Sudhalter and Evans on Ahola's name

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In the seventies I raised an eyebrow reading, in Bix: Man & Legend, that Sylvester Ahola was called "Hooley by friends, perhaps after the Finnish word 'huuli', which meant the embouchure." I still don't believe it, never heard it used as a term for embouchure, never read it in print, nor found it in any dictionary. Also not likely that Finnish-Americans would have invented it; they simply would have mangled "embouchure" to fit Finnish pronunciation, as that is the way they adapted all new English words they needed to use. Huuli (meaning 'lip') is pronounced very much like "hooley," but it seems obvious that Hooley is just mispronouncing (accidentally or as a joke) Ahola as "a-hoola" or something, which resembles such English and Irish names as Hooley and Gilhooley (in Finnish all the vowels in Ahola are short, with the stress on first syllable only). Dick Hill, in The Gloucester Gabriel, repeats the embouchure story even though he tells that both Ahola's father and older brother were also called Hooley.

Posted on May 16, 2012, 2:47 PM

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