The Charleston, with its wild side-kicking and energetic movements, was, like so many dances of the 20th century, scandalous to some, but enjoyable to most.
The term dance music usually implies strong pulses and rhythmic patterns that are organised into repeated metric groupings, synchronising exactly with those of the dance, as does the mood of the music. The term is usually applied to popular-music genres.
Music and dancing moved into the ballroom in the 16th century when formal dances such as the gavotte, minuet, courante, cotillon, and allemande were the domain of the upper classes, who required that orchestras be hidden from view. It was not until about 150 years ago that dancing became a public affair due to the popular success of the waltz. Ballroom dancing remained popular in both the U.S. and Great Britain throughout the first quarter of the 20th century. But it was the foxtrot, with its combination of quick and slow steps, developed in America in 1912, that really established a new era in informal dancing to popular music.
As music began to change and as jazz became increasingly popular, dances and dance music began to change as well. These changes were rooted in African-American culture, not only through ragtime and jazz, but through dances such as the cakewalk, a strutting promenade which was the first American dance to cross over from black to white society. To most ballroom dancers, the cakewalk was a strenuous workout, but it opened the way for a whole series of less demanding but still exotic dances that were adapted from black honky-tonk nightclubs and juke joints. These were the “animal dances” such as the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, the chicken scratch, the camel walk, and the bunny hug, and they became popular in the early years of the 20th century.
Dance music as we know it began in and around Chicago not long before the start of World War I. It was performed by a violin and cornet, sometimes a trombone, all accompanied by piano, banjo, and drums, and was a cross between ragtime and brass bands, with a dash of salon music. According to popular legend, it was Wilbur C. Sweatman who is credited as having the first organised dance band in 1914. He is best remembered as the composer of “Down Home Rag,” and for the fact that he once employed Duke ELLINGTON as his piano player. Following Sweatman, some of the most famous American dance band leaders were Paul Specht, Paul WHITEMAN, Vincent Lopez, Ted Lewis, and Jan Garber.
After World War I, interest in the new dance styles rapidly increased. However, it was the 1920s that saw a dramatic change both in dance music, in dances, and in the development of the dance band. The rise of new dance styles coincided with increasing public interest in ragtime and jazz, and with the syncopation and instrumental characteristics of such ensembles that were taken over by the dance bands of the time.
Perhaps the most widely known bandleader of the 1920s was Paul Whiteman. Whiteman was popularly dubbed “King of Jazz.” Despite this lofty title, his own publicity proclaimed that he confined his repertoire to pieces that were scored and did not allow his players to depart from the script. Whiteman, like the other bandleaders of the 1920s and 1930s, owed his fame to the widespread popularity of the gramophone and, in particular, the radio.
This jazz and dance music led to a particular style of dance that was more vigorous and energetic than had ever been seen before. Some of the new dances that enjoyed periods of popularity were the shimmy, the Charleston, and the black bottom. The shimmy was characterised by a turning in of the knees and toes followed by a shake of the bottom. The Charleston was extremely popular, and featured vigorous sidekicks. As with so many earlier dance forms, the Charleston met with a great deal of opposition from some quarters on moral and medical grounds. The black bottom consisted of bottom-slapping!
Most of the new dances were athletic and bouncy, and some were full of self-mocking silliness. It was their untamed energy that concerned traditionalists. Part of the reason was that the partners held each other while they danced, but the concern was mainly due to the wriggling, shaking, and twisting style of the dancing. All of these dances were inspired by African-American dances, and the relatively free use of improvisation they promoted was considered scandalous.
In the late 1920s, before electrical amplification had become widespread, jazz bands expanded sharply to cope with bigger ballrooms and bigger crowds of noisy dancers. Beginning in the 1930s, as these jazz bands grew, a new form of dance music, swing jazz, developed that, in turn, gave rise to a new kind of dance and music. From 1935, until the end of World War II, the big bands dominated and dance music increasingly showed its jazz influence as sidemen went out on their own as bandleaders. Among the most popular of these bands were those of Jimmy and Tommy DORSEY, Harry JAMES, Benny GOODMAN, Charlie Barnet, Bob Crosby, Gene Krupa, Stan KENTON, and Woody Herman.
Besides Duke Ellington’s band, leading African American bands of the period were those led by Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher HENDERSON, Chick Webb, Earl Hines, Don Redman, and Count BASIE. Basie’s band, which came east from Kansas City in 1936, emphasised blues, riffs, and the importance of swinging, making a virtual counterattack on the developing tendency towards over-elaborate orchestration.
Also popular in the 1930s were Latin influenced dances and dance music. In 1939 at the World’s Fair, a samba orchestra played at the Brazilian pavilion. Soon, popular culture was swept with a rage for South American dances such as the rumba, mambo, cha-cha-cha, and conga line, each one of which emphasised sensual hip movements.
The big bands gave birth to another dance craze that held the public’s imagination throughout the World War II years. This was the Lindy hop, which evolved into the strenuously athletic jitterbug. The Lindy hop allowed for much creative inspiration and improvisation. It was a fast and furious swing dance named after Lindbergh’s solo air “hop” across the Atlantic in 1927.
The main thrust of the Lindy was the so-called “breakaway,” in which a couple, after doing a syncopated and flowing two-step together, parted and went into solo improvisations to the same swinging beat. The challenge was to do something both new and difficult, all the while making it look effortless, and then to come back together seamlessly without missing a beat of the music. It is a perfect alignment between dance, movement, and music.
Like the music and dances of the 1920s, the Lindy grew out of the African-derived notion of embellishing a basic dance step with virtuoso improvisations. However, for the first time it fused this element with the essence of European-derived couple dancing. In 1936, when Benny Goodman’s band played Carnegie Hall and the press reported that teenagers were “jitterbugging in the aisles,” the Lindy was officially launched into white America.
The Charleston, with its wild side-kicking and energetic movements, was, like so many dances of the 20th century, scandalous to some, but enjoyable to most.
Just as the big bands and swing began to fade in the decade after World War II, the Lindy became a mainstay of the dance schools. When rock’n’roll emerged in the 1950s from black rhythm and blues (R&B) as a new dance music, the Lindy was still there. However, dance music began to change dramatically beginning in the 1950s due to the advent of rock. Rock music changed the face of popular culture, and dancing was certainly no exception. This is because rock music was able to combine white and black music in a way that no other genre had ever done before. It was the mixture of these two strains in rock music that swept into pop dominance in the recordings and performances of such artists as Chuck BERRY, LITTLE RICHARD, and Fats DOMINO. The fundamental nature of their music was the rugged honesty of expression and exciting rhythms. Its main characteristic was an unrelenting, unvaried beat that seems to have remained unchanged since the 1950s. The rock rhythm influenced new dance forms and new music forms for the next three decades.
Rock music grew out of various early forms such as blues, jazz, country music, gospel music, and so on. However, since its inception, rock has long been a distinctive genre that has created its own landmarks and produced its own outstanding performers, most notably Elvis PRESLEY. Elvis was what the American promoters of rock music were looking for in the segregationist 1950s: a white singer with a black sound. In addition, Elvis couldn’t help but move to his music and, not surprisingly, he used the same footwork that African-American performers were using at the time, namely newer variations on the Lindy.
In the 1950s, the quietly sensuous movements of the Latin dances became the provocative hip rolls of Elvis Presley. Elvis brought his unique singing style and gyrating hips to network television. His physically dramatic performances, combined with the strong influences of R&B heard in his music, helped to kindle a revolution in popular and social dance.
Also in the mid-1950s, rock’n’roll became a national phenomenon when Bill HALEY and His Comets were featured in the film Rock Around the Clock, performing their huge dance hit of the same name. From that point on, teenagers across America were dancing to the new music, and the television show American Bandstand began its telecasts of dancing teenagers. On that TV show, the kids who showed up every day knew all the most popular steps such as the slop, the hand jive, and the bop. They even invented a few of their own, such as the stroll and the circle and adopted the Caribbean calypso.
Besides dancing on American Bandstand, American teenagers went to dances and danced to rock’n’roll at “the hops.” These were informal dances, such as sock hops and cotillions, that were held in a variety of places: from school gyms to wooden basketball courts where street shoes were forbidden, hence the term “sock hops.” Wherever the dance was held, there was always one thing the dances all had in common—dancing close together in couples.
By the late 1950s, Presley dominated the rock scene. This may to some extent have been because dance music was still affected by racial assumptions. Chuck Berry, a talented African-American performer, might have become a rival of Presley. Fans of his early recordings argued that it was only his race that prevented his being as popular. Audiences also responded positively to the work of the singers Fats Domino and Little Richard, potentially the greatest rock singers of them all.
Just as had happened with the big bands of the swing era, the new sound of rock’n’roll and its new dances found their way to other parts of the globe. Popular music and social dancing in Europe, Asia, and Africa came to resemble that of North America. Japanese pop stars shook their hips in imitation of Presley, and young Englishmen put their own spin on the rhythm and blues of Chuck Berry.
In I960, the rock musician Chubby Checker ushered in the twist, which he performed with gyrating hips and torso and a body attitude that seemed to express individuality. The song “The Twist” was a phenomenon that had never been seen before, and the success of the dance pointed to the influence that rock dance music had come to exert on popular music. Not since the Lindy had a dance craze so overwhelmed America.
The sweeping popularity of the twist spawned a string of similar dances, including the mashed potato, the limbo, the watusi, and the locomotion. In fact, another form of the twist, “The Peppermint Twist,” was recorded by the group Joey Dee and the Starlighters in 1962. The name “Peppermint Twist” came from the club where the band played, the Peppermint Lounge. Soon, the Peppermint Lounge became one of the hottest clubs in New York City. This club also set the scene for the “celebrity” discos of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. In the first quarter of the seventies, dancing the frug, watusi, monkey, funky chicken, and varieties of the twist at discotheques (or discos) was extremely popular.
Another unique dance music grew out of “The Twist.” Gospel had first emerged from the plantations of the American Deep South, and over the years had spread to a larger audience. In the mid-20th century, this trend continued in the powerful work of singers such as Aretha FRANKLIN and James BROWN, and groups such as the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Four Tops, who epitomised a spiritual backlash to counter the excesses of commercial rock with a deeply felt, subtler strain of music that was called gospel rock, or soul music. Under the guiding hand of Berry Gordy, Jr., who founded the MOTOWN label in 1959, soul music, often called the “Motown sound,” reached new heights of popularity and launched the careers of Stevie WONDER, Diana Ross, Marvin GAYE, Gladys Knight, and the Jackson Five.
One of the unique features of Motown was that it was a record company that made music aimed at young people. Before Motown, most of the black artists who recorded R&B during the 1950s were older. Hence, their music primarily appealed to an older African-American audience. With the birth of Motown, young blacks felt that they had a type of music that was exclusively for them. Furthermore, singers in the Motown stable were very young. The Supremes, Temptations, and Smokey Robinson had all only just finished high school when they began their music careers, and Stevie Wonder began recording for the company at the age of 11.
The 1970s saw an unprecedented rise in the popularity of dance music and dance bands with what ultimately became known as the disco era. Disco began by following the soul sounds of the early 1970s, as exemplified in the “PHILADELPHIA SOUND.” Following in the footsteps of Motown, Philadelphia International Records, led by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, was the leading black record company of the 1970s. Their artists included Billy Paul, The Three Degrees, the OJays, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, and Teddy Pendergrass, who all topped the charts and ushered in the Philadelphia Sound: lush arrangements and big orchestrations set to street corner music and doo-wop harmonising. Several of the Philadelphia artists had early disco hits and helped bring disco into popularity, including the Tramps with their smash hit, “Disco Inferno,” featured in the movie Saturday Night Fever.
At the height of its popularity, disco music touched nearly every part of popular culture, including theatre, radio, television, and movies, and spread worldwide, swamping all other types of dance music. By 1980, in the U.S. more than a third of Billboard’s Top 100 was occupied by disco music. Over one hundred thousand discotheques were operating internationally in 1980. The most popular performers of the disco era included Boney M, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, The Bee Gees, K. C. and the Sunshine Band, and Michael JACKSON.
Alongside the disco movement was the more outrageous punk rock movement and slam dancing, which involved leaping, jumping, and sometimes physically attacking others. At the same time, with a turn to nostalgia, the big band sound was revived with foxtrots, waltzes, and jitterbugs. Couple dancing returned in the 1970s and 1980s, with dances such as the hustle performed to disco rock music. In the mid-1980s, break dancing, which had originated with inner city teenagers, became popular throughout the country. This highly acrobatic form of solo dancing was accompanied by heavy electronic “hip-hop” music.
Besides disco, in the 1970s a new musical form called “rap,” or “rapping,” arose on the streets of New York City. The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap hit record. Using bits of funk and hard-rock records, plus a miscellany of sounds as background, rap performers chanted complicated rhyming couplets, generally about ghetto life. In the 1980s, the music spread as young audiences responded to the rap performers’ angry words about social injustice, racism, and drug abuse.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, as disco began to die out, it was replaced by the 1990s version of disco, ironically called “dance music.” Dance music is basically disco under a new name, and it launched the careers of artists such as MADONNA, and PRINCE. In addition, the 1990s saw a nostalgic revival of disco music and disco artists in the dance clubs and on radio stations across America.
Judi Gerber
SEE ALSO:
BIG BAND JAZZ; DISCO; DOO-WOP; MOTOWN; PHILADELPHIA SOUND; ROCK MUSIC
FURTHER READING
Goldman, Albert. Disco (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1978);
Simon, G. The Big Bands (New York: Schirmer Books, 1981).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
The Indispensable Benny Goodman; Popular Duke Ellington; Ready Steady Go: 1960s Sound of Motown; Saturday Night Fever-The Very Best of Glenn Miller