Just went back and read more of this thread than I did yesterday, when I just perused the 2007 messages about "swamp pop."

1) To Reggie Miles, if you're still around to read this: I knew those guys in the jug band fairly well (although I can't remember "Washboard Jackson"'s real first name ~ I can picture him, though!) In fact, they played at least one private party in my backyard on Whitney Avenue in Algiers, as "opening act" for my kid brother's rock band, Satisfaction (which made several such appearances). One of our biggest parties there was my son Cassidy's 2d birthday, August 28, 1981 ~ if you were there, it would be an amazing coincidence.

2) My understanding of the definition of "jockamo" as "jester," etc., is that it comes from the Italian "Giacomo" (same pronunciation), a common jester-figure in commedia del arte and in Italian Carnivale traditions, notably those of Venice. The Italian immigrants who came to New Orleans were almost exclusively from Sicily ~ pretty far away from Venice, both geographically and culturally ~ and so may or may not have incorporated "Giacomo" into the melting pot of New Orleans' Mardi Gras culture, where African Americans could possibly have picked it up. I think it is at least equally likely that the Mardi Gras Indians' "jockamo [fee nah nay]" has nothing to do with Giacomo the jester, and that the common pronunciation is just a coincidence. Homonyms, in other words.

3) It's a long time since the last slave ship crossed the Atlantic, which is why I have my doubts about any Yoruba vocabulary having survived in the US to the present day. I do recognize that a number of West African syntactical constructs and grammatical forms still persist around here, just like such French transliterations as "making groceries" (from "faire marche).

However, I don't believe specific vocabulary words survive as long as speech patterns, which are actually verbalizations of thought patterns. When a family's first language changes, the youngsters adopt the new language but they learn it from parents who are still thinking primarily in the old language, and transliterating word-for-word to create new constructs and idioms unfamilar to native speakers of the new language.

Many of the characteristic patterns of African-American English ("Ebonics") come straight out of West Africa. One obvious example is possessive-by-proximity; that is, omission of the "apostrophe-s" in informal speech.

You can see the same thing in Ireland. The vast majority of the people who have long since adopted English as their first language still persist ~ several generations later ~ in using Irish/Gaelic syntax with their English vocabularies. Examples: The common use of the phrase "in it"; use of the reflexive "himself" where Brits, Aussies, Yanks and other English speakers would simply say "him"; and the avoidance of uttering a simple "yes" or "no," preferring instead to respond in brief declarative sentances like "I did," "He did not," etc. (The old language, apparently, did not have words for "yes" and "no.")

For the above reasons, I think it's more likely for a word to have traveled back to modern Nigeria from Louisiana than for that word to have had its origins in Yoruba and survived for centuries here in the states. Just my opinion.