The Last Word on the Word 'Musclecar' - part one

In the previous edition of Elvisceral Appeal, I traced the history and provenance of the word ‘supercar’ and promised to do the same for the word ‘musclecar’ next time. That time has come!

The May '65 issue of CAR LIFE magazine is credited by Joe Oldham in the the May '74 issue of "CARS" (not to be confused with the British "CAR") as being the first time that big engine, light weight cars were referred to as "Super Cars." Roger Huntington wrote the road test article of the '65 Pontiac GTO in that very issue, and is surely deserving of a large measure of credit for 'coining' the term supercar. So I was struck with serendipity when I found this very early reference to ‘musclecar’ in a March '66 CAR CRAFT article also by Huntington, who wrote for a long list of magazines. Here we already have proof that the word supercar preceded the term 'muscle car,' as Huntington calls the word/phrase "The latest tag line for anything small with a big engine." Here we have the closest person to the original supercar ‘coinage’ telling us about the new ‘tag line.’

In any case, here we already see conclusive evidence that both "muscle car" and "super car" preceded the use of the term super car in the sense of "Lamborghini" or exotic car as it is mostly used today.

In the spirit of “retrodiction” (see my inaugural blog post “Wishful Retrodiction”) we might naively look back from the year 2011 and ‘reason’ that maybe muscle car was coined as substitute for super car because LJK Setright co opted the term. For background on the LJK Setright ‘supercar canard’ see my previous blog entry “American Supercar Provenance or UK CAR magazine Supercar Canard."

The canard has become a cut and paste, drag and drop hoax. Its light-speed race around the web has been turbo-charged by a demonstrably false assertion in the Wikipedia entry for “supercar.”

The ‘supercar’ definition in Wikipedia claims that LJK Setright of Britain's “CAR” magazine “coined the term supercar” after first driving the Lamborghini in “the mid sixties.” Even the highly respected, authoritative Hemmings Motor News has an online article http://www.hemmings.com/hsx/stories/2008/01/01/hmn_feature1.html claiming that it was in this “1000 miles in the Miura” story that Setright coined the term “in 1966.” The timeline seemed highly suspect, so I decided to buy a Brooklands Books reprint of the road test “1000 miles in the Mirua” where Setright first ‘gets to grips’ with the car.

I’ve read it over many times.

He doesn't use the word supercar.

Huntington would have written a March ’66 article probably in January of ’66. But in any case, no one even saw a complete Lamborghini Miura in the flesh before the March 10^th 1966 debut at the Geneva auto show. Besides, the first time Setright drove the Miura was in September of 1967 (the story was published in the Dec ’67 and Jan ’68 issues of CAR). This timeline is decidedly not in ‘the mid sixties’ or ‘1966.’ So even if Setright had written the word ‘supercar’ in ’67 (HE DIDN’T) it would still have been more than a year and a half after Huntington wrote both supercar and musclecar.

So super car and muscle car (not used generically, but as terms of distinction) are indisputably of American coinage, and they are inextricably linked. I originally thought there might be an interesting shade of nuance in meaning between them within the American context (an upcoming post will address various distinctions between words like sportscar and ponycar) but my efforts proved to be futile. For our purposes here in divining their origins in common usage, Supercar = Musclecar. Both supercar and musclecar words were used in reference to ‘compact’ cars ‘sporty’ or ‘pony cars,’ ‘intermediates’ and even ‘standard’ or nominally ‘full size’ cars.*

*Again, look for a fuller and more nuanced explanation from Elvisceral Appeal in upcoming months.

So now we have the job of a simple finding of fact: Since we can identify when “Supercar” was first used in print, can we identify when and where the word musclecar first was printed? A good place to start: The invaluable archive of Google Books. I searched for magazines 1945 to 1967. I found a number of references to 'super car' in the late fifties, but this was used generically to describe modern vehicles with high cruising speeds and the articles were about highways needed to accommodate them.

We know already that Huntington was saying “musclecar” very early in 1966, and I was beginning to suspect that he had actually ‘coined’ musclecar as well! So I was surprised to find this reference to the '66 Dodge Coronet Hemi in the October '65 Popular Science new car preview:

"Dodge Coronet becomes ‘muscle car’ with Hemi-426 engine, but relies on drum brakes only. Rally suspension makes car remarkably well balanced and good handling. The new body retains unit construction."

Some more careful searching turned up a reference one month earlier. Surprisingly, it’s from the same magazine and the same writer: Jan P. Norbye. Here's the article from September '65 Popular Science about the new “Street Hemi” for the Plymouth and Dodge brands. You see the word in quotes and in reference to “the ‘muscle cars’ from General Motors."

In my weeks long project of combing through Google books and exhaustive Google searches I find that before the '66 model year, you just don't see the word ‘musclecar.’ It's almost like the word suddenly steps on stage with the fall '65 new car introductions…except for one interesting exception I think proves a point.

Here's the only earlier ‘musclecar’ reference I can find on Google Books. This is from Popular Mechanics January 1964. The Pontiac GTO was just coming on line when this was printed. (The original run of 5000 GTOs was already 'spoken for' by Thanksgiving, according to a CAR LIFE article on the '64 Pontiac GTO). Here it is being employed to describe a long wheelbase British Leyland Land Rover.

I think this proves an important point: Namely that the word/phrase "muscle car" was not at all common currency at the time. Why would the author use the word if it was already understood to be a classification of an entire genre? If you read the scan, you might get a laugh out of how the author puzzles over how a housewife would deal with getting groceries in a 4x4 wagon.

This plainly shows that musclecar was not, in early 1964, a word commonly understood to mean what we now say it means. One other crucial factor I think must be recognized regarding supercar and musclecar: It's not good enough if one car is called 'super' or 'muscle' and considered a class of one or 'sui generis.'

That's why the Lamborghini Miura/ LJK Setright claim (we now know the claim to be spurious but one made by UK's CAR) doesn't make much sense - how could there only be one super car in the world? If there's only one why not just call it "Lamborghini"? I think the term only has meaning if, when it was 'coined,' there was an identifiable group of cars that met the criteria. That's why the May '65 CAR LIFE, in systematically defining 'super car' should ultimately be credited with delineating what we now call 'muscle car.'

So now we have the earliest mention of musclecar. But can we be assurred Jan P. Norbye 'coined' the word? In the next post, we'll investigate further the intersection of the musclecar and supercar words and delve more deeply into some theories of who might have coined them.