Good morning peeps!! You already know that, "I love music, any kind of music, long as it's grooving..." but, I also love to dance! The two go hand in hand of course. In my parallel universe, I was a "Solid Gold Dancer" like Darcel Wynn; memba her! Tripping back down memory lane, I can recall the many dance records and dances from my youth. The Two-Step, The Twist, The Madison, The Stroll, The Bop, The Mashed Potatoes, The Swim and The Pony to name a few, were from my really early years of dancing. That's when we were glued to the TV set watching American Bandstand.
Next phase: The years of The Motown Sound and The Philly Sound ushered in a new set of dances: Remember The Jerk (the original one), The Hitch Hike, The Monkey, The Boston Monkey, The Boogaloo, The Philly Dog, The Wobble, and The Twine? Now I know that many of these dances might have been local or regional favorites, but often, when a singing group picked up the dance and created a song around it, the dance became more widespread. The Twist is an example of this. Although it was first performed by the original creator of both the dance and song, Hank Ballard and The Midnighters; it was Chubby Checker's version that achieved world-wide fame and became an international dance sensation! To this day, even young children pick up this dance and work it! I taught it to my class of Kindergarten and First grade students, who performed it on stage, to the delight of everyone.
Moving into the Disco era, dancing re-emerged as an important social activity. In my East Harlem neighborhood, we were doing a latin dance called The Palladium. We had no knowledge of the club by the same name...we just knew how to do this particular dance to the Latin music that we all listened to at the time.
This style of dancing evolved into The Hustle that predominated the dance floor, when Van McCoy recorded a song by the same name, Do The Hustle. However, in the movie Saturday Night Fever, The Hustle was depicted as a line dance. That's not how we did it in the hood. It was also during this phase that line dancing became popular once again, after having all but disappeared from the local scene! If the song, "Moving" by Brass Construction came on, nearly everyone did a line dance very similar to The Electric Slide, called The Bus Stop. Solo dances around this time included The Bump, The Rock, The Freak (or Freaky-Deaky depending on where you were from), The Wop, The Skate and numerous other dances with names I can't recall. And I can't talk about dancing without mentioning the best music and dance show of all time...Soul Train of course! A party ain't a party without a Soul Train line!
Just as the music scene changes, so do the dancing styles. By now, Disco was fading and Hip-Hop was emerging as a dominate force. B-Boys and girls destroyed with their gravity-defying moves! Break dancing! Popping and Locking! The Robot! The Electric Boogaloo! By now, people in my age group had to go to dances given by organizations in order to hear "our" music and do "our" style of dancing. I know you can feel me on this. Oh the dances that have evolved out of The Hip-Hop culture!
Moving on through the eighties and nineties: The Cabbage Patch, The Snake, The Worm, The Running Man, The Pee-Wee Herman, The Charlie Brown. All the line dances that evolved from The Madison...Electric Slide, Mississippi Mud Slide, Cupid Shuffle and on and on and on! Walk It Out y'all, Walk It Out! We have danced into The New Millineum ...What's next? Dancing on the Ceiling for real?
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