12 Vernacular Jazz and Lindy Hop Gems You Can Watch (and listen! and read!) For Free
This infamous clip features Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in one of the fastest, most high-flying lindy hop choreographies captured on film. Yes, it does suck that the worlds best dancers of their time are dressed up as servants to fit into the plot of the film “Hellzapoppin’ (1941)”
Frankie Manning & Chazz Young (his son) perform the Shim Sham sometime in the 90s. NOLA.com. Frankie Manning, Chazz Young Perform the Shim Sham, 2016. Speculation in the comments that this was filmed at Herrang Dance Camp, in Sweden, where Manning regularly taught.
The Spirit Moves is a minimalist documentary directed by Maura Dehn and filmed in the 1950s. It’s hours and hours and hours of footage. Lots of it has been posted in smaller pieces on Youtube. A lot of the music is overdubbed, so it’s not what the dancers were originally dancing to. Al & Leon Shim Sham, from Spirit Moves,
Shorty George Snowden was an iconic Savoy Ballroom dancer. This clip is from a 1929 film and it captures an incredible style of dancing that comes slightly before the advent of the Lindy Hop. JazzMAD London. Legend Shorty George Snowden Dances the Charleston & Breakaway in After Seben (1929), 2016
CONSUELA HARRIS. I’m speechless. Peter Loggins. Consuela Harris in “Swing 1938!,” 2012.
Katherine Dunham was a dancer and anthropologist who received government funding to study the dances of the Carribean, her ancestral homeland. She was also an outspoken civil rights and environmental activist throughout her life. She developed her own technique that merges elements of western classical training with vernacular jazz and Afrio-Carribean traditions. She performed and choreographed in many films, building lush, dignified environments for performers. This clip is a recreation of one of Dunham’s later works, performed by Cleo Parker Dance Ensemble at Jacobs Pillow, longstanding center for dance and dance research in Western Mass. Dunham, Katherine. Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble Blues. Video. Jacobs Pillow Performance Series, 1996.
More Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers! “The Big Apple /Keep Punching (1939).” Frankie Manning Foundation (blog), July 3, 2019.
As part of the public works programs of the New Deal, musicologist Alan Lomax traveled the Americas recording folk songs of all kinds. He is one of the foremost archivists of black vernacular song and dance traditions; his work is preserved and available to the public via the Library of Congress. Jelly Roll Morton was a self proclaimed Inventor of Jazz, a real New Orleans character, and remains a piano and music legend. These recordings capture Morton’s musical stylings as well as his encyclopedic story-telling. NPR. “Jelly Roll Morton Plays the Library of Congress.” , December 6, 2005, sec. Music.
Eccentric dancing was a regular part of vaudeville shows until vaudeville died out. It could mean a lot of things: weird, strange, new, Other, outsider, and include magic and circus as well. This film looks at Eccentric as a critical component of Black cultural creation in American popular media and culture. Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “The Choreography of Comedy: The Art of Eccentric Dance,” June 18, 2019.
Charles Dicken’s travelogue didn’t win him many American fans, but it sure does capture in words some breathtaking vignettes of the reality of American life at the turn of the century; vignettes that many American (publishers) may not have dared put into print. Description of Master Juba at Almacks, in New York, late 1890s. “American Notes for General Circulation, by Charles Dickens.”
Be Bop is so darn cool. Leonard Anderson. Jivin in Bebop Ft. Dizzie Gillespie, 1946. I can’t figure out the identity of the dancers in this clip. But —damn! — they are moving fast and doing some wild acrobatic shit!
Lindy Hop and swing dancing has a resurgence in the popular media in the 1990s. The choreographer for this scene worked closely with some of the O.G. Savoy Ballroom dancers to create this choreography for an opening scene in Malcom X’s biopic. The scene, and Malcom X’s interest in Lindy Hop, is described at length in his autobiography by the same name. SwingcatVB. Lindy Hop Swing Dance Scene in “Malcolm X” 1992, 2010.
— Lily