Dance Of The Hoo-Hoo

Vintage ragtime sheet music which reminds me of what some folks teach their kids to call their -- looks around to see who is listening, then whispers -- private parts. No, not the pussy.



Found at A Tad Too Much tan For Taupe, Rob Crausaz's Ragtime MIDI Files (yes, a sound file is there!) says this of the Emma Y. Suckert song:

Dance of the Hoo-Hoo (1898)
This delightful folk rag, which is available on the "Lester Levy" website, was written in honor of "The Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo" (the cover has a replica of their official symbol). According to its website TCOHH is, "the oldest industrial Fraternal Organization in existence in the USA" (being founded in Jan. 1892 as a "public relations department of the lumber industry").

Intrigued, I Googled-on...

From Stichting Argus:

The Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo was founded on January 21, 1892, in Gurdon, Arkansas, to which its headquarters had returned at the time of this writing. In the intervening years, it has moved a long way from its intention, which was to fight superstition and conventionalism, and became a parody of established secret societies. It started out with the intention of having nothing that other orders possess. Originally, there were no lodge rooms. Meetings, or “concatenations,” were held in hotels, the first being at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on February 18, 1892. Even the name is unique. “Hoo-hoo” is not some arcane lumberman’s distress call, but a word coined by one of the founders, Bolling Arthur Johnson, about a month before the order was founded. He used it to describe a lonesome tuft of hair on the head of one Charles H. McCarer. “Concatenated” referred both to the cat, which was chosen as the symbol, and to “concatenation,” or “linking together in a chain.”

The founding members were not just lumbermen. They also included railroad men (who transport lumber) and newspaper men (who cover it with print). The organization chose as its emblem a black cat, to show its disdain for superstition, and based much of its ritual on the cat’s nine lives. Their officers were the Supreme Nine, made up of the Snark, the Senior Hoo-Hoo, the Junior Hoo-Hoo, the Bojum or Boojum, the Scrivenotor, the Jabberwock, the Cuctocacian, the Arcanoper, and the Gurdon. The overall leader was the Snark of the Universe. One of the high points of the ritual was the Embalming of the Snark, by which process he passed into the House of Ancients.

The organization is still around, Hoo-Hoo.org, but it doesn't seem as fun and irreverent as before.