Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Folklore and Society)
by Jacqui Malone
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jacqui MaloneEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-03-01
ISBN: 0252065085
Number of pages: 312
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Book Reviews of Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Folklore and Society)
Book Review: Excellent and Fun
Summary: 5 Stars
I truly enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it so much that I spent hours looking at Youtube videos of the people, groups, and dances that were mentioned in the book. What this book did for me was forced me to seek out other information and learn more. Ms. Malone dealt with various aspects of African American vernacular dance i.e., big bands and jazz dancing, steppin' traditions, Black marching bands, etc.
Excerpt I liked:
"Let the Punishment Fit the Crime": The Vocal Choreography of Cholly Atkins, Chapter Seven
"He is the wellspring from which we flow. And the groups that want to be viable go back to Cholly. What he uses is more of a scientific approach than a fad approach. Cholly understand the way that the human body moves, he understand the grace of dance." Melvin Franklin an original Temptations
"From the twenties through most of the forties, American tap dance in the jazz/rhythm tradition experienced its heyday. Suddenly in the late forties, the bottom dropped out for many rhythm tap dancers who had established successful careers in vaudeville, in musicals, and with big bands. By the sixties, even the great champion and chronicler of American vernacular dance, Marshall Sterns, wondered if classic jazz dance was vanishing forever. Although we know now that black vernacular dance evolves in cyclical pattern, no one could have predicted in the sixties that dance movements from the twenties, thirties, and forties would live on through the nineties and beyond in many of the performance traditions that span African American culture.
The lively existence of such black dancing vocal groups as those in the Motown Town Revue helped preserve and recycle much of the vocabulary of classic jazz dance, including some tap. The man largely responsible for this particular cultural transference was Cholly Atkins, a jazz dance artiest who worked as a choreographer for Motown Records from 1965 to 1971.
The Atkins contribution to American culture has been extraordinarily significant. He not only made polished performers out of rock-and-roll singers who started with a hit single and raw ambition. He taught them to perform their music by doing dances that worked their magic not by retelling a song's storyline in predictable pantomime but by punctuating it with rhythmical dance steps, turns, and gestures drawn from the rich bedrock of black vernacular dance."
In so doing, he virtually created a new form of expression: Vocal choreography. Thoroughly versed in twentieth-century African American dance forms, from social dances like the lindy hop to street-corner (and then stage) sensations like rhythm tap, Atkins gave his singing groups a depth and appeal that was sometimes lacking in their tunes and lyrics. Without knowing, popular groups of the sixties, seventies, and eighties were performing updated versions of dances of the forties, thirties, and twenties - classic black vernacular dances - and projecting them to a larger audience than ever before. Through the good offices of Cholly Atkins, even movements from tap, markedly out of favor in the sixties, were being taught to sixties rock-and-roll stars, who introduced them to the new generation to the United States and around the globe. That the style or body language of rhythm tap is so accessible to young African Americans today has to be due in part to these "underground" efforts of vocal choreographer Atkins.
The book covers so much more. The chapter on Cholly was simply my favorite.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in African American history and culture.
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