It’s been a while since I had any updates on the old clips featuring the dance, so here’s a double video special featuring Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers.
Whitey was the bouncer at the Savoy Ballroom who had the vision of transforming the ballroom’s finest young dancers into a professional dance troupe, and catapulting them and the dance into the limelight throughout the world through performances and film. “A Day at the Races”, a Marx Brothers film, was the time the group was featured in a major Hollywood film. By the time they did the sequence in “Hellzapoppin”, they have refined their technique and dancing – it possibly their best performance captured on film. Much of what people associate the dance with now – the cheesy smiles and the waving hands – can be traced to these films (which was, for me, a rather racist portrayal).
In “Hellzapoppin”, the music introduction features Slim Gilliard and Slam Steward, and eventually Rex Stuart (trumpet) and C.C. Johnson (percussion), all fantastic musicians of the Swing era. However, the California rountine (as the sequence is called), choreographed by Frankie Manning (last couple), was not done to the music in the movie, but Count Basie’s “Jumping at the Woodside” instead. If you check out http://www.savoystyle.com/hellzapoppin.html you will get a reconstructed version of the routine with Basie’s tune.
This would be the clip that would inspire the new generation of dancers in the 1980s to lead the swing dance revival that would last until today. Looking at it, you’ll see why.
