"The ""jive dictionaries"" of the late 1930s and early 1940s provide a unique perspective on commercial jazz's last gasp. For some time, the language of Harlem and its musicians had been troped in the popular press as a counter-modern force (a move critiqued by Rudolph Fisher, Eudora Welty, and others). But Mezz Mezzrow, Cab Calloway, Slim Gaillard, and other musicians published mock-scholarly guides to their talk---guides both about jive, and themselves ""jive""---that put the emerging art, folk, and subcultural discourses surrounding jazz into unsettling play with a residual sense of the music as a form grappling, head-on, with a modern, national economy."