According to lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms
hipster and
hippie derive from the word
hip, whose origins are unknown.
Hip first appeared during the early 20th century, when its meaning was "aware; in the know." During the jive era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans began to use
hip to mean "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date".
The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, and used by the American Beat generation during the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz and swing music performers. The word evolved to describe bohemian counterculture.
Like the word "hipster", the word "hippie" is jazz slang from the 1940s One of the first recorded usages of the word "hippie" was in a radio show of November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson "Hippie" (NBC studios, live radio program, the "Jubilee" show at Billy Berg's jazz club in Hollywood, CA, and recorded through the transcription service of the Armed Forces Radio Corps, or AFRC, and available on the CD "Stan Kenton And Friends," 2006). However, this use probably does not represent a free use of "hippie", but was addressing Gibson by a variant of his nickname, playing off of Gibson's moniker "Harry the Hipster."
In 1963, the British band The Swinging Blue Jeans released the song "Hippy Hippy Shake", which rose to #2 in the British charts and #24 in the US. This song was originally recorded in 1959 by Chan Romero, with less success. The lyrics, at least on the surface, refer to anatomical hips which shake while dancing, rather than to anyone's awareness or culture.
Also in 1963, the Orlons, an African-American singing group from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, released the soul dance song "South Street" (Cameo 243) referring to the real South Street in their city. Composed by Dave Appell and Kal Mann, with part of the old Stephen Foster tune from "Camptown Races", it climbed to #3 in sales in the US. The "South Street" lyrics enthuse, "Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street . . . The hippest street in town". Some transcriptions, however, read "Where do all the hippist (sic) meet?" Nevertheless, since many heard it as "hippies", that use was promoted.
"The Hippies" was also the name of a mixed African American and White soul singing group on the Orlons' record label, Cameo-Parkway. Under a previous name, the Tams, they recorded "Memory Lane" in 1959 (Parkway 863). Re-released in April 1963, "Memory Lane" had printed on the label "The Hippies (Formerly The Tams)". It reached #63 in sales.
On the east coast of the U.S. in Greenwich Village, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips. At that time, as now, to be hip meant to be "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being called a stodgy "square". Disaffected youth from the suburbs of New York City flocked to Greenwich Village coffeehouses in their oldest clothes to fit into the counterculture.
Reminiscing about late 1940s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography, Malcolm X referred to the word hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes."
The more contemporary sense of the word "hippie" first appeared in print on 5 September 1965. In an article entitled "A New Haven for Beatniks," San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Fallon reportedly came up with the name by condensing Norman Mailer's use of the word "hipster" into "hippie".
Use of the term hippie did not catch on in the mass media until early 1967, after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began referring to hippies in his daily columns.
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