Social Dancing As an Agent of Change in Popular Music

Jazz, in its emerging phase in the early part of the 2e century, moved from a ceremonially functional music to a social one. It was employed chiefly for social dancing and for the community-based ritual of the "jazz" funeral and the jazz parade. Thus the style of dancing popular at any given time will have had significant influence on the music being played, since musicians playing for dancers are concerned less with creating art music than with enticing couples onto the dance floor. "The role of exotic and erotic dance in the emergence of ragtime and jazz deserves more consideration than it has yet received. Shifting musical styles were invariably linked with new dancing trends" (Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895, University Press of Mississippi, 2002, p. 285).

As American social dancing gravitated from the old, formally structured group dances to the newer, more intimate closed couple styles, African American influences came to the forefront, particularly in the aspect of a "bent knee posture. quite different from the upright, straight legged posture of earlier ballroom dances. This posture —common to many African-influenced dance traditions in the Americas -- had the effect of freeing up the dancers' hips and upper body" (Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 46, italics mine). Dances such as the Texas Tommy, the Todolo, the Turkey Trot "and other shoulder rocking, feet dragging freak dances" (Starr and Waterman, p. 45), which were originally thought to have appeared in San Francisco around 1915, have in fact been documented by Lawrence Gushee as appearing in New Orleans much earlier (Gushee, pp. 19-22.