October 22, 1998

long-hair(ed)

I was watching a documentary from the mid-1950s, and a taxi driver used "longhair" to refer to classical music. Maybe it's because I was born in the 1960s, but when I hear the term "longhair," I think of people attending Woodstock, not those attending classical recitals. So how did "longhair" come to refer to lovers of classical music? Is it a throwback to famous musicians like Liszt who had long hair? Most of the classical musicians I've seen have short hair (unless they were so busy practicing that they forgot to get a trim).

The word longhair (or longhaired) does refer to people--specifically men, on whom it is, or was at various times, unusual--with long hair, but the implications of this have changed over time.

In the nineteenth century, long hair was chiefly worn by intellectuals or artists. There are assorted examples from the late nineteenth century of longhaired applied to such people: "Romanticism...was fermenting still...in certain long-haired German artists at Rome" (G. Eliot, Middlemarch).

In these examples, longhair(ed) is being used literally, but by the early twentieth century it became current in the sense 'artistic; intellectual', without reference to the actual length of hair worn by a person thus described. A few examples: "Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian Jew, or one of these long-hairs!" (Sinclair Lewis, Main Street); "The long-haired critics were too preoccupied with Kafka and Henry James" (The New Yorker, 1952).

By the mid-1930s, a subsense developed that referred to classical music (either a performer or fan thereof). This was used chiefly by jazz musicians and journalists: "Benny [Goodman] has also become a patron of long-haired composers....He gave the first performance of the new Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra that he commissioned from Aaron Copland" (Time, 1950). By about 1950 the noun longhair was in use in the sense 'classical music': "Classical music, too, is gaining in the field....M.G.M....reports that 10 per cent of its business is 'long hair'" (N.Y. Times, 1952).

While this sense seems to have fallen out of use in the 1960s, a new meaning arose at the end of that decade: 'a person wearing long hair, especially a hippie; (broadly) a person who is politically liberal': "He went along to the bank with another longhair, a member of our commune" (American Scholar, 1973). This sense has taken over the word longhair and is the only way you'll likely encounter it in current use, but during the middle years of the century, the 'artistic/intellectual person' and 'classical music (performer/fan)' meanings were the ones that mattered.