What happens to a dream deferred?
This is my favourite depiction of the lindy hop. The two characters are certainly together, as with any partnered dance, but they are also very much themselves. He is goofy, with his shoulders up, neck forwards, one elbow tucked awkwardly at the side and a long leg swinging across his body. She seems more sharp and controlled, her glutes engaged and her silhouette well defined.
Notably, they are not in physical contact. The painting is entitled Lindy hop at the Savoy, and most of the time when people dance lindy hop they are in some kind of physical contact. But there are occasional moments of complete separation and that is what the artist, Charles Alston, has chosen to depict. Two dancing clearly together but also, at the same time, being themselves.
Alston was born in 1907 in North Carolina, a southern state. At that time the African-American experience was overwhelmingly both southern and rural: 90% were in the south and 80% worked on the land. Charles’ father, Primus, had been born into slavery in 1851. He died in 1910 and five years later Charles migrated north with his mother, Anna, and their new and extended family. Millions of others did the same, travelling northwards and westwards in what we now call the Great Migration. They travelled for both push and pull. The push was economic hardship and the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the south; the pull was the promise of new economic, social and cultural opportunities.
Many found their way to Harlem, at the northern end of Manhattan Island, where a housing crash had made property more affordable than it would otherwise have been. Alston was among them, and he would become an important figure in what was called, at the time, the New Negro Movement. Much of the country still perceived African-Americans as not much more than a source of manual labour. This had to change, and for that to happen it was urgent to present a new idea of what it is to be African-American. Not the old prejudice.
Often described as a cultural ‘explosion’, today this movement is known as the Harlem Renaissance. (It did not happen exclusively in Harlem, or even NYC, but that is nevertheless the name we tend to use today.) Artists, poets, writers, actors, musicians, activists and politicians used the new opportunities enabled by the metropolis to express and assert their identity. One especially central figure was poet, writer and social activist Langston Hughes:
Harlem
Langston Hughes, 1951
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?The painter Aaron Douglas wrote to Hughes. “Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era… let’s bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it.”1 This was the agenda and Douglas showed the way. His Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction is monumental, 3.5m wide and biblical in scope. In the background (left of centre) is the withdrawal of the Union soldiers from the South, which marked the end of post-slavery reconstruction and left African-Americans vulnerable to new violence and institutionalised segregation. Arriving in their place are the Ku Klux Klan, painted as somehow both shadowy and white at the same time. Musicians play traditional instruments, while a preacher, holding a lamp to show the way, points to the metropolis.
Notice that the preacher points from left to right. Since this is the same direction as we read, and also how we mark time on the x-axis of graphs, we intuitively read his point as temporal as well as physical. The past is on the left, the future is forwards: upwards and to the right. Douglas used this same left-to-right, bottom-to-top presentation of time in other paintings. In Aspiration, wrists in chains are at the bottom, and factories and skyscrapers of the city are in the top right. That is where African-Americans must go, to work and, in particular, to assert their rightful identity as Americans. In the Harriet Tubman Mural, women working the land under slavery are on the left; Tubman, an activist who escaped slavery and campaigned for abolition, is front and centre, breaking her chains; and on the right, again in the future, are readers and the city. Education and opportunity.
A 2024 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Harlem Renaissance & Transatlantic Modernism, showed how artists of the Harlem Renaissance were self-conscious in using modernist art forms to assert a modern self-identity. The museum followed up with Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, a 2025 exhibition launched at the Met Gala. Many celebrities attended in outfits consciously inspired by the Harlem Renaissance, when the norm to dress very well for social occasions as soon as you could possibly afford it.
Cities were themselves changing at the same time. Electricity, cameras, radio, trains and cars had recently arrived; televisions and even airports would soon follow. Factories were mastering processes of automation, creating new products and steady work — but also a sort of unforgiving relentlessness. The pace of life was already fast and seemed to be getting ever faster. One reason we know that this feeling was real was that it was satirised in mass entertainment, most famously in the film Modern Times, where the repetition of factory work sends Charlie Chaplin’s character slightly mad.
Technology & swing
Modernity was critical to the advent of swing. Jazz has its origins in New Orleans at the turn of the century, and Charleston appears in the 1920s, also in the south (Charleston is a port city in South Carolina). But swing, as a distinctive form of jazz, is part of the Harlem Renaissance, maturing in the 1930s in the dynamic and fast moving urban centres of the north.
To hear some of the difference, compare these three versions of the same song. The first is led by Paul Whiteman, a very influential figure in early jazz whose popularity faded with the advent of swing. The second is in a similar style to Whiteman and I’ve added it here because, as a contemporary version, the sound quality is much better. The third, recorded live at the Savoy Ballroom in 1939, swings hard.
Without going into musical theory as such, the key contrast to notice is in the rhythm. The first two versions here have a tuba delivering an oompa-oompa sound on every other beat. (It’s not really possible to inhale fast enough to play the tuba on every beat.) This contributes to an up-down, ‘vertical’ feeling. It marches. But in Ella Fitzgerald’s version the double bass, guitar and drums combine to produce a chug-chug-chug sound that marks each beat, while a gentle shuffle from cymbals and snare drum give a sense of steady, side-to-side repetition. The net effect is that instead of a stop-start march, the rhythm hums like a machine. It echoes the sounds and experiences of the modern metropolis.
The quintessential technology of the moment were trains, all power, speed and new possibility. Advertisers used them as symbols of aspiration, music echoed their sound. Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo opens as an arriving locomotive and once the listener climbs aboard the rhythm is smooth. It sounds like comfort. The lyrics speak of convenience and ease: “You leave the Pennsylvania station ‘bout a quarter to four; Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore; Dinner in the diner, nothin’ could be finer; Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina”. From where we are now it seems rather innocent, even corny, but it was sincere and the song was a huge hit. Trains were new freedom, and swing is what they sounded like.
“All aboard, get on the A train…”, sang Fitzgerald, “..Soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem”. The song was written in 1939, by Billy Strayhorn for the Duke Ellington orchestra, a few years after the extension of the NYC Subway that created the A train had been completed — it’s the red line in the map below, also from 1939 — and with this the primary locus of African-American cultural life was suddenly much more reachable than before. Most African-Americans in NYC lived in Brooklyn and the A train was their first direct connection to Harlem. And its nicest parts too: Sugar Hill was (still is) one of Harlem’s more affluent neighbourhoods. Trains had moved many people north in the Great Migration. Now they could get you to Sugar Hill.
Swing is a well-chosen word for this music: balance, rhythm and release all in one plain syllable. In sport (golf, boxing, tennis, baseball) athletes do years of training for a reliable and mechanically efficient swing, but in that case it is just one individual. It is a different challenge when each component part is under the control of a different person, such as in a band.
Between 2011 and 2014 Wynton Marsalis gave a series of lectures at Harvard University. Marsalis is artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in NYC. Swing, he argued, “is the art of balance, of constant compromise and assertion”. He elaborates in his book Moving To Higher Ground: “Every beat requires musicians to reassess their relationship to one another… You are forced to be constantly aware of other people’s feelings… No one person can control the ebb and flow.”2 Swing sounds like an efficient moving machine, and to do it well demands a balance of ‘me’ and ‘we’.
I do not think it is a coincidence that this sound appeared as part of the Harlem Renaissance. Of all people, those whose entry into modern life and market driven economies was most sudden and dramatic were African-Americans newly arrived in the fast changing cities of the early 20th century. Their elders had lived experience of slavery, and even after abolition many lives were still lived on the land, most days similar to the one before. But those now in the city found themselves in the most worldly, socially complicated, technologically advanced and fastest moving places on Earth. This is the nexus — African-American migration and machine-driven modernity — in which swing first emerged.
The meaning of a swing out
Like the music, swing dance has some of this historical context embedded into its physical form. The defining feature of lindy hop is a shape, once called the ‘breakaway’ and now called a ‘swing out’, in which the couple briefly stretch apart before coming back together.3 It’s quite difficult for a supposedly ‘basic’ dance step, because each dancer’s own movements are very dependent on the other’s momentum. But that’s the point! Swing demands constant assertion and adjustment with another. This negotiation has to be present in the foundations of the dance.
One of the most influential lindy hoppers of the present day, Skye Humphries, puts it this way:
Built into the structure of the dance is this breakaway, which compared to other partner dances, where you would be experiencing yourselves as one unit moving around,… It feels like it mirrors jazz in the sense that you get this kind of whole from the interaction of individuals, in a way that some other kinds of music don’t get and other kinds of dances don’t really get. To me, that’s always struck me as one of the most important and definitive things about lindy hop, that it has that interplay between the individual and the whole.4
The clip below is widely regarded as the first recorded footage of the dance, exactly because it is the first time we see the breakaway on film. It’s 1929 and this is a little dance competition in a short film called After Seben. (‘Seben’ is probably an accented spelling of ‘Seven’: the film is about a night time bar in Harlem.) Many of the signature motifs of lindy hop are not yet present. The dancing is not yet prototypical of what lindy hop would soon be. However, two of the couples do show the critical innovation of the breakaway.
The third couple here are George Snowden and Mattie Purnell. We don’t know much about Purnell and her possible influence: she passed away young, in 1930. But Snowden certainly was a major influence on the early development of lindy hop and an inspiration to many younger dancers in the ballrooms of Harlem.
The most important of these ballrooms was The Savoy, one of the first racially integrated social institutions in all America. Everybody who has written or spoken about cultural life in NYC at that time mentions it, and it’s remarkable how many visual artists of the era made The Savoy a subject of their work. One example is Alston’s painting at the top of this essay.5 Here are four more:
Some of the best Savoy dancers were recruited to work in the growing film and theatre industry. The pinnacle of their work is a clip in a 1941 film called Hellzapoppin’. Originally a stage show, it’s was turned into surrealist musical comedy interspersed with gags and set pieces, one of which is a lindy hop routine that is now far better known and more celebrated than the film itself. The dancing starts at 2m26s, but watch from the beginning.
I remember the first time I saw this clip: lunchtime of the first all-day dance workshop I ever attended. It was 2005 and I remember asking myself why they’d artificially speeded it up. I was amazed to learn they hadn’t.
And the obvious question about the outfits? It’s simple old-skool racism. Since the primary target audience for the film were familiar with seeing African-Americans as maids, cooks, waiters and mechanics, that’s how they were dressed for the dancing set piece. The lindy hop was born in a period of new economic and cultural opportunities, but that does not mean that the poison of racial stereotype was dissolved.
There are a few things worth noticing if you watch Hellzapoppin’ more than once. One detail I especially admire is when Frances Jones’ hairpiece comes loose. She pulls it out and tosses it aside so much in the rhythm that it seems like part of the routine itself. Play the clip from 2m45s and keep your eyes on her arms.
A second important detail is that, although the performance is full of air steps, the dancing does not lose its horizontal energy. Not at all. Look in particular at Ann Johnson and Frankie Manning, the fourth couple to dance. They begin with two swing outs that move in and out like a smooth, well-oiled piston. Then they do two air steps — ‘Around The Back’ and a shape I know as ‘The Snatch’ — which are made spectacular not so much by their height but more by their sideways force. She throws herself at him, look how much ground she covers! Anthropologist Joel Dinerstein argues, very persuasively to me, that through its combination of air steps and horizontal motion the lindy hop reflected the social and technological moment: “a mix of skyscraper aspirations and steady locomotive power”.6
Continuous, reliable energy is critical to swing dance of all kinds. Go to some classes and after you have learned the basic steps and rhythms this is what you will hear: maintain a consistent bounce. Bend your knees, keep the centre of gravity low. Try not to fight momentum. Embrace and enjoy the stretch. We teach and preach these skills because they are essential to doing the dance well, and the reason they are essential to doing the dance well is because they are essential tools for merging your own movements with those of another — which is the whole point. Self expression as active social participation.
Lindy hop historian Terry Monaghan believed that this joint self-expression made lindy hop “really the first new form of partnering” in dance. He elaborated in an article with Karen Hubbard:
The lindy hop was the first noteworthy African American dance to be created in the North as opposed to being brought from the South as part of the turn-of-the-century Great Migration… independently and jointly sustaining a combined interactive rhythmic response to swing music, the new lindy hoppers made a major contribution to transforming the way these dancing African Americans not only saw each other but also how other blacks and whites perceived them. Defining individual expression in the context of working closely with another person (i.e. thus revealing its true jazz character) enabled the lindy hop to make such a dramatic impact.7
And it turns out that when you do this — when you pursue individual expression in the context of working closely with another person — the main emotional register it creates is joy. Try it some time. It changed my life.
Swing dance is not nostalgia
Swing became a national obsession, even a global sensation. It is not exaggeration to say that it was the first real ‘pop’ music. The new mass technologies of radio and vinyl meant that it was available everywhere, and young Americans of the 1930s and early 1940s became the first in the nation’s history to have something like a shared musical experience while growing up. Other swing dances emerged too, such as balboa, born in the dance halls of southern California, and St Louis shag.
As the 1940s became the 1950s, trends began to change, as they always do. Bebop was the new thing in jazz and bebop is far less conducive to dancing than swing. Dancers and musicians returned from war and started families, a new phase in their lives. Homes now had TVs. Entertainment options diversified. The Savoy Ballroom, which had opened in 1926, closed in 1958 and was demolished a year later to make space for new housing.8 Count Basie described the moment in language normally reserved for a funeral: “With the passing of the Savoy Ballroom, a part of show business is gone. I feel about the same way I did when someone told me the news that Bill Robinson was dead”.9 Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson was the best known and most celebrated black entertainer in the first half of the 20th century, and had died a decade earlier in 1949.
Swing dance did not disappear altogether. Performance troupes continued to work, albeit in smaller venues than before, competitions still happened, and people danced at family and social occasions. But swing was no longer the mass market, mainstream phenomenon it had been. As more decades passed, musicians and dancers from the original era began to pass away, as did the architects and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Alston died of cancer in 1977.
Nobody was writing new swinging tunes about trains and metro lines anymore. Musically creative African-Americans instead founded several more brilliant genres: rhythm & blues, soul, funk, motown, disco, hip hop and more. Swing influences these sounds in real, substantial ways, and the most aware pioneers of those later decades knew and respected what their predecessors had achieved. Stevie Wonder, for instance: “Here are some of music’s pioneers that time will not allow us to forget now; For there’s Basie, Miller, Satchmo and the king of all, Sir Duke; And with a voice like Ella’s ringing out there’s no way the band could lose”.10
A new resurgence of interest in swing dance began in the 1980s, led by younger dancers who had no special connection to the Harlem Renaissance, but who were inspired and motivated by what they had seen in old films. This resurgence is sometimes called a ‘revival’ but that is not really right: lindy hop had never died. These new dancers did, however, generate a new impetus, with its own story and dynamics.
There are now dedicated communities in every large city and thousands of smaller places too. They say (I have not been myself) that the single largest local scene in the world today is in Seoul, South Korea. The lindy hop has globalised. This process has now been going on for longer than the original swing era and, as then, it has been strongly shaped by new technologies, in this case the internet, YouTube, social media and the growth of mass travel. Something similar seems to have happened with tango, salsa and other partner dances that, like swing, first emerged in specific social and cultural contexts and then experienced a surge of new interest in the 1970s and 1980s.
Modernity utterly changed the psychological experience of being human. Scientific discoveries stripped away at any vanity we might have about our place in the universe: the Earth is much older than religious texts say it is, we are a species of great ape, and the universe is far bigger than you can imagine. Advances in medicine made disease far less common, lifespans longer and childbirth much safer, while at the same time nuclear war and environmental destruction became salient possibilities. New communication technologies, from the telegraph to social media, changed the nature of human interaction. Economic competition became an ordinary feature of daily life. Individual autonomy became both more possible and more expected. The Harlem Renaissance was triggered when a people whose lives were pre-modern in several important respects, and who were perceived by a large part of society as being good for nothing more than manual labour, chose to show, as a matter of urgent and high importance, how, on the contrary, they are as modern as anyone — if not even more so! And swing was one critical way in which they did this.
Some people, including some contemporary swing dancers, seem to think of lindy hop as a ‘vintage’ dance, akin to something like civil war reenactment or other forms of cosplay. Certainly it is great fun to do and entertaining to watch. But if that is all you see, or all you aim for, I think you miss the real point. Swing is not about the past. Swing is, and has always been, about now: it is about expressing yourself under modernity’s consistent pressures of time, rhythm, change and the expectation of dynamic social participation. The creatives who made this dance just encountered these realities in an especially dramatic manner that we should not be nostalgic about. They left us with tools for surviving it.
Further reading & other sources
I’ve been dwelling on the themes of this essay for several years now. Below is a list of sources that helped advance my thinking. I’d like to make special mention of the Dinerstein book: thank you to Syke Humphries and Sean Hall for recommending it to me.
I have an extended presentation prepared on these themes, including more beautiful paintings. If you want me to come to your city or event to talk about it, please get in touch!
Books
Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop. 2007, Cynthia Millman & Frankie Manning.
Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. 1994, Marshall Stearns & Jean Stearns.
Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life. 2008, Wynton Marsalis & Geoffrey Ward.
Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century. 2015, John Higgs.
Swing Dancing. 2011, Tamara Stevens & Erin Stevens.
Swing, That Modern Sound. 2001, Kenneth Bindas.
Swinging The Machine: Modernity, Technology & African American Culture Between The World Wars. 2003, Joel Dinerstein.
Swingin’ at The Savoy. The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer. 1996, Norma Miller & Evette Jensen.
The Visual Blues. 2014, Natalie Mault (Ed.).
Film & TV
Jazz. 2001, Ken Burns.
The Spirit Moves: A History of Black Social Dance on Film, 1900-1986. 1987, Mura Dehn.
Digital
Authentic Jazz Dance (Harri Heinila)
Swungover (Bobby White)
The Track (Ryan Swift)
Wandering & Pondering (Jerry Almonte)
Welcome To The Savoy (Sharon Davis)
Academic papers
Crease, R. (1995). Divine frivolity: Hollywood representations of the lindy hop, 1937-1942. In: K. Gabbard (Ed.), Representing Jazz (pp. 207-228).
Hubbard, K. & Monaghan, T. (2009). Negotiating compromise on a burnished wood floor: Social dancing at the Savoy. In: J. Malnig (Ed.), Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social & Popular Dance Reader (pp. 126-145).
Wade, L. (2011). The emancipatory promise of the habitus: Lindy hop, the body, and social change. Ethnography, 12(2), 224-246.
This line is quoted in a lot of sources online. I haven’t (yet) been able to pin down its original provenance.
p.40.
Some people use ‘breakaway’ and ‘swing out’ to mean two different things: in a breakaway the couple fully separate, even if just for a short period of time; whereas in a swing out they retain some connection, commonly the leader’s left hand with the follower’s right. Others seem to use the two terms interchangeably, as I have done here. See, for instance, the Skye Humphries quotation in this essay.
Alston was a regular at the Savoy: “I used to go there every night; it was routine. Before you went home, you looked in the Savoy. I knew the manager, so it didn’t cost me anything. So I knew Ella Fitzgerald when she was a kid.” Quotation from this interview.
Quotation from the Dinerstein book, p.267.
Hubbard was a Professor of Dance at the University of North Carolina. Monaghan played a key role in the resurgence of interest in lindy hop in the 1980s. The quotation is from Hubbard & Monaghan, 2009.
The exact reason why it closed at that moment is somewhat unclear. See: Harri Heinila, ‘The end of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom — observations and explanations for reasons’.
I’ve taken this quote from the Wikipedia page on the Savoy Ballroom.
‘Satchmo’ was Louis Armstrong’s nickname.