Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake by Julie Malnig

“Charlie Love, born later in 1885…recalled playing a different kind of music-’more raggy’-for less fashionable groups in town, where the Eagle Rock, the Buzzard Lope, and the Slow Drag were the favorite dances. I don’t remember the Irish Reel, and I certainly never danced the Slow Drag.’ (In a tactless moment, we had mentioned the Slow Drag, which is danced with Congo hip movements.)” 1890-1900s, Louisiana:

‘As a girl, let me see, back around 1878, I believe I danced the Mazurka, the Polka, the Waltz, and of course, the Quadrille. Alice Zeno, the ninety-five-year-old mother of clarinetist George Lewis…. “While in New Orleans in 1959, we were invited to visit Mrs. I’m providing the direct quotations and film clips where possible, so you (the reader) can also pick out details and more easily do some analysis yourself. What follows is a collection of descriptions and recordings of slow drag. The sections of this article are the examples themselves, followed by some analysis by me, and then some concluding thoughts. Since slow drag is one of the more well-documented dances in the blues family, this article explores several examples of slow drag from film, writing, and interviews, to help us more easily understand some of the similarities and differences within slow drag across time and location. This is particularly relevant for dances like slow drag, which persisted across more than a century, in several different communities, contexts, and to different styles of music.

It was a dance and it was a step.” Īs we seek to understand the boundaries and definitions of slow drag and other social dances, it’s important to leave room for the variations and differences that could have been part of it. The step is still the same step but it changes because the rhythm of the music changes.

In learning a dance, we want to understand it, and we may look for clear-cut rules of what defines a particular dance.īut to quote dance historian Richard Powers, when it comes to social dances, “no one was in charge of steps or terminology…Often I see beginners in dance history being over-specific, saying… ‘The slow drag looked this way.’ But actually what was going on is many different ways of dancing were called that name and one way of dancing would have many different names… It was the perfect mess.” Īnd jazz performer Chester Whitmore said, “You could take a step, and then every 15, 20 years, it changes. It’s easy when thinking about a social dance, like slow drag, to think of it as more specific and more narrowly-defined than it is.

Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake by Julie Malnig