The Swing Book (3 page)

Duke Ellington mixes it up with Lionel Hampton.
(A
RCHIVE
P
HOTOS
/M
ETRONOME
)

In addition to the Cotton Club, Harlem in the early thirties was literally crawling with raging night spots. There was the
Apollo, with its hard-fought amateur contests; Minton’s, an after-hours joint; and Connie’s Inn, where Waller first staged
his famous
Hot Chocolates
show featuring the song “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” But no place compared to the one and only Savoy Ballroom. What was said of New
York City was doubly true at the Savoy: If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.

Opened on March 12, 1926, and situated just a block from the Cotton Club, the Savoy will go down in history for making the
Lindy Hop the most famous, cherished, wildest, and enjoyable dance in America. Those who were there at the time still get
deliriously misty remembering it. What was the Savoy like? Enormous and elegant, it took up an entire city block on Lenox
Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets in Harlem. There were two bandstands set up, so when the house band took a break, a
visiting orchestra was ready to start blowing—that way the dancing never let up. Decorated in gold and blue with multicolored
spotlights, it had an enormous 50-by-250-foot hardwood dance floor that had to be replaced every three years because of sheer
wear and tear. Significantly, it was also perhaps the first integrated dance hall in the country. “The Savoy was practically
half white and half black,” recalls premier Savoy Lindy Hopper Frankie Manning. “The only thing they wanted to do at the Savoy
was dance. They didn’t care what color you were, all they wanted to know was, ‘Can you dance?’”

The Lindy, of course, wasn’t discovered at the Savoy. It was danced throughout Harlem in the twenties and soon began spreading
around the country—despite overwrought concerns that the dance was too sexual. But fueled by the sounds of the Savoy’s fast
and furious Chick Webb band, the dancers there engaged in all-out competitions that pushed the Lindy to ever greater heights
of creativity and energy. The dance developed out of several other popular dances, such as the Charleston, the two-step, and
the Texas Tommy. The Lindy’s innovation, however, was the swingout, or breakaway, in which dance partners would temporarily
drop arm contact and create their own moves. The breakaway gave the dancers as much room to improvise as the musicians now
had. No other previous dance had provided such space for personal expression. And early Lindy fanatics at the Savoy took the
new style and ran with it. Led by such dancers as Shorty George Snowden, Big Bea, Leroy “Stretch” Jones, Little Bea, and George
“Twistmouth” Ganaway, they began both refining and pushing the limits of the Lindy. The five-foot two-inch Snowden invented
a bent-knee, low-to-the-ground move that became so famous that Count Basie immortalized it in the song “Shorty George.” Jones
created the twist steps for followers as the alternative to the Lindy’s back step. And the dance began to take on its characteristic
African-American style. Loose in the legs and knees, the Lindy Hoppers flowed across the floor with an unstoppable horizontal
momentum.

It was also at the Savoy that the dance was christened, in fittingly improvised fashion. Not long after Charles Lindbergh
completed his inspiring solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927—making the once formidable distance seem just a hop over the
ocean in the popular imagination—a reporter at the ballroom asked Snowden what he was doing. Not having a name for the dance
yet, Snowden made one up, dubbing it “the Lindy Hop.” One reason the name stuck was that a new generation of dancers was on
the rise. This younger group, soon to be dubbed Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, would take their brand of Lindy out of the Savoy and
around the world.

The youngsters, who took over as the club’s premier dancers in the early thirties, drew their inspiration, and a fair share
of moves, from the older innovators. “We copied what we saw them do,” recalls Norma Miller, who started her dancing career
at the Savoy. Miller was one of a group, reaching eighty people at its peak, who were scouted, hand-picked, and pushed to
excel by Herbert White, known as Whitey for the streak in his hair. A former bouncer at the Savoy, White started choosing
the best dancers he saw on the floor—the pros congregated in a part of the club called the Cat’s Corner—and forming them into
a troupe. Today the names of these swing-dance pioneers—Frankie Manning, Willamae and Billy Ricker, Naomi Wallace, Leon James,
Al Minns, and Norma Miller, among others—are repeated from dancer to dancer with awed reverence. But back then, Whitey’s Lindy
Hoppers were just a bunch of kids out to make their names, have a ball, and simply see what they had in ’em. “Those were the
beginning days of the Lindy Hop, everything that was created was new. There were no rules. We made it up. The only rule was:
If it looks good, do it. If it don’t, throw it out,” says Manning. (For the story of Manning’s rediscovery by swing revivalists,
see chapter 2.)

Back in the thirties, Manning was the chief choreographer of the group, and the smoothest cat at the Savoy. “When he’s just
standing still, Frankie is swinging. He doesn’t have to do one thing with his muscles and you know he’s feeling it,” says
jazz singer Ann Hampton Callaway, star of the new musical
The Original Broadway Swing.
But Frankie’s contribution involved much more than just standing around. He was the first to choreograph ensemble Lindy numbers.
And sometime around 1936 he made his lasting mark on the dance, creating the aerial, the move that turned the Lindy Hop into
a showstopper. Never before had anyone thought to throw his partner in the air, twirl her around, and catch her again. And
on top of that do it all in time to the music as a true dance step. “The idea came to me because of a famous step that Shorty
Snowden and his partner Big Bea used to do,” recalls Manning. “Now, she was six feet tall and she would take Shorty on her
back and walk off the stage, and it always tore the house up. So I got the idea that I wanted to make a step out of it, not
just a lift. I went to my partner Frieda Washington and told her. And she said, ‘I ain’t picking you up on my back. Forget
that!’ And I said, ‘That’s not what I want. What I want to do is pick you up on my back, and not just for you to lay there,
but to roll over and come down in front of me. We’ll do it to the music.’ Just picture this: something you’ve never seen,
you don’t know how to do, your partner doesn’t know how to do it either. She said, ‘Yeah, OK.’”

With Manning leading the way, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers brought the dance and their wildly distinctive way of doing it to an
ever expanding and thoroughly wowed public. White, according to Norma Miller, “wanted to be the man to make the Lindy Hop
a famous and accepted art form.” The first step on the road to the Lindy’s greatness began in 1935 when White entered his
dancers in New York’s first annual Harvest Moon Championship, a city-wide competition that put the Lindy side by side with
such traditional dances as the fox trot, rhumba, waltz, and tango. “It was the biggest dance contest ever held in America
and of course it was important to us,” wrote Miller in her memoir,
Swingin’ at the Savoy.
“It was the first time the Lindy Hop was in a dance competition. It was the only black entry in the contest and we were very
proud of that.” The Savoy dancers took first, second, and third prizes in the Lindy section. “When we got up on the dance
floor, we kicked ass and it became such a popular dance it couldn’t be denied,” recalled Miller. From there, Whitey’s troupe
traveled around the world, touring Europe and South America, performing at the New York World’s Fair and on Broadway, at the
Cotton Club and the Moulin Rouge. They even met the queen of England. Most important, they were in movies, an important record
of the dance that would live to inspire a new generation of dancers in the eighties and nineties. Even to this day, people
say that the troupe’s performance in the film
Hellzapoppin’
has never been topped.

In 1943 the Lindy was honored by its own cover story in
Life
magazine, which called it “a true national folk dance.” But if Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, and the rest of Whitey’s Lindy
Hoppers had ever been given the full acknowledgment they deserve for helping make that happen, they’d be as famous today as
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Unfortunately, at the spot where the Savoy once stood (it closed in 1958), there’s not even
a plaque mentioning the wellspring of dancing genius that was unleashed there.

While you wouldn’t know it from all the activity in Harlem in the early thirties, jazz enthusiasts at the time were terribly
worried that the music was in decline. With the Depression gripping the nation, record sales fell from precrash totals of
104 million a year to just 6 million 78s sold in 1932. According to David Erenberg’s incisive
Swingin’ the Dream,
sales of record players plummeted 90 percent after 1929. The cash-strapped public also began to feel that the music itself
was perhaps too decadent during such a period of nationwide want. As one critic wrote at the time, “The public was in no mood
for the reckless promptings of jazz.” In late 1934 Fletcher Henderson went bankrupt. Saxophonist Sidney Bechet opened a dry-cleaning
establishment to help ride out the dry spell. It was sweet crooners like Bing Crosby who ruled the airwaves.

As the country’s economic prospects began to rise under the policies of the New Deal, though, the stage was set for swing’s
breakthrough into the mainstream of America. And the man who would bring it to mass popularity was
Benny Goodman.

In some ways, Goodman was an unlikely man for the role. He wasn’t a showman. He looked like a square. As portrayed in
The Benny Goodman Story
by Steve Allen, he was always fumbling for words. But even before his rise to fame, Goodman played the clarinet with a passionate
excitement and clear brightness that marked him as a one-of-a-kind talent. Born to a poor Jewish family in Chicago, and developing
an early love of jazz, Goodman toured with the prominent Ben Pollack band during the late 1920s. But despite some early success
after moving to New York, by 1933 he was reduced to one low-paying radio gig. According to Erenberg, Goodman no longer saw
a “future for jazz and contemplated forming a society orchestra.” What drew Goodman back to playing real jazz? Credit the
influence of his good friend and supporter John Hammond, an Upper East Side political leftist who was the most influential
behind-the-scenes man in swing. In addition to promoting the careers of
Count Basie, Billie Holiday,
saxophonist
Benny Carter,
and
Lionel Hampton,
among others, Hammond pushed Goodman to work with black musicians and singers, a step that helped reinvigorate the clarinetist.
Beginning in 1933 Goodman recorded with Bessie Smith (it was her last studio session), Holiday (it was her first), and pianist
Teddy Wilson, who would soon join Goodman’s path-breaking trio, the first high-profile integrated group in jazz. Said Goodman
singer
Helen Ward
of these early years: “They were playing a brand of music nobody else had attempted with a white band at that time.”

Goodman’s break came when he was hired in 1934 to be one of three house bands on the NBC Saturday-night radio show
Let’s Dance.
The steady paycheck allowed him to purchase scores of hot arrangements by Fletcher Henderson; the show exposed him to a nationwide
audience. While the radio program was heard late at night on the East Coast, listeners in California heard Goodman’s band
swinging like crazy during peak evening hours. But Goodman himself wasn’t aware of this and, in fact, didn’t see his fortunes
improving much.
Let’s Dance
was canceled after just one season. Goodman then set out on a national tour that was at first nowhere near a smash. At a
gig in Michigan, only thirty people showed up. In Denver the manager of the local ballroom threatened to cancel their contract
after the first night.