Lighter- just for the record, I'm a she and not a he. :o)

I attempted to post as a guest but it didn't take so I've signed in for this posting.

Lighter, I agree with you about the possibile association of juberju with jubilee.

Here's the comment that I attempted to post before reading your comment:


Thanks John for posting those links.

I wasn't sure from reading those pages when that "the juberju song" was first documented. It appears that the informant for that song in one of the links you provided recalls it from the Civil War.

Songquest: the journals of Great Lakes folklorist By Ivan Walton, Joe Grimm

p. 53
Recollection of Captain Martin Johnson (Michigan) in his eighties, 1932

"He knew the juberju song [The E. C. Roberts]

Chorus:
Watch her, catch her
Jump on her juberju
Give her the sheet and let her go
We're the boys to push her through
You ought to hear her howling
Her course was down the shore
She's bound for Cleveland
With nine hundred tons of ore

-snip-

It would be interesting to find out when the dance step "Jubal Jew" was first documented. Professor Thomas Talley gives that dance step as part of the Juba dance, but his book was published in 1922 and the Juba dance is documented from the 1840s.

It wouldn't surprise me if the phrase "Jubal Jew" is folk etymology for a similar sounding phrase such as juberju. But that phrase is itself probably folk etymology.

From another link you provided, John Miner:

The mystery is "juberju". It's context seems to suggest that it is part of the vessel, yet no part of a sailing vessel is generally known by that name. Loudon Wilson suggested that this might be a corruption of another French word "gibre", the extension of the stem or knee piece of a vessel to which the bowspirit is attached. On some vessels, bow rails run all the way to the gibre, giving sailors a foothold. From there, or from foot ropes, they maneuvered the standing jib and others head sails to help catch more wind to bring a sluggish vessel about as it changed track. Another theory is that the expression was a hyperbolic description of the wheelsman's efforts to hold the Bigler's course. The reasoning says that the phrase was borrowed from a dance song of the day

Juba dance and Juba sing
Juba cut the pigeon wing. Juba! Juba!

Winjammers, Songs of the Great Lakes sailors By Ivan Walton, Joe Grimm ; pps 134-135

-snip-

But the word "Juba" itself may be folk etymology. The website http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3juba.htm and at least one other offline book I've read give the spelling of the word "Juba" as "giouba" in the Caribbean, while indicating that comes from a West African dance.

If documentation of the Jubal Jew step doesn't greatly predate the juberju song, I think it's highly possible that that step could have been patterned after the movements made by Black (or White) sailors as alluded to in the above quote.
However, I also think that the meanings of the word (and name)* Juba and Jubal were blended or overtaken by the meanings of the words jubilant and jubilee to (further) contribute to a fast paced dance movement.

Anyway, I like this admittedly vague description for the Jubal Jew dance step rather than the tongue in cheek description that I gave of mimicking the movements of a Black Jew.
For information about the meanings of the names Juba and Jubal, visit this page of my website http://www.cocojams.com/content/names-nicknames

Best wishes,

Azizi Powell