…below, I submit the following answer.
Ich bin so frei, sie auf Englisch zu verfassen, hauptsaechlich weil ich faul bin. Aber als Ausrede werde ich behaupten, wie immer, dass es so besser ist, damit man die Moeglichkeit hat, etwas von einem Muttersprachler zu lesen.
Ausserdem habe ich einen neuen Artikel angefangen, weil ich bemerkt habe, dass wenn ich so weit „unten“ eine Antwort schreiben wuerde, liesst sie kaum einer. (das klingt richtig, scheint aber gegen irgendeinen Regel zu stossen) (liesst einer sie kaum?) (liesst kaum einer sie?) (liesst kaum sie einer?) Anyhow,wenn ich mir die Muehe gebe, so viel Denken in einem Projekt zu investieren, will ich, dass die Welt ihren Nutzen davon hat. (Am Forslundschen Wesen soll die Welt…)
A “Cat” is slang for 1) a person in general, 2) more particularly a person „in the know“ (in der Szene), i.e. hip/hep/cool and 3) most particularly a jazz afficionado. Confer: cool cat, hep cat, hip cat. Although “cat” is used by the British (so I learned from the Internet) to refer to a woman, it is not so used in the U.S., and has not been so used - unless I have been out of the room for almost sixty years when it was so used. Although it is used to refer to a woman tangentially: a “cat house” is a house of prostitution and women can act “catty” – spitefully. A man cannot act catty. Also, come to think of it, two women fighting (ineffectually) is a “cat fight.” Yet, strangely enough, despite all these references, women are not referred to as cats in the U.S., as opposed to GB…well, maybe you can refer to a woman as „a pussycat“ but that would only be in direct address and the light should be off.
Okay, so „cat“ is a person - probably a person in Newport for the jazz. What then, do we do with „hat?“
At first I thought that “hat” could be a reference to women. According to some jazz slang dictionaries, “hat” can mean “woman”, even though I have never heard it used thus.
Hat
Hat is Black-American slang for „any female“
http://www.fas.org/news/reference/probert/PA.HTM
Hat: any female
http://membres.lycos.fr/jpcharp/slang.htm#H
And yet, to assume that “hat” meant women, would mean that “cat” could have meant only men. This is not the case. Even in 1954, a “cool/hep/hip/-- cat” could be either sex –although it is used more often in reference to men, perhaps. The important thing was whether you could snap your fingers in time to music. If a musician told a group in a coffee house: “All right, you cats, let’s hear it for Big Willie here” everyone would clap, not just the men.
So what, then, is a “hat” in der Bing-Crosbyischen Newport-Konstellation.
I am convinced that “hat” is in reference to the phrase “high hat” which can mean “high society” and/or “snobbery.” Think in terms of a top hat –a Zylinderhut.
high hat US - someone who wears a top hat, a snob. Also a verb meaning to snub- „He highhatted me at the party.“
http://www.geocities.com/faskew/WW2/Glossary/WW2-Gen…
The Newport Jazz Festival had been begun only two years before – 1954. Before this, Newport had been known only as a very exclusive community where for seventy or more years the high society of New York and the rest of the northeast came in the summer to escape the heat of the cities and to enjoy the ocean and each other’s company. This began in the Gilded Age (the American equivalent of the Gruenderzeit) when, indeed, top hats had been de rigeur. They were certainly still being worn by members of high society in the 1930’s (remember Fred Astaire in perhaps all his movies but of course in “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.”)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=U…
I assume that they were also still being worn on high society occasions in the 1950’s – in Newport and in New York, at any rate. But, even if top hats would have been hard to find on the streets of Newport in the summer, the cliché of Newport high society and top hats would have been firmly in the minds of der Bingle and others of the period.
Therefore, ”hats” must have referred to the old-line, traditional, upper class residents of Newport who were there because they were always there in the summer and “cats” must have referred to those visitors who were there for the jazz festival. Having written the previous, I just found the following on the Internet:
“With the benefit of a half-century’s hindsight, it seems almost inevitable. Yet as the „First American Jazz Festival“ came roaring into the Newport Tennis Casino on a mid-July weekend in 1954, the now-venerable event was anything but a sure bet. A brainchild of Boston nightclub owner George Wein and Newport socialites Louis and Elaine Lorillard, the festival gathered a massive and motley group of jazz musicians and enthusiasts together in the summer playground of America’s aristocratic class. Its extraordinary debut was both a shot across the bow of high culture and a shot in the arm of the jazz world. More than a merely successful enterprise, the Newport Jazz Festival „opened a new era in jazz presentation,“ in the prophetic words of Down Beat magazine. http://www.festivalproductions.net/v2/html/50th/hist…
I rest my case.
Jim
P.S. in my wanderings, I found this humorous writing in reference to the blues:
http://www.blues101.org/articles/blues.slang.htm It is very entertaining.
))))