About
Here are the resources for Emily and Vanessa's talk 'How to History', given at Slowdown in 2018.
Emily is a historian, Vanessa is a musician. In their work on dance and music history, they both draw heavily on these backgrounds.
Culture shapes lives.
There were no African Americans before the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A new culture emerged out of the trauma of that history and through traditions made and remade on new shores. This self-creation is everywhere in the day-to-day lives of African Americans. It’s in the food eaten, the languages spoken, the art created, and many other forms of cultural expression.
Held within and passed through families and communities, African American culture reflects beliefs, informs behaviours, fosters creativity, and most of all, sustains the spirit during times of overwhelming adversity.
- Quote from Cultural Expressions (American Express Gallery), African-American History and Culture Museum, D.C.
Recording Quality Samples
Dance Videos for Analysis
The Spirit Moves: A History of Black Social Dance on Film, 1900-1987
Chapter 2, Part 1: The Blues.
Contextual Information
Filmmaker: Maura Dehn (Russian American)
Year: 1987
Dancers:
- Rent Party: whole ensemble dancing (starts 0:58 Of video 1)
- Shake Blues: Sandra Gibson (starts 0:02 of video 2)
- Speak Easy: Leon James, Al Minns, and guest partner (starts 2:27 of video 2)
- Male Shake Blues: Al Minns (starts 5:30 of video 2) Example in ballroom (starts 6:54 of video 2)
- Gutbucket Blues: Sandra Gibson and James Berry (guest artist) video 3
Filming Location:
Source type: Documentary
In original form, the documentary is six hours long, including archival footage from the 50s to the 80s. Only a few institutions have the full film; first three parts (two hours long) released on DVD 2008. There are many clips from The Spirit Moves available on YouTube, and institutions such as ACMI have the film in their collections.
Maura Dehn was Russian, and trained as a ballet dancer. She saw Josephine Baker in Paris in the 1920s, performing Charleston, and was inspired. Dehn moved to New York 1930, went to the Savoy Ballroom soon after, fell in love with jazz, immersing herself in the scene. She decided that she wanted to preserve it for future generations.
The documentary is split into three parts, each prefaced by Dehn, but then letting the footage speak for itself. Part 1 covers the turn of the century to 1950; Part 2 was filmed at the Savoy Ballroom; Part 3 1950-80s, was filmed in a public school.
Dehn wanted to include dancing from the turn of the century, but of course there was no footage, so got Savoy Ballroom dancers to recreate the older styles in a studio; she then used the same format for the modern styles. A separate soundtrack was recorded, due to technology available to her.
Clyde Maxwell Blues:
Contextual Information
Filmmaker: Alan Lomax (White American), John Bishop, and Worth Long
Year: September 3, 1978
Dancers: Bea Maxwell and Lilian Simpson (Clyde Jude Maxwell playing) Dancing starts at 0:55
Filming Location: Maxwell’s farm near Canton, Mississippi
Type: Archival footage
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist (1915-2002). During the 1930s he worked with his father collecting audio recordings and some film recordings throughout the United States for the Library of Congress, with a focus on 'traditional' music. In the 1950s he worked in Europe, returning to the American South in 1959 gathering field recordings focusing on African American music including Blues. Lomax again traveled through the South from 1978 to 1985, this time with a video crew, gathering recordings across the Mississippi Delta and Hill Country, Central and Southern Appalachia, New Orleans, Cajun Louisiana and John Island, South Carolina, with this footage forming the basis of his database of collections as well as the series American Patchwork, on PBS.
Alan Lomax audio archive available online at the Association for Cultural Equity: http://research.culturalequity.org/audio-guide.jsp; videos from Alan Lomax are also on their website, and on a YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/user/AlanLomaxArchive
Juke Joint Blues Dance 1941 (YouTube video name)
The Blood of Jesus, aka The Glory Road
Contextual Information
Filmmaker: Spencer Williams (African American)
Year: 1941
Dancers: Unknown
Filming Location: Unknown (movie studio, Dallas, Texas)
Type: Movie
This is a dance clip from a movie, The a Blood of Jesus, also known as The Glory Road. Written and directed by Spencer Williams (African American) and released in 1941. The movie tagline was 'A Mighty Epic Of Modern Morals'.
The movie is set in the rural South - a ‘godly young woman’ is wounded by her atheist husband. She goes to the crossroads, where she is tempted by an agent of the devil with nice clothes, the city, and entertainment including an acrobat and a jazz singer. She gets a job at a juke joint, but has a moral crisis about whether she has chosen the right path and flees back to the crossroads. However she is mistaken for a pickpocket, and is chased by a group of men. At the crossroads Satan is waiting for her with a jazz band on a flatbed truck. She is protected by an angel, who drives the mob away, and wakes, healed, and is reunited with her husband, who has embraced religion.
The movie is 57 minutes long, and was produced in Texas with a $5,000 budget. It screened in cinemas and black churches, and was a commercial success, which led to Williams being offered a ten year contract to produce eight more films with the company, including two more religious ones.
This Youtube video is extracts of the scenes that include dancing from the movie.
Howlin Wolf - Howlin for my Baby
Contextual Information
Filmmaker: Unknown
Year: Unknown
Dancers: Unknown. Dancing starts at 1.10.
Filming Location: Unknown
Source type: Personal footage
With this video, the dancers, setting, and filmmaker are all unknown. The video uploader has added the music, as the video had no sound (this is noted in a comment on the video).
This video has been included here despite having a question of the appropriateness of it being shared in the public domain, as neither the filmmaker or the dancers have, as far as we know, consented to the video being publicly available. However, by including it in the context of this website, we can raise this question of appropriateness as a point of consideration.
Questions
Questions to consider when watching historic dance videos:
Historic dance videos are an amazing resource, and we should definitely look at them and use them (as we are today).
BUT:
When looking at clips and videos of historical dance, need to consider the context in which they were created. This includes:
- When was it filmed?
- Why was it filmed? What purpose were the film makers intending for it?
- Who was the intended audience?
- Did the dancers know they were being filmed?
- Would this have changed how they are dancing?
- Did they consent to having their dancing filmed? Would they have even been asked? Were they coerced?
- Did they consent to having their dancing shared?
- What is the setting - is it social dancing, a performance, or a demonstration (e.g. Spirit Moves)?
- How does this impact on how they might dance? (think about how you might dance differently in each of these circumstances)
- Does this also change how you see the dancing, even if it is staged?
- Is the music that is playing on the clip the music the dancers were dancing to? With a lot of older clips, probably not!
- If it’s a demonstration of dance from an earlier era, are they using the music of the period in which the demonstration is taking place, or that is being filmed? (Think 1990s, demonstration videos of swing danced to neo-swing)
- Are there other sources that can corroborate the accuracy/authenticity of the dance styling?
- Partnerships - are the dancers dancing with regular partners? Romantic partners? Friends? Or two people the film maker put together?
- how might this change how they dance together?
- Performance/movie clips
- impact of the film maker on the dancing
- impact of the story on the dancing
And when looking at videos of an African American artform, this should all be underpinned by questions of race - what are the racial dynamics of the film?
- Are the dancers African American?
- Does the race of the dancers and/or the filmmaker change the dynamics of the film?
Hellzapoppin’ - piece of amazing dancing, and super clear to see, can learn a lot from it. But all the dancers are dressed as service workers - maids, cooks, labourers etc. How would the dancers have felt about that? Wanting to make a living from dancing, this is a great opportunity - but at what cost?
Is Spirit Moves a primary or secondary source? Both. It is a secondary source, in that it is cataloging and recreating a historic dance. But - it in itself is an artefact of history, and we can use it as a primary source. (For comparative example, think a history book written in the 1920s. It is a secondary source, it is talking about the past, and we can get information from it at that level. But we can also learn about the period in which it was written by looking at what they chose to write about and the way that they did this).
Further Reading
Books
Julie Malnig, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1968.