The First Hipster of New York – The New York Times

Harry “the Hipster” Gibson, who sang “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine.” William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress
 
Q. Did the hipster originate in New York? Or did hipsters migrate here from some other bastion of cool?
 
A. We most likely have the jazz clubs of 1940s Harlem to thank for the term, although its meaning may have changed some since then. A Bronx-born, Juilliard-trained musician named Harry Raab helped popularize the word with his stage name: Harry “the Hipster” Gibson.
 
But it’s doubtful that Mr. Raab, an expressive singer and gifted piano player whose most recognizable song, for better or worse, was “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine,” coined the term.
 
Back then, as now, “hipster” was used to describe someone who saw himself as hip and ahead of the curve, said Lewis Porter, a jazz historian at Rutgers University. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is also thought to be a modernized version of “hepcat,” which had the same meaning in jazz circles. Dr. Porter said the word might also have been used to describe white jazz musicians like Gibson who played in traditionally black clubs. “That certainly was not its original meaning, but that could have become attached to it later on,” he said.
In his 1957 essay “The White Negro” for Dissent magazine, Norman Mailer examined beatnik culture, posing the theory that to be a hipster was to be a white American who adopted black culture, worldviews and music as an act of rebellion against capitalist greed, wartime violence and the ever-present specter of nuclear war.
 
The New York Times has used the word “hipster” about 3,000 times since 1851, the bulk of those references coming in a boomlet after the year 2000. It was typically used to describe a class of people who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, wearing white tank tops and clutching cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon — until those people were priced out of the neighborhood, of course.