Of course, there was the old Spike Jones gag, "What do you get if you cross an owl with a nanny goat? A hootenanny!! Nyuk! Nyuk Nyuk!"

Up until the late Forties or so, the word "hootenanny" belonged to that collection of terms that people used when they couldn't think of the right word: like thingamabob, gizmo, and whatchamacallit. Another definition, in line with these, was "a noisy contrivance of questionable utility." This, perhaps, is getting a bit closer to the current definition.

In The Incompleat Folksinger (Seeger, Pete; The Incompleat Folksinger; Edited by. Jo Metcalf Schwartz; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1992; p. 327), Pete Seeger says the following:

In the summer of 1941 Woody Guthrie and myself, calling ourselves the Almanac Singers, toured Seattle, Washington and met some of the good people of the Washington Commonwealth Federation, the New Deal political club headed by Hugh DeLacy. They arranged for us to sing for trade unions in the Puget Sound area, and then proudly invited us to their next "hootenanny." It was the first time we had heard the term. It seems they had a vote to decide what they would call their monthly fund-raising parties. "Hootenanny" won out by a nose over "wingding."

The Seattle hootenannies were real community affairs. One family would bring a whole pot of some dish like crab gumbo. Others would bring cakes, salads. A drama group performed topical skits, a good 16-mm film might be shown, and there would be dancing, swing and folk, for those of sound limb. And, of course, there would be singing.

Woody and I returned to New York, where we rejoined the other Almanac Singers, and lived in a big house, pooling all our income. We ran Saturday afternoon rent parties, and without a second's thought started calling them hootenannies, after the example of our west-coast friends. Seventy-five to one hundred Gothamites would pay 35 cents each to listen to an afternoon of varied folk songs, topical songs, and union songs, not only from the Almanacs but from Huddie Ledbetter, Josh White, the Mechau family, and many many others--including members of the audience.

Pete goes on to describe the spread of hootenannies and the dissemination of the term "hootenanny," along with the evolution and devolution of both; hootenannies organized by Ed McCurdy in New York, and Win Stracke's "gather-alls" in Chicago; then, in 1963, the peremptory appropriation of the word "hootenanny" for commercial exploitation by ABC-TV and other promoters and carpetbaggers.

Most of the "hoots" I attended in the Fifties and Sixties were held in somebody's private home, but they were basically open—come one, come all, sing or just listen. Solo singing, group songs, whatever the people who came wanted to do. Some of them were held in halls of one sort or another and were more like informal, free-for-all concerts. They were generally pretty unstructured, with no formal program.

The commercialism of the Sixties pretty much ran hootenannies into the ground, but it's high time the good, old fashioned hootenannies got going again. Go to it!!

Don Firth