link which is still active on 9/22/2022: http://ozfolksongaday.blogspot.com/2011/05/ham-fat-man.html?m=1

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