Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  To this day, many believers in musical mythologies place the birth of a distinctly American sound and style within Congo Square. If it served as the birthplace of anything, however, as the nineteenth century slid toward the twentieth, it was of mixed messages and misheard phrases, of cultural preservation achieved only after a rape and a fight. The questions its legends raise about where “public” ends and “private” begins, and about how the longings of observers—the audience—shape the meanings of both popular music and eroticism, remain crucial to this day. New Orleans has continued to produce and inspire artists who have put eroticism up front in their work while scrambling its transmitters, making the listener’s own dirty mind complicit in the process.

  Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” recorded in 1955 in the famous J&M studio just down the street from the then-dormant Congo Square, was fully pornographic until Richard and a Creole woman named Dorothy LaBostrie changed its sex-manual verses into code. “If it don’t fit, don’t force it,” the original said, offering advice the way the old Creole songs did, but going further, as the twentieth century did. “You can grease it, make it easy.” That sentiment somehow remains implicit in Richard’s indelible nonsense whoop: “a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” Feeling its deeper meaning, conveyed through the ululations of a singer who can seemingly shake his own ass with the force of his vocal cords, causes the listener to recognize herself as an observer who reads sex into even the clean versions.

  Fast-forward a half century, nearly to the present day. Bounce, a style of music and dance that takes the quadrille’s rum-teacup hip roll to its logical extreme in the motions that Miley Cyrus will come to know as twerking, is starting to sweep the nation. One of twerking’s anthems is a song called “Wop” by the Florida rapper J. Dash—a song connected to “Tutti Frutti” at its central spoke, the word lifted from the beginning of that delightfully nasty nonsense phrase. “Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle WOP!” shouts J. Dash.

  America complies. Viral videos of women and men twerking—including Cyrus—flood the Internet. The impulse to dance that mixed up America in the first place has reached its logical conclusion. Or so it seems—but this is a harkening back as well, to the many variations on those first, centuries-old attempts to say through the body what remains off-limits, unless music loosens the rules.

  In 2016, the African American Queen of Pop, Beyoncé Knowles, released the song “Formation,” an anthem aiming to inspire a new generation of civil rights activists whose first stirrings could be seen after Hurricane Katrina devastated many parts of New Orleans—and Congo Square—eleven years earlier. The video, directed by Melina Matsoukas, builds a dream collage of the Crescent City through images exposing its African American cultural understructure. Beyoncé poses as a quadroon in a corset and a bounce dancer in booty shorts; she declares herself the inheritor of a Creole culture that is steeped in blackness. The voice of bounce’s emblematic figure, the six-foot-three Big Freedia, booms: “I came to slay, bitch!” “Formation” makes clear that in this century, no white observer can adequately speak for those dancers in the square, who had voices, too.

  Many greeted Beyoncé’s reclamation as long overdue, but few noted how long: at least two centuries had passed since those unnamed slaves Thomas Nicholls observed had helped their mistresses in and out of their shoes, so that the white ladies could learn routines increasingly redolent of Africa, perhaps while their servants snuck away to try out some French steps of their own. In that long span, countless dances had been danced, many identities blended and forced apart. The taboo baby had grown up and become a matriarch.

  2

  THAT DA DA STRAIN

  SHIMMYING, SHAKING, SEXOLOGY

  © The New York Public Library

  NEW YORK, 1900–1929

  Two years before Sidney Bechet was born into the jazz cradle of New Orleans, Walter H. Ford sat down more than a thousand miles away to write a sketch that would appeal to theatergoers all across America. Ford was a mainstay of the New York popular music scene, a lyricist who would go on to write many successful songs. In 1895, though, he was just an aspiring vaudevillian about to hit the road with his partner, Frankie Francis. We know little about the relationship between Ford and Francis—in 1898, he dedicated the heartsick “Don’t Ask Me to Forget” to her—but the little play Ford wrote, which the pair performed everywhere from San Francisco to Trenton, reveals something about what he thought a good lover should do. Entitled “The Tryst,” it sparkled with the light of a new dawn of sexual expressiveness.

  “The Tryst” takes the form of a travesty, one of the major set pieces in turn-of-the-century vaudeville. Travesties made quick fun of more highfalutin art forms like opera and Shakespearean drama. In their little parody set in the mountains of Andalusia, Ford and Francis played two couples: the young Dolores, in love with a Spanish outlaw, Manuel Cortez; and her spinster aunt and chaperone, Miss Fitt, who foils the chances of a silly suitor, J. Cornwallis Cobb. The latter pair get the skit rolling with broad jokes about each other’s unattractiveness:

  MISS FITT: Are you sick?

  COBB: Sick! Madam, I was singing.

  MISS FITT: I wondered what had made that milk turn sour.

  And later:

  COBB: What’s your name?

  MISS FITT: Fitt. F-I-Double T-Fitt.

  COBB: Married or single?

  MISS FITT: Single!

  COBB: Oh, I see you’re a “mis-fit.” [Miss Fitt enters through door.] Well, I see you look the part.1

  Singing and dancing are central activities in “The Tryst.” Dolores and Manuel do both naturally, as part of their sexy courtship. Mr. Cobb and Miss Fitt, in contrast, threaten harm with their attempts. Cobb’s warbling of the sentimental ballad “After the Ball” horrifies Miss Fitt; her thunking balletic leaps, according to Cobb, make her look like a wooden horse on a merry-go-round. The younger couple’s love ends dramatically when Manuel, hit by a bullet, dies in Dolores’s arms, but it is love, sensual and fully realized. Cobb and Fitt, the cuckold and the virgin, bumble offstage unsatisfied.

  Ford and Francis appeared on programs alongside Arabian acrobats and Irish character comedians, bird imitators and bicycle tricksters, and spectacular ladies such as Adele Purvis Onri, who dazzled with “illuminated rolling globe and rainbow dances.”2 This was entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century—a sensational hodgepodge designed to titillate, if not outright shock, the paying public. Minstrelsy was still popular, both reinforcing racism and, when performed by African Americans, occasionally subverting it. But sex—and sexual facility in particular—was rivaling race and other identity differences as entertainment’s central subject.

  The key connection Ford and Francis made between connubial and musical success would come to dominate popular culture in the early years of the next century. As the Victorian age ended, old hierarchies gave way to a new openness about the body, sex, and in particular, marital relationships. The Victorian “domino theory of sex,” as the sociologist Steven Seidman calls it, encouraged repression by warning that unleashed desire would become insatiable.3 In the 1900s, dancing replaced dominoes: the idea arose that sexual desire could be managed through the skillful mastery of steps, in sensitive partnerships that resembled the duets heard on the vaudeville stage or the highly expressive couple dances that moved from birthplaces like New Orleans into every café, rooftop club, and cabaret in cities growing up from coast to coast.

  Contemporary historians have refuted the image of Victorians as utterly buttoned down; they enacted their own version of bawdiness behind closed doors. But sexuality in America really opened up at the turn of the twentieth century. Before 1900, premarital sex as a concept was almost completely linked to men frequenting prostitutes; in contrast, 40 percent of women born after 1900 reported having sex before marriage. Birth control became a social cause in the 1910s as both the basis of family planning and an unsanctioned aid for the young independent women flooding into cities looking f
or work and new ways of living. Not long before this, sexology emerged as a scientific discipline, supporting a paradigm shift in the definition of marriage: instead of an arrangement that made families possible, matrimony became the central intimate partnership in couples’ lives, expected to serve all emotional and physical needs. Intimacy and satisfaction weren’t new to people in the first decades of the twentieth century, but these pursuits felt new.

  For all of this seemingly sudden frankness and freedom about sex, people still did not act out their lusts in public—except within the symbolic realms of music and dance. There, as Irving Berlin succinctly stated in his 1911 hit, everybody was doin’ it. From 1900 through the Jazz Age in the 1920s, a syncopated, hip-shaking revolution took place. Dance floors groaned under the weight of hugging partners doing the Charleston, the tango, and other “nasty” routines. Songwriters pursued the meaty topics of fleshly hunger and abandon. Women artists in particular acted out the changes happening in society, and the blues, which came into vogue as early as 1921, stated the terms of women’s desire in language that would make today’s hip-hop-savvy pop stars blush.

  Fundamental to all these developments was the idea that music and dance could pull out what propriety and morality fought to repress, and that in doing so, it would remake the very bodies of Americans. From this point on, popular music became the orgone box that would help people locate, free, and recharge their sexual fire.

  I WANT TO SHIMMIE

  The 1890s was a time of sexual crisis, with divorce rates on the rise and women rapidly becoming more independent and forthright about their needs. Courtship and marriage needed a remodel to keep women happy and allow men to retain domestic authority. This mandate made for what sociologist Steven Seidman calls a new “culture of eroticism”: a variety of new customs and practices celebrating skill and finesse in the love act.

  The nation’s literal loosening of the hips began about a decade before the century turned. In 1893, the Chicago World’s Fair offered an attraction that allowed thousands of Americans to see a dance technique—allegedly new to America—demonstrated by bespangled Arabic women in the Midway’s Algerian Village. The twenty-three-year-old theater producer Sol Bloom imported the dancers after seeing them at a similar fair in Paris.4 Bloom realized he had a gold mine the minute he saw the women in Paris, immigrants like his own Jewish family, shaking and swerving in their coin necklaces and harem pants. He even wrote a song, “The Streets of Cairo,” that would forever be associated with the belly roll.

  All the girls in France

  Do the hootchie-kootchie dance

  And the way they shake

  It could really kill a snake

  When the snake is dead

  They will tie it ’round their head . . .

  Bloom’s Algerian Village dancers became a living channel reintroducing and exoticizing customs that had actually come to America as part of the slave journey. Paradoxically, this made these dances feel more accessible to nonblack Americans. Parisian “can-can” girls were already popular in 1893, but their leggy high kicks seemed almost coy next to the pelvic thrusts and rolls of the dancers who in fairgoers’ minds merged into one performer: the fun and racy harem girl “Little Egypt.” Transferred to an imagined Araby, the dances that had frightened white observers of African Americans became both mystical and anthropological. As this “hootchie-kootchie” mutated to eventually become the shimmy-shake—the basis of most popular dances in the 1920s—it would wear many disguises: a Hawaiian grass skirt, an Egyptian queen’s robe, a Ziegfeld girl’s sequined leotard. Absorbed and incorporated into dance crazes like the Charleston, the shimmy-shake and the ragged, often florid music that inspired it would always serve the same purpose: to make eroticism accessible to even the most fumble-footed dance-floor (or bedroom) novice.

  The hootchie-kootch, after all, was an orgasm: the first publicly displayed enactment of sexual excitement and satisfaction in mainstream America. Here’s a description of the Algerian Village dancers from the journalist Marian Shaw, who traveled to the Fair in 1893: “A girl dressed in a soft, clinging transparent skirt sways. She trembles with violent emotion, the orchestra plays with furious fervor, she undulates and quivers in what might be called an ecstasy of delirious delight.”5

  Bloom’s Algerian Village dancers inspired a craze that took over midways and urban dens where men gathered. Several performers—some Middle Eastern, some not—took the name Little Egypt and made it a vehicle for infamy. Ashea Wabe, born Catherine Devine in Montreal, scandalized Manhattan when a police raid stopped her performance at a high-society dinner in 1896. An early Phonoscope film captured Fatima Djemille, a Coney Island boardwalk dancer, shaking her gold coin–covered costume that same year. “Little Lillian, toe danseuse,” a child of about ten, did the hootchie-kootch in full costume in a 1903 film, while “Princess Rajah” capped her recorded 1904 routine by balancing a chair between her teeth. The Syrian-born Fahreda Mazhar, who danced at the Chicago fair at another concession, the Streets of Cairo, held on to the role most tenaciously, performing for years and even filing a copyright-violation suit against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for featuring a Little Egypt character in the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld.6

  These early “belly dancers” are often credited as the mothers of the striptease. That clothes-shedding bump and grind factors heavily into the history of red-light eroticism in America, but until the late twentieth century, such behavior remained mostly hidden within the shuttered world of adult entertainment in saloons and brothels. The hootchie-kootch was different and mattered more, because it could go anywhere—anyone could do it. And by the early 1900s, it was everywhere, an instant signifier of a new era in sexual expressiveness for men and women both. “I’ve got the River Jordan in my hips, and all the women is rarin’ to be baptized!” declared the vaudeville star Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham from stages all over the country in the early 1920s. He was right about women’s desires, but wrong to think this particular flood needed to be unleashed by a man.

  In the 1910s and 1920s, hip- and shoulder-rolling dances and the music that inspired them—not Middle Eastern music, but the rollicking stuff coming out of African American social clubs and Storyville pleasure palaces—would become a means for millions of average Americans to get in touch with their own wild sides. Once people started looking, they found versions everywhere. The shimmy—the name that took over from hootchie-kootch in the 1920s, describing a motion that connected the shoulders to the hips—was never simply a dance. It was a moving manifesto about dance’s very purpose and about sexuality’s place in public life. The shimmy requires artfulness and discipline, but not rigidity; it’s grounded in the flesh and the firm ground beneath the dancer’s feet. Unlike dances inspired by ballet or the European court, the shimmy doesn’t reach for some ethereal ideal. Moving the torso from neck to tailbone, the dancer directly engages with the physical seat of sexuality—just as a marriage manual might instruct him or her to do in the bedroom, but in public. Learning new dances became a way to show you were open to learning new ways to love.

  The music for these dances would quickly settle into genres—Tin Pan Alley, blues, and jazz—but early on, the style that carried forward its spirit was ragtime. In ragtime, the intermingling of African and European elements that surreptitiously fed the antebellum quadrille was right out in the open. The bandleader and composer James Reese Europe, a star of the style who died tragically young, once called it “a fun name given to Negro rhythm by our Caucasian brother musicians many years ago.” This possibly self-protective remark downplayed the major leap represented by the fact that whites would name a Negro source at all.7 Though it’s remembered through the signature compositions of Europe, Scott Joplin, and Jelly Roll Morton, ragtime was more a revolutionary rearrangement of elements than a set of songs. To “rag” a song was to syncopate: to superimpose an irregular rhythm atop a more straightforward one. Ragtime chronicler Terry Waldo has noted that the term has two meanings—to “rag time” was
to rip up a song’s meter, but “ragging” was also slang for teasing, and, Waldo writes, “the music does just that—it teases the listener. It’s full of surprises—unexpected rhythmic shifts and harmonies.” Ragtime made the beat music’s most essential and exciting element, opened up space for improvisation, and used the pentatonic melodies and harmonies that are at the heart of the blues.8

  Free play and precision met in ragtime, making it the ideal musical engine for listeners’ sensual explorations through dance. This was a technique to be personally explored, not unlike those recommended by the new scientists in the field of sexology, whose expertise Americans were suddenly seeking. We now think of ragtime primarily as the music in whorehouses—the Storyville establishments where Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton learned their trade—but ragtime was everywhere, including in the home. By the late 1910s the educational entrepreneur Axel Christensen had fifty ragtime schools around the country, advertised in his newsletter, the Ragtime Review. Magazines also ran monthly instructions on mastering the style. These lessons put a musical frame around the same lessons people were trying to learn in romance: how to activate one’s inner rhythms and respond to another’s rhythm, too.9

  OH, THE FUNNY FEELING

  The turn of the twentieth century remodeled courtship and marriage, as new customs like the Niagara Falls honeymoon celebrated mastery of the love act and manuals advocated foreplay and the most pleasurable sex positions.10 Works like Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening and James Herne’s drama Margaret Fleming depicted tragedy befalling sexually unfulfilled heroines or treacherous men. Extramarital lust became a public preoccupation, whether condemned in “fallen woman” melodramas or giggled about in songs like “Ma Says I Can’t Go for a Ride.”