After you’ve put your right hand in, and then you’ve taken it out, and then you’ve put it in and out a couple of times and shaken it all about, is it a cokey or a pokey that will follow your hokey?
It all depends on whether you’re a Brit or a Yank. In the UK it’s cokey, and on the other side of the Atlantic (as well as in Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean and even Ireland), it’s pokey. Why cokey, and why pokey?
The real origin of the song-and-dance combo that was so popular as a music hall novelty dance in Britain and Ireland during the mid-1940s isn’t known — but the tales of its conception that persist to this day (including a slightly outrageous religious conspiracy theory) are as peculiar and colorful as the name of the song itself.
It’s been explained as a song written by Scottish Puritans in the 18th century to poke fun (excuse the pun) at Catholics, and was supposedly related to the magician’s phrase “hocus pocus”, ridiculing in a vile parody the words of the Latin mass “hoc est enim corpus meum” (“this is my body”).
It’s more commonly accepted as a dance song composed by a British bandleader — Al Tabor — in the 1930s and 40s who was inspired by the chant of an ice-cream vendor in his childhood. (For a gallop through this and the other hokey cokey stories, read this article in the Jewish Chronicle.) According to Al’s grandson Alan, writing about Al Sr’s dance ditty: “When he was a boy they used to come up and down the street shouting ‘hokey pokey, penny a lump’ to sell ice cream. The Canadian officer said to him why don’t you change it to ‘hokey cokey’ because in Canada ‘cokey’ means ‘crazy’.” Alan Jr. dismissed stories of the hocus-pocus anti-Papist “bunkum”, arguing that his grandfather was “neither a Latin scholar nor a bigot.”
But the son of the song’s first publisher, Jimmy Kennedy, had yet another idea about the song’s etymology. He claims his father told him that “the unusual title was to do with cocaine taken by the miners in Canada to cheer themselves up in the harsh environment where they were prospecting.”
Well whether you’re hokey-cokeying or hokey-pokeying, and whether you believe you’re laughing at Popery, snorting cocaine or pushing ice-cream, at least you know one thing.
Yeah. “That’s what it’s all about.”
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You put your right hand in
Your right hand out
In, out, in, out
Shake it all about.
You do the hokey-cokey
And you turn around.
That’s what it’s all about.
Chorus
Oh-oh, the hokey-cokey
Oh-oh, the hokey-cokey
Oh-oh, the hokey-cokey
Knees bent, arms stretched, rah, rah, rah!