I saw a reference to bootleg records and wondered, for the hundredth time, why they were called that. Obviously it had to do with bootleg booze, but why was that called “bootleg”? And what was the chronology? So I went to the OED, which happily revised its entry just this year (I’ll interleave the corresponding adjective citations for easy comparison):
1. The part of a boot that covers the lower leg; the leather material used for this. Also: a gaiter or greave that covers the lower leg.
1575 [Paid for o]n paire of boote ledges to make [bawdricks] withall.
in J. E. Farmiloe & R. Nixseaman, Elizabethan Churchwardens’ Accounts (1953) 63
[…]2.a. Alcohol that has been illegally produced, distributed, or sold, esp. during a time of prohibition. Also: a club or establishment selling such alcohol.
Now chiefly in historical contexts.
[On the origin of use in this sense see discussion in Etymology.]1844 9 Puncheons of Old Rum (real New England ‘boot-leg’), the balance of a very large stock that has gone off very freely.
Subterranean & Working Man’s Advocate 16 Nov.[adj.] 1861 The vials of wrath spoken of by the sacred writers, as at some future time to be poured out upon mankind, are supposed to be bottles of boot-leg whisky.
Topeka (Kansas) Tribune 9 February
[…]1928 Gradually I’m becoming acquainted with all the brands of bootleg that the Westcoast offers.
H. Crane, Letter 31 January (1965) 315
[…][adj.] 2019 More than 100 people have died after drinking bootleg alcohol in northern India and hundreds more have been put in hospital.
Times 12 February 34/42.b. An unauthorized or illicitly traded item; a counterfeit.
Frequently with the implication that the item is a poor quality imitation of a superior product.[adj.] 1921 War against ‘bootleg’ milk, in an attempt to make all milk sold in the city properly inspected.
Oklahoma News 4 January 1/11923 The printing on the base of the tube is frequently badly smudged on the bootleg, whereas on the genuine it is quite clear and readable.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle 12 August 8c/5
[…]2.c.i. An unauthorized audio or video recording, esp. one that has been illicitly recorded at a live concert or cinema screening. Also: a record, DVD, etc., that has been distributed or reproduced without authorization.
[adj.] 1926 Bootleg jazz records with risque verses distributed.
Dothan (Alabama) Eagle 12 June 2/2 (headline)1951 Victor presses bootlegs!
Record Changer (New York) November 1 (heading)1971 This album of the Experience recorded at the Albert Hall in ’69 is not a bootleg (although there’s an inferior bootleg in mono selling at the same price), it’s an official German release.
It 2 June 18/1
[…]2.c.ii. A piece of music created by merging two or more existing pieces of popular music, esp. the isolated vocals of one piece and the instrumental backing of another. Cf. mash-up n. 2.
1998 Holiday New Bootleg!.. Thomas Bangalter..put out this amazing song called Music Sounds Better With You… There is a bootleg mix that has the vocal from [sc. Madonna’s] Holiday on it.
alt.fan.madonna 30 August (Usenet newsgroup, accessed 13 Aug. 2024)
There are further senses (coffee, football, trousers), but they don’t interest me at the moment. So let’s “see discussion in Etymology”:
The original motivation for use in sense A.2a is unclear. While the term may originally have referred to the use of the leg of one’s boot to hide contraband (compare quot. 1883 at bootlegger n. 1a), there is also earlier evidence describing the practice of mixing alcohol with various adulterants including leather (from e.g. boots), strychnine, and tobacco, evidently to impart a flavour or colour resembling that of an aged spirit. Compare:
1863 The liquor..was nothing more than twenty-two cent whisky colored with logwood, tan-bark, tincture of bedbugs, old boot-legs and copperas; that he sold this vile stuff at retail to his customers; that they died.
Knight’s Landing (California) News 24 October
It’s more complicated than I guessed. (As an Old, I was not aware of the “mash-up” sense. Also, I love the name Subterranean & Working Man’s Advocate and think it should be revived.)
The etymology seems unsettled.
Here’s a New England US earlier account, if only to spur better searches.
Warren, R.I., Saturday Morning, October 9, 1830.
Northern Star, and Farmers’ and Mechanic’s Advocate. 1/2. Newspapers.com
[apostrophes, sic]
Rum better for the feet than the head.–
During the revolutionary war a privateer
was wrecked in a violent snow storm, near
Martha’s Vineyard. A hogshead of run [rum]
was saved and divided among 114 persons,
who composed her crew, ninety eight of
whom drank freely thereof and all perish-
d. The other sixteen wholly refrained
[f]rom the internal use of it, but soaked their
[f]eet and legs in rum by turning it into their
boots, and they all survived the storm.
privateer
Arrr, me hearties!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day
It’s not clear if their 2.b.ii example from alt.fan.madonna really requires a different sense, because it seems clear from context that the “bootleg mix” was done without proper authorization and would be found to have infringed the copyright on the Madonna recording that was mixed in, should the holder of those rights want to get litigious about it. Although OTOH part of the concept of a traditional “bootleg” in the recorded-music context is that it’s “authentic” for a meaning of “authenticity” that doesn’t fit well in the mash-up context. Also, it appears that the unauthorized remix was a literal “bootleg” in the sense of being embodied in physical 12″ records floating around the UK via irregular channels of trade. https://www.discogs.com/release/60792-Various-Stardust-EP
I’d be curious to know more about the “bootleg jazz records” in the 1926 quote, since the technology of the day did not yet make what we classically think of bootlegs as easy to make. Counterfeits (sense 2.b) would have been possible, though …
“bootleg jazz records with risqué verses” – i.e. these were takes not meant for official release. They’re unofficial releases (perhaps on non-existing labels) for amateurs of “risqué verses”, sold under the counter. Although I have heard some official early jazz and blues recordings with what later would be considered “risqué verses”. Even in later years – one early Charlie Parker recording, “Romance without Finance” with the Tiny Grimes Quintet (1944), is basically a song about making your living as a pimp.
…huh. Is leg Norse and ledge its native doublet?
A quality imitation that is poor? five dental clicks
@ulr: not implausible, but logistically complicated, in terms of how the physical embodiment of the takes (in the days before infinitely copyable magnetic tape) would have gotten turned into the manufacturing of officially-unauthorized disks for sale. Back in the Seventies/Eighties* there was a reissue label in the US called Stash Records that specialized in anthologies of jazz/blues vocal numbers from the Twenties/Thirties with lyrics that were noteworthy for either their sexual explicitness or for talking about the use of marihuana (as then spelt) or other unlawful substances. Here’s one of their early releases: https://www.discogs.com/master/492478-Various-Copulatin-Blues But most/all of the stuff anthologized had been originally legitimately released on 78 by established record labels, mostly because what they were marketing to the “race record” submarket was not in those days subject to external pressure by do-gooders or scolds who would complain about such things, so they released whatever they thought might sell.
*When I was a jazz DJ these albums were always good for a quick two-minute change of pace if one got tired of post-bop instrumentals lasting ten minutes a piece.
It’s not clear if their 2.b.ii example from alt.fan.madonna really requires a different sense, because it seems clear from context that the “bootleg mix” was done without proper authorization
If you’re doubting the need for 2.c.ii [n.b.], let me assure you that that is not the only citation; here are two more:
As always, I tend to assume that the lexicographers at the OED know what they’re doing.
Okay, those two are better examples of a distinct sense. See also my quibble re the 1926 cite, where in hindsight it may look like an early instance of a now-established distinct sense but in context it may with equal plausibility just be a particular application of a prior sense.
Ideally, the quote in any OED citation will give enough context for the sense of the relevant word to be clear. However, the editors cannot always be so choosy: sometimes (earliest cites, rare senses) a citation must be used from which such an excerpt would be unfeasibly long, so that the quote amounts merely to a finding aid for any reader who cares to refer to the original.
i wonder whether the core meaning is less “illegal” than “unlicensed”/”untaxed” – the two being basically synonymous in practice when it comes to distilled liquor in the u.s, but bringing in significantly different sources of imagery or vocabulary. more specifically, i’m trying to think of a way to see whether there’s some way to look for a connection to tax-payment stamps or other kinds of certification that would’ve applied to booze.
but the use of boot-legs as a source of leather “to impart a flavour or colour resembling that of an aged spirit” also makes sense to me, having done some vodka-infusing in my time. that would place the core meaning more in the “counterfeit” sense, with the unlicensedness or illegality as an extension of that – and one flattering enough to the liquor-taxers’ excuse of quality control to make it possible for cops to have played a role in it becoming more widespread under Prohibition.
–
I love the name Subterranean & Working Man’s Advocate and think it should be revived.
yes, indeed! especially finding out that uncle walt wrote for the Subterranean! the Working Man’s Advocate seems to have been the organ of the land reformers whose main achievement was the Homestead Act (and apparently had Shaker connections of some kind, because it was new england in the 1840s, so some kinda esotericism had to be in there somewhere).
I will try to translate a Russian joke based on a pun, always a risky business, but. Russian word for lower leg is голень (golen’) which sounds similar to голь (gol’), collective noun for paupers and beggars. Wiktionary claims that the two are etymologically related in misty Proto-Slavic times.
Now the joke.
His Imperial Majesty Tzar and Autocrator of All-Russia Nicholas II liked to drink a bit more than his wife approved of. Thus the generals with whom tzar had regular meetings brought booze neatly stored in their boot legs to the meetings and shared it with their Supreme Commander. This was called, internally, as “голь на выдумку хитра” (necessity is the mother of invention, wiktionary suggests “poor people are crafty” as a literal translation, which doesn’t do it full justice as well, but retains some of the flavor).
In the specific context of whiskey, you might note a contrast between “moonshine,” focused on the illicit nature of its production, and “bootleg,” more focused on the illicit nature of its distribution (although perhaps not in the earliest use per some of the etymological discussion above). Obviously both could be true about the same liquid, of course, but during Prohibition bootleggers in the U.S. might be distributing booze sourced from Canada or Cuba that was perfectly legitimate/authorized/non-counterfeit before being smuggled into the U.S. Cf. the snowclonish adaptation “buttlegger,” referring to those who profit illegally from regulatory arbitrage by buying cigarettes in bulk in U.S. states with low tobacco taxes and then reselling them in states with high tobacco taxes.
Actually, it seems the bootleg entry is freely available at the moment (because freshly added?), so for those who want to consult it, here it is.
I had a friend who grew up in a dry county in Tennessee in the 1960s and 1970s. He told me they had regular visits from a bootlegger, but not one who was selling moonshine—just ordinary distilled, bottled spirits that he bought wholesale in another county and sold illegally out of his car in the dry county.
The very loose analogy of that latter sort of “bootleg” booze in the recorded-music business would be “imports,” which like a lot of “gray market” goods are (in some instances) potentially subject to being shut down as illicit if the relevant rightsholder were to invest enough money in lawyers. But in the U.S. the way things developed historically the major-label rightsholders collectively decided to tolerate imports while remaining quite hostile to bootlegs, so unlike bootlegs they were not distributed or retailed “illicitly” as matter of actual practice. This is probably because: 1) imports traditionally sold at higher price points than domestic pressings, so they did not undercut the labels’ sales in the way that can happen with gray-market competition for other sorts of goods; and 2) the import industry provided valuable information to U.S. labels, because if a given import title sold unusually well that was often a useful signal that it ought to be released legitimately in the U.S. market because there was money to be made.
As a perhaps overtechnical followup possibly of interest to no one other than myself, I should note that as of 2025 it is now clear that the business model for selling “import” records in the U.S. that became a meaningful part of the music biz in the Seventies and Eighties is not even technically illicit, i.e. does not under pretty much any circumstances infringe any U.S. copyright. But that was only really clear when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Kirtsaeng decision in 2013, and the collective decision of the major record labels in the U.S. to tolerate the practice rather than try to shut it down was, I suspect, not primarily driven by an expectation of how the Supreme Court might ultimately rule on the question decades later.
Leg is Norse and there is no native doublet; this spelling must be vanishingly rare, since neither the OED nor the Middle English Dictionary records it s.v. leg. Also, in the source, there appears to be a footnote after “ledges”; I can’t get the snippet view to show the whole footnote, but apparently it says “Boot ledges. Long leather gaiters. cp. Youlgreave, Derbyshire CW accounts 1634 ‘for a payre of boot-legges needful to be used about the bells.’”, i.e. they’re explaining why they think “ledges” is just an odd spelling of what would usually be “legges”. (The 1634 quotation is also in the OED.)
Incidentally, the OED distinguishes square brackets quoted from the source — here, “[Paid for o]” and “[bawdricks]” are insertions by Farmiloe & Nixseaman in 1953 — from editorial comments by the OED itself, such as in the 1998 quotation, “[sc. Madonna’s]”. You can (just barely) tell the difference on their site since their comments are in a slightly different color, which can’t be reproduced here. There are a few entries where they mistakenly marked up square brackets in the source as their own comments, e.g. at phone, n.1 and function space.
In this case probably because it was promoted in a commentary page. This bit didn’t make it into the official etymology:
… the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Kirtsaeng decision in 2013
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. My awareness of Kirtsaeng came about because I volunteered at the local library-owned secondhand bookstore. Some publisher tried to claim its offering could not be resold. Bunk and balderdash, I declared, then researched it to see if the publisher or myself were the bunkster.
As to record imports, perhaps it depended on who was doing the exporting and importing. If private individuals sent material to the U.S., the Kirtsaeng precedent re resale rights would likely prevent objections. If, however, a foreign sales agent, limited by contract to sales in a specified geographic market, were to have sold outside that geography, a record label probably would have had grounds for legal action. That would not have been an IP law matter.
Anyone who takes my opinions on legal matters seriously does so at their own risk.
In this case probably because it was promoted in a commentary page.
Thanks! That’s a great essay about both the word and how the entries were developed.
Subterranean & Working Man’s Advocate
I am disappointed that this is originally two separate things, and no Subterranean Men are involved.
It’s a working man I am,
And I’ve been down underground.
Correction: my first comment quotation here was not from a 1930 newspaper, but from an 1830 one.
Is there a scholarly discussion of bootleg, tangle-leg, tanglefoot, and rot gut?
I made the fix to avoid confusion.
On Google Books the earliest results for bootleg seem to be Dutch with incorrect metadata (“English”), but on closer inspection it’s because the OCR program doesn’t understand the long s. That is, it says ſeg, not leg. (Nor does it seem that the preceding letters in any of the results even form anything approaching “boot,” but I didn’t check the results extensively.)
The aging John Fogerty has just celebrated his 80th birthday by releasing newly-rerecorded versions of a bunch of songs he first recorded with CCR when he was in his mid-twenties. The project seems motivated by a mix of disreputable economic motives and disreputable psychological motives, and I can’t say I approve of it. But I heard a selection of three of the new tracks on the radio yesterday evening and the least-bad of the three was “Bootleg (John’s Version).”* It is, it struck me, actually a bit difficult to figure out from the lyrics exactly which of the many senses of “bootleg” is the one being used.
*Original version on the _Bayou Country_ LP, recorded and released when Fogerty was 23.
Huh, 2.c.ii really surprises me; despite seeking out this kind of music online occasionally and having friends who make mashups, I’ve never encountered “bootleg” used this way. I wonder if its slang past its prime (I didn’t get into this stuff or the internet more broadly until the late 2010s; maybe the 2020 citation is a throwback?) — but ofc its also very possible that it’s used by different subgroups of mashup fans than I’ve encountered.
I’m not the hugest fan of mashups, but I have a vague sense that I have seen that sense of bootleg—although I couldn’t say how long ago, nor which of several mashup-making communities seemed apt to use it.
“Mashup” seems better than “bootleg” for recordings in that it avoids potential ambiguity. While that is often the futile argument of prescriptivists, perhaps in this case it may have helped a gradual replacement of one term by the other.
Another case might be “recharge [one’s phone]” meaning either recharge the battery or to top up call credit.
This site claims a meaningful distinction between mashup and bootleg. I have tracked down the 2020 Variety article (here) and reading more context shows that article’s author considers remixes, bootlegs, and mashups as synonyms not worthy of distinctions. It throws several more key words into the mix for good measure. Maybe, given the nature of the product, confused usages are especially appropriate.
Missing URL for Variety.
Oops. https://variety.com/2020/music/news/spotify-podcast-remixes-bootleg-songs-1234853328/
i haven’t yet gone to look at the article, but from what D.O. says, i’m now (again) unconvinced that the “bootlegs” in question are what i would call a “mash-up”. if “remix” is being treated as a synonym for the other two, i feel like “bootleg” here just means what it usually does: a recording being sold without legal authorization. the thing that holds all three terms together is sampling as a technique: which brings “bootleg” in because using samples (and especially using many samples) means a lot of tracks that aren’t either mash-ups of two songs (a sample-based form) or remixes of an existing song (a sample-based technique), nonetheless cannot be legally distributed.
Yesterday evening I chanced to be at a drinking establishment where there was a football game on the television, and the tv had its sound turned off and the closed-captioning on. At one point I glanced over at the screen just in time to see it displaying the text “THEY CALLED A NAKED BOOTLEG.” Potentially helpful explanation here, although it may presuppose more general familiarity with the game than some in metric-system locations may possess. https://footballadvantage.com/naked-bootleg/
You’d have to listen to specific items referenced to be sure, but just on the surface of the text it sounds like many of the “bootleg” remixes referenced in the Variety piece are “regular” sorts of remixes with no mash-up angle – i.e. all the audio components are from the authorized release but assembled/processed differently, possibly sped up or slowed down and/or with additional reverb or other effects added but no source material external to the original. It seems a bit odd to me to call those bootlegs, but this may be a generational thing and/or be hung up on auteurist notions.*
*I.e. to my ancient sensibility a remix that was done by or with the authorization of the Official Recording Artist but then for whatever business reason not released for public sale could of course be bootlegged and made available illicitly. But if the “auteur” doing the remix is him/herself doing so without the ORA’s authorization that’s something else.
I should note belatedly that the OED does cover the football sense of bootleg as its sense 4 of the noun, although apparently not the specifically the naked subtype, but obviously the idea of complete coverage of idiomatic NP’s is even more preposterous than that of complete coverage of individual lexemes.
The 1830 US use above suggests it is, in the writer’s opinion, unfit for human consumption.
Not originally a place for hiding a flask.
A slightly later US use suggest another odious action, boot-licking.
1850
“Do you think a boy who carries bootleg liquor around with him is nice?”
https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=%22boot+leg+liquor%22&tbs=,cdr:1,cd_max:Dec+31_2+1899&num=10
Unfortunately, that’s a collection of plays from different times. The line you found is from a play first produced in 1923.
Stephen Goranson’s citation from 1830 upthread is very interesting! I haven’t consulted the image of the newspaper, but the text matches that of the account of the 1778 wreck of the General Arnold in James Thatcher (1832) History of the Town of Plymouth; from its First Settlement in 1620, to the year 1832, p. 216f, available here. (See also here for the full story in broader context.)
And from Harper’s, a hundred years later in 1881 (vol. 62, no. 368, p. 191f) here, the same thing general idea, but unconnected to that wreck.
So to sketch out the implications of SG’s suggestion explicitly, perhaps the well-known Plymouth shipwreck was original inspiration of the extended use of bootleg (note the OED’s 1944 cite: “Puncheons of Old Rum (real New England ‘boot-leg’)”? And from there, a notion that some lousy liquor was no better than the rum that drained out of one’s boots after one took them off? And from there, counterfeit and contraband liquor? (And was a shredded bootleg, well-seasoned over the years with whiskey and rum in this way, in fact useful to illicit producers as a flavoring/adulterant —the uppers not being mucky like the heel, toe and vamp?) I am surprised the ADS-L Archive contains very little on bootleg and bootlegger, at least that I could find.
Thank you Xerîb!
Disapproval rather than means of carrying seems the earlier use. After all, a carried flask could contain the good stuff, say, fine brandy. Bootleg might sometimes be associated with bad U.S. company, boot liquor, and bootlicking.
And thanks, Jerry, for the date correction
I don’t currently have access to some of the best search engines; e.g., institution access to newspapers.com is not as extensive as the personal-subscription version.
But, while recalling a semi-related long-ago comment–“how can you put that stuff down your gullet?”–I’ll be back, maybe.
Of course vinophiles do say things with apparently non-pejorative intent like (in the context of describing a 2012 Shiraz from Australia) “showing notes of shoe leather, wet forest, pink peppercorn and blueberry.” But maybe it’s conventional to say shoe leather rather than boot leather?
@jwb
Re “vinophile”, we had another thread about mixed Classical loanwords. But I only know oenophile or wine lover/ connoisseur for this.
@PP: I think I may have become habituated to it in particular because there’s an establishment in NYC (w/ branches in other cities that I’ve never been to) called City Winery, which is a venue for live music as well as a retailer of wine. They keep asking me via email if I want to pay extra $ to join their select list of “Vinophiles,” which in addition to discounts on wine would enable me to e.g. purchase tickets for likely-to-be-sold-out concerts before they go on sale to the general public. I have thus far not taken them up on the offer. I suspect they might think “Oenophile” too obscure a lexeme for the audience they’re targeting?
I wouldn’t think “Vinophile” would be that much better!
“Oenophile” is probably familiar enough in the UK, at least among those who could themselves be described as such. I don’t remember having encountered “vinophile” (which probably means that it’s actually overwhelmingly the commoner word. Prolonged exposure to the Hattery sometimes leads me to wonder whether I am, in fact, a L1 English speaker at all.)
Disapproval rather than means of carrying seems the earlier use.
Then maybe the etymological sense of bootleg in question was jokingly “more suitable for pouring down your boots in winter than for drinking”. I wonder if this is the exact sense in the 1844 citation (“9 Puncheons of Old Rum (real New England ‘boot-leg’), the balance of a very large stock that has gone off very freely.”). The equation of gullet and bootleg might explain why there is the leg in bootleg and it not just *real New England boot rum or something like that.
Thanks as always to our host LH for providing a venue for interesting discussions like this!
Though boots were called that in England since way back, only in America do we find (so far) early uses of bootleg and bootlick and maybe boot liquor. Antedatings to OED:
1836, July 11. Marion Journal 2/3 [1]
…Thou toad eater! Thou boot-lick!…Thou vender of coffee-house wit!….
1845, Southern Literary Messenger, November p. 669/1 [2]
….set forth my peculiar opinions, and to flatter and bootlick the ” dear people , ” since it was the custom , that common law , less flexible than the laws of the Medes and Persians , I had to do , and accordingly I went to the Court House , not prepared with a ” neat and appropriate …[[also includes mentions of “cornjuice” and “barley bree” {brew?}]]
[1]https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/1029317655/?match=1&terms=bootlick&pqsid=qppMQO2LfNl2ojjFK-etvQ%3A17719%3A478846359
[2]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Southern_Literary_Messenger/fHbgAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=bootlicker&pg=PA669&printsec=frontcover
American newspapers of the early 19th century seem to be rich veins of opprobrium.
Luncheon, truncheon, and now puncheon? This is getting out of hand.
The size of puncheons varied, but converted into Foreign nine of ’em would add up to something in the approximate range of 2900 to 4900 liters. That’s a fair amount of rum …
Not bad… not bad at all.
Just noticed, the OED remarks on “boote ledges” in the etymology section: “The affrication in the second element of the α forms [i.e. ledge] is unexplained. Perhaps compare the γ forms at dog n.1 and the discussion at that entry.” At dog, the form history says the spelling “dodge” existed in the 1500s–1600s, but only one quotation has that spelling:
The comment there is similarly baffled: “The γ forms, apparently reflecting a pronunciation with an affricate, are unexplained; it is possible that some of the Middle English spellings could reflect a similar pronunciation.”