Excerpt from the forthcoming book, Doin' The Charleston: Black Roots of American Popular Music & the Jenkins Orphanage Legacy by Mark R. Jones
Chapter
Ten - America Learns To Dance
“It is good for a man not to touch a
woman.”
- 1st Corinthians 7:1.
During the summer of 1912, eighteen-year old New York City
black pianist James P. Johnson daily made the trip to Far Rockaway, a beach
resort near Coney Island, for a summer job. He remembered:
It was a rough place, but I got nine dollars and tips, or about eighteen dollars a week over all. That was so much money that I didn't want to go back to school. That fall, instead of going back to school, I went to Jersey City and got a job in a cabaret run by Freddie Doyle.
James Price Johnson was born in New Brunswick,
New Jersey, in 1894. His mother taught him to play the upright piano in the
family parlor. At age nine he started lessons with Bruto Giannini, a strict
musician from Italy, who corrected his fingering but didn’t interfere with his
playing rags and stomps. The Johnson family moved to New York City when Jimmy
was twelve, and by 1910 he was called the “piano kid” at Barron Wilkin’s
Cabaret in Harlem.
In 1912 Johnson met Willie “the Lion” Smith, a first-class pianist who
became one of his closest friends. Smith was playing in a joint called
Randolph’s, in the tough section of Newark known as the Coast. Johnson and
Smith very quickly made their way back to New York and began to work the clubs
in the “Jungle,” the Tenderloin area of Harlem between 60th and 63rd
streets. Johnson attracted the attention of the music industry and by 1916 he
was recording piano rolls for the Aeolian Company. There he befriended another
up-and-coming, hot shot pianist, a young, white Jewish teenager named George
Gershwin.
Johnson often played at a Harlem club called The Jungles. In a 1959
interview with Tom Davin, he recalled:
The
people who came to The Jungle Casino were mostly from around Charleston, S.C.,
and other places in the South. Most of them worked for the Ward Line as
longshoremen, or on ships that called on southern coastal ports. There were
even some Gullahs amongst them. They picked their [dance] partners with care to
show off their best steps, and put sets, cotillions and cakewalks that would
give them a chance to get off. It was while playing for these Southern dancers
that I composed a number of Charlestons, eight of them, all with the same dance
rhythm. One of these later became my famous 'Charleston' when it hit Broadway.
The Great Migration had transformed Harlem, a section of Manhattan about fifty
blocks long and seven or eight blocks wide. By 1920 more than 200,000 Negroes
had migrated to the community and it was bustling
with energy, streets clogged with traffic and new businesses opening on a daily
basis. It was new-found prosperity for tens of thousands of blacks.
With the sudden population boom, property took an immediate upward
swing. Many of the whites living in Harlem were panic-stricken by this black
invasion. They quickly abandoned their neighborhoods and fled to other places -
Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Westchester. Property owners doubled and
tripled their rents, but the Negro influx continued. With as many as five to
seven thousand people residing in a single block, living conditions were often
anything but wholesome and pleasant. It was a typical slum and tenement area
little different from many others in New York.
In many instances, two entire families occupied space intended for only
one. Large rooms were converted into two or three small ones by building solid
partitions. These cubbyholes were then rented at the same price as full sized
rooms. In many houses, dining and living rooms were transformed into bed rooms
after midnight, like a hotel.
“Shift-sleeping” was common. During the night a day-worker used the room
and soon after dawn a night-worker moved in.
Even this creative apartment sharing was often not enough to
meet the doubled and tripled rents. Another solution developed: a few days
before the rent was due, advertise a party and make one’s “guests” pay a cover
charge. Thus, the Harlem rent-party was born. The majority of working class
Negroes were maids, porters and elevator operators. They were paid on Saturday
and not required to report to work on Sunday. Saturday became the logical night
to party until dawn. Party-goers would squeeze into a
five-room flat until the walls swelled. Card and dice games kept the action in
the back rooms hot. But the center of attention was the piano in the front
parlor, where a piano “tickler” sat on a stool—hands poised above the
keyboard—like a king on his throne. Very quickly, Johnson and Smith
became kings of the “rent parties.”
Piano ticklers were in great demand for cheap entertainment. The better
pianists, like Johnson, Smith and Fats Waller, would move from party to party
playing for several hours at each, trying to outplay and out class each other.
Johnson recalled:
Each tickler kept these attitudes
even when he was socializing at parties, or just visiting. It was designed to
show a personality that women would admire. With the music he played, the
tickler’s manner would put the question in the lady’s mind: 'Can he do it—like
he can play it?'
Willie Smith recalled those days:
A hundred people would crowd into one seven-room flat until the
walls bulged. Plenty of food with hot maws (pickled pig bladders) and
chitt'lins with vinegar, beer, and gin, and when we played the shouts everybody
danced.
By 1913 the
Jenkins’ Orphanage Band from Charleston was a well known quantity in the New York area. The Band’s antics
on the streets and the quality of its music had been noticed by musicians and
professional theatrical agents. James Johnson and Willie Smith on watched the
band perform on occasion.
Willie Smith
recalled:
They had a kind of circus band that marched up and
down the streets of Harlem. They’d play concerts on the street corners and pass
the hat. They sometimes had as many as twenty pieces and none of the kids were
over fifteen years of age.
Several more of the black lambs “jumped ship” while in New
York. As the kids approached the age of twenty, they were more interested in
finding work in the big city than remaining in the Orphanage system. A paying
job in a Harlem band was better than traveling the back roads in a cramped bus
with twenty other kids.
 |
| Dancing the Charleston with the Jenkins Band |
Freddie Green (b.
1911, ukulele, banjo and vocals), played guitar for the Count Basie Orchestra
for more than fifty years. He remembers traveling with the Jenkins Band:
We had a bus. It was
a homemade bus; a truck that was made into a bus. Listen, I can't describe
it. But it was very uncomfortable.
We used to have to get up around noon and play all through the
streets...a parade, you know. We were in the small towns of Maine
I wanted to go. I
wanted experience. I wanted to get on the road.
 |
| Freddie Green, LP cover |
Rev. Jenkins signed
a contract for one of the bands to perform in a new musical production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The show’s white
producers believed that, in order for a white audience to sit through a show
about Negroes, the Negroes had to dance, play music and generally act the fool.
So the Jenkins’ Band debuted on Broadway, playing the part of the jiving coons,
a long ago perfected during their extensive tours of small towns and cities up
and down the eastern seaboard.
By 1913 public dancing had become all the
rage in New York and the most famous dancers in the world were Vernon and Irene
Castle. The Castles became wildly popular among New
York Society, charging more than $1000 an hour for dancing lessons. They taught
white America a new way of dancing, introducing and popularizing the
ragtime-style “fox trot” and the sultry tango. They taught white America to
dance from the waist down.
+(2).jpg) |
| Vernon and Irene Castle |
Up to this time ragtime
music and dancing were considered vulgar and crude, only for lower “black”
tastes. Classical musician Edward B. Perry described ragtime as “a dog with
rabies.” The magazine Musical America
stated ,“It exalts noise, rush and street vulgarity. It suggests repulsive
dance-halls and restaurants.” Forty years later the same complaints would be
leveled at Frank Sinatra, then at Elvis Presley, then The Beatles and finally
hip-hop.
The majority of the
early Americans were opposed to dancing. Puritans equated it with
promiscuity and sinfulness. They were particularly opposed to “mixt” dancing
between men and women that led to temptation and ultimately, adultery. Some
hard-liners even spoke out against the time-honored Maypole tradition – young
ladies dancing around a pole wrapping flower garlands. It was considered a pagan
ritual and therefore, sacrilegious and therefore, evil.
Baptists preached against
the “unchaste handling of male or females. The sin of dancing is that it
assaults a person’s sense and caused them to sin by upon what lust has caused.”
Famous fire and brimstone
evangelist Billy Sunday railed against drinking and dancing in the 1920s and
30s because the activities were linked - drinking led to dancing and dancing
led to drinking. It was a fast and vicious path to hell. Sunday declared:
You sow the dance and the
ballroom and you reap a crop of brothels. You sow saloons and you reap a
harvest of drunkards. You must want a lot of prostitutes or you wouldn’t sow
dances.
In an article of the
Ladies Home Journal, Anne Shaw Faulkner asked the question: “DOES JAZZ MUSIC
PUT THE SIN IN SYNCOPATION?”
Vernon Castle was an
Englishman who moved to New York in July 1906. He followed in the footsteps of
his actress sister, Coralie, who had landed a role in a Broadway musical, About Town. Vernon became a constant
presence backstage during rehearsals, entertaining the cast and crew with his
magic tricks and comedic banter. The producer, legendary vaudeville showman Lew
Fields, was so charmed by Vernon that he gave the young Englishman a small role
in the show. One year later Vernon
was given a larger role in Fields’ next production The Girl Behind the Counter, which became a huge hit.
Over the next two years
Vernon became a popular comic actor, famous for his graceful and acrobatic
pratfalls on stage. As 1910 rolled around Vernon was considered one of the
hottest up-and-coming Broadway stars. During that summer, Vernon rented a room
in New Rochelle, Connecticut. Many Broadway people summered there. It was only
a forty-five minute train ride from New York and offered a quieter and cooler
climate than the city. During that summer he met seventeen-year old Irene
Foote.
Irene was a short-haired
tomboy with a spirit of rebellion and a love of dancing. By age five she was
entertaining at local parties and charity balls. When Irene met Vernon at the
New Rochelle Rowing Club she later recalled, “I could tell by looking at him he
was not my cup of tea.” However, upon discovering that Vernon was a successful
Broadway actor, she became more interested.
“My heart skipped a beat. I turned loose every ounce of charm I could
muster to hold his attention.”
 |
| Irene Castle |
It must have worked.
Vernon managed to get Irene a part in the next Lew Fields’ production and one
year later they married. They moved to Paris in 1912 when Vernon was offered an
opportunity to produce his own show, and the young couple jumped at the chance.
The show, Finally … a Review, was a
mixed bag. The first act, a comedic barbershop skit, bombed in front of the
French audience. The second act, however, became a sensation - Vernon and Irene
dancing wildly to a spirited version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Irene
recalled the dance as being so acrobatic that “I was in the air much more often
than I was on the ground.”
The Castles’ dancing
quickly became the rage of Parisian nightlife, and the couple was invited to
perform at Café de Paris, the city’s leading elegant club. Suddenly, everyone
in Paris society was Castle-mad. These two untrained American dancers were
being invited to dance at every club in the city, in private homes and for
large lavish balls. Women handed over money to dance with Vernon, and men
out-bid each other to take a spin on the floor with Irene. Their dancing
technique at the time was “rough and tumble” Irene recalled, more comic and
acrobatic than smooth and chic.
 |
| Paris nightclub, c. 1915 |
Tragedy brought them back
home to America. Irene’s father died in May 1912 and they returned to New York.
They wasted little time finding employment, landing a job dancing at the Times
Square club Café de l’Opera at $300 a week. At midnight, as the spotlight
focused on the slim couple at the edge of the bandstand, they sprang up,
twirling and swirling across the dance floor. Little did they know that they
were introducing white American audiences to a new style of dancing. As
untrained dancers, they made it up as they went along. Irene remembered:
All we did was write on paper about what we thought we would do.
This custom of writing out our dances first was almost adhered to in later
days. The first dances we never even rehearsed … by keeping my eyes firmly
fixed on the stud button of his dress shirt I could anticipate every move he
was going to make and we made it together, floating around the floor like two
people sharing one mind.
What made the Castles unique was their ability
to refine dance steps that were usually considered too objectionable for polite
society – ragtime trots and grizzly bears. Their grace and elegance turned low
dances into refined entertainment. When the Castles met James Reese Europe at a private society party
where his Clef Club Orchestra was playing, they realized they had discovered
their perfect band leader – a man who shared their musical sensibilities.
 |
| The Clef Club Orchestra, 1912 |
Europe’s “Castle Society
Orchestra” included members of the all black musicians union, the Clef Club. With Eubie Blake at the
piano, and Jim Europe as its conductor, the Orchestra became nationally famous, accompanying the Castles in concert halls
and theaters across the world. Jim composed and arranged several popular songs
for them, including “The Castle Perfect Trot” and “Castle House Rag.”
These were not small
“Dixieland” style bands, but full symphonic orchestras with intricate
arrangements by Jim Europe, similar in style to Sousa’s Marine Band. Europe also added a saxophone to his
band, a bold decision. The saxophone had never been considered a serious
instrument; for years it had been used mainly as a novelty in musical acts, but
Jim’s use of the instrument raised it to the status of a respectable instrument
for the first time. Over the next decade the addition of the saxophone to
orchestras and combos led to a monumental change in American music.
The Castles’ hiring
Jim Europe was a culturally defining moment, exposing syncopated Negro dance
music to an elite sophisticated white audience for the first time. However, the
Castles pushed the mainstream door open wider with the invention of the Foxtrot, a
slower paced dance that most non-dancers could perform adequately. For the first time Negro low music was mixed with low
dancing but handled with such grace by a respectable white couple that it
became acceptable for respectable whites.
 |
| Lt. James Reese Europe |
This was another
fundamental change in American popular music and culture. For the next two years, Jim Europe
and the Castles traveled the world mesmerizing, delighting (and shocking) audiences with their music and performances. They
ushered in an era of “animal” dances which included the Foxtrot, Horse Trot, Kangaroo Hop, Duck Waddle, Squirrel, Chicken
Scratch, Turkey Trot, and the Grizzly Bear.
After two years of
dancing to Jim Europe’s music the Castles were international celebrities. One
night, during the height of their popularity, they had to dance at the New York
Hippodrome, accompanied by the music of John Philip Sousa. It was a clash of
opposite cultures, like pop music before
Elvis Presley.
Irene Castle stated:
He (Sousa) ignored our frantic signals to pick
up the tempo and his uniformed arms flailed away with the precise beat of a man
conducting a military march, which was exactly what he was doing.
Which proves the old
adage: once you go black you can never go back.
Excerpt from the forthcoming book, Doin The Charleston: Black Roots of American Popular Music & the Jenkins Orphanage Legacy by Mark R. Jones
