A brief history of Lindy Hop

Identifying the 'real' roots of Lindy Hop is difficult; the steps of the dance drew inspiration from a number of sources, prominent amongst which were the Charleston, Texas Tommy and Turkey Trot.

What is fairly certain is that the dance grew up, and was first named Lindy Hop, at the Savoy Ballroom, Harlem, New York. The Savoy Ballroom was a very unusual place by the standards of '20s America - from the day that it opened (12^th March 1926), it was mixed race, and was therefore well placed to be the one of the centres of the cultural explosion that took jazz music and dance from its Afro-American roots to the world. It was also huge, extending over an entire block, and could accommodate something like a thousand dancers and two separate bands.

By the spring of 1927, when the Charleston era was winding down and a smoother style of music - swing - was beginning to evolve, this ballroom and its neighbours had given rise to a new dance, based on 8 counts (2 bars of 4/4 jazz). At first it was simply called the Hop. The hop was pioneered by three main characters, George Ganaway, Shorty Snowden and Big Bea, with whom the diminutive Snowden danced a comedy double-act. When the nation's newspapers and newsreels were buzzing with the story of Charles Lindbergh's pioneering solo air flight across the Atlantic, a reporter happened to ask these dancers what their unusual dance was called; apparently drawing inspiration from the news, Snowden replied "The Lindy Hop". The dance proved sensational, and was soon demonstrated outside the ballroom to great acclaim, by George Ganaway and his partner, then regarded as the best dancers, and by the Shorty Snowden Trio (Shorty, Big Bea, Leroy, Little Bea, Madeline and Freddy).

New dance crazes were common in these years; the Shim Sham, the Bunny Hug, the Black Bottom and a host of other jazz age dances came and went. That Lindy Hop achieved an impact that would guarantee a long life and worldwide spread was partly because it was such a wondefully flexible and expressive dance form. It was also probably due to the efforts of Herbert White, a floor manager at the Savoy Ballroom. In the early 1930s, White recruited the best young dancers on the Savoy's floor to form a flambuoyant team - Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. His dancers included Leon James, Edith Matthews, Frankie Manning, Maggie McMillianm William Downes, Sarah Downes, Billy Hill and Norma Miller. They entered, and won, the dancing competition of the 1936 Daily News' Harvest Moon Ball; their photographs were all over the newspaper the next day, and the Lindy Hop rage truly began.

For the first nine years of its life, Lindy Hop was definitely a floor dance, with performances being extremely well-executed versions of what were essentially social dance figures. It was 1936 before the first true aerial steps were invented. In that year, the Savoy ballroom hosted a competition that was essentially a challenge between Whitey's Lindy Hoppes and Shorty Snowden's dancers. When preparing for the competition, two of Whitey's group, Frankie Manning and Frieda Washington, invented a figure ('over the back') which included the couple standing back to back, and the man then flipping his partner up and over his shoulders, upside-down, her feet describing a high arc in the air, to land in front of him. The figure provoked rapturous applause, and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers won the contest. From that date, performance Lindy Hop acquired ever wilder aerial steps (though the social form of the dance remained largely on the floor, for reasons of safety - modern day Lindy Hoppers please note!!!! (click here for an illustration of why I am labouring this point)). There was a second development too, dating from about the same time - Performance Lindy Hop began to include ensemble dancing, in which several couples were on the floor at the same time, sometimes interacting (for example, swapping partners in flying aerial moves).

The following years brought Lindy Hop to theatre audiences far beyond Harlem (and even beyond the shores of America), mainly through Whitey's group, which even managed to feature in the 1939 World's Fair. The dance also began to feature on film, for example in the Marx Brothers Day at the Races, and most famously, Helzapoppin, an film of the Olsen and Johnson comedy stage play of the same name, in which Whitey's Lindy Hoppers had previously starred. Much of the spread of Lindy was due to that one energetic group of dancers, although many others were working at the same time. Their competition was not always welcome; when he heard that one of his dancers wanted to leave for his own company, Whitey beat him up in front of the other dancers. This violent attitude to rivals made headlines in the local newspapers of Harlem, particularly when Whitey and henchmen met a new group entering a Harlem club and beat them up at the stage door. His hardness of attitude could also be seen in his treatment of his most loyal dancers, who were paid little and sometimes driven to such exhaustion that they needed hospital treatment.

The late thirties and early-mid forties were the climax of the Lindy era. A famous example of the great urge people felt to dance came from a 1938 concert given by Benny Goodman in New York's Paramount Theatre; the audience went wild and danced in the isles. Goodman said it they looked like a bunch of 'jitterbugs' had got loose in the room, and the name stuck so that whites tended to call the dance Jitterbug rather than Lindy Hop. [The remark may not have been intended as a complement! The word 'Jitterbug' had already been in use as Southern-States medical slang. Taking its name from the uncontrolled muscle twitches that characterised the diesease, the tertiary stage of the venereal disease syphilis was known as 'the jitters' and the bacterium that causes symphilis, Treponema pallidum to us, was therefore known as the 'Jitterbug'. Goodman's remark implied that the dancers were a bunch of twitching syphilitics, so if you ever have ever wondered why modern dancers prefer the term 'Lindy Hop'... now you know!].

The dance, under whatever name, grew up with swing music and, when the huge social changes accompanying the end of World War 2 brought new types of music and the end of Swing, Lindy hop started to die off. The famous performance groups broke up, either establishing their own dance careers (eg Norma Miller) or finding other jobs (Frankie Manning joined the postal service, for example). Lindy did not enter its old age childless though; a simpler form of swing, based largely on the 6-beat phrase shift figures in Lindy grew up on the East coast of America (East Coast Swing), and ballroom dancers such as Victor Sylvester used it as the basis for ballroom jive. A further simplification (loss of triple steps) gave rise to rock'n'roll in the 50s. In California, Lindy evolved into a slotted dance with strong latin influences, called West Coast Swing. The 'break' moves in Lindy, in which partners let go of each other and dance solo usually when there is a musical solo (eg drums), are arguably the remote ancestors of 'break dancing' that grew up in 1980s New York.

A few people remained interested in Lindy Hop itself, however, and in 1986, Erin Stevens and her partner Steve Mitchell encouraged Frankie Manning to teach them more about Savoy-style Lindy Hop, and to begin a new career as a teacher, particularly to a newly-formed group, the New York Swing Dance Society. He also taught England's Jiving Lindy Hoppers, who have been instrumental in teaching Lindy Hop in the UK (two of the Jiving Lindy Hoppers company, Carolene Hinds and Russell Sargeant, teach weekend master classes for the Edinburgh Swing Dance Society).

Right now, Lindy looks as if it is making a strong return in the USA, Europe and Australasia (click here for a list of Lindy Hop organisations across the world). If you don't already Lindy Hop, join in and help us 'cut that rug'!