ABSTRACT

TOASTS AND DOZENS Folklorists often link toasts and dozens together as African American folk poetry, although their performance contexts are distinguished from each other. African Americans use the term “toasts” to identify a specific narrative oral form with rhymed couplets. The name suggests short drinking testimonials, but the content of toasts is closely tied to long, rhymed barroom recitations in the early twentieth century such as “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “Lady Lil,” and “The Face on the Barroom Floor.” There may be a connection to drinking verses, however, since the form of declarative rhyming appears structurally similar to that of many traditional drinking verses with misogynist themes. Most often told by young men, African American toasts recount the

hypermasculine exploits of trickster figures, badmen, or tragic heroes-as in “Signifying Monkey,” “Stagolee,” “Joe the Grinder,” “Shine and the Titanic,” “Dolomite,” and “Flicted Arm (or Piss Pot) Pete.” Toasts, collected vigorously during the 1960s and 1970s, are often cited as the roots of rap and hip-hop street rhyming in the twenty-first century. Among other features, folklorists are interested in the common themes and connected narrative strategies of different toasts, as in the openings of “Stackolee” and “Shine and the Titanic”:

“Dozens” (also referred to as “capping,” “jiving,” “joning,” “sounding,” “snapping,” “signifying,” and “woofing”) is the most common term used by African Americans for rhymes used in ritualized insult contests. As such, they are directed at other persons. For example, an insult exchange that relies on traditional rhymes goes as follows: “Bullfrog, bullfrog, bank to bank, your momma built like an Army tank,” followed by the reply, “I hate to talk about your momma, she’s a good old soul, she got a humpback boodle like a G.I. Joe.” The dozens is more of a “game” played between two participants in the street, while the toast is an individual oral performance for one’s buddies in a bar, pool hall, military barrack, or prison. The dozens is popular among preadolescents; toasts are more common among older groups. The most prominent common feature in the performance of dozens and the recitation of toasts is the poetic rhythm.