American Fun Page 24
EARLY JAZZ DANCE HAD always left room for grace notes and novelties: hand flicks, eye rolls, kicks, and shimmies were all part of its essential pleasure. Rare couples dances like the breakaway and the Charleston already let partners split apart for a few bars and indulge in some lunatic expression, usually some kind of modified two-step, but they always returned to their basic steps, which, like the accompaniment itself, could be as strict and uniform as the waltz. Perry Bradford’s 1919 “Original Black Bottom,” however, which had flopped years before as the “Jacksonville Rounders’ Dance” (“rounders” were pimps), was a single-dancer “challenge dance”—again, in the tradition of dancing for eels—that anticipated much zanier things to come. Sharing its rhythm with the original Charleston—which wouldn’t gain wide acceptance until 1923, when it was featured in the all-black musical Runnin’ Wild—the black bottom adorned a simple box step with early, slinky African-American moves—mooches, slides, hobbles, and twists that drove average Americans wild.
The 1924 instructional film Let’s Do the Black Bottom provides a spurious history lesson that tries to be both flattering and comical to whites, who it also suggests invented the dance: “—funny how they got the Black Bottom idea—someone strayed from the Great White Way to the great open spaces and saw—” two black boys struggling in the mud, mimicking a cow doing the same. The film features a white girl in a modest white dress giving a plodding demonstration of stamps, double-stamps, and a stiff-legged strut. Strangely, it suggests she started the craze. “They heard her music,” a panel reads, and the film insinuatingly cuts to two gleefully dancing black girls, to a dancing traffic cop, and to some startling footage of construction workers kicking and swaying on a skyscraper’s beam. “All the world will soon be imitating that cow stuck in the mud.” This latest effort in the long white campaign to appropriate African-American culture paled, however, in face of fact: all the world was learning the dance, and America’s soaring new pleasure was black.
In the summer of 1928, twenty-some days into one of New York City’s first non-segregated dance marathons, when the crowd on the enormous Manhattan Casino dance floor had dwindled down to four punchy couples, young gossip columnists Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan zeroed in on dancer number 7, George “Shorty” Snowden. Their publicity drew fresh crowds of spectators who sponsored challenges between the couples. It was during one of these challenges that Shorty pulled a breakaway and electrified even the weary dance band. Onlookers may have assumed he was just going “squirrelly,” a common term for marathoners losing their wits. But when Fox Movietone News got Snowden on film, magnifying his blurring feet, they knew they were seeing something new. An interviewer asked him what he was doing. He called it “the Lindy” and kept on dancing, but as he explained decades later, he was just doing what his friends always did up in Harlem, only possibly faster. “It was new to them, and I was sure having a ball, doing whatever came into my head.” In other words, he was improvising.
When it caught on, the dance was often called the jitterbug, but Snowden’s invented-on-the-spot “Lindy” was uniquely inspired. It captured the dance’s sheer modernity. He named it, of course, for Charles Lindbergh, who had been apotheosized since his transatlantic flight. The Lindy animated reckless grace, and for this it owed more in its style and spirit to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. It answered the jazz solo’s fearless exploration and celebrated the thrill-seeking individual. In the months and years and decades to follow, when the Spirit of St. Louis possessed the dance floor and inspired Lindy Hoppers to leave the ground—with flips, rolls, throws, and swings—it reveled in the majesty of flight.
Back on Snowden’s Harlem turf, the Savoy Ballroom, its owner, Charles Buchanan, who had previously prohibited dancers from doing even the Charleston (thereby spurring them on to invent the steps that became the Lindy Hop), quickly cashed in on Snowden’s celebrity. He awarded Snowden a lifetime pass and rechristened the ballroom “The Home of Happy Feet.” In no time the Savoy’s 12,500-square-foot dance floor boasted, as Jean and Michael Stearns put it, the “ ‘hippest’ dance audience in the world” and was “the acid test of a true dance band.”
All facets of Jazz Age Harlem glittered at the Savoy, where a cut-glass chandelier adorned the marble lobby and all of New York braved its dance floor. Soon the Savoy, an acre-wide rent party, was open to just about anything, including spectacular drag balls and dance marathons. (Its Chicago iteration, in 1926, was home to Abe Saperstein’s “Savoy Big Five,” the choreographed basketballers who would soon become the Harlem Globetrotters.) To accommodate the full range of its clientele, Harlem’s Savoy held special nights—Mondays were “Ladies Night,” Tuesdays featured the club’s best dancers, Thursdays were “Kitchen Mechanics Night,” Saturdays packed in so many dancers that it was difficult to move, and Sunday was “when celebrities and movie stars arrived.” In an interview, Pearl and Ivy Fisher distinguished between the “segregated” Cotton Club and the “open” Savoy, where “everybody went—whites and blacks.” Lucky Millinder’s song commemorates the Savoy as a “joint” where people could “grab a cook or mechanic” and “let [their] feet go frantic,” the great American dance floor where race and class tensions were sublimated into the having of fun.
From the beginning the Savoy sponsored bucking contests between its two opposing bandstands. Legendary black artists like Louis Armstrong, Chick Webb, and Fletcher Henderson went into hot but good-natured battle against white upstarts like Bix Beiderbecke and Benny Goodman. The jitterbugging thousands were the beneficiaries. With the advent of the Lindy, the bands’ competitive spirit spread to the dance floor, where neither the richest nor the most famous but only the most talented could cut it up in “Cat’s Corner,” an area Snowden cordoned off in 1927 for only the hottest Lindy Hoppers.
8
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“Joyous Revolt”
The “New Negro” and the “New Woman”
J. A. ROGERS’S PROMINENT 1925 essay “Jazz at Home” reads like a sporting response to Duffus’s “Age of Play.” Both writers argue for pleasure’s social power, but while Duffus’s “play” involves movies and board games, the raw pleasures Rogers attributes to jazz—“the nobody’s child of the levee and the city slum”—pulse with rebellious electricity. “The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow—from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.” Rogers admitted that jazz, like Duffus’s less offensive “play,” had begun to spread throughout American society, but that wasn’t his point. It mattered more that jazz “spontaneity” and “the perfect jazz abandon” came most easily to “the average Negro, particularly of the lower classes,” who “puts rhythm into whatever he does.”
Black writers of the 1920s often expressed this opinion—for better or for worse. Race leader W. E. B. DuBois often regretted lower-class blacks’ open displays of “jazz abandon.” His friend and peer James Weldon Johnson, however, seemed delighted that “an average group of Negroes can in dancing to a good jazz band achieve a delightful state of intoxication that for others would require nothing short of a certain per capita imbibation of synthetic gin.” Rogers, rather resembling Duffus, takes a middle road. A social conservative among young black urbanites, he warned that jazz was a “poison for the weak”—especially for the poor black whose “amusement life is more open to the forces of social vice”—but allows that it also gives “recreation for the industrious” and “tonic for the strong.” And for this reason, in spite of “its morally anarchic spirit, jazz has a popular mission to perform.” Echoing his era’s progressive arguments for physical recreation, he sees in jazz a civic virtue that transcends race, class, and gender because it is rooted in a most basic instrument—the human body.
Rogers sees this joy as a poison and a tonic, but unlike Duffus he doesn’t want to interfere. Recklessly, democratically—at least in this essay—Rogers puts his trust in the people: “This new spirit
of joy and spontaneity may itself play the role of reformer.” His seemingly utopian vision, in which music and dance cause social reform, was at no time more plausible than in the 1920s, when the rhythms that freed slaves on Congo Square were helping to warm Americans’ chilly attitudes—toward their own bodies and each other’s humanity.
The stakes were much higher for Rogers than for Duffus, nothing lower than political equality for blacks. He hoped that jazz might do the work peaceably. For of course blacks felt more than “joy and spontaneity.” For instance, in 1925, many felt deep reserves of rage. To be sure, the year before, W. E. B. DuBois, while acknowledging African Americans’ “spirit of gayety,” reminded readers that “the first influence of the Negro on American democracy was naturally to oppose by force—revolt, murder, assassination coupled with running away. It was the primitive, ancient effort to avenge blood with blood, to bring good out of evil by opposing evil with evil.” Revolutionary figures like Marcus Garvey kept this violent history in the public eye, lecturing and parading in military dress. But during this highly racist period in American history, when eugenics was a popular academic position and the KKK, in 1925, had five million members nationwide, even the joyous revolt of jazz was an opposition by force: its practitioners stood down their frigid opponents with blatant sexuality and loud racial pride. Under such conditions “democracy” had to be bullish—especially if it was going to be fun.
But jazz wasn’t destructive, jazz was creative. Published in a year when the pages of Crisis were filled with lynchings, evictions, and other evidence of prejudice, Alain Locke’s landmark New Negro anthology, in which Rogers’s essay appears, never ignored such vicious stakes but charted a more constructive heritage of African-American revolt—from spirituals, folk dances, and Brother Rabbit tales to their cultural grandchildren in the Harlem Renaissance. One contributor, the novelist and Crisis editor Jessie Fauset, traces the African-American “gift of laughter” as it comes down from slave culture, through the “jesters” and “clowns” of minstrelsy, to the twentieth-century all-black musicals, where it “radiates good feeling and happiness.” When African-American comedians evolved from playing the “funny man” to what she calls “the state of being purely subjective,” they could enmesh the audience in a common pleasure that acted a lot like a jazz performance—or like antebellum storytelling circles. When black performers can be comical on their terms, she argues, the audience “is infected” by the performer’s “high spirits” and “excessive good will.” “A stream of well-being is projected across the footlights into the consciousness of the beholder.” Here, it seems, was the acme of Harlem Renaissance fun. At its finest moments, a culture born from struggle and trauma shot beyond resistance and mere rebellion. It struck syncopated harmonies of cross-racial experience—laughter, dancing, competition, and the impudent revolt of wild partying.
THE “NEW NEGRO” or “Harlem” Renaissance was a surge in African-American cultural production that culminated in the 1920s. Among its likely causes—black resistance to lynchings and segregation, a rising black middle class with greater access to education, the mainstream popularity of jazz—the widest dispersal was the “Great Migration” of southern blacks to northern cities, some 555,000 in the 1910s alone. The sudden removal of so many rural families brought mixed fortunes—increased economic opportunity in the wartime economy, increased economic privation due to overcrowding, as well as new waves of racial resentment. At its worst, during what James Weldon Johnson famously called the “Red Summer” of 1919—a year of severe labor shortages due in large part to veterans returning home en masse—twenty-five or more major race riots, most of them instigated by whites, erupted from coast to coast and resulted in dozens of lynchings, hundreds of other deaths, thousands of injuries, and an American society in disarray.
But even in the most cramped and impoverished neighborhoods of Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago, a new African-American cosmopolitanism was taking shape. And if New York City set the era’s highest standards for rebellious, socially integrated fun, Harlem was its Main Street. This predominantly black uptown neighborhood—whose population by 1925 was denser by a third than anywhere else in all of Manhattan—teemed with conflict. It was nobody’s utopia. “Long before the stock market crash,” writes the historian Jonathan Gill, “black Harlem had become a community in crisis, leading the nation in poverty, crime, overcrowding, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality.” East Harlem, with its largely Latino population, didn’t fare much better. But the runaway popularity of jazz—as well as Caribbean dance music—brought sudden revenue into the district, and while much of it stayed in the hands of white owners (such as the Mafia ownership of racially exclusive venues like Connie’s and the Cotton Club), a lot trickled down to locally operated bars and dance halls. The influx of wealthy and middle-class whites was only New York’s latest wave of slummers. Their presence was naturally galling to many Harlemites, who, while sometimes befriending them, also mocked, exploited, or ignored them.
Ed Small’s Paradise, with its dancing waiters on roller skates, was nearly as posh and expensive as Connie’s, but it was black-owned, color-blind, and popular for late-night Chinese food. As David Levering Lewis points out, Small’s, like the Clam House and other clubs along the Mob-dominated 133rd Street “Jungle,” sought “white clients enthusiastically, sometimes even fawningly,” in hopes of getting a piece of the market. Farther uptown, at the more populist Panama, a large club with pianos and dancing girls, the clientele was deliberately split between “the more of a quiet reserved type of entertainment” downstairs and the “rougher” type upstairs. The enormous Lincoln Gardens, however, traded ceremony for pleasure: one thousand patrons jammed the smoky floor and balcony, drank $2 pints of “licorice-tasting gin,” and were drawn like moths to Louis Armstrong and King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. “The whole joint was rocking,” recalled Eddie Condon. “Tables, chairs, walls, people, moved with rhythm.… People in the balcony leaned over and their drinks spilled on the customers below.” Lincoln Gardens better resembled jazz’s natural habitat—the surging throngs in New Orleans’s steamy public halls. The most risqué (and fun) nightclubs such as the “transvestite floor shows, sex circuses, and marijuana parlors along 140th Street” were also least amenable to whites. More notorious white hedonists like Phil Harris, Mae West, and Carl Van Vechten managed to “obtain entry” through “persistence, contacts, and money,” but generally these venues didn’t welcome gawkers. The most famous sex circus on 140th Street was either Hazel Valentine’s The Daisy Chain or 101 Ranch. A jewel in the crown of Harlem’s thriving gay and lesbian scene, celebrated in songs by Fats Waller and Count Basie, Valentine’s show was centered on sex celebrities like Sewing Machine Bertha and the transvestite “Clarenz” who performed acrobatics that “catered to all varieties of sexual tastes.”
Private “rent parties”—“Social Whists”—were the beating heart of 1920s Harlem fun. Neighborhood kids, Harlem celebrities, downtown slummers, and working-class blacks could pay a small fee (ten cents most nights) to stomp and dance to stride-piano maestros like Willie “the Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and Fats Waller. More notorious “buffet flats” also marketed red-light favors, but rent parties were most often just overcrowded blowouts. They were announced with witty flyers, sold soul food and corn liquor, and helped overburdened tenants raise some rent money by packing in just about anybody with a thirst: “ladies’ maids and truck drivers,” recalled Langston Hughes, who hit the rent parties nearly every Saturday night, “laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters. I can still hear their laughter in my ears, hear the soft slow music, and feel the floor shaking as the dancers danced.”
Among America’s brightest stars of the 1920s were three African-American women—Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters—who joyfully slaughtered any and all sacred cows: of lyricism, of beauty, of public decency. Bessie Smith, in particular, who tr
ained under Rainey and then paved the way for Waters, earned her title as “Empress of the Blues” through exquisite musicality and thunderous personality. Born poor in Chattanooga in 1894, she was singing for coins by the time she was nine and performing for Rainey at age eighteen, when her voice already was clear enough, strong enough, to captivate audiences without amplification. Deep, rich, conversational, “creamy,” Smith’s voice brought listeners in close and animated her blunt confessions of poverty, promiscuity, and violence, often with a slashing sense of humor. And Smith lived hard. She fired gunshots at her abusive (but beloved) husband, Jack Gee, identified by the biographer Chris Albertson as a “semi-illiterate night watchman.” She was stabbed by a man she’d knocked on his back. She constantly drank, kept a string of female lovers, and enjoyed a buffet flat in Detroit where Coke bottles and “lighted cigarettes” were sex-show props. She strutted out her antics in her hard-stomping blues, as in “Gimme a Pigfoot,” in which she growls in pure exuberance over an illegal Harlem rent party. Wanting “to clown,” wanting to send the piano player a drink because he’s “bringin’ [her] down,” she calls for “a pigfoot and a bottle of beer,” warning other revelers to “check [their] razors and [their] guns” because there’s “gonna be rasslin’ when the wagon comes.” As hearty as any celebrity of her hard-living era, Smith freely mingled her dangers and pleasures. Accordingly, as the song roars to its infamous climax, she keeps on raising the stakes:
We’re gonna shim-sham-shimmy till the risin’ sun
Gimme a reefer and a gang of gin