Nobody Here but Us Chickens!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Janet Lipom, and I’m calling from San Diego.

Hello, Janet, how are you?

Hi, Janet, what’s up?

I’m trying to find out the origin of an expression.

You know how people start IM sessions with, like, YT or You There?

Well, this friend of mine, who is also one of my coworkers, is originally from Vietnam.

So one day she’s IMing me at work, and she starts out, you know, You There.

And I was feeling playful at the time, so my response was, nobody here but us chickens.

Would have thought, you know, in the time that she’s been in this country, she might have heard that, but apparently she hasn’t.

Because her response back to me was, why? Where did everybody go?

Like, we were the only two people still left at work?

And I started to explain it, you know, I explained to her where the expression came from.

And I realized I didn’t know where it came from.

So I did an Internet search, but all I could find were references to an old Louis Jordan song.

So I thought, then I thought of you guys, and I thought, well, if anybody knows where this came from, it would be Grant and Martha.

Now then, I like that kind of faith.

Yeah, yeah.

But it’s amazing how often people put their faith in us, Martha, and we let them down.

Oh, but that’s not going to happen this time, not at all.

What’s the title of the Louis Jordan song? Do you know?

I think that is the title of it, Nobody Here But Us Chickens.

Yeah, and it’s a great song. Have you guys heard it?

No.

No, I haven’t heard it. I saw the lyrics, but I haven’t heard the song.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a lot of fun.

And it refers to this old joke about Farmer Brown.

I think his name is Farmer Brown.

He goes out to the hen house because there’s been a commotion,

And he’s got his gun, and he’s looking around, and he says, who’s there?

And there’s this little voice in the back that says something like,

Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.

So there’s a chicken thief in there or something.

Yeah, yeah. So that’s the joke. But it’s interesting because this actually goes back to the joke itself, the original joke that both Grant and I have read in old, old newspapers say from 1908, 1909. It kind of has racist overtones, doesn’t it, Grant?

Yeah, it’s about the original story that you can find in print, and it’s probably older than we’re finding.

Again, 1908, 1909, around there, involves a slave and a slave owner.

And it’s the exact same story, only the slave is the one in the chicken coop and the slave owner is the one going out to see what the commotion is about.

And the story paints the slave as being stupid.

And so that’s kind of the focus of the joke.

The joke is that this person thinks by saying something in English, in human words, that the slave owner is going to be fooled.

So it’s not a nice story told that way.

But when you tell the story just about a regular old farmer and just somebody coming by to steal chickens, then it’s harmless.

Well, my thought would have been like the fox in the hen house.

You say, oh, no need to worry.

Nobody here but us chickens.

I think that’s probably how a lot of people think of it now.

And to me, this is really interesting because it started out with this story that had kind of language that we would find offensive today.

You know, ain’t nobody here but us chickens, massa, or something like that.

But I would say that in the intervening hundred years that this phrase has taken on such a life of its own that I wouldn’t hesitate to use it, especially after Louis Jordan reclaimed it with that fabulous song that was really, really popular in the 1940s.

I mean, you see all kinds of people covering that song now.

Right. It definitely, if it ever was an unsavory story, it lost it before he recorded the song in the 1940s.

I think also this line was used in one form or another in the movie Chicken Run in the year 2000.

Did you see that?

I did, but I don’t remember the song.

It’s an an, well, not the song.

I think the line was used, the line, nobody here but us chickens.

Yeah, and I’ve talked to a lot of people.

I mean, I hear the expression all the time.

Lots of people use it.

Nobody really knows.

Nobody I talked to really knew where it had come from.

So it’s very, the slave story, I think, is very interesting.

It is.

It’s like a lot of things where it has to be taken in the context of the time in which it was created originally.

Right, because it would be overly simplistic to go back and apply our values of 2008, 2009,

And apply them to something that was 100 years old, right?

Right, exactly.

And thank you guys so much for calling, Janet.

Thank you so much for the information.

All right, bye-bye.

All righty, bye-bye.

Bye.

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