The first verse of the song "All that meat and no potatoes" by Louis Armstrong says:
A man works hard then comes on home,
Expects to find stew with that fine ham bone.
He opens the door, then start to looking,
Says, Woman, what's this stuff you're cooking?
"Start to looking" sounds wrong to me.
Of course he needs to rhyme with "cooking" so he could have used "starts looking" but then the sentence would be too short for the tempo.
So my question is: Is it actually correct to say "start to looking" or definitely not?
Best Answer
Start to VERBing, start in to VERBing, get to VERBing, get started to VERBing, and get started in to VERBing were all common in the dialect around me when I was young in East Alabama; it doesn't surprise me that one such construction should show up 350 miles to the southwest.
To in these constructions is a preposition, not an infinitive marker.