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65.114.18.34 indicates that Gaillard was born in Santa Clara Cuba. Many sources I have found say he was born in Detroit. Does anyone have additional information they can provide? -- SeanO 12:04, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
I am 65.114.18.34. Slim Gaillard is my aunt's (my uncle's wife's) father, and she - HIS DAUGHTER - states that Slim - HER FATHER - was born in Santa Clara, Cuba. This is about as annoying as whoever keeps insisting that Gaillard's granddaughter Nona was born to an Irish/African-American mother. It simply isn't true. Janis Hunter was 1/2 Irish, 1/4 Afro-Cuban and 1/4 Greek. People who keep rolling things like this back to make it fit to whatever they want it to fit to is the reason why Wikipedia is looked down upon as a place to come to for facts. Slim was American by lifestyle, NOT by birth and NOT by parental lineage. -- HannahGrace 23:15, 27 November 2005
Hannah. Thanks for your additional information. I didn't mean to be annoying. When I see an anonymous IP address change data that appears to be contrary to my sources, I do additional research. I didn't find sufficient evidence that the anonymous statements were true, so I changed them back to what my other sources said. One of the suggestions for editing is that you cite your sources. Had you done that originally, I wouldn't have reverted them. Again, thanks for your correction. SeanO 23:37, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
THis is a good example of an article while, without formal citations, is being improved in the direction of accuracy by the participation of people with firsthand knowledge. I believe that this article should not have anything removed from it, unless it's by someone with firsthand knowledge. There are plenty of people living who are relatives or colleagues of Slim's, give them time to contribute and allow their contributions. Thanks, Hannah for the update on Janis's ethnicity - people often shorten such lengthy pedigrees by convention to the kind of error you point out. It's to be expected, but not condoned - I hope Wiki keeps your comments and uses them!-- Levalley ( talk) 05:57, 29 March 2009 (UTC)LeValley
Deletion of uncited content asserting "Floy Floy" was allegedly Afro-American urban slang for gonorrhea based on absence of any verfiable corroboration of contention in obviously ideosyncratically composed entry. A Google search of any documents linking "floy floy" and "gonorrhea" this date produced 157 results, of which all but 10 were direct derivations of this uncited Wikipedia assertion, circular references in effect; of the remaining ten, five more were indirect derivations, the remaining five incoherent or making no connection either to the Wikipedia article or between the two terms, "floy floy" and gonorrhea, at all. In three of these, blog post pages, either one word or the other did not appear in spite of the Google return indicating they would. Of the remaining two one was a blog page in Thai with a poster named "Floy" (singular) and an unrelated entry posting pictures of gonorrhea; the last hit was merely a computer generated word list which returned both terms among an entry of thousands of words in alphabetical order. In sum, precisely zero returns that were not either generated by an evidently spurious Wikipedia entry or utterly irrelevent to the assertion.
Alternatively, the only two reliable printed references to the meaning of the song's lyrics (citing direct quotes from Galliard in each instance) fail to substantiate a link between "floy floy" and gonorrhea. From enotes.com;s biography of Slim Gaillard:
Slim and Slam's first hit was a nonsense ditty entitled "Flat Foot Floogie." It shot to the top of the Hit Parade where it stayed for eight weeks. Years later, both Slim and Slam admitted that their biggest hit almost had a different name, one that could have affected its commercial appeal. 'The song was called before we recorded it 'Flat Foot Floosie.' Now you happen to know what a floosie would be—a street walker," Stewart told Cadence. "We got together with someone down at the station who said they wanted to record us, and when we started to record the number, we said 'flat foot floosie.' Then somebody got smart and said 'no, I don't think you'd better use that word, because it wouldn't be quite kosher. It might be commercial but it wouldn't be good for the recording. So we had to do some fast thinking, and the closest thing to that would be 'the flat foot floogie with the floy floy'." The song was first recorded for Decca but never released; Block accepted a better offer for the duo to cut it for Columbia-Vocalion.
"Flat Foot Floogie" was such a big hit in its time that it was put in a time capsule buried on the occasion of the 1939 New York World's Fair. "I get a royalty from the State of New York every year for that underground floy-floy," Gaillard told Home in 1968, "and I intend to be around when they open the capsule."
http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-musicians/gaillard-slim-biography
And a response to a letter to the editor to Time Magazine of August 22, 1938:
Sirs:
. . . I know I am asking a great deal of you but your position will warrant it. In deciding this, lay aside position and loyalty to your party and tell me from the fullness of your heart: What the deuce is a floy-floy?
PAUL E. LAMALÉ
Wabash, Ind.
Authors of The Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy, Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart, do not know themselves what the words mean. Said Slim: "We were sort of talking a new language." The dance they had vaguely in mind was to be done flatfoot. "When we put the floy floy on it, that was extra business. You got the whole dance right there; you're swinging. See what I mean?"—ED.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,788346-5,00.html
Arguably in the Time quote of Galliard Bowlderized the meaning of the "Floogie/Floozie" part of the lyric. Still, there is no indication in either "floy floy" was Afro American shorthand for gonorrhea. Wikiuser100 ( talk) 10:56, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
There's a lot of info about Slim on album liner notes. Are these acceptable cited as a source (I've asked the same about Babs Gonzales)? Sorry if this is a FAQ. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jiver2011 ( talk • contribs) 16:07, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
Gaillard's daughter Janis Hunter was not an only child, but had a brother, Mark. Can anyone confirm? -andy 77.7.12.56 ( talk) 21:43, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
This is an interesting article. Seeing clips of Slim on Youtube, he was clearly an "off the wall" impromptu performer of great genius. Some of the "info" seems too far-fetched to believe, at least if it were somebody else. I could believe it in Slim Gaillard's case, but still, look at this: "According to the obituaries in leading newspapers, Gaillard's childhood in Cuba was spent cutting sugar-cane and picking bananas, as well as occasionally going to sea with his father. However, at the age of 12, he accompanied his father on a world voyage and was accidentally left behind on the island of Crete. After working on the island for a while, he made his home in Detroit. In America, Gaillard worked in an abattoir, trained as a mortician and also had been employed at Ford's Motor Works.[citation needed]" He was "accidentally left behind on the island of Crete"??? "Trained as a mortician"??? This smacks of some random editor trying to be funny, but maybe it is true. Also, it is not clear to me if his ancestry has Greek or German, or both. I'm happy to see this wikipedia article, and hope that people strive to take it seriously, and make an effort to clear this up.(PS This is a website I discovered, re Gaillard's "Vout" language: http://www.pocreations.com/vout.html) 77Mike77 ( talk) 01:35, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
Dear fellow editors,
I am leaving this message out of courtesy to other editors interested in this article.
As I was adding citation templates today, I also tested all the other external links to see if they were still functional, including this one:
[1] which was added on
12 December 2009 (at 19:19) by
User:Igbo.
I have several concerns about this link:
In an attempt to refresh the link, I searched for a suitable US website that would openly display this information, but I couldn't find any. It is quite possible, of course, that this was possible at some stage in the past, or that the information was openly displayed. However, it is not possible today.
Therefore, I am removing this link and also the information it was intended to corroborate, since it is not possible for a Wikipedia editor, let alone a reader, to verify the claim.
Furthermore, it is impossible to reconcile the dates: Slim Gaillard could not have been the 19-months old 'Beuler Gillard' born in Pensacola, Florida as per the 1920 census, since this is inconsistent with Gaillard's birth year of 1916, which would have made him 4 years old in 1920, not 19 months old.
In summary, there is no justification to keep this confusing information and its link, for two reasons:
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ
Pdebee.
(talk)(
guestbook)
21:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
References
Dear fellow editors,
I am leaving this message out of courtesy to other editors interested in this article.
Because I edit so many articles on subjects related to music (including popular music), I very recently acquired a second hand copy of the first edition (1992) of
Colin Larkin's
The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Here are the first few lines in its entry for "Slim Gaillard" (pages 934-935):
Gaillard, Slim
b. Bulee Gaillard, 4 January 1916, Santa Clara, Cuba, d. 26 February 1991. Gaillard led an adventurous childhood. On one occasion, while travelling on board a ship on which his father was a steward, he was left behind in Crete when the ship sailed. [...]
—Colin Larkin (ed.), The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music. [1]: 934
Now, contrast the above text with the following extract from the online text available at Steven Polatnik's fansite and purporting to be from the "Muze UK Ltd '89-'98" version of the same encyclopedia:
Born: Bulee Gaillard, January 4, 1916, Detroit, Michigan - Died February 26, 1991 - England Other sources including Gaillard himself have claimed he was born on 1 January 1916 in Santa Clara, Cuba. Gaillard led an adventurous childhood. On one occasion, while traveling on board a ship on which his father was steward, he was left behind in Crete when the ship sailed. [...]
—Steven Polatnik's fansite. [2]
It seems to me that the first two sentences of the fansite version of this biography are alterations applied to the original version, and that the place of birth was altered to support the prevailing view, generally sourced from generations of album sleeve notes, that Gaillard was born in Detroit. A tell tale sign of the suspected alteration is the absence of punctuation between the words 'England' (which ends the first sentence) and 'Other sources ...' (which begin the second sentence) — although this could also be a simple typo introduced when the text was typed into the fansite. However, I am inclined to conclude that the fansite's version of the biography appears to be
WP:OR applied to an original extract from the quoted encyclopedia, the rest of the fansite's text being otherwise identical to the original text in the 1992 edition of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
I am happy to be proved wrong, especially if another editor has access to a later edition of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, where Gaillard's place of birth might have been the subject of a revision. Until then, I will be giving precedence to the text from the first edition of the 1992 encyclopedia, in my possession.
In addition, a second reason for removing the link is simply because a fansite is considered unreliable, as per
WP:FANSITE. However, I have retained the link and relocated it to the 'External links' section after changing it to point to the 'Discography' page of the fansite, since the material shown there is verifiable through other means, such as the links to cduniverse in the new 'Discography' section I created a few days ago.
Thank you.
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ
Pdebee.
(talk)(
guestbook)
17:36, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
References
The following can't be used as sources because they are user-generated: Discogs, YouTube (also copyright violations), IMDb, genealogy sites, and retail sites like Amazon, iTunes, and CD Universe. The sourcing that does exist on this page isn't great. There's a link to a Japanese site, so I assume that editor knows Japanese, but I wonder whether a better source could've been found, one in English for example. I don't know if Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation is a reliable source. But again, why use it?
Listmania. The text is divided into decades, even if little more than a few sentences are provided to cover an entire decade. The whole article looks like a compilation of lists. There were separate headers for languages in Galliard's songs. The discography, filmography, and bibliography take up much of the page and aren't done that well. For one thing, CDs aren't the only recording medium used today. The generic term to use is "album", which covers CDs, SACDs, vinyl (LPs), and online albums that can be downloaded as computer files. There's no reason to have "CD" discographies.
The page is deceptively long (and important) because of the box quotes, which I find rarely necessary, esp. in an impartial work like Wikipedia where facts are more important than opinions. Yes, this entry is a biography, but it's a Wikipedia biography, not a book biography. Re:quotes, What point is being made? Can it be paraphrased or omitted? Is the quote vital to the entry or did an editor include it simply because it was considered interesting, amusing, entertaining?
Detail is included for the sake of detail and for having something to say. There are opinions (POV) and uses of the first name (a plague in Wikipedia), about which I could draw all sorts of conclusions. There are many citation templates, one going back to 2007. If it were possible, I would start from scratch, but that isn't how Wikipedia works.
–
Vmavanti (
talk)
"I would rather have wrong data from AllMusic than right data from Discogs."Wow. Personally, I think that's pretty arbitrary and confusing. Martinevans123 ( talk) 18:00, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
Re this deletion, I see that The Washington Post also says that he appeared in that film: here? As does the Los Angeles Times here? Thanks Martinevans123 ( talk) 15:37, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
You claim that a piece of music called "The Groove Juice Special (Opera In Vout)" was recorded by Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart. But according to the labels of the 78 rpm disks, the title of the work is "Opera In Vout (Groove Juice Symphony)", and Slim Gaillard performed it with Bam Brown. 62.7.182.106 ( talk) 05:10, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
PS - I'm not making this up just to mess with your heads! https://ia801901.us.archive.org/5/items/78_opera-in-vout-groove-juice-symphony_slim-gaillard-and-bam-brown-c-jam_gbia8000475c/78_opera-in-vout-groove-juice-symphony_slim-gaillard-and-bam-brown-c-jam_gbia8000475c_itemimage.jpg — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.138.52.159 ( talk) 17:03, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
PPS - Do these talk pages actually serve any purpose at all, or are they just a waste of cyberspace nobody who matters ever bothers to visit? And if so, why do they exist? 86.136.178.243 ( talk) 07:59, 12 September 2023 (UTC)