Shakespeare to CBGB: What was the first song to feature the word punk?
Ever since the endearingly abrasive sounds of punk rock first hit the airwaves, a debate over the exact origins of the movement has raged on. Depending on who you ask, punk rock might have its roots in the Beatnik generation of the 1950s, the garage rockers of the 1960s, or New York’s CBGB scene in the 1970s. Ultimately, there is no definitive answer as to who recorded the first-ever punk rock song, but one thing is for sure: the word ‘punk’ has an extensive history going back centuries before Iggy Pop ever stepped foot on a stage.
It is counterculture icon and Fugs frontman Ed Sanders who is credited with coining the term ‘punk’ as a means of identifying a specific style of music. Back in March 1970, he wrote a piece in the Chicago Tribune which described his solo album as “punk rock—redneck sentimentality”, marking the first recorded use of the term ‘punk rock’. A year prior to this publication, however, Sanders had written and recorded a track called ‘Street Punk’, which might have helped to establish the term and attach it to a specific sound…were it not for the fact that the song didn’t see an official release until decades later.
Regardless of the origins of punk rock as a term, the sound of the movement was carved out by pioneering garage rock outfits like Question Mark and the Mysterians, The MC5, and The Stooges during the mid-to-late 1960s, although it was never referred to as punk rock at that point. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when the punk explosion became much more widespread, that punk rock became an accepted, widely used term for the music.
Ramones were an essential outfit in the development of the punk scene, so it is no surprise that they are responsible for a number of ‘firsts’ within punk. Their 1976 debut album, for instance, is regularly hailed as the first official punk album (although Patti Smith’s Horses predates it by a year).
Perhaps more interestingly, though, that album features the track ‘Judy Is a Punk’, the first song to feature ‘punk’ in its title. Both musically and in terms of its linguistic choices, the cut was a landmark moment for the punk scene, but it is far from being the first song to utilise the word punk in its lyrics.
Turning back the clock, the word has its origins in the 17th century, when it was used as a term for a female prostitute. William Shakespeare famously used the word in his plays The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure. It was around this time that the word punk was first used in a musical context, featuring in the lyrics of the centuries-old drinking ballad ‘Old Sir Simon the King’, which appeared as far back as 1652 in the publication Musick’s Recreation on the Lyra-Viol.
When did punk develop its modern meaning?
Inevitably, the meaning of the word developed over the course of centuries, and by the early 20th century, it was used as a general term for a good-for-nothing young man, which seemed to fit in quite well with the attitudes of the punk rock scene decades later. In this sense, one of the earliest songs to use the word punk was ‘Lumberjack’, recorded by country music icon Johnny Cash for his 1960 album Ride This Train. “Is it two for stop or four for go? Boy, ask a whistle punk I don’t know,” sang the ‘Man in Black’.
The word appeared in various tracks throughout the 1960s, with one notable example in the form of Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘I’ll Be Hard To Handle’, during which she warns the listener, “Just remember, I think you’re a punk”. It is likely that these early instances of the word appearing in Cash and Fitzgerald’s works influenced its later usage by Ed Sanders and, eventually, Ramones.
Punk has certainly had an interesting linguistic journey over the past four or five centuries, from Shakespearean literature to the track listing of Ramones’ eponymous debut. It would seem that, much like punk rock in general, the exact origins and derivations of the word punk are difficult to pin down. In terms of the modern context of the word, though, it appears Johnny Cash was the first artist to employ it in his lyrics; another accolade to add to his incredible career.
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