Leonard Reed could give an account of tap that went back some ninety years. It was only his version, but he lived it and was eager to tell. Any attempt to trace tap’s roots back much farther faces multiple obstacles. Drawings of dancers in action can capture a gesture, a pose, but can only imply motion. Written accounts are often imprecise, contradictory, and—particularly in the case of forms, such as tap, that develop largely below the notice of official recordkeepers—simply scarce. Historians of pre-twentieth-century dance (which is to say, pre-film) are forced to recycle a few descriptions, arrange them by date and location, surround them with speculation, and patch them together with mutable oral traditions wherever those traditions have been fixed by documentation. Tracking development requires much gap-leaping and guesswork.
Consider the following story told by one James W. Smith about an event he witnessed while a slave in Texas just before the Civil War. By way of explaining how good and kind his master was, Smith spoke of how there was dancing on the plantation most Saturday nights, how his master built a platform for “jigging” contests, and how the colored folk came from miles around to compete. He spoke of a fellow slave, Tom, as “the jigginest fellow dat ever was.”
Everyone round tried to get some body to best him. He could put de glass of water on his head and make his feet go like triphammers and sound like de snaredrum. He could whirl round and sich, all de movement from his hips down. Now it gits round that a fellow has been found to beat Tom and a contest am ’ranged for Saturday evenin’. There was a big crowd and money am bet, but master bets on Tom, of course.
They starts jigging. Tom starts easy and a little faster and faster. The other fellow doin’ de same. Dey gits faster and faster, and dat crowd am a-yelling. Gosh! There am ’citement. They just keep a gwine. It look like Tom done found his match, but there’s one thing he ain’t done—he ain’t made a whirl. Now he does it. Everyone holds his breath, and the other fellow starts to make the whirl, but jus’ a spoonful of water sloughs out his cup, so Tom am the winner.
If this isn’t tap, it sure sounds like an ancestor, a clear antecedent for cutting contests at the Hoofers’ Club. Tap dancing is a twentieth-century term, but the practice it labels is much older, at least as old as the United States. Like most of the testimony about slave dance given by slaves themselves, Smith’s account entered the historical record in the form of an interview conducted by members of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. In it, the seventy-seven-year-old Smith is remembering his very early childhood. He is talking to a representative of the government, most likely a white person, in the segregated South. The words on the page are that interviewer’s transcription of Smith’s dialect—what the interviewer thought he heard, and maybe what Smith thought the interviewer expected or wanted to hear.
Caveats aside, what is happening in Smith’s story? This contest—was it the master’s idea or the slaves’? The glass on the head, the hip-down action, the feet behaving like “triphammers” and sounding like a snare drum up on a platform—where did these practices come from? Smith calls it all jigging, a word that seems to point to Ireland even as the lineage of the slaves points to Africa.
Any attempt to answer these questions is made difficult not just by the scarcity and ambiguity of documentation, but by the concept of race. Classifying humans by a rough set of physical features assumed to indicate ancestry is a scientifically dubious practice, especially when the physical differences are taken to stand for innate differences of intellect, aptitude, morality, or human possibility, and are used to establish and justify immutable hierarchies. Neverthless, it must be acknowledged that the socially constructed idea of race has been enormously influential in shaping how people regard, and treat, one another. Because of race, the question of tap’s origins is always on the verge of becoming a property dispute, a question of who owns what. Or, as Leonard Reed would say, a question of who gets credit. The denials, evasions, rationalizations, and resentments of four centuries taint every fragment of evidence, and since indirection and dissimulation were essential defenses for blacks, nothing is necessarily as it seems.
AFRICA, OR, AN ECHO OF THE DRUM
What can we know of the dance that Africans might have brought with them and thus contributed to tap? If the West and Central African tribes from which the slaves were taken described their dancing in written form, then Western scholars haven’t discovered it; it seems that the dancing, along with music and stories, was the record. Just about the sole written voice is that of Olaudah Equiano, a slave who purchased his freedom and who, in his 1789 autobiography, claimed that in his Igbo childhood, dancing was part of every occasion, translating stories and events into varied movement. That’s about all he wrote on the subject, and so we have to rely upon accounts by European travelers and traders, filtered through their prejudices and likely miscomprehension, or we must extrapolate backward from scholarship on twentieth-century African dance, always keeping in mind how much could have changed in the interim.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to venture generalizations across the slave-trading region. All accounts stress how very much the Africans danced. As the British trader Richard Jobson put it in 1623, “There is, without doubt, no other people on earth more naturally affected to the sound of musicke.” (This generalization was already long in the tooth. In his eleventh-century guide to buying slaves, Ibn Butlan said of African slaves that “dancing and beating time are engrained in their nature.”) Africans danced to celebrate victories and to mark seasonal cycles. They danced at weddings and at funerals. In some tribes, dance was part of the instruction given to youth during initiations, part of the education considered essential for adulthood. European observers marveled at the dancing of children so young they could barely stand: “One would be apt to say that they are born dancing, to see the exactness of their movements,” a visitor to Senegal wrote in 1753. Later scholars would add that the aged danced, too, and that when they danced, they appeared young.
The Europeans identified patterns: a call-and-response between performers and spectators, blurring the distinction; the arrangement of dancers in a ring, with individuals taking turns in the center and those on the circle’s edge clapping their hands in time. “With crooked knees and bended body they foot it nimbly,” Jobson wrote about Senegambian dancers in 1620, catching what could be called the default position of West African dance: knees bent, torso piked forward, butt out. The crooked knees help the body to bend, freeing the pelvis and making it easier for upper and lower halves to operate independently. Supple knees absorb shocks, steadying the gait of someone carrying a load on her head. The crouch emphasizes a connection with the earth that deepens with rising intensity: when the music heats up, the dancer gets down. A great dancer was said to have no bones. Bent knees produced and signified flexibility, a quality prized not only in dance.
“The Negroes do not dance a step, but every member of their body, every joint, and even the head itself expresseth a different motion, always keeping time, let it never be so quick.” So wrote a French botanist about a Senegambian funeral dance in 1749, identifying a core feature of West African dance, “keeping time.” What struck the botanist as distinctive would continue to amaze Europeans—a rhythmic exactness, which, to have attracted such consistent attention, must have been very pronounced. Africans danced percussively. They beat their feet on the ground, but they also tied bells to their ankles and loaded their arms with bracelets, adornments that were noisemakers, rendering a dancer’s precision audible. Even body parts without ornaments—shoulder blades, necks—behaved as if they could be making sounds.
This exactness, noted the botanist, was synchronized with drums. Europeans who wrote about African dance rarely failed to mention drums. African dancers studied by twentieth-century researchers were in constant communication with drummers. In the words of one Bakebe tribesman, the dancer “creates within himself an echo of the drum. Once he is seeing the echo, he is dancing with pride.” The drummer directed the dancer, yet the dancer could also signal the drummer with gestures and rhythms; they could converse. (And since in many West African languages words could be distinguished by pitch, drums could “talk,” transmitting messages with pitch patterns.)
“Every member of their body expresseth a different motion”—this might have registered a distinguishing trait of music in the region, what musicologists call polyrhythm. From a European perspective, the music of West and Central Africa uses at least two different rhythmic systems at once. (To take the most basic example, one drum plays three beats in the time it takes another to play two.) Though the individual parts are often simple, they interlock into a complex pattern that to many European ears throughout history—perceiving no pattern or only the repetition of one—has sounded chaotic or monotonous. Perhaps polyrhythm is what the botanist was seeing: the feet following one drum, the hips another. Such segmentation would pervade twentieth-century West African dance: polyrhythm encouraged isolation of body parts, and skilled dancers could follow three or four rhythms simultaneously. The best dancers could add more.
Music of that character, and the dancing to it, required a particular approach to time. One musicologist called it a “metronome sense,” the listener’s ability to hear the regular pulse of a metrical pattern, to feel it bodily, whether or not it’s expressed aurally. In relation to tap, what’s most intriguing is that, in addition to handling polyrhythms, a person with a strong metronome sense can divide or multiply the pulse, so that rhythmic accents that might seem off or random are sensed instead as being on the beat—the beat if the song were played at two or three times the tempo. Call it fractal rhythm, an apprehension of patterns across scales of magnification. It allows a seeming suspension of the beat that is, at a deeper level, no suspension at all. It sounds like essential equipment for a tap dancer, a secret to keeping time.
If the Europeans, in their appreciation of the Africans’ exact timing, picked up on this, they likely missed much else. Several early European visitors noticed that the songs that accompanied dancing worked to “praise or blame” certain people, inducing laughter. The failure of these Europeans to mention the satirical dancing described by twentieth-century researchers might be explained by the probability that the earlier visitors, unfamiliar with norms or exaggerations, would have had trouble identifying the joke—particularly since they tended to find serious African dancing laughable. Among their descendants, those who could recognize themselves as the object of danced satire remained a minority. (And when they did recognize themselves, they tended to respond as the colonial government of Zambia did, by banning the dances.)
Also hiding in the silences of the record could be more of what a Dutch man of science witnessed in 1673: the propensity of dancers to “stamp on the ground vigorously with their feet … with a fixed expression on their faces.” Robert Farris Thompson found something similar among twentieth-century Yoruban dancers, who performed the wildest movements while balancing upon their heads terra-cotta sculptures and containers of fire. Balance was the idea; a controlled dance style expressed self-mastery. “To do difficult tasks with an air of ease and a silent disdain,” as was admired among the Gola, sounds universal, yet “the aesthetic of the cool” that Thompson identified in multiple Central and West African languages was “a special kind of cool,” a spiritual principle, a metaphor for right living.
This is the kind of meaning that early European observers, who generally found sub-Saharan dance immoral from a Christian perpective, were least likely to intuit. Arranging serial solos within a circle of dancers is, like call-and-response, a way of negotiating the relationship between individual and group, between innovation and tradition. The set parts provide a foundation against which the swerves of the soloist acquire significance. It’s safe to assume that for sub-Saharan Africans in the time of the slave trade, dance functioned as a mnenomic. Just as danced imitation could be a form of mockery, it could also be emulation of the most radical kind, the embodiment of ancestors or gods. In Yoruban tradition, the appearance of a god in a dancer is recognized as much by a signature rhythm and motion as by costume and mask. Across the region, it was commonly believed that ancestors lived on in the bodies of dancers, who entered a state of possession by disrupting a rhythm. (“Breaking the beat or breaking the pattern,” as Thompson explains it, “is something one does to break on into the world of the ancestors.”) It was believed that executing the ancestors’ steps brought them back to life, a principle that in some measure carried over into tap. “When you’re dancing,” said Buster Brown, “I’m dancing with you.”
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The ships that transported Africans to the New World starting in the 1500s were densely packed. Diagrams of the hulls resemble the inside of a pomegranate. The cargo was chattel, yet those crammed-in bodies carried culture. The same immateriality of dance that frustrates the search for hard historical evidence helped African dance survive the Middle Passage. Among historians, a debate long raged between those who argued that the displacing forces of slavery had destroyed a usable African past in America, and those who insisted upon continuities. Until the 1960s, many blacks had no interest in being associated with an African culture assumed by majority opinion to be inferior; they and some well-meaning whites feared that admitting to African retentions would be giving ammunition to racists or be part of an argument that slavery wasn’t so bad. With his 1942 book The Myth of the Negro Past, Melville Herskovits gave the continuity school a leg up, cataloguing hundreds of American practices with African analogues; he believed that dance had carried over the most. Other historians indentified more retentions, but more important was a “grammar of culture,” the theory that it was an African way of doing things that affected how transplanted slaves adapted to the cultures of their Euro-American masters and neighbors and forged new cultures. The African heritage was less what the slaves danced and sang than how. Or, as Trummy Young and Sy Oliver, African-American musicians of the 1940s, would put it, “’Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”
BRITAIN, IRELAND, OR THE MOVING THING
Africans weren’t the only percussive dancers who came to America. They weren’t even the only ones who came as slaves. One might expect the history of dance in Britain and Ireland to be more fully documented than that of Africa, yet while the court dances and theatrical dances that emerged there left a wealth of records, the probable British ancestors of tap were not so highborn. For the most part, the folk traditions in question were deemed unworthy of mention by the literate, who either weren’t aware of them or took them for granted. Often, the only way folk dance left a trace was by being adopted and altered by the upper classes—refined, polished, and tamed by “dancing masters,” professionals who codified rules to teach and publish in treatises. This continual circulation of dance practices among the social classes, a process of imitation that was often parodic, further confuses any search for origins or authenticity, as does the constant traffic between folk customs and theatrical representations, particularly considering that when the dances changed, the nomenclature often didn’t. In the oral tradition itself, the words used to label movements varied regionally: the same name might refer to different steps, or the same step might go by different names.
Take the word jig. The etymologist who traced it back to the ancient Sanskrit jagat, or “the moving thing,” was probably overshooting, but he was onto something, because in the Europe of the late Middle Ages, the various cognates (gigue, giga, Geige, jigge, jegg, etc.) came to be applied to the fiddle and to almost any lively dance or dance tune—to anything that moved. In Elizabethan English, iygges, gygges, and jigs labeled various kinds of dance. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare characterized the “Scotch Jigge” as “hot and hasty” in a metaphor for wooing. (However, the dance that William Kempe, the great clown of Shakespeare’s day, did with bells on his ankles, was a morris dance. When Kempe said he spent his life in “mad jigges,” he meant bawdy song-and-dance afterpieces.) By the seventeenth century, jig had emerged as one of the most popular, if generic, terms for the dance and music of informal social occasions. Consider the good time Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary of 1665, watching his wife’s maid dance a jig, “which she does the best I ever did see, having the most natural way of it and keeps time the most perfectly.” Rhythmic accuracy and naturalness—meaning ease, lack of inhibition—were virtues that a university-educated, upwardly mobile son of a tailor might recognize, with some wistfulness, in his servant.
In the eighteenth century, the jig was danced alongside—and frequently conflated with—a dance called the hornpipe. The first uses, likely named after the instrument, include a Baroque court dance with a rhythm adopted by Purcell and Handel as characteristically English. But a different hornpipe popped up on London playbills in the 1700s. This denoted a solo step dance, a percussive style, usually performed in the character of a rustic. The dancer Nancy Dawson found fame in the class satire of The Beggar’s Opera, hornpiping to the tune that would become known as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” (Earlier, it was called “Piss on the Grass.”) Increasingly, the stage hornpipe grew associated with the character of a sailor, incorporating pantomime of sailorly activities. Actual sailors may have also done the hornpipe, for exercise and to stave off boredom. In any case, something called the hornpipe became basic equipment for performers in British fairgrounds and saloons, a dance that lower-class audiences recognized as an elaborated version of their own pastimes.
Scattered reminiscences of the early nineteenth century portray “stepping” as a standard feature of feasts and wakes and Saturday nights at the alehouse. These dances were percussive, too: even without a fiddler playing along, listeners could recognize the tune in the steps. Yet the dances were also meant to be seen. Dancers elevated their footwork closer to eye level by dancing atop tables; ladies raised their skirts. The upper-class attitude toward such stepping comes through in the remarks of a well-heeled witness to a Grasmere harvest dance in 1827: “The country lads tripped it merrily and heavily. They called the amusement dancing, but I call it thumping; for he who could make the greatest noise seemed to be esteemed the greatest dancer.”
The county of Lancashire, associated with hornpipes since the seventeenth century, became associated in the nineteenth century with a dance called the Lancashire clog or clog hornpipe—the old hornpipe, perhaps, in different shoes. Clog as a term for wooden shoes was more than a century old. Farmers wore clogs, and during the Industrial Revolution, mill workers adopted the footwear as cheap protection against damp workplaces and cold stone floors. According to oral history, the workers, inspired by the beat of machinery, rattled their feet to keep warm and were pleased by the sound. During breaks, they held competitions on the cobblestones, folding in jigs and morris dances. Factory lads took the dance into alehouses, huddling on the flagstones by the hearth. (Their “quick, well-timed clatter” caught the ear of Edwin Waugh, who in his 1855 Sketches of Lancashire Life writes about following the curious noise into a tavern.) Clogs were originally loose-fitting, necessitating a flat-footed style lest the shoes fall off. Sole guards made of iron only encouraged further abuse. Metal against stone strikes sparks.
Clogs were associated with labor. Miners wore clogs, as did canal boat workers, who could practice their dancing on the job. Establishments wishing to exclude the “unwashed” put up notices that “Persons in Clogs” would not be admitted. Clog dancing was something most everyone could do, yet some people were experts. “Twopenny hops” of the 1850s might feature a paid exhibition by a “first rate professor.” Street cloggers worked inside and outside of public houses, collecting coins, but competitions were also formalized with judges, rules, prize belts, and wagers. Clogging was an athletic event, taught aside wrestling and boxing. (One of the earliest mentions of “clog-hornpipe” is as a skill ascribed to the Lancashire pugilist Jack Carter in Pierce Egan’s Boxiana of 1824.) In the second half of the century, the dance of the pub moved into the music hall. Stage dancers adopted the tighter-fitting clogs of dandyish young men, shoes snug enough for a high style, up on the toes. Compared with the more down-to-earth and presumably older “heel and toe” tradition, the new style was urban and social-climbing. Clogging of all kinds was referred to as “noisy shoe” and “shoe music,” the difference residing not just in the skill of the dancer but in the ear of the beholder.
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Considering that a large portion of the workers in those Lancashire mills were Irish, refugees from the famines of the 1840s and ’50s, it’s possible that much in Lancashire clogging could have been Irish in origin, or Irish-inflected. But Irish step dancing, at least from the late eighteenth century on, was generally called jigging. Prior references to jigs in Ireland are missing, but references to any dance in early Gaelic texts are few and unspecific: circle dances, sword dances. The accounts of traveling Englishmen, as shaped as European descriptions of Africa by the prejudices of a conquering power, repeatedly stress the Irish fondness for dance, often contrasting Irish vivacity with staid Englishness. The Irish stressed this about themselves. “An Irishman may be said to love fighting well, whiskey better, and dancing best of all,” wrote the Irish antiquarian Thomas Croker in 1829. William Carleton, an Irish writer invested in defining Irish national character, charged (in 1840 but referring back to “racy old times” before the already compromised present) that “of all the amusements peculiar to our population, dancing is by far the most important … it may be considered as a very just indication of the spirit and character of the people.” Furthermore, he boasted, “no people dance as well as the Irish,” citing as explanation and proof the well-known Irish susceptibility to music.
Croker and Carleton were principally referring to dance figures and steps likely imported from England, Scotland, and Europe in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. The population learned these from itinerant dancing masters, upwardly mobile Irishmen who larded their high-flown speech with French and took pride in their shabby-genteel attire of tall hats, fine stockings, ornamental canes, and light pumps. Dancing masters taught deportment along with various kinds of dances. In the earliest descriptions of any specificity (from the mid-1800s, alas), jigs were danced by couples and distinguished by a 6/8 time signature and steps whose names—drumming, battering—suggested noise. The dancing masters demonstrated steps of common currency alongside those of their own invention, which might then enter the general fund under their name. Exhibitions of mastery came in solo step dances, interchangeably labeled hornpipes and jigs, full of hops and rapid crossings of the feet suggested by the adjective twinkling and the expression “cover the buckle.” These solos were often beaten out atop a door pulled off its hinges, a sounding board in a land of sod or clay floors. The door was also a stage. Confronted with this spatial limitation, dancers embraced it as a preference. According to twentieth-century folklorists, those dancers who stayed most in place shot up highest in esteem. (The ability to execute every step starting with either foot was also prized.) If someone said you could “dance on a plate,” you were dancing well. Dancing “on a sixpence” was better. There were stories of competitions in which the door started on the floor and was raised in successive rounds like a high bar—up onto the table, up onto barrels on top of the table. In one story, the contest ends with the door on top of the chimney.
In Ireland, the idea of dance as a competition, often with a cake as a prize, goes back at least to the seventeenth century. For rivalrous dancing masters, challenge matches served as advertising and a way to vie for fame, pupils, and territory. Many challenge stories have the sound of endurance contests, the winner being the man who lasts longest. Or the victor is he who spools out the most steps, displaying the most knowledge or invention. Where there’s a suggestion of improvisation, it’s treated as exceptional. Routines were set, and some sequences, mated to a matching tune, are still performed today, the oldest supposedly dating from around 1750, preserved through an unbroken line of teachers and students. The aesthetic became highly controlled. It wasn’t just that the dance stayed in place; the body was disciplined, an ideal manifest in tales of dancers performing with a pan of water on their heads and not spilling a drop. It was dancing masters who fixed the arms to the dancers’ sides, banning as vulgar the rhythmic rise and fall of upper limbs and the snapping of fingers mentioned in early descriptions. Some teachers, it is said, weighed down their pupils’ hands with stones. That’s one solution to the problem of what to do with the arms while the feet are making a racket. It made for a severe, unchanging front, all the motion from the hips down, a chest-forward martial rigor appealing to Irish pride and lacking in any show of sensuality to which the Church might object.
It appears that the influence of the dancing masters was greatest in the south, where the dominant style placed the weight over the ball of the foot, with the heels not touching the ground except when heel drops were explicitly part of the step. The north was characterized by a rocking between heel and toe, while in the west, the approach was flat-footed and low-slung, with the arms and torso unrestrained. While closely tied to music, the western style was more free-form; improvisation was encouraged and individual style linked to personality. It is sometimes presumed that the western style of dancing is the oldest. (Such is the assumption behind the name given to it by twentieth-century revivalists: sean-nós, Gaelic for “old-style.”) But it was the southern style, the dancing masters’ style, that Irish cultural nationalists of the early twentieth century codified and enforced: the rules, rigidity, and uniforms that came to dominate the teaching of Irish dance, both in Ireland and in America. It’s worth remembering, though, that many of the Irish who came to America before that time might have danced quite differently.
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In America’s early colonial period, one of the functions of the British colonies was to serve as a dumping ground for what authorities considered “the dangerous classes”: vagabonds, debtors, criminals, rebels. The Irish were well represented in each category. In the 1620s, the British began deporting Irish prisoners of war, tens of thousands of them, to Barbados, Jamaica, and Montserrat, lesser numbers to Virginia. The distinction between indentured servitude and slavery was not as fixed as it would become, and race relations were more fluid. Servants and slaves, white and black, often worked together, played together. More rarely, they rebelled or ran away together. Antimiscegenation laws passed as early as 1661, and their violation, indicate racial mixing in Virginia and Maryland. Cultural mixing is harder to trace but impossible to discount.
In the early 1700s, great numbers of Scots-Irish—Presbyterian Scots whose families had been settled as colonists in northern Ireland—migrated across the Atlantic, putting down roots in New England and Pennsylvania before spreading along the frontier regions of the Appalachian Mountains, where they would long constitute the majority of settlers and the dominant cultural force. Smaller numbers of Catholic Irish also immigrated, largely as indentured servants, but the largest tide of Catholic Irish immigration started flowing around 1814, when a swell in population combined with an economic depression and crop failures, and it surged with the famine and forced evictions of the 1840s and early 1850s. This wave of people, which mostly came from rural southern and western Ireland, concentrated in the eastern cities of the United States, but also in the South, establishing an Irish America that was urban and Catholic. The propensity for dancing remained a just indication of its spirit and character.
Many of these Catholic Irish occupied a position in American society nearly as low as that of blacks. In one sense, they were lower: black slaves were worth money. In New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, the Irish would occupy the same crowded slums as blacks. That was also the case in Mobile and Savannah and New Orleans. Ships returning to New Orleans from exporting cotton to Liverpool filled their hulls with famine-fleeing Irish, who would often work alongside blacks in the same servile or dangerous jobs. Some of the same adjectives were used to denigrate both groups: savage, simian, low-browed, bestial. Closeness gave rise to competition, hatred, and bloodshed, but also to friendship, love, and shared recreation among people to whom dance and music were vital. The jigging of Tom, that black slave in Texas, might have been Irish after all.
THE AMERICAN CUT-OUT JIG
If tap is a mix, where and when might the mixing have begun? Perhaps on the very ships that transported slaves to the New World. In 1694, a commander of a British slave ship noted a curious practice in his diary: “We often at sea in the evenings would let the slaves come up into the sun to air themselves, and make them jump and dance for an hour or two to our bag-pipes, harp, and fiddle, by which exercise to preserve them in health.” For as long as the slave trade continued, and even after it was outlawed, witnesses attested to such onboard dancing. Most accounts echo the suggestion that the exercise was compulsory, commonly enforced by the lash. A brief escape from the airless hold must have brought relief, yet claims that the slaves took pleasure in these dances are tainted by their use in apologies for the slave trade, as part of the argument that such dancing was evidence of good treatment and slave contentment. Other accounts, such as testimony before Parliament by abolitionists, characterize the dancing as joyless, in key with the slaves’ songs of lamentation. This tension surrounding the pleasure expressed in slave dancing—what it might have meant to the slaves versus what it was perceived to mean by those who enslaved them—would prove long-lasting.
A slave might beat on a drum or kettle while others clapped their hands and rattled their chains. More rarely, a stringed African instrument would be on hand, an ancestor to the banjo, and the British commander’s account isn’t the only one to speak of bagpipes, fiddles, and harps. The few mentions of crew members joining in the dancing sound more like rape than like cultural exchange, but the possibility remains that there on those cursed vessels, on those wooden decks, English and Irish ways of dancing met African ones. Considering the tradition connecting sailors and the hornpipe, and considering how many Irish were pressed into naval service, hornpipes and jigs might have come up against African rhythms. In any event, the ships transporting African slaves to British colonies guaranteed such collisions.
Outcomes varied with the configurations of slave-based societies. Compared with the colonies of the Caribbean, the colonies that would become the United States imported far fewer slaves, and these were generally scattered, especially early on, among a larger white population in ratios that encouraged cross-racial interaction. Where the deadly work of sugar production in the Caribbean and Brazil necessitated a continual resupplying of labor from Africa, in groupings large enough to sustain distinct tribal identities, up north differences in climate, crops, and policy produced a slave birthrate that was eventually self-sustaining. The replacement of the international slave trade with a domestic one, as the eighteenth century met the nineteenth and slavery expanded westward in the newly established United States, reinforced local developments, sowing American hybrids across the land like cottonseed. As a result, the cultural expressions of West and Central Africa weren’t preserved in forms as obvious as they were farther south. Just as the descendants of slaves brought to Cuba are much more likely to know the tribe of their ancestors than the descendants of slaves brought to Virginia or New York are to know theirs, so it is much easier to identify what is Yoruban in Afro-Cuban dancing than what is Kongo or Wolof in any African-American variety.
Until the American Revolution, Virginia and South Carolina were part of the same British system as Jamaica and Barbados—as until the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans and a huge swath of land west of the Mississippi were connected to the French- and Spanish-controlled islands. Since slaves were often acclimated in the West Indies before being shipped north, Caribbean slave culture influenced American slave culture. In Caribbean accounts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much more plentiful and detailed than contemporaneous northern ones, slaves defy fatigue and distance to circle up and dance together in perfect time to drums, and Caribbean blacks, enslaved and free, imitate Europeans in dance and dress. The Europeans generally considered the imitation amusing, though some of what the Europeans considered “affectation” might have easily been satire. Europeans also laughed at the seriousness of the slaves’ African dancing, the cool combination of “strange indecent attitudes” and “solemnity of countenance.” That laughter was an expression of perceived incongruity, and it was likely echoed in reverse as Caribbean-born whites adopted African-based dances, dances that made it to Europe. Europeans documented the influence in warnings against contagion; then, as African elements were absorbed, reminders of African origins dwindled. But tap did not originate in the Caribbean or in Europe. It required different conditions to grow.
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One Sunday in 1739, in Stono, South Carolina, a region of rice plantations where the black population outnumbered the white one, a group of slaves burst into a warehouse, beheaded two whites, gathered rifles and ammunition, and marched south toward freedom in Spanish Florida. Along the way, they killed whites and burned houses, beat drums and gathered recruits. According to more than one account, they stopped in a field to dance. Whatever the reason for this delay—a premature celebration, an invocation of divine assistance—it helped the white militia catch up. Most of the rebels were killed, and selected heads were mounted on mileposts. Soon, the colonial government issued a new, much more restrictive slave code. Among many other measures, it sought to limit the meetings of Negroes on Saturday nights, Sundays, and holidays, and to ban them from “using or keeping drums, horns or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.” Drums were loud, dangerous. Whites understood them to have a military purpose, because that’s mainly how whites used drums themselves, in militias. So the slaveholders attempted to keep drums from the slaves. British colonies in the Caribbean had passed similar laws, but the mainland colonies were more successful in enforcement. In the territories that became the United States, records of African drumming, so deeply connected with African dance, are much more rare.
Yet no matter how effective, suppression of drums was not the same as suppression of drum rhythms. Those rhythms could be transferred to other instruments, including the body, including the feet. One might even speculate that the suppression of the drum encouraged the development of new outlets—that it created a need for tap that didn’t arise elsewhere in the African diaspora.
Although Africans were imported into Virginia as early as 1619, evidence of African dancing in the American colonies before the mid-eighteenth century comes mainly in the form of churchmen objecting, ineffectually, to how the Negroes were allowed to profane the Lord’s Day with their idolatrous practices. This dearth of documentation leaves nearly blank a long period when the line between African slaves and white indentured servants (many of them Irish) was more permeable, a time when much might have been exchanged. When white observers began recounting black dancing in more detail, they recognized rhythmic precision—the exact time and cadence with which slaves in Virginia in 1784 matched their “astonishing agility” to the music of a banjo and a drum. Yet when an English traveler characterized the dancing to a banjo that he witnessed at a “Negro Ball” in Maryland one Sunday in 1774 as so “irregular and grotesque” that he was “not able to describe it,” both the demurral and the adjectives suggested an encounter with a foreign aesthetic. His response, and language, would prove typical, as would his observation that the dancing slaves were “exceedingly happy”—“as if they had forgot or were not sensible of their miserable conditions.”
Perhaps some of the aesthetic is captured in a watercolor known as The Old Plantation, probably made in South Carolina in the late 1700s. A slave man wields a stick as he balances on the balls of his feet, with crooked knees and bent body; two women stretch handkerchiefs in his direction; one man plays a gourd banjo; another plays a drum. The slaves’ attire, apart from the scarves on their heads, is in the style of their masters. Separate scholars, in ascribing distinct tribal origins to the headscarves, the handkerchiefs, the banjo, the drum, or the stick, collectively imply a potluck. Though it is to some degree possible to calculate the shifting ratios between points of origin for slaves in South Carolina at that time, arguments for the dominance of any one African region or tribe tend to break down—the general pattern in North America. At the moment of The Old Plantation or earlier, Africans from different cultures were discovering and negotiating a common culture. They were recognizing themselves as African, as opposed to Wolof or Kongo. Considering the importance of dance in those cultures, especially its function in cultural preservation, learning to dance together was a serious business. So was teaching dance to children who would never know Africa directly, children for whom Africa would be imagined and inherited, children who were becoming American.
Writing in his diary about festivities on a South Carolina plantation in 1805, a New Englander observed the African-born slaves dancing apart, “distorting their frames into the most unnatural figures.” What the locally born Negroes were doing was more familiar to him. They were dancing to fiddles. At the same time that the slaves were working out commonalities among their ancestral cultures, they were also adopting aspects of Anglo-American culture, the English language above all. Fiddles had African analogues. The instruments were familiar to the slaves, too, and the most prevalent traces of the musical mixing are the abundant advertisements in colonial newspapers offering rewards for the return of runaway slave fiddlers. Slave fiddlers commonly played for the dancing of both blacks and whites. Their masters often hired them out for that purpose, and many notices described fugitive fiddlers as “well known.”
If black slaves had a “mania” for dancing, which was often observed to be their favorite amusement, so did their white masters. European visitors remarked on the habit regularly, whether in pious disapproval or surprised admiration. The same newspapers that ran notices about runaway slave fiddlers also advertised the services of dancing masters. On many occasions, those two kinds of ads crossed in notices about runaway slave fiddlers who played for dancing masters. (More crossing: some of the dancing masters themselves were servants, “impudent” Irishmen with runaway notices of their own.) It seems safe to assume that these fiddlers absorbed dance instruction—minuets but also jigs—and even that they passed on such instruction to other slaves. “A good dancer and proud of it” was how an owner chose to characterize the escaped slave Sambo in a 1775 edition of the Georgia Gazette, the praise suggesting that slaves were mastering dance their masters could recognize and appraise as good. “He values himself for his fine Dancing,” the owner of Tom, an escaped slave in Virginia, wrote about him in 1774, and the threat that a slave who valued himself could pose to the social order might be inferred from Tom’s having run away.
Scattered stories in which members of the planting class—such as Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph—fiddle and dance with the slaves half the night point to boundary crossings more common than documents certify, meetings too furtive to mention, or too ordinary. The children of slaveholders grew up among slaves, and mutual habits formed early could endure into the separations of adulthood. Although there’s much evidence of poor whites drinking and gambling together with blacks in dramshops and tippling houses, dancing is rarely mentioned. Yet the mixing did happen, and one outcome might have been the practice that whites labeled the Virginia Jig. In accounts from the mid-to-late eighteenth century, it’s also called the “cut-out jig,” since one couple engaged in amorous chase until either the lady or the gentleman was “cut out” by another. These jigs, which European visitors found “bacchanalian,” often came at the end of an evening and might last until the fiddler quit. That fiddler was usually a slave, and at least one observer categorized the music as “some Negro tune.” (In a Glasgow songbook of 1782, the transcription of a song labeled “Negro Jig” is built on a structure of repetitive cells that suggest African influence.) There are later accounts of similar jigs in Ireland, but one English traveler in Virginia was informed that the practice was “originally borrowed” from the Negroes.
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Despite the oft-expressed anxiety of Puritan clergymen about the liberties to which dancing might lead, dancing masters found plenty of business in eighteenth-century New England. Quaker qualms didn’t exclude dance from the middle colonies, either. The elite of Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia attended dancing schools, where they learned minuets and country dances. White citizens did cut-out jigs in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. More advanced pupils studied hornpipes, which, as one student of the Boston dancing master William Turner recalled, were only for boys. That same student also remembered Turner’s fiddler, Black Harry. As in the South, eighteenth-century periodicals in the northern colonies carried plentiful notices about slave fiddlers for hire, slave fiddlers who had run away. Dancing masters relied on their services.
They weren’t the only ones. In 1760, a young John Adams recorded in his journal a visit to a dockside tavern where a “wild Rable of both sexes” was dancing “as if they would kick the floor thro.” Who was inspiring this vigor? “Negroes with a fiddle.” Among the white revelers was one Zab Hayward, whose fifteen-year reputation as the best dancer in the region was known to the future president. Adams allowed that no one could equal Hayward “in the nimbleness of heels” but judged that he had “no conception of the grace, the air nor the regularity of dancing,” a deficiency connected with his “low and ignoble” face. Was nimbleness the standard by which the taverngoers rated Hayward so high? Those who knew did not usually commit their thoughts to writing. Though contemptuous, the Harvard graduate’s description of how jigging Hayward caught the tavern girls in his arms betrays envy. The rabble was having more fun.
One distressed informant of The Boston Evening Post discovered a comparable tavern scene in 1740, except that the black violinist was playing for black dancers. This particular party was private, yet dancing, all night long or even a few days running, was a conspicuous feature of northern holidays for slaves and free blacks. Negro Election Day, for instance, was an annual festival during which blacks elected their own ruler, then celebrated with parades, feasting, and dance: more banjos, fiddles, and drums. “Most fatiguing” is as detailed as any source gets about the dancing; what captured attention was the flamboyance of the slaves’ attire, finery often borrowed with permission from the closets of their masters. This was seen, with a patronizing smile, as an imitation of white Election Day, though, again, there’s always the possibility that what whites understood as childish or pompous was actually parodic.
The case is similar with Pinkster, the main slave holiday in New York and New Jersey, a Dutch observance of Pentecost that by the late eighteenth century had largely been taken over by slaves. The evidence is shaky, but in Albany, a King Charles from Guinea was said to have presided, decked out in the ankle-length scarlet coat and tricornered hat of a British brigadier. Descriptions of the dance he led by thumping on an eel pot resemble descriptions of dancing in Martinique and Senegambia. It seems there was some Africa in Albany at the center of a Dutch carnival that had grown increasingly popular with “a certain class of whites” and a black population in a state that had, as of 1799, entered a gradual process of manumission.
By the time James Fenimore Cooper described a Pinkster celebration on a Manhattan parade ground in his 1845 historical novel Satanstoe, it was lore, a discontinued custom distinguished from the usual frolic by what Cooper called its African features: how the slaves danced not just to banjos but to drums. Cooper’s telling was fiction, set before the author’s birth. The researches of his contemporary Colonel Thomas De Voe are historically more trustworthy. Born in 1811, De Voe grew up as a butcher’s assistant and became an expert on the city’s markets. In his Market Book of 1862, he recounted how, at the turn of the nineteenth century, slaves from New Jersey and Long Island would gather on Pinkster at Catharine Market on the lower Manhattan side of the East River. They brought items to sell—roots, berries, fish—and they were always ready, De Voe wrote, “by ‘negro sayings and doings’ to make a few shillings more.” This they did by engaging “in a jig or break-down, as that was one of their pastimes at home on the barn-floor, or in a frolic.” Do what you love and get paid for it, as Buster Brown would say.
Each group of dancers brought its own dancing surface, a board called a “shingle,” about six feet long, “with its particular spring in it.” While one of the dancers jigged up a storm, two others would stand on opposite sides of the board, holding it down while beating time by dropping their heels and slapping their legs. Spectators rewarded the dancers with money, collected in a hat, and “if money was not to be had,” the slaves “would dance for a bunch of eels or fish.” (Eels were cheap and plentiful then, a staple of the poor.) Rivalry for reputation and spoils produced, as De Voe phrased it with patronizing quotation marks, “some excellent ‘dancers.’”
This was the account of a man writing in the 1860s about dancing he may or may not have witnessed. Though elements seem African, he did not describe them as such. To him, the dance was Negro, and it was a jig, a Negro jig about making rhythms with the feet against a wooden platform, about making money in the marketplace of Manhattan. Everything about it sounds like tap.
FREEDOM DANCING IN SLAVEHOLDING AMERICA
In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free black farmer from New York lured south with the offer of a job as fiddler in a circus, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. A dozen years later, after he escaped, he published an account of his ordeal (the one adapted into the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave). In his book, Northup described how his master, soused and in the mood for sport, would call upon him to play the fiddle. The master would dance and would require his slaves to join him, slashing with his whip if anyone dared rest. (The master’s wife, disapproving, could not always suppress a laugh.) This scene was an exhibit of a master’s cruelty, but it was with pride that Northup wrote of slaves dancing in the starlight of a Christmas night: “If you wish to look upon the celerity, if not the ‘poetry of motion’—upon genuine happiness, rampant and unrestrained—go down to Louisiana.” On such occasions, Northup wrote, the slaves were “different beings from what they are in the field.”
Whether or not Northup’s account—written with the help of a white writer and with the expressed intention of converting whites to abolition—is entirely credible, those scenes capture the competing meanings of slave dancing. On one side was the coerced and degrading entertainment for slave owners, the stories told by former slaves about white folks coming to watch their dancing, coming to laugh, or about whites forcing them to dance, sometimes at gunpoint. And on the other was the happiness, genuine even in bondage, even if such a triumph of spirit could appear, to some, as a justification for slavery.
In an 1846 journal entry, the Harvard historian Francis Parkman described two slaves, chained together and dancing as another slave beat on a banjo: “They seem never to have known a care. Nothing is on their faces but careless, thoughtless enjoyment. Is it not safe to conclude them to be an inferior race?” A Virginia doctor, in an 1838 article, reported his wonder at slaves swigging persimmon beer and dancing to a banjo, merrily, percussively, ludicrously. The doctor recommended the scene as a rebuke to Northern abolitionists, as verification that the slaves were “the happiest of the human race,” and also as proof for his Southern readers “that God has placed us high in the scale of human beings.” These were the lines of thought, so pervasive as to be unremarkable, that led some abolitionists to insist that blacks did not dance and that all reports of slave dancing were proslavery propaganda.
The opportunities for slaves to dance varied from region to region and master to master. Although slave owners feared that slaves in large gatherings might plot rebellion, they also regarded recreation as a reward for good behavior and a safety valve of the kind Frederick Douglass meant when he characterized holidays as among “the most effective means in the hands of slaveholders of keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” Holidays at Christmas, Easter, or the Fourth of July were occasions of license, often of liquor, and they always included dancing. Corn shuckings, quiltings, logrollings, and rice threshings all culminated in a feast and a dance, which served as a goal to inspire effort. Many masters allowed weekly dances or would allow slaves to attend dances on other plantations. “On Saturday nights,” recalled the former slave James Campbell, “we’d dance long as de can’les lasted.”
In their owners’ eyes, the slaves were labor, merchandise, collateral, capital that reproduced itself. That they might also be family was among slavery’s most awful complications. Through dancing, the slaves could reclaim their bodies for themselves. That was worth the effort of walking great distances after a long day’s labor, worth the risk of a whipping or worse for attending a dance without a pass. Some slaves would recall dance explicitly as a form of resistance, glorying in remembrance of when they danced without permission. “Might whip us de nex’ day,” said Charles Grandy of Virginia, “but we done had our dance. Stay as late as we want—don’t care ef we is got to be in de field at sunrise. When de dance break up we go out, slam de do’ ef we wants, an’ shout back at de man what had de party.”
The slammed door resounds, flaunting the defiance involved whenever the slaves redirected energy to their own ends. Some meetings were secret, and thus required a short-term escape, as implied by the slave term for them, “steal away.” But even sanctioned dances were interludes of freedom. In a clean shirt, a spare dress, adorned with a treasured ribbon, these people were different beings from what they were in the field, individuals who valued themselves for their fine dancing and could be so valued by others. Saturday evenings and holidays were the slaves’ own time, and dancing was how they chose to spend it. Setting a high value on the community-strengthening powers of rhythmic synchronization came with the slaves’ African heritage; associating dance with freedom became part of their American one.
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Take it as heroic metaphor or as rules of the game, the dances of the slaves were dances of endurance. Solomon Northup, playing his fiddle in Louisiana, saw a man with a “placid bosom” and “legs flying like drumsticks” get cut out by a man shuffling and twisting his body into every conceivable shape as a woman outlasted them both, thereby sustaining her reputation as “the fastest gal.” This was couple dancing but also individual competition. Slaves around the counterposed couple kept up the rhythm with foot tapping and body clapping. The Virginia doctor’s similar account of jigging adds the slaves’ comments, their aesthetic encouragement and criticism: “Molly move like the handsaw, see how she shake herself.” “Cut him out, Gabe.” Both scenes sound syncretic.
So does the competitive dancing that followed corn shuckings, events that blended European and African harvest customs. The slaves, divided in teams, worked to a beat in call-and-response with a singer who improvised rhymed commentary, commonly at the master’s expense. For the dancing that followed, the slaves were said to prefer a plank floor or even the bottom of a wagon bed, concerned as they were with audible rhythms. (This observation, credible enough, comes from the 1914 memoir of a slaveholder’s son, a man who missed the “faithful, patient, submissive, and happy creatures” of antebellum days.) Sharing a plank, two dancers would face off, spurred by the clapping and encouragement of those ringed around them into ever more rapid and violent motion until one of the dancers gave up.
Some former slaves would recall this use of a platform for public events, a sounding board that was also a stage. Yet Isaac Williams (in his as-told-to autobiography) attested that the clay floor of his slave cabin was hard enough to transmit the perfect time of bare feet as his friends danced to the music of his homemade fiddle, Saturday night right through Sunday morning. “Setting the floor,” other slaves would call this practice, a couple squaring off and slapping their feet down on dirt. (The phrase also crops up in Scottish Gaelic songs for and about dancing.) Williams also remembered how he and his fellow slaves did the same dances—or at least dances with the same names—for their master’s guests and how the best dancer won twenty-five cents.
Touring the South in 1851, Frederick Olmsted met the son of a small-scale Mississippi planter who informed him about the dancing favored “among common kind o’ people.” More than cotillions and reels, the young man enjoyed dancing on a plank balanced across two barrels “so it’ll kind o’ spring.” Two people faced each other and danced as fast as they could while everyone else clapped and stomped and hollered phrases such as “Old Virginny never tire!” and “Heel and toe, Ketch a-fire!” The plank heightened the sport and turned up the volume. Between those barrels, it was like a door. But if dancing on a plank echoes Irish lore, it—and the competitive play and the clapping encouragement—equally resembles the dancing of African-American slaves.
The rowdy style of a country frolic was common ground. A handful of reports attest to whites dancing with slaves at communal events. A Rhode Island man who taught school in Georgia in the 1840s (and went to prison for aiding in the escape of a slave) wrote of dancing to fiddle music after a logrolling, whites and slaves together, inebriated and joking. But what astonished the Rhode Islander was the slaves’ ability, the usual list of rapidity, accurate time, physical power, humor. “The sound of a fiddle makes them crazy,” he wrote, speculating that in the case of insurrection, someone would merely have to strike up a tune and the slaves would drop their rebellion to jig. Dancing to the fiddle, he wrote, they were “at home.”
The slaves, as they become excited, use the most extravagant gestures—the music increases in speed—and the Whites soon find it impossible to sustain their parts, and they retire. This is just what the slaves wish, and they send up a general shout, which is returned by the Whites, acknowledging the victory. Then they all sing out, “Now show de white man what we can do!”
The ground might have been common, but not quite even.
ERECT AND DIGNIFIED
“Us slaves watched white folks’ parties,” remembered one former slave, “where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march … then we’d do it, too. But we used to mock ’em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it. I guess they thought we couldn’t dance any better.”
Those words were written down in 1960, when the black actor Leigh Whipper, eighty years old at the time, recalled what his “nurse” had spoken on an occasion in 1901, when she was more than seventy. The events she was recounting had taken place some sixty years before that, when she was a young “strut gal” enjoying privileges for being a good dancer, taken from one plantation to another for competitions upon which her master wagered. This statement, so far from direct, is almost the only documentation of slaves imitatively mocking their masters in dance, the quote itself supplying one reason why evidence might be scarce: white folks’ misinterpretations. Yet there’s plenty of evidence of slaves mocking their masters in song, transcribed words whose meanings, overt and coded, we can now read. And it makes sense that from an African perspective a minuet might have appeared comically rigid. It makes sense that slaves would have been eager to send up the pretensions and hypocrisies of the planter class.
Derision, however, can’t fully account for why people of African descent, to whom dance meant so much, borrowed from or adopted European dance. Certainly among black domestics and artisans, dance functioned as a mark of status. In his 1856 book Virginia, especially Richmond, in By-Gone Days, Samuel Mordecai fondly remembered the “colored aristocracy” of the early nineteenth century. Though Mordecai considered their “aping” of genteel behavior to be ridiculous, his account of the “erect and dignified” slave fiddler Sy Gilliat seems believable. Imagine the appeal of holding your body erect and dignified when, as Solomon Northup put it, “the attitude and the language of the slave,” the demeanor expected and enforced by whites, was one of downcast eyes and bowed heads, a bodily lexicon of servility. An upright carriage, by contrast, was a show of pride, a trait disturbing enough to slaveholders that it merited mention in runaway slave notices.
“Erect and dignified” describes the manner of the black wedding party in Christian Mayr’s 1838 painting Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia. Up north, the formal balls held by free blacks provided ripe matter for nasty cartoons and newspaper articles, often prompted by court proceedings treating the events as disturbances of the peace. The Pennsylvania Gazette rated one Philadelphia occasion of 1828 as “a joke of no ordinary magnitude.” The mockery concentrated on fancy attire and high modes of address, yet most of the information about the dancing of Northern blacks comes in this form, with reported fact nearly indistinguishable from jest. A few genuine-sounding black voices cut through, such as the woman in a court proceeding who asked simply, “If the big white folks dance, why should not people of color?” That’s a fair question, yet how did the people of color do the big white folks’ dances? The most suggestive clue is the judgment of a white observer that Frank Johnson, a renowned black Philadelphian composer and bandleader who played at black functions and white resorts, showed “a remarkable taste in distorting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song into a reel, jig, or country-dance.” The “distortion” sounds rhythmic, a remix bent toward the preferences of rhythm-oriented dancers.
Interviewed in 1883, Sylvia Dubois would recall the superior dancing of her youth in the first decades of the century, when she was a house slave in New Jersey; the superiority, in her telling, lay in the quick, nimble crossing of feet (“ninety-nine times in a minute”): a value that sounds Irish. In the mind of the former slave Hannah Crasson, the way her aunt could “tote herself” was part of what distinguished her as a “royal slave.” Crasson’s aunt “could dance all over the place wid a tumbler of water on her head, widout spilling it.” Many slaves would recall similar dances of balanced water. Water on the head was part of Set the Floor and other competitive pastimes. The idea could be an Irish dancing master’s, or a game that conforms to the African aesthetic of the cool: the bosom placid while the lower limbs fly like drumsticks, the dancing style of people accustomed to toting loads on their heads. Beyond the allure of status markers, the slaves (and free blacks, too) must have been attracted to aesthetic qualities of European dance—to, say, the “easy careless manner” stressed by the influential dancing master William Turner. As much as African-derived dancing could strike whites as alien or absurd, the aesthetic of the cool was not incompatible with a European-derived ideal of grace.
We might speculate that slaves took to dancing with water on their heads much as some of them, recalling, if only dimly, the water deities and cleansing rituals of Africa, took to baptism. Efforts to convert the slaves to Christianity found greatest purchase in early-nineteenth-century camp meetings, where modes of worship were musically and emotionally ecstastic, drawing slaves in with resemblances to African spirituality that the slaves’ participation reinforced. Yet among the most successful sects were Methodists and Baptists, who taught that dancing was sinful, causing many a pious slave to swear off it altogether. For people of African descent, this was an epochal conversion. It meant that the black church, already becoming a powerful, community-binding institution, set itself against dance, a proscription that persists in certain black churches to this day.
At least doctrinally. An 1819 catalogue of Methodist errors and excesses detected in the camp-meeting singing of blacks a rhythmic “sinking” of the legs, “producing an audible sound of the feet at every step, as manifest as the steps of actual Negro dancing in Virginia.” Visiting a Georgia plantation in 1845, Sir Charles Lyell noted that while the Methodist missionaries silenced violins, the slaves were permitted to move around in a ring, “as substitute for the dance.” Such dances became known as shouts. Northerners who journeyed south during the Civil War registered a shuffling dance of hand-clapping, foot-drumming, knee-bending, body-rocking motion that accelerated to a fever pitch. The shocked teacher who wrote home that the shout seemed “the remains of some old idol worship” and “like a regular frolic” was more right than she knew. In African-American culture, the line between feeling the spirit on Saturday night and feeling it on Sunday morning would ever remain thin—or rather, in tension, the body-denying doctrine contradicting a mode of delivery that forced the body to respond. And the expressive urge that kept the dance in church is among the urges that forged tap.
A SHARED LANGUAGE
Separately derived traditions could share much, and it was at points of commonality that they were most likely to blend. In dance, however, the most plentiful evidence is the most tenuous: a shared vocabulary of casually applied terms. Words that might reveal genealogies might just as well disguise them.
Ponder, for instance, “the pigeon wing,” a phrase that former slaves applied to their antebellum dancing. Fannie Berry glossed it as “flippin’ yo’ arms an’ legs roun’ an’ holdin’ yo’ neck stiff like a bird do,” a description that suggests animal mimicry. But according to other former slaves, these from Texas, it was all about cracking the heels together, in the air, as many times as you could before landing. That’s what the pigeon-winging young men, all white, do in one 1841 story of a Mississippi frontier wedding. (They’re expressing their impatience with a tardy Negro fiddler, “indispensable at every frolic.”) Everyone seems to agree on the appropriate verb: cut. Yet in the early-nineteenth-century New York ballrooms immortalized by Washington Irving, “cutting the pigeon wing” designated a difficult dancing-school step. This pigeon wing, an airborne beating together of extended legs, was then associated with French dancers and pirouettes; it may have derived from France and ballet’s ailes de pigeon (or brisé volé). But by the mid-nineteenth century in America, the phrase was more associated with slaves and rowdy frontiersmen.
The situation is similar for “double shuffle,” which the former slave Isaac Williams used to describe his own dancing, both the audible dances of the slave cabin and the funny dances that amused the master’s guests. Yet the double shuffle could also be a flourish that a white Bostonian, in 1827, inserted into a cotillion while following the calls of a Negro fiddler. The double shuffle is what a Negro banjoist in the 1833 Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee directs the white frontiersfolk to do, along with such rural steps as “weed korn” and “kiver taters.” Corn and potatoes also cropped up in the dance steps of New Jersey farmers, as recorded in the 1813 satirical poem The Lay of the Scottish Fiddle (attributed to James Kirke Paulding), and as an assumed terpsichorean skill of a Long Island Negro in an 1807 Washington Irving story. But in both cases, the term linked to the hoeing and digging is “double trouble” (which might be a corruption of “double treble”). Irving called it Dutch, but for his friend Paulding, it was “undoubtedly of African origin,” a shuffling that kept accurate time without lifting feet off the floor.
“Double shuffle” also shows up suggestively in Life in London, Pierce Egan’s scandalously popular British novel of 1821. The sports Tom and Jerry, sampling life high and low, visit All-Max, an East End tavern serving sailors, garbage collectors, prostitutes, Indians, and blacks, all swigging gin and jigging to a fiddle. The mood is “happiness—everybody free and easy, and freedom of expression allowed to the very echo,” a freedom that includes “footing the double shuffle against each other.” George Cruickshank’s illustration centers on Dusty Bob, a white though grimy coal whipper, footing it against African Sall. A “comic pas de deux” for those two partners made it into several stage versions, which were hits in London and New York. Though fiction, Egan’s scene offers a creditable glimpse of free and easy mixing among the lower classes; he was a connoisseur of urban slang, and for him, the double shuffle was a dance of a motley clientele, conceivably as much African Sall’s as Dusty Bob’s. In Britain and Ireland, the double shuffle, originally associated with hornpipes, would remain a basic step in jigs and clog dancing. In America, it would get combined, and confused, with the floor-scraping “shuffling” of blacks.
Jig was the word that Henry Ravenal chose, writing in 1876 of his 1820s youth, to label the dancing of the slaves on his family’s South Carolina plantation. “The jig,” he maintained, “was an African dance and a famous one in old times, before more refined notions began to prevail.” This was a cut-out jig, with a shuffling of partners. The woman moved with a “slow shuffling gait … edging along by some unseen exertion of the feet … sometimes courtesying [sic] down and remaining in that posture.” The man’s feet “moved about in the most grotesque manner stamping, slamming, and banging the floor, not unlike the patterning of hail on the housetop. The conflict between brogans and the sanded floor was terrific.” Aspects of the music point to African influence, as do the woman’s bent-kneed curtsy and those unseen exertions of the feet. Perhaps it’s significant that brogans, the word former slaves would choose to refer to the stiff footwear their masters provided them, derives from Gaelic. The word jig would make a similar jump, adding to its Old World affiliation with Irishness a New World usage as a name for blacks.
Some jigs were called juba. Patting juba or juber was a term for body percussion. Patting juba is what Solomon Northup said the slaves were doing in the Louisiana starlight; it’s what the slaves at the Georgia logrolling were up to when they outlasted the whites. When the revels of poor whites in Baltimore got them hauled before a court in 1839, and thus reported in the newspaper, the story of their drunken spree also involved “patting juba.” When a writer the following year related the amusingly rustic habits of Florida frontiersfolk, their dancing—to a “sable Paganini,” naturally—consisted of “double trouble” and “juba,” steps the writer categorized as “peculiarly cracker.” Fragments of juba songs that Virginia slaves were singing in 1838—“Juber dis, and Juber dat,” “get over double trouble”—would regularly resurface in accounts of Southern life over the next century. What happened to the words likely happened to the dance, less traceably.
As for the word juba, Bessie Jones, a black folksinger born in 1902, learned from her grandfather that juba meant “giblets,” leftovers from the kitchens of whites slopped into troughs for blacks. Count on folk etymology for a flavorful metaphor. Juba was also the name of the king of Numidia in the time of Caesar, and Americans named their slaves Juba as they named them Pompey and Scipio. The word means something different in Zulu, Swahili, and Ashanti. Scholars point to a Bantu word for beating time, a harvest ritual from the Giouba tribe, and dances in the Caribbean. Robert Farris Thompson traces juba to the Ki-kongo words zuba (dance) and nzuba (hitting or slapping). Nineteenth-century enthusiasts focused on rhythmic properties. A Virginian friend of Edgar Allan Poe wrote to him about the possibilities for verse in “capriciously irregular” departures from meter that nevertheless maintained the cadence. Sidney Lanier, in his 1880 The Science of English Verse, would use patting Juba to explain syncopation. (His notated example—though he doesn’t identify it as such—is a cross-rhythmic pattern found across Africa and known in Afro-Cuban music as clave.)
One final phrase was “buck dancing.” In the slave trade, buck was an animal-breeding term applied to black males in advertisements. Before that, buck referred to a white dandy. Certain theories trace the word to the West Indian term po’bockorau—buckaroo, buccaneer, rowdy jigging sailor—or to the Gaelic term for playboy, boc. Others posit Native American origins, a black and white imitation of Native American dances imitating buck deer. (The Ute had their own stomping Buck Dance. Native American men were also called bucks.) Etymology by homophone can get you almost anywhere. In the 1890s, when buck first came into print as a dance term, the black poet James Edwin Campbell glossed the Mobile Buck as the dance of Negro roustabouts on the Ohio and the Mississippi, who bucked against each other.
THE BREAKDOWN
One platform that slaves had to themselves was the auction block. After their teeth were inspected and their backs scrutinized for whip scars, slaves might be made to dance—to demonstrate that their bodies were in good working order and to provide entertainment for those buying and selling them. In a 1931 book of interviews with former slaves, a man identified solely as Jolly Old Uncle Buck remembered one such incident vividly. As Buck sat waiting with other children to be sold and possibly separated from their families, he watched a slave named Fred stand on the auction block as another slave started to play the banjo:
Fred ’gin ter shuffle roun’ on his big feet, an’ fine’ly he can’t stand it no longer. He gotta dance. He slap his big feet on de banjo table, an’ we all pat wid de banjo music. White man laugh an’ clap dey han’s. Make him dance some mo’. Wouldn’t let de auctioneer start till Fred dance de buck-an’-wing. Yo-ho! It sho’ly was funny! De white man what bought Fred say he done paid hundert dollars mo’ fo’ dat nigger cause he could dance like dat!
Everybody’s laughing here, a laughter that courses through similar stories. But is the joke on Fred? Is he dancing because he can’t resist the banjo or because they make him? Because he’s dancing, his value has risen. Fred doesn’t get the money or his freedom, but he gets some satisfaction, some glory, set apart up on the platform. Good dancers could win privileges. A slave who danced well might get himself out of the fields for a while. Dancing feet attracted coin. One former house slave reported being taken as a child by his master to dance “the jig and buck” for pennies in Annapolis stores; afterward, his master bought the talented slave a new pair of shoes.
Jolly Old Uncle Buck told his story about Fred to a white journalist in the segregated South. It’s suspect yet not easily dismissed. When a black person being interviewed by a white person because he or she was once a slave recalls dancing for guests (and for food and drink) at the Big House and says, “You know a nigger is jest a born show-offer,” how should that statement be taken? (Especially when the person goes on to say, “Niggers was all right on the plantations”?) These stories might tell us what they seem to on the surface, something about extroversion in African-American culture, or they might themselves be more examples of the performance that blacks in America found necessary for survival. Blacks told these stories and these stories became a staple of white Southern fiction and memoir. In Julia Morgan’s memoir of the war, How It Was, she recounts how her faithful servant Joe cleverly avoided working for the Confederate army by pretending to be crippled. The ruse failed when this “celebrated jig dancer” who “cut the pigeon wing to perfection” saw a platform in the street and couldn’t resist.
Which brings us back to Tom—that jiggin’est slave in Texas, up on a platform, making his feet sound like a snare drum, faster and faster, all the movement from the hips down, beating the other fellow because he could twirl without spilling water from the glass on his head. Where did all that come from? Though we can hear the acceleration, we can’t quite hear the rhythm. Neither do we know who set the rules. Likely it was a negotiation, as with much in master-slave relations. But sorting out the ethnic origins of the behavior described in that anecdote, deciding the winner of the origin contest—it can’t be done. Why not just call it American?
That’s what the newspaper editor Ed James did in the 1871 dance manual Jig, Clog, and Breakdown Dancing Made Easy. Breakdown was one more term for slave dancing. The word suggests the breaking of pattern that induces possession in African dances; it seems kin to the breaks and breakaways and break-it-downs of later African-American dance and music. Yet in the printed record, the earliest “Virginia ‘break-down’” I can find is in the diary of a governor of Mississippi, where he records the phrase as piquant slang encountered during a youthful keelboat journey on the Ohio River in 1819; here, it means a frolic attended by rough river men. The next usages, appearing in the 1830s, also refer to the dancing of whites—the dancing of whites imitating blacks. Here, a breakdown is a Negro jig, the kind of jig that Ed James, forty years later, considered “a peculiarly American institution.” James located its origin in another peculiar American institution, “among the slaves of the southern plantations”: “No white man taught the original darkies the arts of Jig or Clog Dancing, and it is equally as indisputable that they did not pick either one of them up from reading books on the subject. It was original with them and has been copied by those who, in the early days of minstrelsy, made that a feature of their business, and by them brought down to a complete science.”
The question of origins can’t be so easily fixed. Distinguishing original from copy would be hard enough, but what makes it nearly impossible is precisely this business of minstrelsy, a theatrical form in which whites imitated blacks. That the imitators altered the dances can be presumed, but with what mix of mimicry and mockery, distortion and invention? The questions are important, because it was through minstrelsy that the dances called jigs, juba, shuffles, and breakdowns became theater. It was through minstrelsy that they became tap.