Swing Dance in Hawaii

Obviously, there’s been a swing craze in this century. How does this compare, or does it compare to the original swing craze? At this time the enthusiasm is still there in spite of the Trump Pandemic. It’s not quite the same as the enthusiasm for the dance as when I was coming up because it was something new at the time. And now, at this period, it’s something new to many of these youngsters. It’s just that it’s a different environment altogether. When we were coming up, we danced to live music all the time.

“Social dancers know that every dawn is born

with its own unique hopes!

There weren’t many tapes and CD’s and all that stuff. We didn’t even know what a disc jockey was. If we went to somebody’s house, there was someone playing a piano, or some kind of instrument for the rhythm for us to dance to. If we went to a ballroom… it was unheard of if they just had tapes. So it was always live music, a live band. And by us being able to dance to live music, to musicians, we were able to feed off the music that they gave out and they were able to feed off our energy. This may be a different century.

"Hukilau Song" by Amy Gilliom

So it was an interchange between the dancers and the music and that’s the difference that we cannot see now. Most of the time today, it’s DJs. You can only identify with the music that’s coming over the loudspeaker. Back then we could listen to a record, and we could say, "Oh, that’s Harry James, that’s Gene Krupa, that’s Benny Goodman!" We knew who was playing what, because we listened to these guys impressions so much, we knew how they sounded; we knew what they did. Now you listen to music coming from the CDs and the tapes and somebody has to tell you who the person is that’s playing. We will adjust.

"Social dancers know that hope is not a strategy.
we have to do something."