I have been re-reading Faulkner´s Snopes trilogy, and came across this passage from Dilsey 1928.
Luster went to the woodpile. The five jaybirds whirled over the house, screaming, and into the mulberries again. He watched them. He picked up a rock and threw it. "Whoo," he said. "git on back to hell, whar you belong at. Tain´t Monday, yit."
[Emphasis mine]
Luther is a young Afro-American kitchen helper, fairly irresponsible, working in a white household in Missisipi. Throughout the story he has been sneaking off to drink and avoid work.
I had never heard this expression before, and I believe it originated in the South of the United States. After doing a little searching around, I came across several usages of the expression. One was the title of a book by Havilah Babcock Jaybirds Go to Hell on Friday and Other Stories (1965).
I found another use of the expression in one passage in the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (1977) :
"…they (jaybirds) go to hell on Friday to tell the devil about all the meanness you people done to us Negroes through the week."
And in Carl Sandburg´s Mary Lincoln: Wife and Mother.
She told them that the jay birds go to hell every Friday night and tell the devil all wrongdoings they have seen the week just passed.
What is the origin and first usage of this expression?
Best Answer
Research suggests the phrase in your question title, "[go to] Hell on Friday", originates in a folk tale about jaybirds, and is dependent on that tale or knowledge of the tale for both its meaning and origin. So yours is a question not about the origin of a phrase, but about the origin of a folk tale. Even supposing the question was about the origin of a phrase, the entire phrase in question would be "jaybirds go to hell on Friday" (or variants), which is nothing more or less than a capsule summary of the tale.
The "first use" of the phrase (or variants), therefore, must lie in an oral, folk tradition. This is beyond the brief on ELU. However, to illustrate the boundaries of that brief, I'll contrast evidence showing the first (documentable) use of the phrase with evidence exploring the (documentable) origin of the folk tale.
The first use of the phrase I could locate was this from The Pulaski Citizen (Pulaski, Tennessee), 19 Jun 1884, p 3 (paywalled link):
As can be seen in this, what is for now the first documented use of the phrase, its origin is referred to a "tradition". That "tradition" is the tale.
The tale, as it turns out, is interesting in its own right. Evidence for the origin of the tale is murky and speculative, although now the proper province of a rigorous scholarly discipline (Folkloristics or Folk Studies) with linguistic elements. One of the earliest accounts of the tale's origins is this from Ernest Ingersoll's 1923 Birds in legend, fable and folklore (pp 166-7, but see pp 154-78, the chapter titled "Black Feathers Make Black Birds", for complete reference):
Two things about Ingersoll's account stand out:
A more comprehensive, recent collection of the tale can be found in the 1977 The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore: Vol. VII: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina, Part 2, pp 394-5, where sections 7252-5 present a variety of forms of the tale encountered at various times and in various places by folklorists. To illustrate, here is a clipping of sections 7253-5:
Altogether, none of the evidence regarding the origin of the tale is specific to any phrase. The phrase itself only exists as a reflection of variants of the tale and, as such, has no independent, discoverable linguistic origin. Its origin is, rather, folkloristic.