Here's where 'woke' comes from | Arkansas Democrat-Gazette |

Given this origin story, some observers have berated progressives for appropriating a term coined by Black activists. Kelly's 1962 essay in the Times addressed this very subject. Titled "If You're Woke You Dig It," the piece argued that Black people living in a white world needed a way to talk to each other that outsiders would not understand. Each time a word entered the mainstream, he wrote, "the Negro knows that part of his code is being broken."

Kelly's point is powerful, but the etymology of "woke" doesn't quite fit his thesis. Even granting the proposition that a race can "own" a word, a better description of where the term came from would acknowledge that it's been traded back and forth.

To begin with, Garvey isn't relevant. True, the phrase appears in the aforementioned 1923 volume, but there's no evidence that "woke" was associated with him by the Black public of the day. Small wonder, given that Garvey was merely borrowing a term Black leaders had long ago adopted.

As for Lead Belly, his 1938 usage of "woke" was likely a repurposing of the key line in "Sawmill Moan," a song recorded a decade earlier by the great blues artist Willard "Ramblin'" Thomas:

If I don't go crazy,
I'm sure gonna lose my mind
'Cause I can't sleep for dreamin',
sure can't stay woke for cryin'.

Although on the surface the song laments a lost love, historians have suggested that the lyrics were a veiled protest against the atrocious conditions faced by Black workers in Southern sawmills, where Thomas and other blues artists often performed.

This interpretation makes sense, and not only because blues songs often included hidden meanings representing opposition to cultural norms, particularly norms about race.