This is a dance-floor love song told almost entirely in 1943 slang, and the fun of it is how much of that slang fits into two minutes. To flip your wig is to lose your composure; to be hep to the jive is to be in the know; hubba-hubba is what a serviceman said when a pretty girl walked by; and cuttin' a rug is dancing hard enough to wear out the carpet. A jitterbug is both the dance and the dancer—anybody doing the fast, acrobatic swing that the Lindy Hop had turned into by the war years.

The rest is a roll call of the era's catchphrases. Hi-de-ho is Cab Calloway's call-and-response from “Minnie the Moocher”; solid, Jack means “right on”; jeepers creepers was a 1938 hit; and the Lindy is said to have been named for Charles Lindbergh's 1927 “hop” across the Atlantic. The sergeant tells the kids to dial it back; by the last chorus it's the colonel, and nobody listens to him either.

One line had an edge that June. The zoot suit—long drape jacket, high-waisted pegged trousers, a watch chain nearly to the knee—was the uniform of young jitterbugs, especially Mexican-American and Black kids in the cities. Under the War Production Board's 1942 rules for saving cloth, a suit that used that much fabric looked unpatriotic, and from June 3 to 8, 1943, crowds of sailors and soldiers roamed Los Angeles hunting the young men who wore them, stripping and beating them while the police mostly arrested the victims. The Navy finally declared the city off-limits, and the City Council moved to outlaw the suit itself. A committee appointed by Governor Earl Warren later named racism as a central cause. On our dance floor, the fellow in the zoot suit just gets to dance.

I was flippin' my wig at the USO,
Feelin' hep to the jive and ready to go;
When a hubba-hubba honey with a wink and a shrug
Said, "Come on, daddy, let's be cuttin' a rug!"

He had a zoot-suit shuffle and a re-bop grin,
A little razzle-dazzle when the band kicked in;
The boogie-woogie beat made the rafters hum,
And the heebie-jeebie jitter got my heart goin' numb.

[Chorus]
We were cuttin' a rug with my jitterbug,
Spinnin' like a top on a ten-cent plug;
With a hi-de-ho holler and a solid, Jack!,
We were swingin' every corner of that old dance shack.
Oh, cuttin' a rug with my jitterbug,
Till the sergeant yelled, "Kids, dial it back!"
But we kept on flyin' like a bug in a jug,
'Cause I'm cuttin' a rug with my jitterbug!

He said, "Baby, don't dilly-dally, let's hit the floor,"
And we shook a leg clear to the old band's door;
The juke-joint jive made the windows shake,
And the hokey-pokey hop made my shoelace break.

[Bridge]
From the boogie-woogie bounce to the Lindy swing,
We were in the groove, daddy, doin' our thing;
Every hep cat cheered with a jeepers creepers shout,
When my jitterbug spun me like a propeller about.

[Final Chorus]
We were cuttin' a rug with my jitterbug,
Till the colonel said, "Kids, that's enough of that hug!"
But the jive-bomb jam had us feelin' smug—
So I kept cuttin' a rug with my jitterbug!

[Tag]
Oh, hubba-hubba, honey, when you give me that tug—
I'll be cuttin' a rug with my jitterbug.