Eepha-Soffa-Dill and Eephing: Found in Ragtime, Jazz, and Country Music, from Broadway to a Texas Plantation

There is a previously little-noticed and underdocumented group of phenomena surrounding the nonsense syllable singing practice called "eephing" (also spelled "eefing") and the phrase "eepha-soffa-dill" (which also has various forms and spellings).¹ From the 1890s onward, these conventions enlivened performances by some of the most famous stars of the era—such as George M. Cohan and Al Jolson—as well as performers now obscure. The practices cropped up in almost every entertainment venue of the time, including vaudeville, burlesque, and Broadway musicals. For a few years epha-soffa-dill represented what was newest and most exciting in ragtime-era show business. It supplies an important context for jazz scatting and the country music practice still called eefing.

The eephing phenomenon is discussed both on the Internet and in print in an enthusiastic but loose manner. These commentators often give unsupported hypotheses as fact and do not display a detailed listening of recordings or a sense of fine discrimination between phenomena. This article will seek to rectify these tendencies.

Among the most provocative issues raised are the possible relationships between the eeph trope, eephing, and scat singing. Nonsense syllable singing in the jazz idiom has been labeled "scat" ever since Louis Armstrong's famous 1926 recording of "Heebie Jeebies." It is a central technique in jazz and jazz-influenced singing. Unlike the scat singing that followed Armstrong's legacy, the eeph phrase, along with most nonsense syllable singing before 1926, has been given scant attention in discussions of ragtime and jazz. The following history of eepha-soffa-dill and eephing leads to provocative new questions both for the field of jazz studies and, more generally, for the field of American music scholarship.

Two pivotal figures in the present narrative are singer-entertainers of the ragtime and early jazz eras: Gene Greene, who used the phrase "eepha-soffa-dilly" on the many recordings of his theme song in the 1910s; and Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, an icon of the Jazz Age who reportedly called his nonsense syllable singing eefing.² (Edwards is best known today as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in the 1941 Pinocchio and other Disney products—and as well to ukulele enthusiasts as a notable exponent of the instrument.) Both Greene and Edwards present a wide range of nonsense syllable singing in their recorded work; both have therefore been hailed by aficionados as pioneers of scat singing; and both recorded short passages that resemble the later work of country music artist Jimmy Riddle, whose vocal percussion technique was dubbed eefing in the 1960s and who used that style in the long-running television variety show Hee Haw.³ The present discussion will begin to trace the patterning of these wide-ranging factors.

Many singers in many genres use nonsense syllables, and this fact supplies the context for eephing and scatting. Oddly, nonsense syllable singing has no widely accepted label (and, indeed, no aesthetic theories)—not across genres and often not even within genres.⁴ There is a lack of both detailed studies and broader surveys of these practices. To satisfy my own curiosity, I made notes on early recordings in my collection, encompassing 598 popular music vocal recordings from the mid-1890s through 1923, and found uses of nonsemantic syllables in 6 percent of the renditions, many of them by performers associated with ragtime and early jazz such as Bert Williams, Al Jolson, Ethel Waters, and Noble Sissle. This indicates that the use of nonsense syllables was present in popular music before the jazz practice of scat singing crystallized. My survey manifested a wide range of nonsemantic vocal practices, many of which can also be found reflected in sheet music. These include yodeling on nonsense syllables; humming; melismatic singing on a single open vowel (ah, oh, uh); traditional European nonsense syllables ("fa la la," "tra la loo," etc.); mock foreign languages; laughter—not just chuckles or giggles but "ha-ha-ha" sung in rhythm and, often, on pitch; imitations of animal sounds; and, particularly germane to the...