Dance Craze
The choreography from the musical, in which the song was a show-stopping Cockney-inspired extravaganza, inspired a popular walking dance, done in a jaunty strutting style. The craze reached Buckingham Palace, with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attending a performance and joining in the shouted "Oi" which ends the chorus.
The fad reached the United States in 1938, popularized by Boston-based orchestra-leader Joseph (Joe) Rines, among others. Rines and his band frequently performed in New York, and the dance became especially popular at the "better" night clubs. As with most dance crazes, other well-known orchestras did versions of the song, including Duke Ellington. It was also heard on radio.
A member of the Nazi Party drew attention in 1939 by declaring the Lambeth Walk (which was becoming popular in Berlin) to be "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping" as part of a speech on how the "revolution of private life" was one of the next big tasks of National Socialism in Germany.
In 1942, Charles A. Ridley of the British Ministry of Information made a short propaganda film, Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style, which edited existing footage of Hitler and German soldiers (taken from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will) to make it appear they were marching and dancing to "The Lambeth Walk". The propaganda film was distributed uncredited to newsreel companies, who would supply their own narration.
One of photographer Bill Brandt's most well-known pictures is "Dancing the Lambeth Walk", originally published in 1943 in the magazine Picture Post.
Both Russ Morgan and Duke Ellington had hit records of the song in the United States.
Read more about this topic: The Lambeth Walk
Famous quotes containing the words dance and/or craze:
“Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
Our virgins dance beneath the shade—
I see their glorious black eyes shine;
But gazing on each glowing maid,
My own the burning tear-drop laves,
To think such breasts must suckle slaves.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)