A history of the street insult game that has inspired artists from Jelly Roll Morton to Zora Neale Hurston to NWA.

Coming from Oxford University Press
in June 2012.

"The dozens is the most ephemeral and most contextual of the black verbal traditions, hence the hardest to get a handle on. The origins of blues, toasts and dozens, even the sources of the names are all lost in time. But after reading Elijah Wald's superbly researched and splendidly written book, no one will have any doubt what this important black verbal tradition is and means."
           --Bruce Jackson, author of "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me": Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition

“The dozens” is a tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap.
           
At its simplest, it is a comic concatenation of “yo' mama” jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered as vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians for a century. This book explores the depth of the dozens’ roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; the edgy brilliance of generations of black comedians; and the raw language and improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden tradition that has survived for well over a hundred years below the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children's clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore. In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, the literature of the Harlem renaissance and the flowering of blue nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap.