purchase [ Jimmy Reed ]
Thinking over the word <boss> and its connotations, it occured to me that the word probably came into the English language via Dutch. A little research and ... voila .. "boss is Dutch in origin"... it comes from base or bass or baas. However, being the polyglot that I am, I can't help surmising that there is more to this than that. The Turkish word for "put pressure on" (as in oppress a worker, or force) is <bas>. I am going to go one step further than Collins and Oxford dictionaries and posit that the root goes back further than the Dutch - back to the Ottomans, in fact. It's just an observation, but it makes an awful lot of sense. (You heard it here first.) bas=baas=boss.
So... who's the boss? Well, even that phrase, popularized in many forms, has a somewhat murkey provenance. A 1914 Oliver Hardy film?
The boss is "the person that other people have to obey". That could also take us down a rabbit hole of what it means "to obey", but it also conveys "authority and expertise", and with this we have a more accessible value to the word as it applies to musicians like Springsteen (known as "the boss" for some reason.)
I'll try to take a cue from our own Jordan Becker (and in the process confess that I too often paste information you can find in your own searches - tho' I generally say as much). This week it''s not Springsteen . although it could have been. Not bossanova (tho, again, I love Carlos' music in any form, and thanks Seuras). And not Blue Cheer who were also on my list of potentials on account of their "Summertime Blues" (wherein we have the <I hate my boss> theme).
Pardon me while I provide some freely accessible Wiki data as I assume you haven't yet been there nor know it. Big Boss Man is a Luther Dixon/Al Smith song first recorded by Jimmy Reed - and you would be excused for not knowing the names. That said, some of Dixon's songs were recorded by the Beatles, the Jackson 5 and more.
Sing "You ain’t so big, you’re just tall, that’s all."[
Above it's the Grateful Dead's version and below we have Jimmy Reed, then B.B. King and Elvis.
