May 18, 2015 • 22 mins
Frankie Manning grew up loving dance, learning and practicing in ballrooms and private parties in New York. His innovations in creating new moves for the Lindy hop led him from dancing as a hobby to a career as a performer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Well, I'm Holly Frying.
You pay attention to our Facebook or our Twitter. You
may have noticed a goofy picture. It was a very
(00:22):
goofy picture, and Holly and I put up there, uh
last winter from our office holiday party, in which Polly
is like Googley exclaiming over my engagement ring. I like,
how silly. I like how you think I was purposely
being goofy when in fact I was being delighted and genuine. Okay, good, Well,
I felt I felt goofy because we were taking this
(00:47):
picture in front of a in front of a Christmas tree,
and like you had actually already seen my ring and
we were it was all. The whole setup was kind
but anyways, a little stage, but my reaction remained genuine.
I feel okay, okay good. Um So, people basically immediately
started asking whether we would do some wedding episodes. Not
(01:07):
as a please, they keep that away from me, but hey,
you should do this. Uh So here we go. Here's
our first episode that pertains in some way to to
my wedding, and it's not about flowers or diamonds, or
cake or Queen Victoria, which are all things that people suggested.
It is about dancing. Specifically, it is about Lyndi hop
and the most famous of all the Lindie Hoppers, who
(01:29):
was Frankie Manning. Uh frank Benjamin Manning was born in Jacksonville, Florida.
On His parents were Jerry and Lucille Hadley Manning, and
his only sibling was an older sister who died when
Frankie was only two. The family lived in the segregated
neighborhood of Campbell Hill until he was three, at which
(01:50):
point his mother left his father and they moved to
New York. A whole series of his childhood experiences directly
influenced his later work and dance. When they moved to
New York, he and his mother made the trip by boat,
and Frankie was just fascinated with the motion of the
waves as they rolled over one another, and he said
(02:11):
he wanted to figure out what kind of game they
were playing. His earliest musical memories were in Aiken, South Carolina,
where his father moved. After Frankie and his mother had
gone to New York. Frankie would spend some time on
his uncle's farm. There in the summers and in the evenings,
once all of the work was done, the family would
sit on the porch and friends and farm hands would
(02:31):
play harmonica and washtub bass and other instruments while other
people danced. And when he was young, Frankie really had
to be kind of encouraged to get out there and
and dance. But as soon as his grandmother got him
into the circle with the other dancers, that was a
done deal. He did not want to stop. Front Yard
and church music continue to be a really big part
(02:52):
of his summer life until he was about ten years old,
and at that point his father moved to New York
as well. Yeah, once his father was in New York,
there wasn't nearly as much of an impetus for him
to go visit South Carolina anymore. Uh. But you know,
during the school year, Frankie was an extremely good student,
and since his mother worked, after he got out of
(03:12):
school every day, a friend of hers would let him
fit in a vaudeville theater that was across the street
from his school. He sat in the back and he
did his homework, but he also watched the films and
the comedy and dance performances that went on in the
theater every afternoon for pretty much all of his school years.
That sounds sort of dreamy, I have to say. Uh.
(03:33):
Frankie Manning style of dance was really quite physically demanding,
so it's no surprise that he was also pretty athletic.
When he was a kid, he and the neighborhood children
would play stickball and race around, and they also climbed
all around construction sites and roofs, and they would leap
back and forth along the building's basement doors and their stoops,
(03:54):
and he was extremely versatile. He participated in a lot
of different sports all the way through both junior high
and high school. His mother really loved to dance, and
starting when he was about eight years old, she would
take him with her to social dances, and a lot
of these dances were at rent parties. These were parties
where people would charge a quarter or so for people
(04:16):
to be admitted, and this would help them raise the
money to pay the rent. So at rent parties, people
eight drank and danced, usually accompanied by somebody playing the piano.
At first, Frankie's mother would leave him in a bedroom
to just sleep while she was at the party, but
usually he would instead get up and watch the grown
ups through the door. And although he wasn't quite at
(04:39):
the point where he was really interested in dancing himself, uh,
these early experiences really affected how he thought about dance.
These people were clearly having a great time in great company,
and different dance styles came out for different moods and
different styles of music, and when someone was really good,
the rest of the crowd would just sort of clear
(04:59):
the space and watch so that that person could really
just show off and let loose. A couple of years later,
once he was old enough to spend a little more
time with the grown ups instead of in a room
where people were leaving their coats, Frankie really started to
pay attention to how people moved and what steps they did,
and he started trying to remember how these dances worked
(05:21):
with the rhythms of the music. So by the time
he was about ten, he was practicing steps at home.
In October of n Frankie was twelve years old. At
this time, his mother was going to help decorate a
Halloween dance, and she told them that if he helped
to he could go to the dance with her, and
he was a wildly excited about this. In his own recounting,
(05:43):
he was the youngest person on the dance floor that night,
but when he finally danced with his mother, she told him, Frankie,
you'll never be a dancer. You're too stiff. And his
own words, after my mother told me I was too
stiff to be a dancer, I felt pretty sad. I
honestly thought that I was dancing like everybody else at
the Renaissance ballroom that night. I was really dragging on
(06:04):
the way back home. But the next day what she
said kind of lit me up. That comment from his
mother is when he really got seriously interested in dancing.
He started practicing at home to the couple of records
that he owned, and doing anything he could do he
could think of to keep his body from being stiff
and straight. When his mother walked in on him dancing
(06:24):
with a broom or a chair as his partner, he
would tell her that he was quote trying to get unstiff.
He also kept watching dancers as much as he could,
both at ballrooms and private parties, and he noticed the
differences at how people danced in these different environments. Ballroom
dances were social events, and everyone danced there in a
(06:46):
more formal way, with kind of an upright posture, usually
wearing their Sunday best. Private parties, on the other hand,
were a lot looser and freer and wilder, and for
the most part, the exact same people were dancing in
both places, although to look at them in either setting
you would not so much expect that. And he also
practiced in the basement with his friend, Herman Jackson, and
(07:09):
they would trade off who was leading and who was
following because they didn't have a girl to practice with.
And when Frankie was thirteen, the two of them skipped
out on their Baptist Young People's Union events to instead
go to a dance for young people at the Alhambra Theater.
The dance, which was for kids age twelve to fifteen,
had a big band playing and it cost a nickel
(07:30):
to get in. They had a really good time. They
did not dance with anybody uh. They did, however, decide
to go back, and they went for the next four
weeks before Frankie finally asked someone to dance with him,
and he was hoping to show off the swing moves
that he had been practicing at home. However, as soon
as he asked someone to dance, the band struck up
(07:51):
a waltz, and he didn't know how to waltz, so
he basically uh imitated what the male partner was doing
in a dancing couple nearby, and kind of watched that
guy the whole time and imitated what he was doing
without looking at his partner at all. It was kind
of a disaster. For several months after that, Frankie and
(08:12):
Herman brought their own partner to the social dances. Uh.
This was a neighbor named Virginia, and they brought her
until they were confident enough to start asking other people again,
and they went to these dances every week with very
few interruptions. Once after Frankie's mother heard him mention a
dance and she at that point found out that he
had not been going to the b YPU meetings anymore.
(08:34):
He actually got grounded for a week. After a while,
Frankie and Herman started attending the Alhambra Theaters dances for
adults and also dances for older teams at the Renaissance
ball Room, because these were for people who were a
little older than the ones for the younger teenagers. That
they had been attending before. The dancers that they were
seeing and dancing with were better, which meant that consequently
(08:57):
Frankie and herman themselves got better too. And it was
actually at the Renaissance that Frankie first saw people doing
the Lindy hop. And we're going to talk a lot
about that, but first we are going to have a
quick word from a sponsor before we continue with Frankie's story,
we need to talk a little bit about what lindy
hop actually is. Along with swing, the Charleston and the
(09:19):
Jitterbug and many many other dances, Lindy hop is a
dance that falls into the umbrella of African American vernacular dance.
These are dances that have African roots and have been
created and popularized in social settings during the time period.
We're talking about. These settings where juke joints, ballrooms, and
the rent parties that Frankie's mother would take him to.
There's often some level of competition inherent in invernacular dances
(09:43):
in the form of dance contests and dance offs. African
American vernacular dances have been passed down from one generation
to the next within Black communities. Morphing and kind of
evolving along the way, and many of them are quite
highly improvisational. Linda Hop itself actually evolved from the Charleston Uh,
the collegiate, and the breakaway kind of combining. It reportedly
(10:06):
got its name when a reporter asked a dancer what
dance he was doing, shortly after Charles Lindbergh's famous flight
across the Atlantic. Social dances have played a huge role
in community building and creative expression in African American communities
for more than a century. So Lindy Hop and other
vernacular dances created in popularized during the Swing Era were
(10:28):
a really important part of the social fabric and black
and black communities from the nine twenties all the way
through the end of World War Two. This is especially
true during the Great Depression, when people didn't have much
money and social dancing was both an inexpensive form of
entertainment and a much needed social outlet. Frankie Manning learned
the Lindy Hop exactly the same way he had learned
(10:49):
other dances, by watching other dancers and dancing with them,
and it was with the Lindy Hop that he really
started to improvise steps of his own. He was dancing
as often as he could. At the same time, he
was also finishing school, and he was playing on multiple
team sports at school, and he was actually working multiple
jobs to try to keep himself and his mother afloat,
(11:10):
And he finally dropped out of school in the twelfth
grade in part because the teachers, who were all white,
we're encouraging the black students not to go to college. Yeah,
they were in being encouraged to basically take up laboring
jobs instead. The popularity of Lindy Hop was spreading by
and Frankie's friends, who knew how much he liked the
(11:31):
dance and thought he was pretty good at it, encouraged
him to enter a contest at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem.
When it was their group's turn, they started doing their
regular social dancing like they've been doing, and it did
not go very well. The audience booed them, and a
comedian whose job it was to make fun of dancers
who did poorly, did exactly that and then hauled them
(11:52):
off the stage with a hook. It was another disaster
and Frankie's early dancing career. But the good news is
that Frankie Manning did not give up and maybe a
year later, on New Year's Eve, he and his girlfriend
started doing the Charleston at a dance, and at that
point they were so good that people started throwing money
(12:12):
and apparently amused by the sight of one of them
scrambling to pick up this money that had been thrown
uh the onlookers through more money, and Frankie called this
his first big payday as a dancer. He was about
fifteen years old at the time. About a year after
Frankie Manning left high school, he was playing a pickup
basketball game with Herbert Roper, and Herbert scored and then
(12:36):
did this version of a Lyndy step that Frankie had
never seen before as kind of a celebratory move. Frankie
asked Herbert where he had learned to dance like that,
and Herbert said at the Savoy. Harlem's Savoy Ballroom had
opened on March twelfth of nine and it was owned
by Mogaile, who was white, and managed by Charles Buchanan,
(12:57):
who was black, and it was one of the first
Racheli integrated social spaces in the United States. It was
a beautiful ballroom with two bandstands in an immense spring
loaded wooden dance floor, and it made a name for
itself as being home to the best music and the
best dancers. Many of the dances that later became really
(13:18):
popular were developed at the Savoy, and the Lyndy Hot
became really the signature dance that was danced there. For
many years, the best, wildest, and most inventive Lindy Hot
dancers usually got together and danced in what was known
as Cat's Corner, on the north end of the hall
and near the bandstand. The Savoy was also a performing
venue for some of the biggest names of the era,
(13:39):
including Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. I could just rattle
off names of people who performed there forever. If you
can think of a big jazz person who was performing
during that time, or a big band performing that time,
probably they performed at the Savoy ball Room. Frankie's first
trip to the Savoy was when he was about nineteen,
and he went with a group as moral support because
(14:01):
they were concerned that they wouldn't be good enough to
fit in, and since he still knew a lot of
people who were dancing at the Renaissance. He spent his
dancing time between the two ball rooms for a while,
but within a year he had really shifted to doing
most of his dancing at the Savoy. Herbert White, known
as Whitey, started a dance troup at the Savoy, and
at first it was just called the Savoy Lindy Hoppers,
(14:23):
but it eventually became known as white EA's Lindy Hoppers
around four so when Frankie was about twenty, White he
asked him if he wanted to join the Troope. This
meant that Frankie would be able to get into the
Savoy for free, he could practice when the ballroom was
technically closed, and he would get to dance with the
best dancers all the time. So instead of just watching
(14:44):
people dance and trying to pick up their steps, he
could just ask them to teach him. And he actually
learned that he could have done that the whole time.
He did not need to have like an official endorsement
to ask somebody, hey, how did you do that step
whom It's one of those wonderful things. I think lots
of people, uh, lots of us do things exactly like that,
Like we assume there's some social rule that there isn't,
(15:05):
and we could have been helping ourselves a lot the
whole time. It's easy to identify with that. UH. As
a side note before we jump into a sponsor break,
there's an interesting point in that. UH. Some writing about
the Lindy Hop kind of suggests that dancers had almost
proprietary steps that were there's and that other dancers would
not do, and there was sort of a code of
honor around that. But in his autobiography, Frankie flatly rejects
(15:29):
this idea and says that people learned from one another,
they shared steps all the time, they copied each other's
work like it was a lot more collaborative and crossover
e than some writing would indicate. So to get back
to Frankie's story, about six months after joining the troop,
he really started to develop his own style of Lindi Hop.
He lowered his center of gravity way way down towards
(15:50):
the ground, and he started just making these big, long,
reaching movements with his legs and arms. It's a style
that he described as trying to get as far as
poss bawl from his mother's observation that he was too stiff,
and he was also really trying to interpret the music
with his body, not just to do the steps of
a dance to time with the music. Well. In nine four,
(16:14):
Frankie and his partner Hilda Morris actually entered a Lindy
contest at the Apollo Theater and they won. Their prize
was to appear in the review that was opening there
and that ran four shows a day for a week,
and they did that, and the musician that was performing
that week was Duke Ellington and they were also paid
for this work. So this was pretty big stuff, uh.
(16:34):
And soon after this Frankie and Hilda started to tour
his dancers. A little later on, Whitey arranged a dance
competition between his dance troupe and another troupe headed by
Shorty Snowdon So. Shorty's troop had started at the Savoy
and they had been performing elsewhere professionally for a while.
They were quite good. They were seasoned professional dance troupe,
(16:57):
but some people felt like maybe they had gotten a
little bit complacent and they're dancing. Frankie Manning started working
out one of his most famous moves for this contest.
One of Shorty's couples did a comedic bit at the
end of their routine in which the very tall female
partner carried the male partner off the floor. Frankie also
(17:18):
wanted to take his dance into the air, and his
partner for the contest was free to Washington, and he
wanted her to go over his head in a kind
of backward somersault and then land in front of him.
And so they wouldn't give this move away. They actually
practiced it at home on a mattress for safety, and
he called this the over the back. So when they
(17:40):
did this in the contest, which was kind of build
as the like fiery young upstarts against the established professional troope,
it went over amazingly. People could not believe what they
had just seen. And today aerials are a really big
part of the Lindy hop scene, especially among the most
experienced dancers and the people who dance competitively. Frankie at
(18:04):
the time, though, called it an air step because he
wanted to distinguish it from lifts that are common in
ballroom dancing. After this success at this contest, Frankie started
looking for more and more air steps, and this was
one of his most recognizable and famous innovations in the
world of Linda Hop. And this is really where Frankie
(18:25):
kind of moves into having a professional career as a dancer.
But we're gonna not talk about that today because we're
gonna talk about it next time. You get a two
parter on Frankie Manning. I'm so excited. I love it.
I love talking about dance. We get a lot of
requests from people to talk about dance. Yeah, lots of
people love it, myself included. Uh, do you have a
little bit of listener mail? I do, And this is
(18:48):
a listener mail from Elizabeth who is writing about our
episode about special education. And Elizabeth says, Hi, ladies, I
wanted to write to you about my journey through the
educational system and being an RSP student. I have mild
dyslexia and discalculia, which is essentially dyslexia with numbers, along
with some other mild information processing challenges. I must also
(19:10):
say that my mother is a retired special education teacher
and she greatly shaped my progress through school. My mother
knew I was dyslexic from a young age and worked
rigorously with me outside of school all through elementary and
junior high school. She feared the prejudices of educators and
therefore did not have me tested for US for special
Education until high school. At that time, I was granted
(19:32):
an I e P which included accommodations such as using
a computer to write in class essays and a simple
calculator on math exams for basic computation. My mom knew
that I, like many students who fall into the mild
slash moderate special education category, are quote lumpy learners her term.
As far as I knew. With my accommodations, I was
able to progress in English to Honors English my junior
(19:55):
year of high school and Advanced Placement English my senior
year of high school. This is because using the computer
allowed me to communicate my thoughts and ideas to my
teachers without the distractions of bad handwriting and spelling. I
did go on to college where I earned my bachelor's
degree in psychology, philosophy and theology. Currently I am an
internship and thesis away from my Masters of Science and
(20:15):
Educational Counseling with a three point seven to g p A.
As a side note, one of my best friends from
high school, who was an RSP with me, just finished
her master's degree in journalism from a university in London.
I have done advocacy for special education students on and
off ever since I was diagnosed, because I passionately believe
that just because our brains function differently than someone else's
(20:37):
does not mean that we are stupid. We can achieve
great things in life, both personally and professionally, if we
are given the accurate tools to do so. I apologize
for the link this. I tried to keep it discinct.
I could certainly say more, but anyhow, thank you for
bringing to light a topic that can be easily overlooked.
And she says, keep up the excellent work, Liz, I
said Elizabeth at the top of the letter, but she
(20:59):
signed it Liz, Uh, thank you so much. Liz. I
wanted to read this for two reasons. One is that
it's always awesome to hear from people who have been
directly affected by the things that we talk about UM.
And the other is that my aunt, who I mentioned
at the top of the episode about special education, who
was a special education teacher for most of her career,
(21:20):
UM dyslexia runs really prominently and a lot of my
family and her sons have dyslexia. She actually thinks she
probably has dyslexia as well, and was never diagnosed because
when she was because of when she was growing up,
So that's one of the reasons that led her to
be a special education teacher. If you would like to
write to us, you can. We're a history podcast at
(21:42):
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(22:02):
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(22:24):
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Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Well, I'm Holly Frying.
You pay attention to our Facebook or our Twitter. You
may have noticed a goofy picture. It was a very
(00:22):
goofy picture, and Holly and I put up there, uh
last winter from our office holiday party, in which Polly
is like Googley exclaiming over my engagement ring. I like,
how silly. I like how you think I was purposely
being goofy when in fact I was being delighted and genuine. Okay, good, Well,
I felt I felt goofy because we were taking this
(00:47):
picture in front of a in front of a Christmas tree,
and like you had actually already seen my ring and
we were it was all. The whole setup was kind
but anyways, a little stage, but my reaction remained genuine.
I feel okay, okay good. Um So, people basically immediately
started asking whether we would do some wedding episodes. Not
(01:07):
as a please, they keep that away from me, but hey,
you should do this. Uh So here we go. Here's
our first episode that pertains in some way to to
my wedding, and it's not about flowers or diamonds, or
cake or Queen Victoria, which are all things that people suggested.
It is about dancing. Specifically, it is about Lyndi hop
and the most famous of all the Lindie Hoppers, who
(01:29):
was Frankie Manning. Uh frank Benjamin Manning was born in Jacksonville, Florida.
On His parents were Jerry and Lucille Hadley Manning, and
his only sibling was an older sister who died when
Frankie was only two. The family lived in the segregated
neighborhood of Campbell Hill until he was three, at which
(01:50):
point his mother left his father and they moved to
New York. A whole series of his childhood experiences directly
influenced his later work and dance. When they moved to
New York, he and his mother made the trip by boat,
and Frankie was just fascinated with the motion of the
waves as they rolled over one another, and he said
(02:11):
he wanted to figure out what kind of game they
were playing. His earliest musical memories were in Aiken, South Carolina,
where his father moved. After Frankie and his mother had
gone to New York. Frankie would spend some time on
his uncle's farm. There in the summers and in the evenings,
once all of the work was done, the family would
sit on the porch and friends and farm hands would
(02:31):
play harmonica and washtub bass and other instruments while other
people danced. And when he was young, Frankie really had
to be kind of encouraged to get out there and
and dance. But as soon as his grandmother got him
into the circle with the other dancers, that was a
done deal. He did not want to stop. Front Yard
and church music continue to be a really big part
(02:52):
of his summer life until he was about ten years old,
and at that point his father moved to New York
as well. Yeah, once his father was in New York,
there wasn't nearly as much of an impetus for him
to go visit South Carolina anymore. Uh. But you know,
during the school year, Frankie was an extremely good student,
and since his mother worked, after he got out of
(03:12):
school every day, a friend of hers would let him
fit in a vaudeville theater that was across the street
from his school. He sat in the back and he
did his homework, but he also watched the films and
the comedy and dance performances that went on in the
theater every afternoon for pretty much all of his school years.
That sounds sort of dreamy, I have to say. Uh.
(03:33):
Frankie Manning style of dance was really quite physically demanding,
so it's no surprise that he was also pretty athletic.
When he was a kid, he and the neighborhood children
would play stickball and race around, and they also climbed
all around construction sites and roofs, and they would leap
back and forth along the building's basement doors and their stoops,
(03:54):
and he was extremely versatile. He participated in a lot
of different sports all the way through both junior high
and high school. His mother really loved to dance, and
starting when he was about eight years old, she would
take him with her to social dances, and a lot
of these dances were at rent parties. These were parties
where people would charge a quarter or so for people
(04:16):
to be admitted, and this would help them raise the
money to pay the rent. So at rent parties, people
eight drank and danced, usually accompanied by somebody playing the piano.
At first, Frankie's mother would leave him in a bedroom
to just sleep while she was at the party, but
usually he would instead get up and watch the grown
ups through the door. And although he wasn't quite at
(04:39):
the point where he was really interested in dancing himself, uh,
these early experiences really affected how he thought about dance.
These people were clearly having a great time in great company,
and different dance styles came out for different moods and
different styles of music, and when someone was really good,
the rest of the crowd would just sort of clear
(04:59):
the space and watch so that that person could really
just show off and let loose. A couple of years later,
once he was old enough to spend a little more
time with the grown ups instead of in a room
where people were leaving their coats, Frankie really started to
pay attention to how people moved and what steps they did,
and he started trying to remember how these dances worked
(05:21):
with the rhythms of the music. So by the time
he was about ten, he was practicing steps at home.
In October of n Frankie was twelve years old. At
this time, his mother was going to help decorate a
Halloween dance, and she told them that if he helped
to he could go to the dance with her, and
he was a wildly excited about this. In his own recounting,
(05:43):
he was the youngest person on the dance floor that night,
but when he finally danced with his mother, she told him, Frankie,
you'll never be a dancer. You're too stiff. And his
own words, after my mother told me I was too
stiff to be a dancer, I felt pretty sad. I
honestly thought that I was dancing like everybody else at
the Renaissance ballroom that night. I was really dragging on
(06:04):
the way back home. But the next day what she
said kind of lit me up. That comment from his
mother is when he really got seriously interested in dancing.
He started practicing at home to the couple of records
that he owned, and doing anything he could do he
could think of to keep his body from being stiff
and straight. When his mother walked in on him dancing
(06:24):
with a broom or a chair as his partner, he
would tell her that he was quote trying to get unstiff.
He also kept watching dancers as much as he could,
both at ballrooms and private parties, and he noticed the
differences at how people danced in these different environments. Ballroom
dances were social events, and everyone danced there in a
(06:46):
more formal way, with kind of an upright posture, usually
wearing their Sunday best. Private parties, on the other hand,
were a lot looser and freer and wilder, and for
the most part, the exact same people were dancing in
both places, although to look at them in either setting
you would not so much expect that. And he also
practiced in the basement with his friend, Herman Jackson, and
(07:09):
they would trade off who was leading and who was
following because they didn't have a girl to practice with.
And when Frankie was thirteen, the two of them skipped
out on their Baptist Young People's Union events to instead
go to a dance for young people at the Alhambra Theater.
The dance, which was for kids age twelve to fifteen,
had a big band playing and it cost a nickel
(07:30):
to get in. They had a really good time. They
did not dance with anybody uh. They did, however, decide
to go back, and they went for the next four
weeks before Frankie finally asked someone to dance with him,
and he was hoping to show off the swing moves
that he had been practicing at home. However, as soon
as he asked someone to dance, the band struck up
(07:51):
a waltz, and he didn't know how to waltz, so
he basically uh imitated what the male partner was doing
in a dancing couple nearby, and kind of watched that
guy the whole time and imitated what he was doing
without looking at his partner at all. It was kind
of a disaster. For several months after that, Frankie and
(08:12):
Herman brought their own partner to the social dances. Uh.
This was a neighbor named Virginia, and they brought her
until they were confident enough to start asking other people again,
and they went to these dances every week with very
few interruptions. Once after Frankie's mother heard him mention a
dance and she at that point found out that he
had not been going to the b YPU meetings anymore.
(08:34):
He actually got grounded for a week. After a while,
Frankie and Herman started attending the Alhambra Theaters dances for
adults and also dances for older teams at the Renaissance
ball Room, because these were for people who were a
little older than the ones for the younger teenagers. That
they had been attending before. The dancers that they were
seeing and dancing with were better, which meant that consequently
(08:57):
Frankie and herman themselves got better too. And it was
actually at the Renaissance that Frankie first saw people doing
the Lindy hop. And we're going to talk a lot
about that, but first we are going to have a
quick word from a sponsor before we continue with Frankie's story,
we need to talk a little bit about what lindy
hop actually is. Along with swing, the Charleston and the
(09:19):
Jitterbug and many many other dances, Lindy hop is a
dance that falls into the umbrella of African American vernacular dance.
These are dances that have African roots and have been
created and popularized in social settings during the time period.
We're talking about. These settings where juke joints, ballrooms, and
the rent parties that Frankie's mother would take him to.
There's often some level of competition inherent in invernacular dances
(09:43):
in the form of dance contests and dance offs. African
American vernacular dances have been passed down from one generation
to the next within Black communities. Morphing and kind of
evolving along the way, and many of them are quite
highly improvisational. Linda Hop itself actually evolved from the Charleston Uh,
the collegiate, and the breakaway kind of combining. It reportedly
(10:06):
got its name when a reporter asked a dancer what
dance he was doing, shortly after Charles Lindbergh's famous flight
across the Atlantic. Social dances have played a huge role
in community building and creative expression in African American communities
for more than a century. So Lindy Hop and other
vernacular dances created in popularized during the Swing Era were
(10:28):
a really important part of the social fabric and black
and black communities from the nine twenties all the way
through the end of World War Two. This is especially
true during the Great Depression, when people didn't have much
money and social dancing was both an inexpensive form of
entertainment and a much needed social outlet. Frankie Manning learned
the Lindy Hop exactly the same way he had learned
(10:49):
other dances, by watching other dancers and dancing with them,
and it was with the Lindy Hop that he really
started to improvise steps of his own. He was dancing
as often as he could. At the same time, he
was also finishing school, and he was playing on multiple
team sports at school, and he was actually working multiple
jobs to try to keep himself and his mother afloat,
(11:10):
And he finally dropped out of school in the twelfth
grade in part because the teachers, who were all white,
we're encouraging the black students not to go to college. Yeah,
they were in being encouraged to basically take up laboring
jobs instead. The popularity of Lindy Hop was spreading by
and Frankie's friends, who knew how much he liked the
(11:31):
dance and thought he was pretty good at it, encouraged
him to enter a contest at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem.
When it was their group's turn, they started doing their
regular social dancing like they've been doing, and it did
not go very well. The audience booed them, and a
comedian whose job it was to make fun of dancers
who did poorly, did exactly that and then hauled them
(11:52):
off the stage with a hook. It was another disaster
and Frankie's early dancing career. But the good news is
that Frankie Manning did not give up and maybe a
year later, on New Year's Eve, he and his girlfriend
started doing the Charleston at a dance, and at that
point they were so good that people started throwing money
(12:12):
and apparently amused by the sight of one of them
scrambling to pick up this money that had been thrown
uh the onlookers through more money, and Frankie called this
his first big payday as a dancer. He was about
fifteen years old at the time. About a year after
Frankie Manning left high school, he was playing a pickup
basketball game with Herbert Roper, and Herbert scored and then
(12:36):
did this version of a Lyndy step that Frankie had
never seen before as kind of a celebratory move. Frankie
asked Herbert where he had learned to dance like that,
and Herbert said at the Savoy. Harlem's Savoy Ballroom had
opened on March twelfth of nine and it was owned
by Mogaile, who was white, and managed by Charles Buchanan,
(12:57):
who was black, and it was one of the first
Racheli integrated social spaces in the United States. It was
a beautiful ballroom with two bandstands in an immense spring
loaded wooden dance floor, and it made a name for
itself as being home to the best music and the
best dancers. Many of the dances that later became really
(13:18):
popular were developed at the Savoy, and the Lyndy Hot
became really the signature dance that was danced there. For
many years, the best, wildest, and most inventive Lindy Hot
dancers usually got together and danced in what was known
as Cat's Corner, on the north end of the hall
and near the bandstand. The Savoy was also a performing
venue for some of the biggest names of the era,
(13:39):
including Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. I could just rattle
off names of people who performed there forever. If you
can think of a big jazz person who was performing
during that time, or a big band performing that time,
probably they performed at the Savoy ball Room. Frankie's first
trip to the Savoy was when he was about nineteen,
and he went with a group as moral support because
(14:01):
they were concerned that they wouldn't be good enough to
fit in, and since he still knew a lot of
people who were dancing at the Renaissance. He spent his
dancing time between the two ball rooms for a while,
but within a year he had really shifted to doing
most of his dancing at the Savoy. Herbert White, known
as Whitey, started a dance troup at the Savoy, and
at first it was just called the Savoy Lindy Hoppers,
(14:23):
but it eventually became known as white EA's Lindy Hoppers
around four so when Frankie was about twenty, White he
asked him if he wanted to join the Troope. This
meant that Frankie would be able to get into the
Savoy for free, he could practice when the ballroom was
technically closed, and he would get to dance with the
best dancers all the time. So instead of just watching
(14:44):
people dance and trying to pick up their steps, he
could just ask them to teach him. And he actually
learned that he could have done that the whole time.
He did not need to have like an official endorsement
to ask somebody, hey, how did you do that step
whom It's one of those wonderful things. I think lots
of people, uh, lots of us do things exactly like that,
Like we assume there's some social rule that there isn't,
(15:05):
and we could have been helping ourselves a lot the
whole time. It's easy to identify with that. UH. As
a side note before we jump into a sponsor break,
there's an interesting point in that. UH. Some writing about
the Lindy Hop kind of suggests that dancers had almost
proprietary steps that were there's and that other dancers would
not do, and there was sort of a code of
honor around that. But in his autobiography, Frankie flatly rejects
(15:29):
this idea and says that people learned from one another,
they shared steps all the time, they copied each other's
work like it was a lot more collaborative and crossover
e than some writing would indicate. So to get back
to Frankie's story, about six months after joining the troop,
he really started to develop his own style of Lindi Hop.
He lowered his center of gravity way way down towards
(15:50):
the ground, and he started just making these big, long,
reaching movements with his legs and arms. It's a style
that he described as trying to get as far as
poss bawl from his mother's observation that he was too stiff,
and he was also really trying to interpret the music
with his body, not just to do the steps of
a dance to time with the music. Well. In nine four,
(16:14):
Frankie and his partner Hilda Morris actually entered a Lindy
contest at the Apollo Theater and they won. Their prize
was to appear in the review that was opening there
and that ran four shows a day for a week,
and they did that, and the musician that was performing
that week was Duke Ellington and they were also paid
for this work. So this was pretty big stuff, uh.
(16:34):
And soon after this Frankie and Hilda started to tour
his dancers. A little later on, Whitey arranged a dance
competition between his dance troupe and another troupe headed by
Shorty Snowdon So. Shorty's troop had started at the Savoy
and they had been performing elsewhere professionally for a while.
They were quite good. They were seasoned professional dance troupe,
(16:57):
but some people felt like maybe they had gotten a
little bit complacent and they're dancing. Frankie Manning started working
out one of his most famous moves for this contest.
One of Shorty's couples did a comedic bit at the
end of their routine in which the very tall female
partner carried the male partner off the floor. Frankie also
(17:18):
wanted to take his dance into the air, and his
partner for the contest was free to Washington, and he
wanted her to go over his head in a kind
of backward somersault and then land in front of him.
And so they wouldn't give this move away. They actually
practiced it at home on a mattress for safety, and
he called this the over the back. So when they
(17:40):
did this in the contest, which was kind of build
as the like fiery young upstarts against the established professional troope,
it went over amazingly. People could not believe what they
had just seen. And today aerials are a really big
part of the Lindy hop scene, especially among the most
experienced dancers and the people who dance competitively. Frankie at
(18:04):
the time, though, called it an air step because he
wanted to distinguish it from lifts that are common in
ballroom dancing. After this success at this contest, Frankie started
looking for more and more air steps, and this was
one of his most recognizable and famous innovations in the
world of Linda Hop. And this is really where Frankie
(18:25):
kind of moves into having a professional career as a dancer.
But we're gonna not talk about that today because we're
gonna talk about it next time. You get a two
parter on Frankie Manning. I'm so excited. I love it.
I love talking about dance. We get a lot of
requests from people to talk about dance. Yeah, lots of
people love it, myself included. Uh, do you have a
little bit of listener mail? I do, And this is
(18:48):
a listener mail from Elizabeth who is writing about our
episode about special education. And Elizabeth says, Hi, ladies, I
wanted to write to you about my journey through the
educational system and being an RSP student. I have mild
dyslexia and discalculia, which is essentially dyslexia with numbers, along
with some other mild information processing challenges. I must also
(19:10):
say that my mother is a retired special education teacher
and she greatly shaped my progress through school. My mother
knew I was dyslexic from a young age and worked
rigorously with me outside of school all through elementary and
junior high school. She feared the prejudices of educators and
therefore did not have me tested for US for special
Education until high school. At that time, I was granted
(19:32):
an I e P which included accommodations such as using
a computer to write in class essays and a simple
calculator on math exams for basic computation. My mom knew
that I, like many students who fall into the mild
slash moderate special education category, are quote lumpy learners her term.
As far as I knew. With my accommodations, I was
able to progress in English to Honors English my junior
(19:55):
year of high school and Advanced Placement English my senior
year of high school. This is because using the computer
allowed me to communicate my thoughts and ideas to my
teachers without the distractions of bad handwriting and spelling. I
did go on to college where I earned my bachelor's
degree in psychology, philosophy and theology. Currently I am an
internship and thesis away from my Masters of Science and
(20:15):
Educational Counseling with a three point seven to g p A.
As a side note, one of my best friends from
high school, who was an RSP with me, just finished
her master's degree in journalism from a university in London.
I have done advocacy for special education students on and
off ever since I was diagnosed, because I passionately believe
that just because our brains function differently than someone else's
(20:37):
does not mean that we are stupid. We can achieve
great things in life, both personally and professionally, if we
are given the accurate tools to do so. I apologize
for the link this. I tried to keep it discinct.
I could certainly say more, but anyhow, thank you for
bringing to light a topic that can be easily overlooked.
And she says, keep up the excellent work, Liz, I
said Elizabeth at the top of the letter, but she
(20:59):
signed it Liz, Uh, thank you so much. Liz. I
wanted to read this for two reasons. One is that
it's always awesome to hear from people who have been
directly affected by the things that we talk about UM.
And the other is that my aunt, who I mentioned
at the top of the episode about special education, who
was a special education teacher for most of her career,
(21:20):
UM dyslexia runs really prominently and a lot of my
family and her sons have dyslexia. She actually thinks she
probably has dyslexia as well, and was never diagnosed because
when she was because of when she was growing up,
So that's one of the reasons that led her to
be a special education teacher. If you would like to
write to us, you can. We're a history podcast at
(21:42):
how stefpworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at
miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
tumblr dot com, and we're also on Pinterest at pinterest
dot com slash miss in History. We also have t
shirts and phone cases and similar things at our spread
shirts store, which is in history dot spreadshirt dot com.
(22:02):
If you would like to learn more about what we've
talked about today, come to our parent company's website. Put
the words Harlem Renaissance uh in the search bar and
you will find some articles about the Harlem Renaissance. And
that's at stuff works dot com. You can also come
to our website, which is missed in History dot com,
and you will find lots of information about the episodes
that we've put out there, show notes for all of them.
(22:24):
We've got archive of every single episode I've ever done,
lots of cool stuff. You can do all that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot Com
or missed in History dot com For more on this
and thousands of other topics. Doesn't how stuff works tot
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