4/28/2023 0 Comments The spanish tingeHa! Ha! White folks yo’all sho is a mess. In a similar fashion, Louis Armstrong would explain to Bing Crosby: ”Ah, swing, well, we used to call it ragtime, then blues -then jazz. Louis Blues” as being non-blues, and even some songs long after were still labeled foxtrots, like many of Washboard Sam’s recordings. ”Memphis Blues” can actually be considered a rag, no musician of the time seems to reject fast versions of ”The St. ![]() What could have changed as well, in similar fashion, are the labels for the music. (Basically, no fun.) After Vernon and Irene, things could have easily found another path in history and their dance could have ended up being called blues dancing. The star couple had a very strict idea of what dancing was all about: no shimmies, no hip movement, no hopping, no dips, no twisting the body and so on since such movements were obviously sinful and disgraceful. It simply demonstrates the complications of trying to find out what is the ”real” way of dancing a dance. Which is, indeed, not a problem by itself. Although the following video doesn’t show us this particular dance, it does present the general movement of the famous dancers.Ī slightly sarcastic but maybe accurate description would be: white people dancing to Afro-American music. The first white craze for blues music exploded around Handy’s composition ”The Memphis Blues” (recorded in 1914) that Vernon and Irene Castle were using to promote the new dance in vogue: the foxtrot. While the dance itself remained obscure, the music started to appear in partitions during the next 20 years or so. This article reaches back in history to try to find some hints about blues’ birth and the meaning it could have for dancing.īack at the beginning of the last centuryīlues music probably appeared somewhere in the 1890’s in Afro-American communities and slowly spread around. ![]() In between lies a big gap in knowledge and a long list of innovations, adaptations and all natural elements contributing to the evolution of any dance. It reminded me that there’s always a difference between how a dance really looked back in the good old days and what we can see in modern competitions and dancefloors. I was then surprised to learn that even long-time dancers or teachers seemed unaware of one of the most important Latin influences on the blues: the Spanish tinge. In the process, after going through quite an unhealthy amount of documentation, I had the chance to give history classes to blues dancers in Montreal and Toronto. ![]() Being very passionate by nature, I started out with this simple motivation but ended up with the desire to write a book on blues history. When I started to dance and DJ, I quickly became interested in the history of American blues music to find out what it could add to the scene. ”The blues were played in New Orleans in the early days very, very slowly, and not like today, but in a Spanish rhythm.” Baby Dodds, musician.
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