Q From Ginger Johnson: I am curious as to the origin of vamp.
The vampire to vamp connection (as in Theda Bara) is
straightforward, but how on earth did it come to have something
to do with music? A It has nothing to do with vampires, but its
origin is almost equally weird. The word comes from the medieval
French avant-pied, literally “before the foot”, in reference to
the forepart of the foot, in particular the part of hose or
stockings below the ankle. It became corrupted in English to
vampe, said as two syllables, and then vamp. (In the eighteenth
century the old pronunciation was revived through a fashion for
short stockings that covered only the foot and ankle, which were
called vampeys.) This sense of vamp is preserved in the meaning
that denotes the part of a boot or shoe that covers the upper
front part of the foot. It seems that in the middle seventeenth
century the word came to be used for anything that had been
patched up or refurbished (like darned stockings, we may guess),
as in the old phrase to