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Hop alley st. louis8/4/2023 ![]() Wright told the Aiken Standard in August 1937 that “We call it a swing dance, the white people call it the Big Apple.” And the Pittsburgh Courier describes an already-familiar lexicon of Harlem jazz dancing: In many ways, the Big Apple’s newness was merely in its name-branding. ![]() By the end of 1937 the Big Apple had been performed by 500 children at the White House, where President Roosevelt claimed that it “lacks rhythm.” Soon enough entertainment scouts began holding contests and staging the Big Apple at grand theaters like the Roxy and across the vaudeville circuit. It was a microcosm of the legally enforced racial modus operandi that allowed white dancers to siphon off Black dances into spaces of opportunity to which white folks alone were privileged. Elliot Wright allowed Billy Spivey, Donald Davis, and Harold Wiles to sit in the balcony, where they could watch the dancers. The version of the Big Apple that quickly spread to white coastal beach resorts in the spring of 1937, and then on to large stages and ballrooms in New York, was a version as imitated, interpreted, and adapted by white teenagers. The eagerly anticipated “slow motion” and “freeze!” calls during the free-for-all portion of the routine forged new creations only partially within one’s control.įrom the Big Apple Club to the White House The way he called the steps enlivened a new sense of how they should be executed. The fact that most had memorized the routine didn’t matter. When Wright developed new figures to call at the Big Apple Night Club, the convention of calling dances was likely as idiomatic as the old one-step and slow drag.Īs an adjacent thought about called dance traditions, I can’t help thinking of how legendary jazz dancer Frankie Manning would call out the steps of the Shim Sham routine on a floor full of swing dancers. Black professional “set-callers” became reputable for inventing new systems of set-calling and performing original solo steps. White ballroom instructors were eager to point out the connections between the Big Apple and traditional European square dances, but African-American dancers had a long-standing tradition of stylizing cotillions, quadrilles, and contradances, which remained popular during the ragtime era. Group dances that required a caller were widely practiced by Americans of all ethnicities leading up to the 20th century. Manager Elliot Wright at the Big Apple Club in Columbia, South Carolina. ![]() According to the article, the figures included Truckin’, Suzie Q, the Charleston, as well as some apple-themed steps, such as “carvin’ the apple,” which involved a series of crisscross steps and fast shuffling. In a 1937 newspaper article, the 20-year-old Boyd states that clubgoers had been doing the slow drag and one-step for a long time, and that he decided to “step things up lively,” with new figures, which he called by number and were danced by 18 of the club’s expert dancers. Some nights the club was so full that a queue formed outside of the front door. Where Orthodox Jewish men had prayed in rows of pews, Black youngsters now held their Saturday night functions. To go to the beginning, or at least a beginning, we must travel to Columbia, South Carolina in 1936 and enter the Big Apple Club, an obsolete Jewish synagogue converted into a Black nightclub managed by Elliot Wright and Frank “Fat Sam” Boyd. The Big Apple’s biggest impact may have been reinforcing the prominence of existing dances and generating a new enthusiasm for “shag” dancing in places like St. Ballroom instructors and theater managers sought to capitalize on the craze, and the Big Apple, although not enduring, became a huge popular culture reference. The Big Apple possessed siren-like echoes of past dances, from recent Prohibition-era favorites to the African-derived ring shout of coastal Carolina and the square dances of the 19th century. Not since the Charleston years had a dance held such a capacity to merge exhibition with social participation. What Black dancers in South Carolina did with existing conventions is precisely what made the Big Apple so electrifying to the dancing public in 1937. ![]() ![]() Albert Murray writes that innovations in jazz music have far less to do with originality, and much more to do with how musicians use counterstatement and variation through existing conventions. ![]()
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