What’s the definition of this? I ask because last night I heard an old time radio program that had Deems Taylor on it. It also had George Burns and Gracie Allen. They had a joke that got a very big laugh.
The conversation went like this
Deems) I’m a man who has devoted his life to the classical traditions music, In fact many people refer to me as a long haired muscian.
Gracie) That’s not nice they should’nt make fun of you just because you haven’t…
George) Gracie!!! (as if to say OK enough shut up)
<–insert very big laugh–>
Gracie) Well he hasn’t??
I looked but can’t find a definiton of a long haired musician so what is it and what was Gracie refering to?
WAG: Weren’t classical musicians associated with long hair back then? I seem to recall hearing that growing your hair out was popular with classical musicians long before rock and roll got a hold of it.
That meaning of longhaired was fading out when I was a kid. It meant a classical musician. You may have heard of a New Orleans jazz piano wizard called Professor Longhair. His name was a joke on the old meaning of longhair, not the hippie kind.
I’ll add another vote for classical musician. That’s how I’ve always understood the term: “long hair music” referred to the works of Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt; among other classical composers, many of whom had hair much longer than men would have in the first half of the 20th century.
By the 30’s “longhair” was used to denote classical music by musicians and journalists. Then it moved into common use.
*By about 1950 the noun longhair was in use in the sense ‘classical music’: “Classical music, too, is gaining in the field…M.G.M…reports that 10 per cent of its business is ‘long hair’” (N.Y. Times, 1952). *
I’ve known most of my life that the original meaning of “longhair” music was classical music. But I thought the image of long hair came from the composers rather than the more recent performers.
Ok thanks I get the joke. I get what the term means
Funny I looked at a pic of him and never made the connection till someone pointed it out. Oddly enough though Deems Taylor must’ve been really famous, or else I could see the radio audience understanding the joke but it must’ve been missed by the home audience.
In the Television Show M.A.S.H. there are at least two references to Long Haired Music. Both times it was said when Major Winchester was listening to classical music. MASH was set in the early 50’s and often has dialogue that was common to the 50’s. When I first heard the term I thought it was because MASH was really about Vietnam and they were referring to hippies. After reading this I realize it was about classical music.
In the movie “Silk Stockings” (1957 Silk Stockings (disambiguation) - Wikipedia ), movie mogul Fred Astaire wants to adapt music by a living famous Soviet composer for his upcoming motion picture (more or less as a publicity stunt); he asks the female star of his picture to persuade the composer to allow this, but she thinks it’s a bad idea “He’s so long hair!” and she also calls him “square” and she means the same thing by both expressions - he’s a stodgy middle-aged guy who composes dry classical music.
“Longhaired” was, as noted above, a synonym for classical musicians and other intellectuals dating from the 30s. There was an implication that they were experts only in their narrow fields, and were, at best, fuzzy-minded about Serious Things.
It is difficult for people who weren’t around then to understand how contentious an issue hair length was; indeed, the length of your hair became a proxy for your political views. This was true for both men and women. The phrase “long-haired men and short-haired women” was sometimes used to describe people you might otherwise call “crackpots”. And, yes, there were also homophobic implications as well.
In the 60s, long hair became associated with the hippy movement, and people could be and were literally beaten up for having hair deemed “too long”. At the same time, the hippies looked down on people with short hair - “crew cut” was a designation of an overly conventional mindset. The term “skinhead”, of a somewhat later vintage, was an example of this taken to extremes.
Hair length is a much less contentious issue for the moment, as we currently seem to take other indicators as proxies of political views.
