Shakerag

See also: shakerag

English

Etymology

Probably from shakerag, although some authors propose other etymologies such as the use of rags to cover the nose and mouth during the Spanish flu.

Proper noun

Shakerag

A common nickname given to a poor rural town.
- 1882, Benjamin F. McGee, William Ray Jewell, History of the 72d Indiana Volunteer Infantry of the Mounted Lightning Brigade:
  We passed a little place to-day called Shakerag, which reminded us very much of a little town we passed through in Kentucky called Dogwalk.
- 1883, William Henry Perrin, History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois:
  Almost every cross-roads, that had a cabin and a man who could read and write enough to become Postmaster for the monthly pony mail, was at once a New London, Pekin, Liverpool or Shakerag.
- 1958, Georgia Mineral Newsletter - Volume 11, (Please provide the book title or journal name), page 102:
  it reaches a village that is properly called Sheltonville but which has long been known to the facetious-minded as “Shakerag.” The spot is not the only Shakerag in the state; there are some half-dozen other communities and spots in Georgia with the name, but the first locality mentioned seems to be the only such place that has a road with the same tab.
A nickname sometimes given to the slum area of town in the Southern United States.
- 1993, Howard A. DeWitt, Elvis: The Sun Years : The Story of Elvis Presley in the Fifties, page 53:
  Shakerag's nondescript shacks were alive with music day and night, a sharp contrast to the dreary, monotonous routines of work-a-day life.
- 2012, Robert Blade, Tupelo Man: The Life and Times of George McLean, page 150:
  In the fall of 1946, when George was serving as the Chamber of Commerce president, Keirsey hired a new cook, an angular, twenty-six-year-old, Viceroy-smoking woman named Essie Howard, who lived in the black slum Shakerag with her husband, Seaphus, a janitor at the North Mississippi Community Hospital.
- 2014, Joel Williamson, Elvis Presley: A Southern Life:
  The rundown wooden structure they occupied on Mulberry Alley lay on the eastern edge of town in a mostly black neighborhood called “ShakeRag.”