By: Ava Rahimpour
The theme of our upcoming issue is ‘Heebie Jeebies’—a term reserved for that creepy, hair-raising feeling you might get while walking alone through a graveyard, or watching hundreds of spiders spill out of an egg sack sitting between your feet. However, when the term first came about it had nothing to do with ghosts or creepy crawlers and everything to do with a cartoon racehorse and its bug-eyed owner.
Back in the early 1920s William Morgan DeBeck—an American cartoonist better known as Billy DeBeck—had created a comic strip called Barney Google (originally Take Barney Google, For Instance) that started gaining traction. The strip followed Barney Google and his racehorse, Spark Plug, who’d at times give Barney the heebie jeebies.
DeBeck made the term up for when Spark Plug gave off unsettling energy that made little Barney nervous, and at first spelled it ‘heeby jeebys.‘ Over time, however, the spelling and use changed to what we see and know today.
Such sayings, called rhyming reduplications, were often used in newspaper comics at that time. Other examples are hoity-toity, bees knees, silly billy, and hotsy totsy—which is yet another term that’s attributed to DeBeck. For anyone who’s still curious: Merriam-Webster lists a few more rhyming reduplications and includes a brief history and context for each one.
As the term’s popularity grew, its use branched out from newspaper comic strips to—believe it or not—jazz compositions. None other than Louis Armstrong and his band recorded a song called Heebie Jeebies in 1926. Fans of jazz might already know the story associated with the recording of this song: that Armstrong dropped his sheet music and started improvising the vocals, in turn inventing scat. While he did drop his music and start scatting, it’s been proven false that he himself invented the jazz vocal style.
It’s an interesting story, especially—I’d think—for those of us pursuing the arts, because the song recording essentially immortalizes a moment where Louis Armstrong slipped up and scrambled to salvage the take, fully expecting a redo. Instead, the producers loved it so much they released that exact version of the song, which is now considered a significant part of jazz music history and American culture.
I recommend giving the song a listen. If you’re thinking creepy music isn’t for you, don’t fret. The song is fun, upbeat—and one you can even dance to! Check out the instructional video to get your heebie jeebies on.
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