Blues Dancing

Blues dancing is a family of historical dances that developed alongside and were danced to blues music, or the contemporary dances that are danced in that aesthetic. Amateur Dancer carried an article entitled "Blues and Rhythm and Blues Dancing" in a July/August 1991 issue.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

Mura Dehn used the term "The Blues" in The Spirit Moves, referencing different dance styles. African-American essayist and novelist Albert Murray used the term "blues-idiom dance" and "blues-idiom dance movement" in his book Stomping the Blues.

History of blues dancing

Early commentators on dance from sub-Saharan Africa consistently commented on the absence of close couple dancing, and such dancing was thought to be immoral in many traditional African societies.

In all the vast riches of sub-Saharan African dance heritage there seems to be no evidence for sustained one-on-one male-female partnering anywhere before the late colonial era, and even then, it was apparently considered in distinctly poor taste.

In the United States the dances of white Americans were being adapted and transformed over time from all over with the large groups of immigrants. As dance evolved, the Afro-American elements became more formal and diluted, the British-European elements more fluid and rhythmic. Dance moves passed down through generations were revised, recombined, and given new flourishes. The cyclical re-emergence of similar elements marks the African-American dance vocabulary.

"Blues In The Night" by Johnny Mercer

During the post Reconstruction period (1875–1900), as Jim Crow Laws were passed in the South, dance steps once linked to ritualistic or religious dancing also acquired a more secular identity. Where by and large, slavery had inhibited the retention of specific African tribal culture, the dances of working-class and lower-class blacks relinquished some of their Euro-American characteristics during this time.

Meanwhile, "dances became more upright and less flat-footed. As dance became more associated with sexuality and the free consumption of pleasure, which in the black community still had some communal ties to group dancing, the partnering relationship became more isolated and individualized. The "sport" and the "good-time gal" were people of the moment. Hip shaking and pelvic innuendo were now more of a statement to one's partner than to one's community.

W. C. Handy, who wrote some of the first published blues songs, documented his earliest experience with what may have been blues, and dancers reaction to it, at a dance c. 1905 in Cleveland, Mississippi. At one point Handy was asked to "play some of our native music". Although "baffled" he had his band played "an old-time Southern melody", after which he was asked if a local band could play a few numbers.

That group consisted of "just three pieces, a battered guitar, a mandolin and a worn-out bass" (Handy described the group as "a Mississippi string band") and played "one of those over-and-over again strains that seem to have no very clear beginning and certainly no ending at all .... Actually Indian type music. It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps "haunting" is a better word for it ... The dancers went wild. Little did they know that their dancing would eventually splinter into dozens of different dances.