(This post originally appeared at NA Confidential in 2017. Photo credit: Library of Congress, via PBS.)
For the past four decades, any mention of “Black Friday” immediately cues the song by Steely Dan, which promptly starts playing in my head, except that it doesn’t ever seem to end there.
That’s because back in 1975, most of us were listening to albums, and if you heard these songs often enough, it becomes impossible to stop the internal playback mechanism from repeating their long established running order.
“Black Friday” is the first song on the album Katy Lied. It leads directly to “Bad Sneakers,” then “Rose Darling” — and if something doesn’t occur to interrupt the stream, it only ends with “Throw Back the Little Ones” and the album’s conclusion.
In historical terms, “Black Friday” has tended to denote disasters.
It was a financial crisis during the presidency of U.S. Grant, occurring on Sept. 24, 1869, after an attempt was made to corner the gold market following the Civil War. In fact, Steely Dan’s song refers to this original Black Friday.
Black Friday has been used to denote other historic dates, too. A quick search confirms a short list of at least 25 instances of Black Friday: a storm in Scotland in 1881 killed 189 fishermen; a flood in Johnstown, Penn., killed 2,200 in 1889; and on a Friday in 1939 the worst wildfires ever in Australia killed 71 and destroyed several towns.
The list goes on. At various times, the other six days of the week have pulled duty as “black” in a negative context, but Friday seems to be the most memorable.
Somehow “Black Friday” has morphed from being universally deployed to describe tragedies and catastrophes to our present-day idiocy, where it boosts, boasts and symbolizes shopping excess.
I find this contemptible, although on second thought, blind consumer-driven materialism probably does fit the previous usage, albeit with little appreciation of the irony. Still, there is a dispassionate explanation, one with a slightly gentler trigger.
The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular...Read more
