Blues Dance - History of Blues Dancing

History of Blues Dancing

Early commentators on dance from sub-Saharan Africa consistently commented on the absence of close couple dancing, and such dancing was thought to be immoral in many traditional African societies. In all the vast riches of sub-Saharan African dance heritage there seems to be no evidence for sustained one-on-one male-female partnering anywhere before the late colonial era, when it was apparently considered in distinctly poor taste.

In the United States the dances of white Americans were being adapted and transformed over time. As dance evolved, the Afro-American elements became more formal and diluted, the British-European elements more fluid and rhythmic.

Dance moves passed down through generations were revised, recombined, and given new flourishes. The cyclical re-emergence of similar elements marks the African-American dance vocabulary."

During the post Reconstruction period (1875–1900), as Jim Crow Laws were passed in the South, dance steps once linked to ritualistic or religious dancing also acquired a more secular identity. Where by and large slavery had inhibited the retention of specific African tribal culture, the dances of working-class and lower-class blacks relinquished some of their Euro-American characteristics in during this time. Meanwhile, "dances became more upright and less flat-footed. As dance became more associated with sexuality and the free consumption of pleasure, which in the jook still had some communal ties to group dancing, the partnering relationship became more isolated and individualized. The "sport" and the "good-time gal" were people of the moment. Hip shaking and pelvic innuendo were now more of a statement to one's partner than to one's community."

W. C. Handy, who wrote some of the first published blues songs, documented his earliest experience with what may have been blues, and dancers reaction to it, at a dance c. 1905 in Cleveland, Mississippi. At one point Handy was asked to "play some of our native music". Although "baffled" he had his band played "an old-time Southern melody", after which he was asked if a local band could play a few numbers. That group consisted of "just three pieces, a battered guitar, a mandolin and a worn-out bass" (Handy described the group as "a Mississippi string band") and played "one of those over-and-over again strains that seem to have no very clear beginning and certainly no ending at all.... It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps "haunting" is a better word for it...The dancers went wild."

Handy also described the reaction to his band, which included violin, guitar, string bass, clarinet, tenor saxophone, trombone, and trumpet, playing his song "Mr. Crump" in 1909. "We were all settled into our chairs. I flashed the sign and the boys gave. Feet commenced to pat. A moment later there was dancing on the sideways below. Hands went in the air, bodies swayed like reeds on the banks of the Congo....In the office buildings about, white folks pricked up their ears. Stenographers danced with their bosses. Everybody shouted for more."

While playing mostly one-steps, polkas, schottishes and waltzes for colored patrons at Dixie Park in Memphis, Handy noted a reaction to the habanera rhythm included in Will H. Tyler's "Maori". "I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction to the rhythm....White dancers, as I had observed them, took the number in stride. I began to suspect that there was something Negroid in that beat." After noting a similar reaction to the same beat in "La Paloma", Handy included this rhythm in his St. Louis Blues, the instrumental copy of Memphis Blues, the chorus of Beale Street Blues, and other compositions."

Handy also elicited an enthusiastic reaction from colored dancers at the old K. of P. Hall with "a sort of Italian climax with a tricky rhythm" at the end of the first four bars of his "Memphis Blues". "During the playing I noticed periodic shouting from the floor, and a great roar of voices broke out when we came to a certain point in the piece. "Set in it", I heard them say. "Set in it!". Others told me of hearing happy little squeals among the Negro dancers for whom they played the piece."."

Writing about the first time "St Louis Blues" was played (1914), Handy notes that "The one-step and other dances had been done to the tempo of Memphis Blues.... When St Louis Blues was written the tango was in vogue. I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels."

The great Delta blues player Johnny Shines, who was born in 1915, recalled that "mostly you played for the dancers... They were doing two-steps and quite a few waltzes in those days."

"So far as what was called blues, that didn't come till 'round 1917...What we had in my coming up days was music for dancing, and it was of all different sorts" - Mance Lipscomb, Texas guitarist and singer

A tune called "Slow Drag Blues", composed by Snowden, was recorded c. 1915-19 by Dabney's Band.

Black dancers in Chicago continued to use the term "slow dragging" through the 1940s. By the 1960s, however, the term "belly-rubbing" gained acceptance. In the 1970s, both blacks and whites referred to very close slow dancing as "slow dancing". The degree of affection the partners had for each other generally determined how closely the partners danced, and there were widely varying levels of proficiency and styles of footwork.

"Blues dancing" - continued in African-American communities throughout the United States.

According to Albert Murray, blues idiom-dance movement has nothing to do with sensual abandonment. "Being always a matter of elegance is necessarily a matter of getting oneself together." Practitioners of this style do not throw their bodies around; they do not cut completely loose. A loss of coolness and control places one squarely outside the tradition.

In fact, the very nature of a vernacular dance culture ensures the survival of socially and culturally useful or valuable dances. Many of the steps specific to dances associated with popular blues songs of the 1920s were adapted for new musical structures in jazz, and new dance forms such as the lindy hop. Early African-American blues dances were very simple in their core movement and allowed for a wide variety of musical interpretation, embodying a black aesthetic approach to rhythm, movement and melody which permeated black music. They were often a simple one-step or two-step and though some movements may have been adapted and integrated into some mainstream popular dances, blues dancing as a distinct dance genre and social practice never became a specific focus for white America in the way that dances such as the Lindy Hop and Charleston have.