Irish American Vernacular English - Black Irish
The Sanas (Irish Etymology) of Hoodoo
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Barack Obama
One more American President whose Great Great Grandfather was Irish and went to NY in 1850.
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How did Hausa words find their way into Ireland and thence to Brooklyn in the early 1880s? How did they get to Canada ? Hoodoo is not related etymologically as a word to voodoo. Most Anglo-American dictionaries derive hoodoo from voodoo. There is no proof of any relation. In meaning, actually, they are quite different. BLACK IRISH
IRISH AFRICA
BLACK IRISH BACKGROUND
Population genetics - Origins and geographical distribution.
Pliny the Elder affirms that Celtica (the country of origin of the Celts) was in the delta of the river Guadalquivir in the south of Spain. Map 200 B.C.
Flag of Sardinia the four heads represent four Moorish "emirs" who were captured, killed, blindfolded and beheaded in an 11th Cent (CE/AD) battle. English slavers and the African kings and caboceers (native middlemen who arranged the raids) and slave captains.
Jewish In Ireland - By 1232, there was probably a Jewish community in Ireland, as a grant of July 28, 1232 by King Henry III to Peter de Rivall, gives him the office of treasurer and chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, the king's ports and coast, and also "the custody of the King's Judaism in Ireland." This grant contains the additional instruction that "all Jews in Ireland shall be intentive and respondent to Peter as their keeper in all things touching the King.
16th-20th Century Maps of Africa
In 1948, Melville J. Herskovits established the First African Studies program at Northwestern University. This particular online collection contains 113 antique maps of Africa dating from the middle of the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. Visitors can utilize a search engine to look through the maps, or they may also browse by title,cartographer, or date. There are a number of real finds here, including Frederik de Wits 1708 map of North Africa (titled Barbaria) and an early map of Zanzibar from 1740.
IRISH AFRICA
The Irish Language Reportedly Heard Spoken in Africa 1821
Discover early cultural mergings of African and European currents and their Moorish Legacy by Ted Gioia. Learn how the Irish were carried off as captives by the Corsairs in the middles ages to Africa, maybe as early as the third century. Find out about La Coruna in the most northwest corner of Spain and it's Celtic roots complete with bagpipes and Irish dialect the Celts in Galicia, Spain the Barbery Coast and the origin of Gypsies. Trace the shared custom of lamenting over the dead, the funeral dirge the funeral song of the African, Irish, Jew and Arab.
The Moors ruled Spain and parts of Europe and North Africa for about 800 years. The principal cities of Moorish Spain -- were Seville, Cordoba, and Grenada.
The Crusiades brought Christian rule to Spain, and by the early thirteenth century, the area of Moslem rule shrunk by half. "...by the middle of that same century only Andalusia, al-Andalus, remained under Moslem control. Jews in large numbers moved to Andalusia, seeking sanctuary with Moslem rulers who were historically more tolerant than their Christian counterparts. Many Jews and Moslems converted to Catholicism to escape persecution. Some Jews left Spain altogether, moving to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
Between 150,000 and 300,000 Jews left Spain in 1492. Most of the Jews that escaped the inquisition went to North Africa or to Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans in the east -- the area to be known as the Ottoman Empire. The remainder escaped to Jerusalem and Safed. The exiled Jews of the Ottoman Empire became known as the Sephardim. Their music was written down and survives today as a history of peoples once joined, then scattered by religious intolerance and racial hatred.
A traditional song, "Il bastidor" is about a woman who is frustrated at her daily chores that keep her from making a vest (bastidor) for her husband. The language is a mixture of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Arabic, and Turkish Balkans. The instrument is the guitar, an African import of the Moors.
Louisiana 1860 census breaks down the Irish population "Irish Channel." Irish people have been in New Orleans in large numbers since the 1720s. During much of the antebellum period Louisiana had the highest death rate of any state in the nation and New Orleans the highest of any city. Yellow fever, smallpox, and cholera epidemics accounted for many of these deaths. However, the high mortality rate was offset by increasing immigration and rising numbers of births in the state. In the five decades prior to the Civil War, Louisiana's population increased from 80,000 to 700,000. The Crescent City held its first St. Patrick's Day celebration in 1809. Everyone came to the crossroads. The Irish built the canals. As the city grew, the American elite leap-frogged the Irish Channel, gobbling up old sugar plantations and establishing the Garden District in the 1830's and 1840's. Irishman Stephen Foster born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Churches of Fire in Ireland and the South
ALTHOUGH IT HAS been more than 20 years since Alex Haley's ``Roots'' first hit the top of the best-seller list, it is still the most widely read novel written about African-American history. What is less known is that before his death, Haley was working on another book concerned with ``roots.'' This new story would begin not in Africa however, but in Ireland. Alex Haley, Mohammed Ali, writer Alice Walker, Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Gough Fagan, and Ella Fitzgerald were Irish African American. A people that both communities have chosen to forget, descended from the slave ships of Liverpool and the coffin ships of the Great Famine of Ireland. The ``Bloody Ould Sixth Ward'' turned up a number of Irish-African-American families living in New York's largest Irish ghetto before the Civil War. A history that stretches from the ancient fortresses of the Ulster kings, who traded with merchant princes of Africa two centuries before Christ, to Pete Williams' dance hall in The Five Points neighborhood of New York.
Learn how the Irish were carried off as captives by the Corsairs in the middles ages to Africa, maybe as early as the third century. English slavers and the African kings and caboceers (native middlemen who arranged the raids) and slave captains.
Red Heads / Fire / War
Neanderthals 'were flame-haired Some Neanderthals were probably redheads. Something like 23 presidents out or all American Presidents can trace their roots to Scots or Scots/Irish decent. They appear in the fossil record about 400,000 years ago and, at their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters dominated a wide range spanning Britain and Iberia in the west, Israel in the south and Siberia in the east.
Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis) after entering Europe about 40,000 years ago. The last known evidence of Neanderthals comes from Gibraltar and is dated to between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago.
Black Irish Muhammad Ali 67 year old, three-time heavyweight champion made a journey to Ennis, western Ireland the home of his great-grandfather Abe Grady who settled in Kentucky in the 1860s and married a freed slave. One of their grandchildren, Odessa Lee Grady Clay, gave birth to Ali – then Cassius Clay – in 1942.
Hoodoo
Hoodoo , n., a cause of bad luck, a jinx; a person or thing whose presence brings bad luck; a magician or necromancer; an evil spirit; an eerie-looking rock pinnacle, or earth pillar, formed by erosion and nature; a mountain in Canada.
Uath Dubh, (pron. h-úŏ doo): dark specter, evil phantom, a malevolent thing; horror, dread; a dark, spiky, evil-looking thing. Uath, n., a form or shape; a spectre or phantom; dread, terror, hate. Old Gaelic name for the hawthorn. Dubh, (pron. doo, duv), adj., dark; black; malevolent, evil; wicked; angry, sinister; gloomy, melancholy; strange, unknown.
(O’Donaill, 457, 1294; Dineen, 374, 1287; De Bhaldraithe, English-Irish Dictionary, 755; Dwelly, 988)
"Fifth Hoodoos Thomas & Seals Lose Game" (headline, S.F. Examiner, March 15, 1913, p. 15)
Uath, -a, pl. id., m. (pron. h-ooah; aspirate “th” = “h” in Irish and Gaelic), a form or shape; a spectre or phantom; dread, terror, hate. See fuath. Uath- in compds., dreadful Uath, -a, pl., -ta, m., the white-thorn+, the name of the aspirate “h” in the Irish alphabet, (which is Ms. Symbol for ua or ó). See uath, lonely, and note that H is often represented by a single stroke in Ogham.
The word hoodoo only enters American language in the 1880s. Most dictionaries derive “hoodoo” from voodoo, a syncretic religion of the African diaspora. This is currently discounted by a number of researchers. Hoodoo rocks are “grotesque eroded landforms” in deserts all across America . There are hoodoos in Alberta 's Dinosaur Provincial Park , the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, and in Yellowstone Park in the United States.
In the 1880s, the hoodoo man was in Brooklyn.
“I’M NO GYPSY, I’M IRISH,’ SAYS EDWARD O’ROURKE
“...His Arrest as Hoodoo Man. Miss Myers Says That O’Rourke Was Introduced by a Woman as a Gypsy King
“Edward O’Rourke, the young man arrested in Flatbush Saturday, accused of posing as a hoodoo man and of collecting $50 from Margaret Meyer, a servant...” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 8, 1901, 20)
The Hoodoo was a gallows bird.
“HARD LUCK AND A HOODOO --
“The Tale of a Hangman’s Cap and Noose
“It is a tale of the hoodoo the writer is about to tell – a hoodoo which began active business in Brooklyn ...” (Brooklyn Eagle, March 25, 1894, 20)
The hoodoo haunted a Brooklyn baseball park in 1887.
“A HOODOO SHOT -- Why the Brooklyn Base Ball Team Is Winning --
“...A shadowy figure with wings that spread out at least twelve feet flew in the window...It was the hoodoo beginning his deadly work...The red haired girl...and the white horse... are the mascots purchased two weeks ago by Manager Byrne immediately after the terrible series of disasters... Everything has now prospered and the terrible hoodoo has fled.
(Brooklyn Eagle, Aug. 11, 1887, 4)
In 1883, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the Irish “Hoodoo” was a necromancer.
“A young man named Hogan charged Foster Rankin, Edward Horan, Dennis Sullivan, and Albert Hodge with necromancy and conspiracy before Alderman Fuller today... The other night..after having some wine, they introduced him to a magician, or ‘Hoodoo,’ who was supposed to work supernatural wonders. The ‘Hoodoo’ passed his hands over Hogan’s head, and made him think he was President Judge of Lackawanna County .”
(N.Y. Times, Aug. 26, 1883, 1)
In the 19th century, in Ireland, English colonialism was a hoodoo.
“In Ireland ...he fled from him on sight, for fear he would "hoodoo" them in some way.”
(Thomas Addis Emmet, Incidents of My Life, 1911, 75)
Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman visited hoodoo land in Yellowstone Park.
“I had wanted to go to the Yellowstone river region – wanted specially to see...the ‘hoodoo’ or goblin land of that country.”
(Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, 1883, 1887, 229.)
But the hoodoo has always been in Ireland. Today the phantom of the hoodoo has been euhemerized* to a jinx in sports...
“ Leinster break Munster hoodoo with late show -- “CELTIC LEAGUE FINAL - Leinster 24 Munster 20 –.” (The News Letter, Belfast , Ireland ; December 17, 2001 )
By the hoodoo, voodoo, hindoo
Ancient and noble art of prestidigitation…
—Riverboat gambler in Disney's Adventures of Davy Crockett, 1955.
Great line from the thimble-rig sequence at the Alamo.
Most Anglo-American dictionaries derive hoodoo from voodoo. There is no proof of any relation. In meaning, actually, they are quite different. Voodoo is a syncretic religion of the African-American diaspora that helixes strands of West African religious belief with Christian and Native American spirituality.
A hoodoo in Ireland is a very common word-phrase used to describe a hex or a malevolent curse. In New Orleans and the American south it was used by the Irish, Scots, and African-American communities to describe a spell or amulet.