Lindy Hoppers

Dancing.Org: Lindy Hop was so named after Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927, when the newspaper headline read: “LINDY HOPS THE ATLANTIC”. The dance has no “hop” in it. On the contrary, it is smooth and solid, and while there is a constant rhythmic 8-count “pulse” that you feel in your bones, there is no hopping, bopping, or prancing in the dance.

Archives of Early Lindy Hop : In the late 1920’s in Harlem Lindy Hop was breaking out wherever people were partying… But it wasn’t until after the opening of the Savoy Ballroom that Lindy Hop got its name and a home. At the Savoy the Lindy Hop got hotter and hotter, as people danced to the top Big Bands in the land.

StreetSwing.com : In the 1930’s a dancer named “Frankie Manning” *claimed to add the first Air-Step” (lifts/ flips) into the Lindy (Al Minns and Leon James as well). These and other “Air-Steps” or Aerials had been done for years before in other dance styles such as the tango, waltzes, Flash and Acrobatic dance acts, apache dance etcetera,through many exhibitions by professional club entertainers, but supposedly had not yet been done in the Lindy, especially with the speed in which they would be done, plus add the element of surprise and these aerials would become completely unique to the Lindy Hop.

Frankie Manning : Upon the demise of the Swing Era, Frankie took a job in the Post Office, where he worked for thirty years until his rediscovery by a new generation of swing dance enthusiasts in the mid-1980s.

Austin Lindy Hop : Lindy Hop can be done to any music with a swing rhythm: music played in 4/4 time with a rhythm that has an even-keeled “pulse” on every beat along with syncopated triplets that shift the beat slightly (bat… ba-bat, bat… ba-bat, instead of bat-bat-bat, bat-bat-bat) for rhythmic emphasis.

Wikipedia : There are thriving communities throughout the world. The small village of Herräng in Sweden (north of Stockholm) has unofficially become the international mecca of Lindy Hop thanks to the annual Herräng Dance Camp run by the Harlem Hot Shots with an attendance from around 40 countries.

The Lindy Circle : In New York City, ballrooms dominated Harlem, but one, The Savoy was to become the king of Swing. The Savoy was huge, taking up the whole block at 141st Street and Lenox Ave. Lindy flourished there, partly because it was one of the few racially integrated ballrooms where White and Black could dance, be inspired and shared moves like no other place.

kclindyhop.org : In 1942 an event took place that four years later caused the Big Band era to fade. That event began to unfold in 1941 when the American Federation of Musicians (AFM, the national musician’s union) conducted a survey to better understand the impact record sales, radio play, and jukeboxes had on the jobs and income of musicians. It was concluded that recorded music did indeed negatively impact the work of musicians, that “…juke boxes took away musician’s jobs and record playing radio stations eliminated the need to hire studio musicians…”

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