Shish Kebab-o-Rootie

Possibly no musician has ever had more fun than Slim Gaillard, a guitarist and jive singer popular in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.... (Hang on, there’ll be a food angle eventually. Just wait.)

Gaillard invented a much-quoted jive-talk language, exemplified in hit songs such as “Flat-Foot Floogie (With a Floy Floy).” It was big on nonsense words like “vout-o-rootie” and “vootimo” and all-purpose suffixes like “-oroonio.”

It probably represents the exotic welter of languages Gaillard heard when he was growing up in Detroit during the teens and ‘20s of the last century, when people from all over the world flocked there to work in the auto factories. Of course, there was also that unique learning experience of accompanying his father, a steward on an ocean liner, on a trip to the Mediterranean and being accidentally left on the island of Crete for six months.

He clearly spent part of his youth hanging out in Detroit’s Lebanese neighborhoods, because he tossed Lebanese dialect words into some of his songs. And here we get to the food; in 1951 he recorded “Yip Roc Heresy,” basically a list of Lebanese dishes (pronounced with a pretty good accent, -oroonios aside) sung to a jump tune. (Yapraq is a name for stuffed grape leaves and hariseh is a sort of wheat porridge with lamb in it. Kibbeh is a paste of lamb and bulgur wheat that can be cooked in a variety of ways.) It goes:

Yip Roc Heresy,

kibbeh siniyya (baked kibbeh), kibbeh ba’ (probably short for “batata,” meaning with mashed potatoes),

laham (meat) mack voutee.

Yip Roc Heresy,

laham mishwi (shish kebab), laham mishvoutee,

laham misharoonimo.

And so it continued, with the odd “mack foonio” and “sivootee” thrown in, not to mention “lamb-oroonio” and even “chili with tomato sauce.” Without a doubt, it was the single greatest jazz lyric of the ‘50s in terms of mentioning lamb-based dishes.