by Ann Powers
It was the perfect time for a loosening of the hips.
“The men and women of races spread all over the world have shown a marvelous skill and patience in imparting rhythm and music to the most unlikely, the most rebellious regions of the body, all wrought by desire into potent and dazzling images,” wrote the English sexologist Havelock Ellis in “The Philosophy of Dancing,” published in Atlantic Monthly in 1914. Ellis, in an Orientalist mode, extolled Africa, Polynesia, and ancient Rome as the sites where “dancing is dancing of the body, with vibratory or rotatory movements of breasts or flanks.” Giving a highbrow spin to the scandalous movements of Little Egypt, Ellis encouraged middle-class readers to try a little libertine shake.11 Other magazines illustrated the sexologist’s point with spread after spread of articles on dances of the tropics, the Gypsies, the Far East, and the ancient world.
The hootchie-kootch, absorbed into the shimmy and crossed over to a general public, motivated the turn toward erotic frankness. “Oh, the funny feeling, through my system stealing! What is that? What am I at?” went the lyrics to one popular parody of Bloom’s “Streets of Cairo.”12 That funny feeling was frustration dissolving and desire being worked free, the way muscles could be, through movement inspired by fascinating rhythms. In search of pleasure, Americans explored a dazzling array of new steps. Between 1912 and 1914 alone, at least one hundred dance crazes came and went. Virtually every one of these new styles involved some kind of shimmy shaking. Ragtime entered the home through the piano, and the dances that people attempted in their own parlors began to change. At the same time the advent of mass media—film, recordings, and the celebrity-oriented magazines and newspaper columns that promoted these new diversions—made stars of people whose physical skills amazed, challenging novice dancers in the audience.
Every great vocalist of the era was a dancer, too, and usually a dancer first. Recalling his initial meeting with the great blues pioneer Bessie Smith in Atlanta, Georgia, the songwriter Perry Bradford recalled that he didn’t even know she could sing: “She was doing an act at the time with a partner named Buzzin’ Burton, and they were featuring a dance called Buzzin’ Around,” he told his fellow musician Noble Sissle in a 1957 interview. “Oh, she was a dancer at first!” Sissle exclaimed. “Yes, a whopping good flat foot dancer,” replied Bradford, linking Smith to the anchoring stance that best allows a performer to shimmy and shake.13 Aspiring stars knew that the right moves could win over a crowd more surely than a great voice might. “I seldom depended on my voice to win social recognition,” wrote the theatrical blues queen Ethel Waters of her first teenage performance in a Philadelphia nightclub. “I had developed into a really agile shimmy-shaker. I sure knew how to roll and quiver, and my hips would become whirling dervishes. It was these completely mobile hips, not my voice, that won me friends and admiration.”14
The shimmy also found its way into high society, through opera. Richard Strauss’s Salome, inspired by the Oscar Wilde play, caused a sensation when it debuted in 1905. Its unfettered portrayal of the hootchie-kootch dancer who would have John the Baptist’s head played one night only at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1907, then was banned by the opera’s board of directors for its “repulsive grewsomeness [sic].” The production’s star, the ballerina Bianca Froelich, immediately took her Dance of the Seven Veils to the nearby Lincoln Square Variety Theater, where it became a smash. Broadway’s greatest producer, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., had a version of it in his show by the end of the year. Salome remained a favorite role for African American and white theatrical divas alike, including the pioneering Ada Overton Walker, who performed the role with an elegance that made her a critics’ favorite as well as a sensation. Just as with Little Egypt, an exotic Orientalist veil—seven of them, in Salome’s case—allowed some to turn the shimmy into an intellectual pursuit.15
Hitting the culture on so many different levels, the shimmy was more than a fad: it was a means to self-actualization. The external boundaries that nineteenth-century ballroom dance sometimes broke down became internalized as women, especially, sought to get in touch with themselves on the deepest possible level. Through dance, and the bawdy songs and ragged music that nearly always accompanied it, Americans goaded each other into putting old ways aside in favor of what felt good.
“I don’t want no ‘Hesitation,’ all I crave is syncopation,” sang Bee Palmer in the 1918 song “I Want to Shimmie,” by the interracial songwriting team of Shelton Brooks and Grant Clarke.16 The song, just one of many hits with the dance’s name in the title, enacted what many young white women were dreaming about. An ingénue goes out one weekend, and, by taking a chance on a dance new to her, discovers a route to unanticipated levels of bliss. Clarke’s punning lyrics made light of an outdated version of the waltz, called the “Hesitation” because of its built-in pauses. But everybody got the double entendre. The song’s story of an adventuress looking for more than what an uptight ballroom date could offer pointed to women’s growing outspokenness, especially in matters of love. The freshest stars of the new epoch expressed themselves this way. They were loud, limber, and ready to party.17
Bee Palmer, who grew up in a Swedish family in Chicago, was the shimmy dancer whose image most easily appealed to the society wives and embryonic flappers who frequented Florenz Ziegfeld’s spectacular Broadway shows. Palmer—a Ziegfeld girl herself—radiated health and good nature in her often comical routines. An accomplished pianist and songwriter as well as a dancer, Palmer was what we now often think of as a Jazz Age heroine: a cute sort-of tomboy whose can-do spirit helped her flourish in male-dominated environments. She extolled the shimmy as a boon to good health. “This constant practice from childhood limbered my shoulders, developed my chest, kept my body lithe,” she told a reporter in 1919. “I have seldom been ill. Every muscle in my body is in perfect condition. I can stand a tremendous amount of exercise, of work, without feeling the least fatigue.”18
Many Jazz Age women took up Palmer’s health regimen. Magazines regularly published articles with titles like “Dancing—the Fountain of Youth” and even “Dancing Is Best Exercise Recommended by Football Coaches.”19 Irene Castle, whose elegant routines with her husband Vernon persuaded a whole generation of housewives to try steps they initially found shocking, advised her fans that grace and vigor learned through dancing made women more attractive. “The woman who dances does not need other beauty aids,” she remarked in a dance manual she and Vernon cowrote. “Beauty will seek her . . . for when a woman is dancing, she is happily unconscious, and therefore easily carrying out all the exercises taught by beauty experts.”20
For all its beneficial qualities, the frankness of the shimmy still disturbed many people. Some performers played upon this anxiety. Palmer’s rival Gilda Gray, who grew up in a Polish family in Milwaukee, also claimed to have naturally invented the shimmy as a child. Yet the more vampish Gray saw it as the opposite of wholesome. In a magazine memoir published in 1928, Gray described the first night she did the dance, in a saloon where she was a teenage waitress:
A lean disreputable-looking young man with a cigarette continuously dangling from his lips ran his fingers over the dusty ivory keys . . . Sometimes the patrons were treated to a special concert. On certain gala occasions the lone piano gained company . . . a trombone and a violin. Then the so-called musicians attempted to strum a Negro spiritual. On one of those evenings a girl stepped to the centre of the floor. A girl with yellow hair and blue eyes that tried to laugh upon a cynical world. A girl whose face was thin and white. A girl who stood out there in the limelight; stood singing for her bread and keep. She sang one song. She sang another. The makeshift band played on. There was a primitive strain in their music that night. The girl’s shoulders quivered. Somehow the beat of the blues got into her blood. The sensuous tunes caused her shoulders to vibrate. The mad pulsating rhythm crept under her skin, and shivers ran down her spinal column. Great throbbing shivers. Afterwards they told her that she shook like an aspic jelly, but t
he girl was crying, and tried not to hear . . . for she had been fired! Fired for doing the shimmy!21
While Palmer stuck to adorable flowered dresses and spangled Ziegfeld costumes, Gray often assumed foreign garb: Egyptian, Himalayan (one remarkable photograph shows her with an Asian drummer in “A Tibetan Monastery”), sometimes a strange amalgam of ancient Greek and African. Her interpretation of the shimmy stressed its cathartic qualities, and connected Gray to other celebrity explorers of femininity’s dark side, like the film star Theda Bara and the dancer Alice Eis, whose hypnotic routines with her partner Bert French bore titles like “The Vampire Dance” and “The Dance of the Temptress.” That last one featured Eis, only partially dressed and awash in billowing soapy “sea foam,” enticing French before pulling him under the suds.22
Palmer made the shimmy sweet. Gray reveled in its dangerousness. But even though Palmer sometimes worked with African American musicians, neither shimmy queen talked much about the real source of the dance that made them famous. It was the daring Mae West who unhesitatingly connected it to the thrill and threat of interracial mingling. “We went to the Elite No. 1, and the colored couples on the dance floor were doing the ‘Shimmy-shawobble,’” she wrote in her autobiography. “Big black men with razor-slashed faces, fancy high yellows and beginner browns—in the smoke of gin-scented tobacco to the music of ‘Can House Blues.’ They got up from the tables, got out to the dance floor, and stood in one spot, with hardly any movement of the feet, and just shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises. We thought it was funny and were terribly amused by it. But there was a naked, aching sensual agony about it, too.”23
Mae West didn’t pretend the shimmy had sprung from nowhere the way Palmer and Gray did. Yet the scene she painted made the Elite No. 1 seem as foreign to white audiences as the Algerian Village or Congo Square—a primitive, permissive netherworld separate from the happy homes of the bourgeoisie. White slumming—entering predominantly black spaces in search of otherness—remained part of the process of “participatory minstrelsy,” as the dance scholar Danielle Robinson has called it. Thinking of black, brown, and Middle Eastern people as more salacious than they ever could be, West and her fans took on their moves and also what they thought were their personalities. “Do like the voodoos do, list’ning to a voodoo melody,” Irving Berlin’s 1927 song “Shaking the Blues Away,” a hit for Ruth Etting, explained. “They shake their bodies to and fro, with every shake, a lucky break.”24
African American artists used the shimmy as strategically as possible. Ethel Waters writes of her dancing as a way of reminding fans of her recordings that her voice emanated from a powerfully female body. “I really dressed in beautiful gowns for that act of ours,” she wrote of her Southern tour in the early 1920s. “For my closing number I sang ‘Shake That Thing’ and did a dance for the encore. That was a big surprise to my public, which because of my records, thought of me only as a singer.”25 And Waters’s dancing was definitely provocative. Mistreatment in an Alabama hospital after a 1918 car accident had left her with a lingering leg injury, so she developed a modified, more sizzling approach to the bump and grind that turned out to be even more provocative than her original approach. It became her trademark.26
One of the hits Waters promoted on the road was “That Da Da Strain,” a peppy companion piece to the more gut-wrenching blues music that was beginning to gain popularity. “It will shake you, it will make you really go insane” goes the song’s chorus; the force bringing delirium is the see-sawing ragtime melody itself. Lyricists of the time paid tribute to the music that enabled dancing to get dirtier. “That Da Da Strain,” like the myriad songs about ragtime written by Irving Berlin and other Tin Pan Alley composers, paid tribute to the music that made shimmy shaking possible by carbonating familiar song forms with irresistible rhythm.
Exoticism continued to mask or at least confuse the lineage of the shimmy-shake, though several African American artists made it a trademark. In 1923, Ethel Ridley performed the variation known as the Black Bottom for the first time in a Harlem theater. Alberta Hunter, who tried to copyright the dance, brought it to white audiences in 1925. A white dancer, Ann Pennington, then brought it to Ziegfeld rival George White’s Scandals show in 1926; like Gray and Palmer, she claimed to have invented it.27 Pennington sometimes did the shimmy in Hawaiian garb, taking advantage of a concurrent craze for all things tropical. Gray also often performed in grass skirts and claimed to have been crowned a princess of the Philippines when she visited those islands to film the romance Aloma of the South Seas (actually made in Puerto Rico and Long Island).
Yet even as middle-class white women used the shimmy to become more sexually expressive in private and in public, it continued the thread within African American dance that began in Congo Square and continues wherever anyone drops it like it’s hot. One dancer of the Jazz Age took it as far as the most salacious exhibitionists do today. Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker, the Baltimore-bred “eccentric dancer” who came to Harlem in the mid-1920s and wowed the likes of Duke Ellington with his extreme gyrations, wielded his sexuality as if it were a weapon against propriety, against being assimilated into someone else’s idea of a good time.
Two film clips survive of Tucker doing his astounding routine. One is of Ellington’s “Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life.” Shown mostly in shadow, Tucker dances in an imagined Harlem cabaret. He’s much more visible in the 1930 short subject Crazy House, playing one of the inmates in a comical asylum. He’s dressed all in satin, as he was in his nightclub routine, though a shiny belt replaces the sash that often dangled down to accentuate his pelvis. For two full minutes, Tucker twists and sways, making slow, sinuous movements that point directly to the spot just over the edge of good taste, where Elvis Presley would take his own white Southern hips in the 1950s.
Unlike the women who popularized the shimmy, Tucker seems to have had little interest in rehabilitating the dance, either through anthropological association with a distant land or by extolling it as a healthy way to limber up. Few accounts of Tucker’s life survive, but it seems that he was not one to make nice. Marshall Stearns, later a pioneering jazz and dance historian, was scandalized as a college undergrad when he escorted “an even less worldly Vassar sophomore” to see Ellington at the Cotton Club in the late 1920s and Tucker opened the midnight floor show. “Tucker performed with deadly and what might have been called artistic seriousness, but that did not lessen the impact,” Stearns wrote, declaring Tucker’s routing “a public endorsement of depravity.”28 His date, however, had cheered the routine.
Women, in fact, loved Tucker, perhaps for the very menace Stearns considered corrupting. “He used to say, ‘I am the Snake, the lowest thing on earth,’” noted his fellow dancer James Berry in a French magazine interview published in 1978. “He did not tell it to the public but to all the people backstage—mostly to the girls.” In florid and possibly exaggerated terms, Berry recalled Tucker’s temper, and his “very nasty mouth. Mostly about sex. He used to go round and beat on the door with his penis. On the girls’ door. They’d open the door and there he was, holding it in his hand.”29
Making the genital focal point of the shimmy obscenely explicit, Tucker was, in his way, more honest than most. This reincarnation of the dandified candio, known for bedding multiple women at a time, could never become an American sweetheart like Bee Palmer or even the racier Mae West and Gilda Gray. Tucker paid for his priapic ways, dying of syphilis before turning forty. Yet his insistent sexuality connects the shimmy to later eras, when the veils of humor or exoticism that softened its impact would fall away and the River Jordan in dancers’ hips would be fully released.
APACHE DANCES AND MASOCHISM BLUES
In the steamy late summer of 1925, Charlie Chaplin took Louise Brooks on a date to the Lido. The thirty-six-year-old Hollywood player had come to New York for the August premiere of his movie The Gold Rush, and hung around to begin an affair with the eighteen-year-old Ziegfeld girl, thou
gh he’d left a wife and new baby back in California. Chaplin liked to check out Manhattan’s fancy new nightclubs, and this evening he and Brooks did the town with his assistant and one of her girlfriends. “Swirling in chiffons of pink and blue, Peggy and I danced the tango with them at the Montmartre where the head waiters bowed reverently before Charlie and the haughty patrons pretended that they were not thrilled at the sight of him,” Brooks wrote much later.30 The group also watched the exhibition dances staged to incite and inspire amateurs.
They’d come to the Lido, a very exclusive spot that demanded a five-dollar cover, to see Brooks’s friend Barbara Bennett debut with a new partner, the infamous Latin Lover Maurice Mouvet. The Chaplin party, seated at a front table, gazed with interest at the violence that ensued. “Barbara muffed a step and giggled,” Brooks wrote in her remembrance. “Glaring with rage, Maurice did not kick her then because he was reserving his punishment for their final Apache number at the end of which he sent Barbara skidding on her face to the very edge of the dance floor.”
Six years later, Chaplin was still thinking about that disturbing dance. He mined its mixed messages in the famous nightclub scene in City Lights, his comical critique of urban life, released in 1931.31 The film shows his Little Tramp character trying to break up a couple’s apache routine, which he misinterprets as a dangerous fight. Chaplin found comedy in the unease that complemented the era’s bubbly sexual optimism.
The apache dance (pronounced A-POSH, not like the Native American tribal name) allegedly came from the back alleys of Montmarte in Paris, where the New York–born but Europe-raised Mouvet saw it performed by a street tough and his companion while drinking in a sleazy bar. To a piano waltz, a probable pimp strode toward his woman and grabbed her. “She did not seem willing to dance, but with simple persuasion he raised one of his hands and gave her a smart smack across the mouth,” Mouvet recounted in his 1915 autobiography-cum–instruction booklet, Maurice’s Art of Dancing. “It was a novel way to begin a dance, and I held my breath. She did not seem to resent it. Thoroughly cowed, she submitted to be taken into the middle of the floor, and the peculiarly vicious and savage dance commenced.” After several moves that resembled a fistfight, and one spectacular lift that left the woman dangling upside down over the man’s shoulder, the apache dance ended with the man spinning the woman around, held by her neck, and then roughly discarding her to return to his poker game.