'Reach Your Destination and Alas and Alack!'

A friend and I were swapping favorite tracks by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five when he passed along “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” (1946). It’s a song I’ve known since I was a kid. The composer was Denver Darling, a “cowboy singer,” with lyrics by Vaughn Horton. The words are notable for thirteen different rhymes ending in “-ack,” including these: 

“You reach your destination and alas and alack!

You need some compensation to get back in the black.

You take a morning paper from the top of the stack

And read the situation from the front to the back.

The only job that's open needs a man with a knack.”

 

The words are sometimes read as a muted protest against the discrimination faced by returning black veterans of World War II. Perhaps, though the songwriters were white. Jordan is the wittiest of singers. His enunciation is precise and he always sounds as though he is enjoying himself. This time, listening again to words I’ve known most of my life, I wondered about the meaning of “alack.”  “Alas,” I know.

 

The OED warns that alack is “now archaic or humorous.” That much I understood. The definition: “used to express grief, condemnation, pity, regret, concern, or surprise.” The word is “often used in collocation with alas,” making them virtually synonyms. Alack shows up eighty-two times in Shakespeare; alas, 237 times. Romeo and Juliet, not surprisingly, is alack-dense. He uses it eleven times. The nurse is especially fond of the word, as she announces to playgoers what they already know:

 

“Alack the day! He’s gone, he’s kill’d, he’s dead!” Then, shifting pronouns: “She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead; alack the day!”

[I can’t resist. Here’s another Louis Jordan track: “Beans and Cornbread.”]