Talk:Slim Gaillard

message: 65.114.18.34 indicates that Gaillard was born in Santa Clara Cuba. Many sources I have found say he was born in Detroit. Does anyone have additional information they can provide? --SeanO 12:04, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Birthplace

message: Deletion of uncited content asserting "Floy Floy" was allegedly Afro-American urban slang for gonorrhea based on absence of any verfiable corroboration of contention in obviously ideosyncratically composed entry. A Google search of any documents linking "floy floy" and "gonorrhea" this date produced 157 results, of which all but 10 were direct derivations of this uncited Wikipedia assertion, circular references in effect; of the remaining ten, five more were indirect derivations, the remaining five incoherent or making no connection either to the Wikipedia article or between the two terms, "floy floy" and gonorrhea, at all. In three of these, blog post pages, either one word or the other did not appear in spite of the Google return indicating they would. Of the remaining two one was a blog page in Thai with a poster named "Floy" (singular) and an unrelated entry posting pictures of gonorrhea; the last hit was merely a computer generated word list which returned both terms among an entry of thousands of words in alphabetical order.  In sum, precisely zero returns that were not either generated by an evidently spurious Wikipedia entry or utterly irrelevent to the assertion.
Alternatively, the only two reliable printed references to the meaning of the song's lyrics (citing direct quotes from Galliard in each instance) fail to substantiate a link between "floy floy" and gonorrhea.  From enotes.com;s biography of Slim Gaillard:
Slim and Slam's first hit was a nonsense ditty entitled "Flat Foot Floogie." It shot to the top of the Hit Parade where it stayed for eight weeks. Years later, both Slim and Slam admitted that their biggest hit almost had a different name, one that could have affected its commercial appeal. 'The song was called before we recorded it 'Flat Foot Floosie.' Now you happen to know what a floosie would be—a street walker," Stewart told Cadence. "We got together with someone down at the station who said they wanted to record us, and when we started to record the number, we said 'flat foot floosie.' Then somebody got smart and said 'no, I don't think you'd better use that word, because it wouldn't be quite kosher. It might be commercial but it wouldn't be good for the recording. So we had to do some fast thinking, and the closest thing to that would be 'the flat foot floogie with the floy floy'." The song was first recorded for Decca but never released; Block accepted a better offer for the duo to cut it for Columbia-Vocalion.
"Flat Foot Floogie" was such a big hit in its time that it was put in a time capsule buried on the occasion of the 1939 New York World's Fair. "I get a royalty from the State of New York every year for that underground floy-floy," Gaillard told Home in 1968, "and I intend to be around when they open the capsule."
http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-musicians/gaillard-slim-biography 
And a response to a letter to the editor to Time Magazine of August 22, 1938:
Sirs: 
. . . I know I am asking a great deal of you but your position will warrant it. In deciding this, lay aside position and loyalty to your party and tell me from the fullness of your heart: What the deuce is a floy-floy? 
PAUL E. LAMALÉ
Wabash, Ind. 
Authors of The Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy, Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart, do not know themselves what the words mean. Said Slim: "We were sort of talking a new language." The dance they had vaguely in mind was to be done flatfoot. "When we put the floy floy on it, that was extra business. You got the whole dance right there; you're swinging. See what I mean?"—ED. 
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,788346-5,00.html
Arguably in the Time quote of Galliard Bowlderized the meaning of the "Floogie/Floozie" part of the lyric.  Still, there is no indication in either "floy floy" was Afro American shorthand for gonorrhea. Wikiuser100 (talk) 10:56, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Floy Floy" story 

message: There's a lot of info about Slim on album liner notes.  Are these acceptable cited as a source (I've asked the same about Babs Gonzales)?  Sorry if this is a FAQ.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jiver2011 (talk • contribs) 16:07, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Album liner notes as a source 

message: This is an interesting article. Seeing clips of Slim on Youtube, he was clearly an "off the wall" impromptu performer of great genius. Some of the "info" seems too far-fetched to believe, at least if it were somebody else. I could believe it in Slim Gaillard's case, but still, look at this: "According to the obituaries in leading newspapers, Gaillard's childhood in Cuba was spent cutting sugar-cane and picking bananas, as well as occasionally going to sea with his father. However, at the age of 12, he accompanied his father on a world voyage and was accidentally left behind on the island of Crete. After working on the island for a while, he made his home in Detroit. In America, Gaillard worked in an abattoir, trained as a mortician and also had been employed at Ford's Motor Works.[citation needed]" He was "accidentally left behind on the island of Crete"??? "Trained as a mortician"??? This smacks of some random editor trying to be funny, but maybe it is true. Also, it is not clear to me if his ancestry has Greek or German, or both. I'm happy to see this wikipedia article, and hope that people strive to take it seriously, and make an effort to clear this up.(PS This is a website I discovered, re Gaillard's "Vout" language: http://www.pocreations.com/vout.html)77Mike77 (talk) 01:35, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fact vs Fiction? 

message: Dear fellow editors, 
I am leaving this message out of courtesy to other editors interested in this article.
As I was adding citation templates today, I also tested all the other external links to see if they were still functional, including this one:
 which was added on 12 December 2009 (at 19:19) by User:Igbo.
I have several concerns about this link:
*it points to the 'ancestry.com' website, which requires a user registration; therefore, it does not openly display the information that it is supposed to corroborate;
*as a UK user, even selecting 'United States' (in 'Visit our other sites:') on that website automatically links me back to 'ancestry.co.uk';
*it is therefore impossible for the reader to access the information that the link is supposed to corroborate.
In an attempt to refresh the link, I searched for a suitable US website that would openly display this information, but I couldn't find any. It is quite possible, of course, that this was possible at some stage in the past, or that the information was openly displayed. However, it is not possible today. 
Therefore, I am removing this link and also the information it was intended to corroborate, since it is not possible for a Wikipedia editor, let alone a reader, to verify the claim.
Furthermore, it is impossible to reconcile the dates: Slim Gaillard could not have been the 19-months old 'Beuler Gillard' born in Pensacola, Florida as per the 1920 census, since this is inconsistent with Gaillard's birth year of 1916, which would have made him 4 years old in 1920, not 19 months old.
In summary, there is no justification to keep this confusing information and its link, for two reasons:
# the dates are inconsistent;
# the link does not lead to a corroborative source.  
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(guestbook) 21:17, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing link to 'ancestry.com'. 

message: Dear fellow editors, 
I am leaving this message out of courtesy to other editors interested in this article.
Because I edit so many articles on subjects related to music (including popular music), I very recently acquired a second hand copy of the first edition (1992) of Colin Larkin's The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Here are the first few lines in its entry for "Slim Gaillard" (pages 934-935):
Now, contrast the above text with the following extract from the online text available at Steven Polatnik's fansite and purporting to be from the "Muze UK Ltd '89-'98" version of the same encyclopedia:   
It seems to me that the first two sentences of the fansite version of this biography are alterations applied to the original version, and that the place of birth was altered to support the prevailing view, generally sourced from generations of album sleeve notes, that Gaillard was born in Detroit. A tell tale sign of the suspected alteration is the absence of punctuation between the words 'England' (which ends the first sentence) and 'Other sources ...' (which begin the second sentence) — although this could also be a simple typo introduced when the text was typed into the fansite. However, I am inclined to conclude that the fansite's version of the biography appears to be WP:OR applied to an original extract from the quoted encyclopedia, the rest of the fansite's text being otherwise identical to the original text in the 1992 edition of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
I am happy to be proved wrong, especially if another editor has access to a later edition of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, where Gaillard's place of birth might have been the subject of a revision. Until then, I will be giving precedence to the text from the first edition of the 1992 encyclopedia, in my possession. 
In addition, a second reason for removing the link is simply because a fansite is considered unreliable, as per WP:FANSITE. However, I have retained the link and relocated it to the 'External links' section after changing it to point to the 'Discography' page of the fansite, since the material shown there is verifiable through other means, such as the links to cduniverse in the new 'Discography' section I created a few days ago. 
Thank you.
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(guestbook) 17:36, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing link to online biography. 

message: The following can't be used as sources because they are user-generated: Discogs, YouTube (also copyright violations), IMDb,  genealogy sites, and retail sites like Amazon, iTunes, and CD Universe. The sourcing that does exist on this page isn't great. There's a link to a Japanese site, so I assume that editor knows Japanese, but I wonder whether a better source could've been found, one in English for example. I don't know if Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation is a reliable source. But again, why use it?
Listmania. The text is divided into decades, even if little more than a few sentences are provided to cover an entire decade. The whole article looks like a compilation of lists. There were separate headers for languages in Galliard's songs. The discography, filmography, and bibliography take up much of the page and aren't done that well. For one thing, CDs aren't the only recording medium used today. The generic term to use is "album", which covers CDs, SACDs, vinyl (LPs), and online albums that can be downloaded as computer files. There's no reason to have "CD" discographies.
The page is deceptively long (and important) because of the box quotes, which I find rarely necessary, esp. in an impartial work like Wikipedia where facts are more important than opinions. Yes, this entry is a biography, but it's a Wikipedia biography, not a book biography. Re:quotes, What point is being made? Can it be paraphrased or omitted? Is the quote vital to the entry or did an editor include it simply because it was considered interesting, amusing, entertaining? 
Detail is included for the sake of detail and for having something to say. There are opinions (POV) and uses of the first name (a plague in Wikipedia), about which I could draw all sorts of conclusions. There are many citation templates, one going back to 2007. If it were possible, I would start from scratch, but that isn't how Wikipedia works.–Vmavanti (talk)
:Looks like you may be busy. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:50, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  I did a lot yesterday. Then a bot replaced some things that had been deleted, two of the sources, including the IMDb citation. I'm not sure why.–Vmavanti (talk) 21:36, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: IMDb is used all over the place. Maybe that's why we have a template for it? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:46, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: My understanding is that IMDb can't be used as a source because it relies on user-generated material. WP:USERGENERATED: "Content from websites whose content is largely user-generated is also generally unacceptable. Sites with user-generated content include personal websites, personal blogs, group blogs, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the Comic Book Database (CBDB.com), content farms, most wikis including Wikipedia, and other collaboratively created websites."–Vmavanti (talk) 04:00, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a semantic difference between saying something "can't" be used as a source and saying that it "shouldn't" be used as a source.  Sites like IMDb and Discogs, for example, are in fact often pretty reliable - often far more reliable on facts than, say, Allmusic - but, because they are user-generated, they should not be used unconditionally, and certainly not where better sites that have been checked by independent experts are available.    The trick here would be to find the best available sources on Gaillard, and use them.  Ghmyrtle (talk) 07:25, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the decision to avoid them is a good one given the nature of those sites. I don't think the difference is semantic. It's substantive. I've found errors in Discogs and IMDB, and of course in AllMusic, but AllMusic is a professional site with a business and legal infrastructure as outlined in the WP documentation. I would rather have wrong data from AllMusic than right data from Discogs. Of course, you don't always know which is which at the time. But I will continue to delete the use of these sites as sources. My approach is to have less information rather than more, quality over quantity, which is consistent with the goals and purposes of Wikipedia but contrary to the desires of some people who contribute to Wikipedia. Letting people use discogs or IMDb occasionally, then telling them they can't, is arbitrary and confusing.–Vmavanti (talk) 17:25, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Wow. Personally, I think that's pretty arbitrary and confusing. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:00, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a specific issue in relation to popular music (including jazz), in that much of the most authoritative and accurate research is not set out in peer-reviewed academic journals or books - which often disdain involvement in such matters - but is done by aficionados and independent researchers of the music, often published in user-generated sites or blogs.  Of course, such sources should be treated with extreme caution, and more reliable sources (in the WP sense) should be used whenever possible - but that is not the same thing as baldly stating that user-generated sites "can't" be used.  Ghmyrtle (talk) 18:29, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems with this entry 

message: Re this deletion, I see that The Washington Post also says that he appeared in that film: here? As does the Los Angeles Times here? Thanks Martinevans123 (talk) 15:37, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''[[Planet of the Apes (1968 film)]]'' 

message: You claim that a piece of music called "The Groove Juice Special (Opera In Vout)" was recorded by Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart. But according to the labels of the 78 rpm disks, the title of the work is "Opera In Vout (Groove Juice Symphony)", and Slim Gaillard performed it with Bam Brown. 62.7.182.106 (talk) 05:10, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, they do, because eventually some volunteer (as we all are) like me will take responsibility for checking.  I think you're right, the citation adds up, and I'll correct the article.  Thanks!  Ghmyrtle (talk) 12:06, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Opera In Vout" correction