In his book, the Incomplete Folksinger, Pete Seeger describes how he and Woody Guthrie came upon the word when they were travelling in Seattle in the early 1940's. He says that it originally was a word like "wingding" or "whatchamacallit" -- as in, hand me that XXXXX. It had come to mean an informal gathering of people, sort of like a potluck supper. He and Guthrie took it back to New York and started labelling their weekend folk song get togethers "hootenannies" and the name stuck. Yours, Peter