And interestingly the earliest instance of “Hey, homes” is from 1974. And in both cases the phrase is attributed to poor Hispanics.
So it seems that the phrase is a “Hispanic gang” thing rather than “Black gang”.
And it seems that whether it was Holmes or homes was unclear right from the beginning.
Hmm, given the apparent Hispanic origin, I wonder if it “hombre” isn’t a more plausible origin. That would also make it it easier to explain “home boy”.
No evidence for any of this of course.
You say you’re not starting up some language/politics thing and yet here you are.
The OP asked a etymological question. Why mention race?
Actually, the OP had it right the first time. This particular variety of slang is common to both inner-city whites and inner-city blacks, and is rare amongst suburban blacks unless they’re deliberately affecting an urban dialect. Since the inner cities tend to skew black and the suburbs tend to skew white, it’s not wholly inaccurate to call this “black slang”, but it’s far more accurate to call it “urban slang” (or, if you prefer, “ghetto slang”).
Yeah, I personally associate “Holmes” with Hispanic culture myself, too. But that’s because that’s where I would have heard it from in my neighborhood. The street gangs around here tended to be either white or Latino.
I’m sure I’ve heard people say “Holmes”, and a quick search on Google Books turns up a number of instances of this being used in print (many of the hits involve a character actually named Holmes, but there are some where it’s a generic greeting). I would assume this is just a variation on the more common “homes” and that it probably originated as either a mistake or a joke.
The OED doesn’t have an entry for “Holmes” in this sense, but it does have “homes”, “home”, “homie”, and “homeboy”. The OED’s earliest citation for “Hey, Homes!” is 1971, and “home” as a form of address dates back to the 1940s. “Homie” is even older, with citations from 1929 and 1937. “Homeboy” as a slang term for one’s friends is cited going back to 1965, but was used in the slightly different sense of a man from one’s hometown or region a century before that.
Doesn’t Chevy Chase address someone as “Holmes” when he gets lost in East St Louis (?) in Vacation?
My point is that Holmes is not necessarily homes. It may be, or may be a later variation, or may be a pun, or may be all sorts of things. But giving dates for homes does not give dates for Holmes.
I’ve know it as “Holmes” and associate it with Latinos, I’m Californian, which I suspect makes a difference.
Yeah, I recall it as LA Latino slang from the 80s while I was there. Jaime Hernandez used ‘Holmes’ as such in Love and Rockets in the mid to late 80s in his ‘Maggie and Hopey’ and ‘Vida Locas’ comics set in the fictional SoCal barrio of Hoppers 13.
So I learned to associate ‘home’ or ‘homeboy’ with black culture and ‘Holmes’ with Latino culture.
I was hearing “Homes” and “Homeboy” in the USMC in 1971.
I only knew of black/urban/lower-class people saying it before the early 90s. Don’t know why you didn’t.
Going by the movies, absolutely. It’s all over Blood In, Blood Out, for one thing. 
I realise this isn’t much of a cite, and I’m offering it as a corroborating data point only. 
In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there is a Hispanic character who routinely refers to the player character as “Holmes”. It’s spelled this way in the subtitles, and it’s clearly used as an expression of friendship / respect.
Pamela Munro’s Slang U, Richard Spears’ Slang American Style, McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, and Paul Dickson’s Slang all list “holmes” as a variation of “homes”, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary it seems likely that two nearly identical slang terms that are used in exactly the same context are related.
While I haven’t found any dictionary or book of slang giving a date for “holmes”, pulykamell has already provided a cite from a 1978 issue of Lowrider magazine. So although I think Leo Bloom’s posts in this thread have been strange and rather offensive, it looks like he’s right about “holmes” being used as a form of address nearly 40 years ago. Since “homes” dates back to at least 1971, it’s at least plausible that “holmes” was in use even earlier than 1978.
This is just another recollection but in the '70’s routines Cheech called Chong what I heard as ‘Homes.’ I suppose it might show up at IMDB in their movie quotes. Those are all past the time period we have currently established, anyway. I brought it up to toss on the Hispanic L.A. origin side.
Isn’t there a SD member whose user name is heyhomie? Would he be an expert here?
There’s a linguistic term I can’t remember for shortening a term and appending an s. More common in UK English. It’s a diminutive, familiar kind of nicknamey thing. I strongly suspect that “Holmes” is more commonly a misused homophone than a term/joke in itself. It’s just “homes,” short for homeboy or homie, right?
Shaun of the Dead
Great film!
For what it’s worth, I heard this a lot and even saw it spelled out a few times and it was always “homes,” a standard shortening of “homeboy.” There was never any implication of Sherlock Holmes, and I would be startled if the people using this term thought much about Arthur Conan Doyle’s oeuvre. I tbink thisis likely to be classic false etymology.