History of the term "punk" as used with music, part 2 of 3 - 1920s to 1960s

This is an edited version of the second part of an article on the history of the term "punk" as related to music. You can read the first part here.

The Rotten Etymology of Punk (Part 2 of 3)

by J.P. Robinson

Occasionally, with a familiar sense of irony, “punk” became a positive description. In 1929, a critic for the Asheville Citizen-Times described a song called ‘That Empty Pantaloon’ as “so punk, it is refreshing.” Ten years later, the Pittsburgh Press went further: “Americans wouldn’t be likely to know whether a singer was good or bad and would prefer him fairly punk, because sour notes are the sound of native music that Americans like, such as jazz and swing.” When the story was reprinted elsewhere, some used the heading “We Like It Punk.”...

(Ernest) Nelson was then twenty-one, and had formed the band (Oregon Loggers) a couple of years before, in 1930, with five other part-time lumberjacks.... Nelson called himself “Whistle Punk,” a logging term for the young, often teenaged, worker responsible for signalling other members of the gang. Sometimes Nelson cut it short, to “Punk.” He was probably the first musician to call himself a punk.

The Oregon Loggers, 1932. Ernest Nelson is bottom left, with his harmonica (Source: The News-Review, Roseburg)

This was not a punk in the Shakespearean sense, nor the poor quality punk of Otto Wise. Through the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, punk had become a term for a young person, often a delinquent, sometimes a young gay man. Inevitably, the word was applied to musicians; writing in his 1939 autobiography, Benny Goodman remembered being called a “little punk” when he was twelve, in about 1920. In Really The Blues, clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow’s 1946 autobiography, “punk” was included in the glossary of jazz slang; Mezzrow said it meant a “young man who plays the feminine role in a homosexual relationship.” “Punks and skunks,” he wrote, could also mean “there’s nothing very exciting to report.”

The “poor quality” sense of the word still lingered. A feature in Ballyhoo magazine in the early thirties asked readers to decide if Bing Crosby and other musical stars were “‘punk,’ ‘lousy’ or ‘marvellous.’”...

By the fifties, the “delinquent” sense of the word became ubiquitous. Newspapers across the country worried about “grisly whodunits, horror films and cinema and airwave glorification of punks.” According to the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, Elvis Presley was cast as “a hot-headed punk” in Jailhouse Rock. “This punk can’t smile,” a correspondent to the Pittsburgh Press wrote, “he has a nasty curled lip, a mean eye and those sideburns remind me of a hoss-rustler who was hanged a long time ago.” Presley himself used the word; in 1957, he threatened a young Marine with a prop pistol, and called him a “punk.”

Presley as a punk, 1957 (Source: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal)

Presley also inspired what was likely the first television reference to “punk” music. It came in 1956, on The Steve Allen Show, the week after Presley made his famous first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In a dig at both Presley and his main television rival, the announcer said there was a “peculiar trend” in music, where “some of the new singing groups look like four fellas you’d hate to meet in a dark alley.” That night, the announcer said, they had “the ultimate in the new trend,” a group called “The Four Punks.” Allen came onstage wearing leathers, with a low slung guitar, swinging his hips, joking about petty crime, before the group performed a song he called ‘Misery Motel.’

By the 1960s, punk was so closely associated with young music fans that, when a seventeen year old “psychedelic painter” was beaten and robbed in Arizona, while hitchhiking from Los Angeles, his assailants cut off his hair and carved “punk” into his back with an empty beer can. Even high-school students in Delaware, campaigning to raise money to renovate the school roof, were called punks: resisting the name, one told his local newspaper that “punk-ness is in the eye of the beholder.”

“The professional punk”, 1968 (Source: Chicago Tribune)

Through the sixties “punk” became a journalistic failsafe. Musicians were often dismissed as punks, with The Beatles at the forefront. “They know they’re punks. They admit it,” the Austin American-Statesman argued in 1964. They were “immature punks” in the Uniontown Evening Standard, and “just punks with long hair” in the Fresno Bee. The San Bernardino County Sun complained that “these four little punks’ fad-fed bank accounts have gone to their heads.” Even in the countercultural Berkeley Barb in 1968, they were “punk millionaires.”

“Punks’ Haircuts”, 1964 (Source: The Salina Journal)

Other musicians had the same treatment. In 1965, one news agency ran a story from the Whisky-A-Go-Go, Los Angeles, criticising “punks who can burp into a microphone and produce a hit record.” In 1967, a journalist who had recently returned from Vietnam complained that “we’ve got kids out there dying without a sound and we’ve got punks here who dress up like girls and make millions of dollars doing it.” The same year, Mel Torme called The Rolling Stones “dope-ridden punks.” In 1968, Mike Butterfield told Hit Parader about walking into his first session with Bob Dylan “like a dumb punk with my guitar over my back, no case.”

“Young punk” in Dick Tracy, 1965 (Source: Great Bend Tribune)

The word was also used by specialist music journalists, on both sides of the Atlantic. At first, it appeared in reported speech: in 1967, according to Derek Taylor in Disc and Music Echo, “a young artist” in Los Angeles, painting a sign for the Monterey Pop Festival, was told to “get a haircut, punk” by a passing driver. In 1968, in The New Yorker, Ellen Willis reported that staff at the Newport Festival mistook the Village Voice critic for “just another of those young punks.” In Melody Maker, in February 1969, Chris Welch imagined executives at Motown calling him a “Limey punk.”

The old “poor quality” meaning was still occasionally used about music. In 1966, the New York Daily News recalled “there was a middling popular and middling punk song some decades ago called ‘I Surrender, Dear.’” In 1967, the Indiana Gazette discussed “a number of the big names who are by any standards of real musical judgement pretty punk performers. Yet these fairly punk performers sell hundreds of thousands of records.” In July 1969, the Indiana underground magazine The Spectator argued that the 5th Dimension’s ‘Don’tcha Hear Me Callin’ To Ya’ was “so hilariously punk” that it could be a pastiche.

“…it sounded awful punk…”, 1961 (Source: Danville Bee)

Gradually at first, punk became part of a wider, critical argument, with“punk” musicians in opposition to high art or the mainstream music business. In 1967, in the Indianapolis News, Misha Dichter, a pianist with the Boston Symphony, was said to look “like a cross between a punk and a poet.” In 1968, the Los Angeles Free Press suggested Frank Zappa’s work was an angry response to his a time as a “teenage punk” listening to the bands of the late fifties and early sixties. Writing in New York in December 1968, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Lillian Roxon described “Dylan’s switch to rock” as “the beginning of a new golden era when the punks and the scruffies and the weirdos would take over Tin Pan Alley.” A month later, the St Louis Post-Dispatch said Dylan was “half-punk, half-guru, probably America’s best young songwriter, possibly its best young poet.”

The word also crossed over to the music itself. In 1967, Simon & Garfunkel released ‘Punky’s Dilemma,’ about a Californian draft dodger. The same year, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band used the word on ‘Big Shot.’ In 1968, The Mothers of Invention included ‘Flower Punk’ on We’re Only In It For The Money: “hey punk,” Zappa sang, to the tune of ‘Hey Joe,’ “where you going with that flower in your hand? Well, I’m going up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band.”

Probably the most widely read reference to “punk” and music in the sixties came in March 1969, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Rickey Ivie, a seventeen year old from Fremont, California, was interviewed about a “series of boycotts” that had been organised at his high school. As co-chairman of the Fremont Black Students Union, he railed against the “ghetto educational system” and its “racist training.” “In the world of music,” he said, “we want to hear about black composers, about the Supremes, Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye,” not Bach, “that old, dead punk.”...

William Buckley’s Los Angeles Times column, as it appeared in The Billings Gazette, Montana, 31st March 1969

Three weeks after the Rickey Ivie story, and the week after Buckley’s column, Lester Bangs’ byline appeared for the first time in a national publication, for his review of The MC5’s debut album in Rolling Stone. He panned the record, saying the band looked like “a bunch of sixteen-year-old punks on a meth power trip.”

Read the complete article here.

Read part 3 here.