A hootenanny is a freewheeling, improvisatory musical event in the United States, often incorporating audience members in performances. It is particularly associated with folk music.

Etymology

Placeholder name

Hootenanny is an Appalachian colloquialism that was used in the early twentieth century U.S. as a placeholder name to refer to things whose names were forgotten or unknown. In this usage, it was synonymous with doohickey, thingamajig or whatchamacallit, as in: "That hootenanny that she shovels her bread with — that long-handled majigger, you know" (from Sim Greene: A Narrative of the Whisky Insurrection [1906]).

Folk music performance

Hootenanny is also a rural word for "party" or get-together. It can refer to a folk music party with an open mic, at which different performers are welcome to get up and play in front of an audience. According to Pete Seeger he first heard the word hootenanny in Seattle, Washington in the summer of 1941 while touring the area with Woody Guthrie. It was used by Hugh DeLacy's New Deal political club to describe their monthly music fund raisers. After some debate the club voted in hootenanny, which narrowly beat out wingding. Seeger, Woody Guthrie and other members of the Almanac Singers later used the word in New York City to describe their weekly rent parties, which featured many notable folksingers of the time. In a 1962 interview in Time, Joan Baez made the analogy that a hootenanny is to folk singing what a jam session is to jazz.

Events

During the early 1960s at the height of the American folk music revival, the club Gerdes Folk City at 11 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village started a folk music hootenanny tradition every Monday night. It featured an open mic and welcomed a broad variety of performers. The Bitter End at 147 Bleecker Street—not far from Gerdes—continued the folk music hootenanny tradition every Tuesday night. A weekly hootenanny has been held during the summers at Allegany State Park most years since 1972. The Hootenanny was an annual one-day rockabilly music festival held on July 4th weekends from 1995 to 2013 at the Oak Canyon Ranch in Irvine, California. The July 3, 1999 Hootenanny was recorded and released as Live at the Hootenanny, Vol. 1. It featured rockabilly bands like the Reverend Horton Heat, The Derailers, Mike Ness, and the Royal Crown Revue. For years there have been online hootenannies. The most long-standing example is Small Talk At The Wall, which originated in 1999.

Recordings

Television

Several different television shows are named hootenanny and styled after it, including:

Other uses