Still image from the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery transformed into a meme with the words “I found my mojo, baby. YEAH!”
7 May 2021
Mojo first appears in Black English, associated with voodoo and other folkloric beliefs. The word’s origins are obscure, but it is likely of African origin. Cognates appear to be the Gullah moco, meaning witchcraft or magic, and the Fula moco’o, meaning medicine man. Mojo first appears in print in the 1920s but is certainly older in oral use.
Early print appearances of mojo in English tend to fall into two categories, that of Black confidence men selling magical charms to the gullible elements of the Black community (in this, the Black community is no different than any other ethnic group; only the terminology and branding of the fake nostrums and woo changes with the ethnic group), and in the titles of jazz songs, where it acquires the sense of life force, good luck, and sexual prowess.
I found this appearance of Mojo in the name of a horse in the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 17 September 1921. Given the context, a white, upper-class horse show, it is may be unconnected to the Black term and the similarity coincidental. But one never knows; while the owners of the horse are indisputably white, Black men and women were commonly employed in stables and as trainers, and the name could have come from a Black stable hand:
Mr. F. R. White on his own pony, Leap Year, was presented with the trophy in the Gentleman’s Hack event, his horse showing the best style in a free open walk, square trot and easy canter. Mr. E. S. Nichols on Russell Alger’s Fairchild and Mr. Woods King with his horse, Mojo, were second and third.
(The 1973 movie The Sting, set in the 1930s, had a horse named Mojo running in one of the races.)
An unambiguous use appears in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 24 October 1923 in an article about the trial of a confidence man:
SELLING LOVE CHARM NOT THEFT
So Negro Is Freed, Despite Failure of $85 Mojo Bag to Work.William Gassway, 49 years old, a negro, was freed today when Circuit Judge Grimm held that he had not committed grand larceny when he sold to John Rogers, another negro, a Mojo bag for $85 on July 26.
The Mojo bag was guaranteed to be a charm strong enough to soften the heart of John’s wife, Amelia, who had fled to Wisconsin after renouncing her husband. John took it to Wisconsin and said, “Amelia, come back home.” Despite the Mojo bag, Amelia shouted “No!” John testified today. The Judge sustained a demurrer by counsel for Gassway, who contended that he had been wrongfully charged. Selling Rogers a bag with a lump of coal in it was a business transaction of questionable nature possibly, but not grand larceny, it was held.
Another early use is in an academic text, Newbell Puckett’s 1926 Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro:
Many other strange terms have come to have an American Negro meaning, but were, I suspect, used once in Africa in the same or different sense. The term mojo is often used by the Mississippi Negroes to mean “charms, amulets, or tricks,” as “to work mojo” on a person or “to carry a mojo.”
And later on in the same book:
One “mojo” worn for good luck by an old Negro cook in the Mississippi Delta, included among other things such ingredients as a lizard’s tail, a rabbit’s foot, a fish eye, snake skins, a beetle, and dime with a hole in it. Other Negroes use a piece of moss wrapped in red flannel or a rusty nail wrapped in the same flaming material.
This 1926 appearance in an academic text on Black folklore demonstrates that mojo was definitely in circulation for some time in oral use, probably decades if not longer, before appearing in print.
And there is this 26 February 1927 advertisement selling incense that appeared in the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier:
Mojo Lucky Incense
Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Are you unlucky? Burn Mojo Good Luck Incense and see the change. Be rich, be happy, influence your loved ones. Change your whole life. Results guaranteed or money back.
Send $2.00 At Once. With C.O.D. Orders Send 25c.
Mojo Science Studio
528 So. 19th Street, Philadelphia, Pa.
One also occasionally finds the syllables of mojo reversed, that is jomo, as in this 4 July 1925 article in in the Baltimore Afro-American:
Birmingham, Ala.—(A.N.P.)—Will Hollins is to spend six months in jail as a result of his failure to work and spell with his famous “jomo” bags on the judge of the police court here. It is claimed that Hollins had been taking money from his customers for ills which he said were curable with his bags.
The “jomo” bag happened to be, when examined, a plain cloth bag, filled with ordinary steel fillings [sic], picked up in a blacksmith shop. Hollins carried a steel bar magnet with him and when making a sale, is supposed to have impressed the sick and the halt by passing the bar over the bag so as to attract the latter. He almost invariably made a good impression. Many of his dupes appeared in court to attest his success with them.
But early print appearances of mojo are predominately in the titles of jazz songs, such as:
Mojo Blues, by Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders (1925)
My Daddy’s Got The Mojo, But, I Got the Say So, by Butterbeans and Susie (1926)
Barrel House Mojo, by Iva Smith (1927)
Mojo Hand Blues, by Ida Cox (1927)
Mojo would remain primarily in Black American and in jazz/musical circles (e.g., “Mr. Mojo Risin” by the Doors and “He one mojo filter” by the Beatles) until the Austin Powers series of films, starring Mike Myers, debuted in 1997, when the word started being widely used by white Americans.
Sources:
“Butterbeans and Susie” (Display Ad). New York Amsterdam News, 24 November 1926, 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Curtiss, Cornelia. “Vassar Body Gives Party to Children. Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio), 17 September 1921, 13. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2010.
“Goldman & Wolf” (Display Ad). Pittsburgh Courier, city edition, 5 November 1927, Section 2, Page 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. mojo, n.
“Jinx Blues” (Display Ad). Chicago Defender, 28 May 1927, 7, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“‘Jomo’ Bags Fail.” The Afro-American (Baltimore), 4 July 1925, A8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Mojo Lucky Incense” (Display Ad). Pittsburgh Courier, 26 February 1927, 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“The New July Paramount Records” (Display Ad). Chicago Defender, national edition, 27 June 1925, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. mojo, n.1.
Puckett, Newbell Niles. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. New York: Negro UP, 1926, 19, 234–235. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Selling Love Charm Not Theft.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), 24 October 1923, 28. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Mike Myers, writer, Jay Roach, dir. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (film). New Line Cinema, 1997. Fair use of an altered image to illustrate a point under discussion.