Here is a song that has been sung by toddlers, wedding guests and skiers in a state of cheerful intoxication, and nobody has ever once asked it for identification. “The Hokey Pokey” is probably the most democratic piece of music in the English-speaking world. It has no verses to memorise, no key to worry about and no talent requirement beyond a working left foot. Yet it also happens to be one of pop’s great mysteries, a song with several rival creators, a lawsuit, a religious conspiracy theory and a title that began life as slang for cheap ice cream. What does it mean? Possibly everything. Possibly nothing. Possibly both at once, which is how the best pop has always worked.
A Song With Too Many Fathers
Most pop songs have a creator. This one has a crowd of them, each clutching paperwork. In Britain the credit usually goes to Jimmy Kennedy, the Irish songwriter who wrote the words to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, and who copyrighted a version called the Cokey Cokey in 1942. His son has said that his father based it on a traditional Canadian children’s game, which fits the story that it was meant to cheer up Canadian soldiers stationed in wartime London. Rival claims turned up quickly. A bandleader named Al Tabor said he had created it around 1940, and another bandleader, Gerry Hoey, is linked to a similar piece called “The Hoey Oka”. Nobody has ever quite settled the argument.
Across the Atlantic the story gets messier still. Robert Degen and Joe Brier had copyrighted a Hokey Pokey dance in the mid-1940s. Then, towards the end of that decade, a trio made up of Larry LaPrise, Charles Macak and Taft Baker began performing their own version for the après-ski crowd at Sun Valley in Idaho. They recorded it, they copyrighted it, and a dispute followed that ended with Degen and Brier receiving a share of the money. It is a tale of copyright law, certainly, but it is also a reminder that songs designed for groups tend to end up belonging to nobody in particular, which may be the secret of their success.
Where the Name Comes From
Before it was a dance, hokey-pokey was a phrase for cheap ice cream sold from street carts, usually by Italian immigrants, and the term is recorded in Britain in 1884 and in the United States in 1886. Whether the dance borrowed the name, or whether something older sits underneath it, nobody can prove. One famous theory says the title is a mocking echo of hocus pocus, the supposed corruption of words spoken at Catholic Mass, which would make the song a Protestant jibe at a sacred ritual. It is a fabulous story and has all the shape of folklore. Relatives of both Kennedy and Tabor have publicly denied it.
Another theory points to a Shaker song called “Hinkum-Booby”, printed in a book about the Shakers in 1940, which has a similar in-and-out structure and might be a distant ancestor. Perhaps it is. Perhaps people simply keep reinventing the same game, because the game is so obviously good. Folk culture rarely leaves a paper trail, and the Hokey Pokey is folk culture that happened to wander into a recording studio and get sued. History, as usual, prefers a pile of maybes to a single clean answer, and the song is quite happy to live in the pile.
What Actually Happens
Strip away the folklore and the song is a set of instructions delivered at a cheerful clip. A body part goes into the circle. The same part comes out again. It gets shaken. Then the process repeats with another limb until you have, in effect, taken an inventory of yourself, and at the end you spin around while the song announces, with total confidence, that this is the whole point of everything. The British version adds a joyful crowd surge, with everybody charging towards the middle in a happy scrum. Both versions assume that you will join in. The song does not want an audience. It wants a circle.
That is worth pausing on. Most pop songs ask you to listen, to sing along, perhaps to feel something about an ex. This one asks you to move your body in public according to rules you were given ten seconds ago. It is closer to a game than a song, closer to a ritual than a game, and it works precisely because nobody is in charge. The leader is whoever happens to be holding the microphone, and the microphone is optional.
Is There a Hidden Meaning?
Let me offer three readings, none of them proven and all of them irresistible. The first is the absurdist reading. Here is a ritual with a clear structure and no obvious purpose, repeated until you forget to ask for one, which is not far from Camus’s picture of Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill and finding a kind of cheerfulness in it. The second is the ambivalence reading. In, out, in, out: this is the oldest human problem, whether to commit or step back, and the song’s wisdom is that you can try both, over and over, and shake it all about while you make up your mind.
The third reading is the plainest and perhaps the best. Every part gets its turn. No limb is the star. In a culture obsessed with faces and brains, the song insists that the knee also deserves attention, that the hip has feelings, that a body is a committee in which everyone gets a vote. Children learn left from right by doing it. Adults rediscover that they have elbows. For a few minutes, the whole self is invited into the room, and nobody is allowed to stay mentally in the car park checking their emails.
Why We Keep Doing It
Pop in the streaming age is mostly a private activity: one person, two earbuds, a quiet commute. The Hokey Pokey is the opposite of that. It requires physical presence, shared silliness and a willingness to look slightly ridiculous in front of people you will see again tomorrow. That willingness is a form of trust. Schools use the song to calm a classroom, weddings use it to melt stiff uncles, and nursing homes use it because movement is memory, and memory often stays when much else has gone.
There is also something faintly radical in a song that cannot be performed alone. It cannot be monetised, filtered or listened to ironically from the back of the room, because the moment you stand at the back with your arms folded, you have left the song. You are either in, or you are out, and the lyrics, sneakily, have been asking you which one it is all along.
Final Thoughts
“The Hokey Pokey” survives because it demands almost nothing and gives back almost everything: a circle, a laugh, a brief and welcome escape from your own dignity. Its origins are tangled, its authors still argue from beyond the grave, and its so-called secret meanings are probably more fun than true. But the real meaning is on the dance floor, in the awkward, delighted moment when a room full of strangers turns around together. Anyone who has ever stood in a circle of relatives, one arm out and no idea why, already understands it better than any critic could explain. Pop music’s first purpose was never to be understood. It was to be done, with other people, badly, and with enormous joy.