Ok so Gino Stickley and I worked on this a bit together so I apologize if our blog posts sound a bit similar? I think we have two of the same sources.

Gino originally started looking up jazz but my inner (well maybe outer) love for 70’s music shouted “NO. DISCO.” And thus, here we are.

After screwing around on Ngram viewer for maybe 25 minutes searching every. possible. (non assignment related) word…. we finally looked up disco. The first result I clicked on was from 1805 and was a dictionary entry. Here, disco was used as a prefix for various words such as “discomfort” and “discompose” (all pretty unpleasant.. so the exact opposite of what I’d relate to disco.)

I wanted to stay with the sources provided to us but I also wanted a better idea of WHAT exactly I could search for using them so I looked up the definition of disco on Merriam Webster. Here, disco was defined as “a nightclub for dancing to live and recorded music” and “a popular dance music characterized by hypnotic rhythm, repetitive lyrics, and electronically produced sounds.”

I already knew that disco was also used to define a nightclub  (mainly because whenever I decide to play ABBA my dad reminds me of how my mom would “go out disco dancing” in the 70’s. Which, is also how I already had somewhat of a general idea of when the music itself originated.

I decided to try Google Books. One book I found is called “Turn the Beat Around” by Peter Shapiro. I scrolled through until I got to the chapter “A Prehistory of Disco” which I figured would be pretty helpful for some background info. One quote I found interesting was “discotheque and discontent go together like glitterballs and rhinestones.” The author further went on to say that although disco was a means of dancing ones blues away, it originated from a society “teetering on the brink of collapse.”

Some other things I learned from just from skimming this first chapter

• disco comes from discotheque, which is a combo of two French words, disque meaning record and bibliotheque meaning library
• the ancestral routes of disco culture can be traced back to Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Paris during WWII from the “Swing Kids”
• the Swing Kids were a group of middle-class German youths dedicated to jazz and the flamboyant fashion accompanied by the music
• a police order was issued where no adolescents were allowed to attend dances after 9PM, so secret gatherings based on availability of a gramophone and swing records were started

^ Peter Shapiro (23 June 2015). Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4668-9412-9.

So I think all this gave me a pretty good insight onto how and when disco began/ got its roots perhaps. But I don’t know if this counts as finding the earliest references? But I thoroughly enjoyed this brief history of disco origins.

So, back to Ngram. Knowing disco came from discotheque, I made that my next search on Ngram. The first couple results seemed to all be from around 1965, so I figured I was onto something date wise. The first article I clicked on was titled “Girls a Go Go in Denver” by Bob Latimer which made me wonder if there was somehow a connection to go-go dancing/music and disco? I think they originated around the same time. From what I could gather from this article, discotheque is being used to describe the place where people were dancing as well as playing “discotheque” music. It didn’t really provide any insight on whether it was the same music as the disco I’m trying to find out about. Most of the articles I was finding were describing a discotheque as a place where live music wasn’t being played. Much like the Swing Kids, more and more gatherings at these discotheques were gathering in the 60’s. A lot of the attendees were those from marginalized groups at the time, who were against the dominant white music in America. (Which I got just from outside research. I’m trying to use the ones provided! I can’t help it. I’m wikipedia garbage.)

Proquest however was my last resort. I found an article from 1968 which talks about socialites attending one of these “discotheques” but the music in this article was described as “loud.” It also mentions a dance floor, and jammed tables. This sounds a lot more like the disco I was thinking of. So, theres my earliest reference closest to the definition of disco music I could find. Maybe I’m just bad at searching.

Savoy, M. (1968, Jun 25). Socialites take disco spin at newly opened club john. Los Angeles Times (1923-1995) Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/155981787?accountid=14541

(P.S. –

Gino convinced me to post the disco playlist I was inspired to make after writing this so, here it is, world.)