Swing History 101: The Golden Age of Harlem Lindy Hop (1935-1942)

Updated 4/19/17 with additional socio-economic details.

Setting “The Scene”

As we discussed in the last episode, as the ’20s passed into the ’30s the new “swing” sound was evolving away from the hot jazz of the 1920s. Bands were smoothing out their rhythm into a steady, rolling-thunder beat. Drum sets were getting more drums and cymbals, and bands were getting more musicians and creating sections with them. They were also using more written arrangements that countered the sections off of each other in growing sophistication.

In the 1930s, the neighborhoods above New York’s Central Park, known as Harlem, became a hot spot for the new swing sound. Harlem was a primarily Black neighborhood, though its East side also had strong Italian and Hispanic communities. Though 1920s Harlem was a pilgrimage for Black intellectuals and artists, the early ’30s Depression brought high rates of poverty.

Though it greatly affected the lives of its residents, the Depression didn’t stop Harlem from swinging. In many ways, the joyful swing music and dancing of the area was a welcome relief from the hard times. Clubs and bandstands littered the area, making it a destination not only for locals but for people all over the five boroughs and tourists from outside the city. The biggest of these clubs was called the Savoy Ballroom, at 141st Street and 7th Avenue. It took up an entire block length and had a sign that read “The Home of Happy Feet.” This integrated ballroom (which was very rare in America at this time) was the mecca of Harlem social dancing night life and where visitors of all races expected to see the Lindy Hop being done by the best of the best. Many tourists, knowing of the Savoy Hotel in London, pronounced it the “SAV-oy.” But if you were in the know, you pronounced it “Sa-VOY.”

The first real “King of Swing” was a short, slumped, slightly disfigured band leader who was barely visible behind his giant bass drum. But he never let his size keep him from being heard. His name was Chick Webb, and he led the bandstand at the Savoy.

“A Night-Club Map of Harlem” (1932) by E Simms Campbell

The Second Generation

The first great generation of Lindy Hoppers danced in front of Chick’s drums at the Savoy in the late 20s and throughout the 30s — dancers like Mattie Pernell, Shorty George and “Big Bea.” A spot near the stage where tourists and locals alike could gape at the best dancers showing off was known as “The Corner” (the name “The Cat’s Corner” came later). And by the mid-30s, the next generation started pushing themselves into The Corner and to make Lindy Hop their own. These young dancers had names like Frankie Manning, Willa Mae Ricker, Leon James, Norma Miller, Al Minns.

They were mostly teenagers, which is important. Yes, they were Black kids, many of which lived in depressed households, but like most teenagers, they were still relatively young and carefree, and spent a lot of time playing with the dance and challenging each other to new heights. And they were the first people in the world to grow up with the Lindy Hop. They were dare-devilish, they were entertaining, and they were getting good.

A young Al Minns prepares to enter a jam circle.

Among the Savoy’s management staff was a man with a white streak in his hair notorious for his street smarts. His name was Herbert White, better known by his nickname Whitey, and with Lindy Hop groups like Shorty George’s around, he soon realized that the Lindy Hop had a great deal of potential as a stage entertainment, and the new, younger dancers had a great deal of potential as cheap labor.

With the ballroom’s permission, he started Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, taking the young dancers under his wing. His hustling personality just so happened to make him perfect for starting a company of performance dancers. He knew how to work people off of each other, and before long he had the most talented dancers practicing hours a day at the Savoy, stealing moves from the social dancing at night, inventing new moves constantly, teaching each other their strengths, and showing off in The Corner for attention. He soon put the strong and charismatic Frankie Manning, probably his most-all-around-gifted dancer, in charge of putting together their performance numbers.

We will discuss Frankie Manning in greater detail later; however, we have to re-mention a story we discussed in the previous chapter of this history, because it deals with these teenagers taking the baton from the first generation in almost a single moment. In the mid-1930s [1936?], in a contest against Shorty George himself, Frankie Manning reportedly took his partner into a new step he had developed that mimicked one of Shorty George’s where his partner would walk him off on her back: Instead of walking his partner off on his back, however, Frankie went all the way and flipped his partner over his back. In this contest, surprising everyone, he did the first known Air Step in Lindy Hop.

The silence that followed before the crowd erupted into cheers was the sound of a dance changing forever. The very next day, Manning strutted into the ballroom to teach his air-step to the other Whitey’s dancers. They soon began making up dozens of their own air-steps, and to this day if you say “swing dancing” to an average person, they probably imagine people flipping each other in the air.

(A quick note on this air step contest: We haven’t seen any evidence to refute this story. Lindy Hop from 1935/36 doesn’t have Air Steps, Lindy Hop afterwards does, which supports Frankie’s timeline. There had still been lifts and floor acrobatics in Lindy Hop and other dances before this, and their had even been flips like Frankie’s in the more exuberant 1920s Charleston contests, but this was the first time it was recorded in Harlem Lindy Hop history, so for all intents and purposes, it was a dance-changing innovation.)

Once the first generation had moved over, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers took off. This is the time when a specific version of Lindy Hop appeared. Harlem’s social ballroom dance Lindy Hop — a Black American dance — being born on dance floors with jam circles and from cultures with circle shouts, always had a performative nature — it was meant to be shared with its community. But with air-steps, and the other performance refinements Whitey’s dancers would soon bring to the dance, a new performance-oriented version of Lindy Hop was born.

It only helped that, starting in 1935, New York’s biggest dance contest started a Lindy Hop division.

The Harvest Moon Ball took place in Madison Square Garden and was a night full of waltz, rumba, tango, and other dances. In the first Lindy Hop division, Whitey’s Lindy Hopper Leon James and Edith Mathews broke every rule in the contest and took first place. And all the Harlem Lindy Hoppers stole the show. For every year after the Lindy Hop division was the crowd favorite, and the contest quickly became an all-out throw-down of air-steps, breath-catching moves, and choreographed shenanigans. Seeing the opportunity of such great press, and feeling a great deal of pride for his ballroom and his team, Whitey made it a goal to have his couples win the Harvest Moon Ball Lindy Hop competition — all placements — as much as possible, which they always fought hard for.

The Silent Majority

The Whitey’s performance Lindy Hop was wowing audiences all over the world. But Lindy Hop started off as a social dance, and for most Lindy Hoppers in Harlem, even some of its greatest performers like Frankie Manning, it was still first and foremost a social dance.

A night at the Savoy would go like this: Everyone would get dressed up to the nines. (This was very important in Harlem culture.) Upon entering the ballroom, they would take the stairs to the second story, where two bandstands stood side by side. One band would start playing right when the other band stopped playing a set, giving the room continuous live music. The dance floor was only about a third of the space; the rest was chairs, bars, and booths; the Savoy was a social club. Lots of people talking, drinking, flirting, laughing, having an evening out. Lines of famously attractive “taxi dancer” hostesses waited for men to purchase dances with them. Busses of tourists would go around Harlem and a few would get off at the Savoy to watch the dancing. White Jewish and Italian teenagers from all over the city and Jersey would  make pilgrimages to the ballroom. In the booths, celebrities could often be seen. Clark Gable was a frequent visitor.

The band would play a variety of songs — a few ballads and waltzes, but mostly swing. During the ballads, everyone would do simple slow dancing, or ballroomin’. The dirtier “slow drag” would usually be reserved for rent parties or later at night. (There’s a rich history to those slower Blues dances as well, but I will leave that up to those much more knowledgeable about the subject.) During the fastest swing songs, some daring souls might attempt to Lindy Hop, but most would do a walking dance called The Peabody or Swing Walk that would travel around the floor. Some people would race. (The long, thin ballroom floor surrounded on 3 sides by seats, and the sight of Peabody dances and racing, are what inspired one of the ballroom’s nicknames, “The Track.”)

Many people would go to the club to watch the “wild” Lindy Hoppers. Once again, Whitey knew what he was doing — he had Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers dance along the edges of the ballroom and The Corner and show off, or he would send them to dance close to the celebrities in their booths — advertising for the performance group. Most people who socially danced Lindy Hop at the Savoy Ballroom only knew a few “steps” — they didn’t need to know more, cause they danced the shit out of those steps. (The modern intermediate dancer probably knows two or three times as many steps as the majority of the 1930’s Harlem Lindy Hopper.)

The Whitey’s Hit Hollywood

In 1936, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had gigs in dance revues all over town. Frankie Manning headed Whitey’s top troupe at the Apollo, which was the sign that someone had “made it” in Black entertainment. It was during this time that Whitey got called by Hollywood for the first time, and he sent a troupe to perform in the Marx Brothers’ A Day At The Races.

Two quick things about this performance a geek Lindy Hopper should know:

1 — Norma Miller and Leon James are the second couple. Norma passed away in 2019 , but she was a strong presence in the the modern swing dance scene, travelling and teaching and doing talks and helping guide it, especially after Frankie Manning’s passing. Leon’s the leader mentioned above, who broke all the rules in the 1935 Harvest Moon Ball Championship and won. He was considered one of the showiest Lindy Hoppers in history and one of its greatest male stylists.

2 — The leader who does the awesome slide is named Snookie (a term that meant “sweetie”) Beasely, and that move is called his “lock-up.” Frankie talked about how they all tried and tried, but no one could ever do it as well as he could.

Most modern viewers can tell that, despite the beauty of these performances, the racial ideas of America made a mark on the performance. When the Whitey’s performed for major films, they were not showcased in their professional performance outfits, nor in the suits and dresses they danced in at the Savoy, but in the stereotypes of the time — Black Americans as farm hands or later, servant staff. Sadly, as we shall see, their two most-watched performances (this one and Hellzapoppin) will not showcase them the way they would have preferred. It didn’t however, stop them from getting the energy and beauty of the greatest performances of Lindy Hop on film.

The Whitey’s would do a lot more over the next five years, including tours all over the world, where they would even perform for and shake hands with royalty, which were unimaginable opportunities for a group of mostly low-income Black teenagers from this era. Norma Miller was even one of the first people ever on television when she danced for a camera at the World’s Fair in 1939.

With the success of his first troupes, Whitey began making the Savoy a factory producing dozens of couples from teenagers all over the neighborhood, including a White Jewish couple and a White dancer named Jimmy Valentine who only had one leg. Whitey’s factory began to annoy his top dancers, as Whitey was basically giving the new, lesser experienced dancers all of the original group’s hard-developed material. Coupled with Whitey’s low pay and shady character, Whitey was losing a lot of trust.

During those five years, the top troupe did a few more movies and film shoots, but two of the films stand out for their importance:

In 1938 the Whitey’s did two choreographies for the film Keep Punching. The first was some simple jam dancing for a “contest:”

Here’s what’s important about this footage: sneakers. Simple Keds had been around for over a decade, but here for the first time, some of the Whitey’s are using them to perform in. (In photographs of the group performing from 1938 and before, they are all wearing hard leather shoes. However, in pictures afterward, there are more and more sneakers, until the leaders especially almost exclusively wear sneakers by the early 40s.)

Perhaps it was because they used them when practicing air-steps, or perhaps it’s just because they were teenagers and they liked wearing sneakers, or a combination of these and other factors, but this began to change the dance — sneakers allowed for more purchase but less pivoting, and so the dancing became more linear, more “stretchy,” more athletic. Less slipping meant they could dance cleaner at higher speeds. More cushioning meant they could do more air-steps safely. And it meant performance Lindy Hop was beginning to separate even more from social Lindy Hop. (A telling story occurs in Maclom X’s autobiography, where he talks about his younger days as a Lindy Hopper: When at a social dance, his partner would change out of her heels and into sneakers for the dance contest.)

Another important thing was that teenage women were wearing shorter skirts now that stopped right above the knee rather than below it. This also allowed for easier air-steps and more athletic dancing from the followers.

The second choreography the Whitey’s did for Keep Punching was The Big Apple. Whitey had heard about a popular new dance craze being done at a club called “The Big Apple” in South Carolina (which is currently owned by a Lindy Hopper, by the way). The dance was simple — people stand in a circle and do solo dance steps that someone calls out. Whitey described it to Frankie, who created a choreography based on the idea — which is now a favorite group solo-jazz choreography in the modern dance scene.

The final, and most important, choreography in Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers career came in 1941, for an otherwise strange and silly movie called Hellzapoppin’. Frankie, the artistic director for this performance, was looking to take the group’s exhibition to the next level. Choosing Whitey’s best available couples, he put them on a regimented practice schedule, and when the time came to perform the routine for cameras, he asked them to do it at a breakneck speed. The result is the group’s masterpiece.

You can tell what a difference the years of practice and refinement had made in the five years since Day At The Races — the dancing in Hellzapoppin’ is more efficient in its mechanics, more precise in its execution, and with a much greater number of air steps that were now more powerful and impressive. (Not to by any means knock the still-incredible dancing of their younger work.) And yet they both still showcase the great joy of swing dancing, which thankfully the Whitey’s never lost.

The dancers also saw a lot of change in themselves. They had gone from being “raggedy kids” in the showbiz world to being a well-honed professional act. In doing so, many of them became disillusioned with Whitey, feeling he had blatantly exploited them. Even had Pearl Harbor not been bombed in 1941, thus bringing America into a war which would draft most of the Whitey’s men into service, the group’s top dancers probably would not have stuck around much longer.

But, by 1943, many of Whitey’s men were in the military, and the troupe was more or less no more. And with it, Harlem would have to wait until after the war before a new generation would grow up at Savoy and take the reins of Lindy Hop.

Further Reading & Viewing

Norma Miller, “Swingin’ at the Savoy.”

Frankie Manning and Cynthia R. Millman, “Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop.”

Norma Miller Interview & Videos: Lindy Hop & Swing on Film
Norma Miller Interview & Videos: Growing Up Next to the Savoy

Marshall and Jean Stearns, “Jazz Dance.”

Jazz: A film by Ken Burns, [Episodes 1-6 ].

Special thanks to Nathan Bugh for his insight into some aspects of this article.