May 20, 2015 • 28 mins
Once Manning became a professional dancer and choreographer, his work took him all over the world. After WWII derailed his swing dancing, he had a hard time returning to a world where musical tastes had changed. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from works
dot Com. Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm Tracy Eagleson
and I'm Holly Frying and today we are picking up
the second half of our story about Frankie Manning, who
(00:21):
was one of the most prominent figures in the world
of Lindy hop uh. This started out as a hobby
but then became his career. Starting in six Frankie Manning
became a professional dancer and choreographer with Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
and this group performed at the Alhambra Theater as part
of reviews. They also toured and they danced for films.
(00:44):
One of the places they performed was at the Cotton Club,
and this was a whites only establishment that had mostly
black entertainers. It was known for hosting some of the
best and most influential jazz performers that existed at the time.
The Lindy Hoppers danced with swing bands Count Basie and
Cab Callaway, and even though they've done plenty of performing
(01:04):
before that, performing at the Cotton Club made Frankie feel
like a real dancer, just because the establishment had a
certain level of prestige, and at the same time, Frankie
also started to resent it. Most of the time, the
Lindy Hoppers did not have top billing, They were lesser acts,
and the stars often looked down on them. So he
made up his mind to change people's attitudes about Lindy
(01:26):
Hop and to stop thinking of the dancers as raggedy.
He started dressing immaculately and encouraging his fellow dancers to
do the same. As their fame spread, their tours took
them farther and farther from New York, as well as
touring all around the United States. In seven, the Cotton
Club Show went to Europe to tour France and England.
In addition to their regular performances, they gave a royal
(01:49):
command performance for King George the sixth and the future
Queen Elizabeth the Second. According to his autobiography, when she
got to him in the receiving line, she extended her
hand to shake his, and he was so flustered by
this gesture that he curtsied to her instead of bowing.
That makes me wonder what kind of hilarious comments were
(02:09):
made on the royal side of that game after the fact,
What and there were from his point of view, there
were running jokes about that afterward. I'm sure it is
not the first time someone had awkwardly, uh made an
embarrassing gaff in front of her, and certainly it's happened
many times since. In Frankie and the Troop toured Australia
(02:33):
and New Zealand for a year where they performed a
production called The Hollywood Hotel Review. And this was a
major production and it was very well received by both
critics and audiences. The Lyndi Hop Troupe were the only
black members of the cast during this Australian and New
Zealand's tour, and they saw very few other people of
(02:53):
African descent while on the tour. So while Frankie wrote
of being treated very warmly in Australia, he also wrote
that he saw Australia's Aboriginal people being treated the same
way that black people were back home in the United States.
And after they got back, he and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
performed in the nineteen nine World's Fair, but Frankie only
(03:13):
did so for a day. The ten and twelve show
per day schedule was just too much. I think this
is the only time that he was like, I can't.
That's a lot of shows to do in a day,
especially if you're doing physical stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So from
there though, he in the Street performed in the Broadway
productions Swinging in a Dream, which is a swing version
(03:36):
of a Midsummer nine stream in nine. I wish there
were archival video of this. If there is, maybe someone
will tell us about it, because that sounds incredible to me.
But they also performed at Radio City Music Hall in
the film Radio City Reels, and in the film Hell's
a Popping. They toured with more jazz greats like Billie Holiday,
(03:57):
Ella Fitzgerald and Bilbo Jankles Robinson. In the late nineteen thirties,
Frankie started trying to break away from the gender dynamics
that were part of the Lindy Hop at the time,
as well as ballroom dance in general. Because male dancers
did the lead parts and female dancers followed their direction.
The male dancers got all of the acclaim and also
top billing, but the female dancers were just as good
(04:20):
as the male dancers, they just had a different skill set.
So Frankie started actually teaching his female partners to lead
steps so that they could do them together for a while.
White these Lindy Hoppers were the headliners at the Club Alabama,
and they were such a big draw that the club
built a whole show around them, which Frankie staged. This
(04:42):
was a total departure from being thought of as the
raggedy swing dancers that the rest of the show looked
down on. This was a huge departure from being the
raggedy dancers that the rest of the performers looked down
on that we talked about earlier in the show. About
a month into their run, Frankie got a telegram from
Herbert Whitey White, who the dancer the dance troup had
(05:02):
been named after, saying that they've been contracted to go
on a tour in South America. They were once again
very well received by the audience in Rio, although the
audience shouts for more sounded like booing in English, so
there was some confusion. Uh They did so well though
at their original six week run that it was extended
and expanded to tour around South America. But a couple
(05:26):
of days into all this, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and
the United States entered World War Two. This meant that
Frankie and the rest of the troop wound up stranded
in Rio for months. They needed to get a commercial
flight back home. That seats were really hard to come
by because all of the other Americans in that hemisphere
(05:46):
were also trying to get back home. Their trip home
eventually required bribery, and they got back to the United
States after ten months of being away. They were so
broke after being stranded and after their bribery that they
had to do to get back home, but they had
to work in Florida to be able to afford to
get back to New York at all. And while they
(06:09):
were still in Florida trying to earn this money just
to get back to New York, Frankie's mother wrote him
and let him know that he had actually been drafted.
We'll get to that. After a quick break for a
word from a sponsor, Frankie was drafted in ninety three.
He went back to New York to prepare for the army,
at which point his professional relationship with Herbert White and did.
(06:31):
After all the effort of getting back to the States
and then back to New York, Frankie no longer had
the money to pay Whitey for his commission for the
South American Tour, and Whitey was of course extremely angry
about this, but Frankie, of course had legitimately needed that
money to get everyone home to safety. They only worked
together a couple of times afterward. After joining the United
(06:54):
States Army, Frankie served in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan.
He spent a very few pages in his autobiography talking
about his time in the army, but in them he
talks about facing racism, horrific experiences, well deployed, and occasionally
performing with the USO when they asked for soldiers to
join the show. He had actually tried to get into
(07:15):
the Special Services, which was where some of the biggest
name entertainers served, but he apparently didn't have the right
connections or enough name recognition. He hadn't wanted to join
the army at all because he knew he wouldn't be
able to dance anymore as long as he was there,
and after he returned to civilian life in ninety six,
it turned out to be a lot harder to return
(07:35):
to his former work. The nation's musical tastes really changed
after the war, and the news styles of music just
weren't as suited to Lindy hop as jazz and swing
had been. He just couldn't get the feel for the
bebop and rock and roll music that overtook jazz in
the post four years. Although he founded a new troupe
(07:55):
called the Kangaroos for several years and did still do
some dancing and performing, engagements were much shorter and they
were not nearly as lucrative as they had been in
his prior career. He managed to tour with other prominent names,
including Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. But it
was much harder than it had been in the years
before the war. The old ballrooms started to close or
(08:18):
change their focus, and one day Frankie heard about an
Arthur Murray dance school that was teaching Lindy hop. He
went there out of curiosity to see what it was like,
and it wasn't a dance that he recognized at all.
Frankie eventually met Gloria Holloway, who would eventually become his wife.
He would have two children with Gloria, in addition to
another son who had been born in nineteen thirty two,
(08:40):
and he supported his family through a job at the
post Office. The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem closed in nineteen
fifty eight. Frankie's mother died in nineteen seventy five, and
Frankie and his and his wife divorced in nineteen seventy six.
In the early nineteen eighties, a swing dance revivals started
to germinate in cities around the United States. Larry Schultz
(09:04):
and Sandra Cameron invited a group of Lindy Hoppers who
had frequented the Savoy to their dance studio. The husband
and wife team encouraged those dancers to teach swing dancing
to a new generation of dancers. Frankie went to a
couple of reunions, and while he thought it was nice
to see everyone, he really didn't think that swing dancing
was making a comeback at that point. But then one
(09:26):
day he got a call from a woman named Aaron Stevens,
and she said that she and her dance partner had
been studying with Lindi Hopper al Men's before his death
in nine and she wanted to know if Frankie might
work with the two of them when they were in
New York on an upcoming trip. And at first he
said no, but she was very persistent, so he finally agreed.
(09:48):
Frankie watched the two with him dance and you thought
they were pretty good. He said they had soul and
he thought maybe he could help them get a little better.
So this event sparked and Frankie manning the desire to
teach Lindi Hop to more people. By this point, he
was past the age of eighty. Frankie credited the two
of them with changing his life. So then he started
(10:10):
touring again all over the world, this time teaching Lindy
Hop and other swing era dances, and some of his
students had learned by watching the old movies with Lindy
Hop scenes in them. He taught people, and he taught
people how to teach. He also found work as a
choreographer all over the world, including for the Alvan Ailey
(10:31):
Dance Theater. In nine he won a Tony Award for
his choreography in the Broadway musical Black and Blue. In
one he was asked to work on Spike Lee's biopic
of Malcolm X, and at first he said no because
he was about to go out of town for a month,
but they asked again when he returned from his travels.
He wound up teaching the company, helping select the dancers
(10:52):
and showing them some of the film's Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
had start in. He later worked on a made for
TV movie called Stomping at the Savoy. He earned numerous
awards and acclaim for his work, and he continued to
teach until very late in his life. He died on
April two thousand and nine at the age of ninety four.
(11:14):
At this point, you may be asking yourself, Jacy, why
did you tell us that this was a wedding episode?
And we're going to talk about why that is after
another brief word from a sponsor. So we kicked off
this two parter with a story about how people started
asking us for wedding episodes after we put up a
picture from our office holiday party on our Facebook and
Twitter in which Holly was exclaiming over my engagement ring.
(11:36):
And so if you tuned in for that part, you
might be wondering what all of this has to do
with weddings. And here's the answer. The venue for our
wedding was built in the nineteen twenties. All right, fiance
and I have both learned six counts swing dancing. I've
also learned Charleston and Lindy Hop, so we've been talking
about whether to have swing dancing at the wedding, but
(11:57):
I have some hesitations about that, and scifically, what I've
been wrestling with is whether that feels like an appreciation
and celebration of Lindy Hop or an appropriation of a
culture that isn't mine. Now, I know that mentioning cultural
appropriation at all means that there are some people right
now who are about to stop listening and start writing
us an angry email. And if this describes you, all
(12:19):
I ask is that you please listen to the rest
of what we say before you start the angry typing.
You know, warm up your fingers. It'll be fine. Um.
One of the common misconceptions about cultural appropriation is that
people who argue against appropriation are saying that anytime someone
does something that came from another culture, it's bad, and
(12:40):
that is really not the case. When two cultures come
into contact with one another, there's inevitably going to be
an exchange of ideas and beliefs and practices, and there
are examples of one culture influencing another in a positive
way all over history. So it's not innately a bad thing.
It doesn't come with that baggage inherently. But sometimes what
(13:01):
happens is that a dominant culture takes something that a
marginalized or disenfranchised culture created and then uses it and
sometimes even profits from it without ever having considered the
implications of what is actually happening in that equation, or,
to be more direct, one culture that's subjugating another culture
takes that culture's innovations and inventions as their own, and
(13:23):
that is cultural appropriation, and that is what we're talking
about here. So African American vernacular dance was developed and
shared among Black people in joke joints and rent parties
and ball rooms for decades and for decades as knowledge
of these dances spread beyond Black communities, white communities also
adopted them as their own. And as we talk about
in Part one, these social dances were a really important
(13:46):
part of black culture, and black culture was at this
point the target of segregation, discrimination, and extreme racism. So
to black communities, these dances were often really about social
connections and community pro side and having a venue for
free and creative expression outside of all of these societal
issues that they had to deal with all the time,
(14:08):
and sometimes it was even a form of political resistance.
But many of the white people who later learned these
dances were completely ignorant of all that history and meaning,
and instead it just seemed like a fun and popular
thing to do. That is on my experience when I
first started studying swing dancing. Even during the heyday of
the swing era, the Lindy hop that predominantly white audiences
(14:31):
saw in motion pictures and stage shows was often a
lot different from how people experienced it in a social setting.
Sometimes these films and stage productions were choreographed by a
long time Lindy hoppers themselves, but directors and other choreographers
who worked on these films a lot of time toned
back what was happening to be a little more choreographed
(14:52):
and a little less improvisational. And if you watch any
of these films, you will probably notice that the dancers
in musicians in the dance scenes are often dressed as
maids and waiters and delivery boys and other service staff,
and this basically is to give them a reason to
be in the movie at all, because they don't have
speaking roles with the other actors in the film so
(15:14):
there has to be something that makes their presence there
makes sense, and the thing is that they are in
service jobs. This is not necessarily true of every uh movie,
old movie that has let me happened then, because some
of them were basically movie versions of theatrical reviews. But
ones where there's a Lindy hop scene in a film
that has a story. A lot of times that story
(15:35):
is as a story about white people with white actors,
but the dance scene is suddenly a group of black
people dressed for work. So swinger and dances spread into
white communities so thoroughly that for a lot of people
myself included saying the Charleston conjures up an image of
a white flapper with bobbed hair and a straight waisted dress.
(15:58):
But flappers didn't invent the Charleston. Black people did. Anger
and resentment about white people stealing something black people created
is a recurring theme in literature from the Harlem Renaissance
and beyond, and these are discussions that are continuing today. Recently,
Amandalas Stenberg, the actress who played ru in The Hunger
(16:19):
Games and Macy Irving and Sleepy Hollow, among other roles,
released a YouTube video about white celebrities appreciating black culture
more than they appreciated black people. It's a really incredible
video and we will link to it in the show notes,
and it ties into this whole conversation of the Lindy
Hop and it's particularly relevant now because in the swing
revival that started in the nineteen eighties and nineties, this
(16:41):
new generation of dancers was, at least in the United States,
overwhelmingly white. From my own experience, apart from one South
Asian teacher, all of my swing teachers were white, and
the dancers that every dance menu where I danced were
also overwhelmingly white. But here's another case of whether the
question of whether Lindy hop is culturally appropriative is pretty nuanced.
(17:05):
In Frankie Manning's autobiography, he writes over and over about
the racism and discrimination that he experienced as a black
dancer and a black person. But the Lindy Hop revival
kept the dance from dying out, and Frankie himself, for
more than a decade of his later life, devoted himself
to sharing this dance with as many people as possible.
(17:25):
He found absolute joy in this dance, and he wanted
to share that joy. From the introduction to his two
thousand seven autobiography, Cynthia Millman, who collaborated with him on it, wrote, quote,
as much as Frankie appreciates the new found recognition of
his talent and accomplishments, by far his greatest greatest pleasure
comes from the opportunity to share the dance he loves
(17:46):
so much with a new generation of enthusiasts, young and old.
So given how happy he ultimately was about the swing revival,
the verdict does I haven't decided what to do or
whether to have swing dancing at my wedding, but I
know I definitely can't do it unless my guests also
learned something about its history too. So will we be
(18:09):
getting uh, some sort of history crib notes with our
invites if you decide to. I'm like, maybe we'll have
a little essay about Lindy hop in people's little gift bags.
I don't know. I don't know the answer. Yeah. There
(18:29):
there are definitely some cases where you can look at
somebody's use of another culture and and sort of go, well,
that's really gross and weird. And this is a case
where the history of it is so long, and there
are so many different facets of it that it's a
it's I don't think there's a very easy answer. And
if there is an easy answer, then there are pieces
of it that are not really be being examined. Uh
(18:51):
About how especially how people who thought that this dance
had died and was gone got to participate it in
it again, uh and share with other people when they
were older. So the jury is still out. Will you
share with our listeners when you make this decision so
we'll all know? Uh? Maybe I'm okay. I might do
it after the wedding. Seems fair because well, the the
(19:14):
whole subject of appropriation has so many pieces to it,
and it's so like if you are thoughtful about it,
there's so many different things to consider. And I know
from experience with our inbox that regardless of what the
decision is, there will be people who are unhappy about it.
(19:35):
And I prefer not to get hate mail about my
wedding until after it's over. Until after it's over. And
it's interesting because you know more and more in recent years.
I hope it's a good indicator that people are being
more thoughtful about historical context. That there have been a
number of weddings that have come up sort of you know,
you'll see articles about them in your social feed about like, hey,
(19:57):
this that probably didn't mean to be this way, but
they weren't thinking about what they were doing, and it
involves some appropriation, and you also don't want to be
that person, right. One of my favorite examples of that
is actually I don't remember which which one of the
wedding blogs that it was on, but it was a
woman who had put up pictures of her wedding and
it had Native American themes to it and there was
a peace pipe and I think it was a sort
(20:19):
of a fusion also of Scottish heritage, and uh, the
somebody wrote this blistering comment about how it was culturally
appropriative and she never should have used Native American symbols
in her wedding, and she was like, do I need
to get out my tribal identification card for you, because
if there's someone who's being racist here, it's definitely not me.
(20:43):
Because the reason they had had this particular wedding was
because that she was like part of a specific drive
and her fiance then husband was Scottish. Like the person
who had made this blistering comment was just assumed that
that was not the case. So with that, to on
(21:05):
with that, with that weighty topic of cultural appropriation, I
have some listener mail perfect. Our listener mail is from
Ali and Alice, says Dear Holly and Tracy. I've recently
listened to your series of podcasts on US civil rights
cases that it had something to add that I thought
might be of interest to you. I am a PhD
(21:25):
student in Melbourne, Australia. Side note, I cannot say that
like someone from Australia, I sound like an offensive caricature
of an Australian when I try. I researched language discrimination.
While listening to your podcasts, I couldn't help but think
of what is known to linguists as the ann Arbor
Decision and thought you may be interested in it if
(21:47):
you've not already heard of it. I'm not sure how
familiar most Americans are with the trial known officially as
Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children at All versus
and Arbor School District Board. And if you are, please
feel free to ignore this email and go back to
making excellent podcasts. They get me through many hours of
data entry involving my thesis project. The trial is well
known to linguists, largely due to an article published in
(22:10):
nineteen eight two by socio linguist William Labov. Much of
what I'm about this how You comes from that article.
The an Arbor Decision was a lawsuit brought against the
Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School, the n R School Board,
and the Michigan Board of Education on behalf of fifteen
children from the Green Road housing project in an Arbor.
In July seven. The school had declared the Green Road
(22:31):
children quote learning disabled, quote emotionally disturbed, and as having
quote behavior problems these terms obviously not mine, and had
put the children into special education classes. The plaintiffs in
the case argued that the children's lack of academic success
was a result of a language barrier. They claimed the
children were speakers of Black English, which is known nowadays
(22:53):
as African American Vernacular English or a a V, rather
than the standard English being used in the classroom. The
try addressed the legitimacy of the claim that a a V.
Was the distinct variety of English rather than simply bad English,
and several linguists were asked to testify, including labof This
was because Title twenty of the US Code, Section sevent
(23:14):
three f protects the educational opportunities of individuals in the
face of linguistic barriers the failure by an educational agency
to take appropriate action to overcome linguistic barriers that impede
equal participation by its students in in instructional programs. On
July twelfth, nineteen seventy nine, the presiding judge found for
(23:34):
the plaintiffs and the school board were required to submit
a plan detailing how teachers would be helped to identify
speakers of African American Vernacular English and the steps that
would be taken in order to teach these students standard English.
Following the Antarbor decisions, several school districts across the US
implemented literacy programs to help break the language language barrier
(23:54):
for speakers of African American Vernacular English, giving them access
to the education and social mobility that they had previously
been denied. While the case played out a linguistic debate,
the judge in the case recognized that the problem was
a result of quote unconscious negative attitudes formed by teachers
toward children who spoke Black English and the reactions of
(24:15):
children to these attitudes. To quote Labolf quote, the main
problem was a cultural and political conflict in the classroom,
not a linguistic one. You both seemed quite disheartened that
that quasi segregation and discrimination were still an issue in
the United States. Another reason I wanted to write to
you about this case was because while the Antarbor decision
happened many years ago, to me, it proves that things
(24:37):
can still improve if the problem isn't immediately fixed as
we may have hoped. Relegating children's to special education classrooms
helped maintain a kind of segregation in the years following
Brown versus Board, as I believe you mentioned, and this
decision helped fix that. I spend my days reading transcripts
of nasty things that people say to each other about
the way they speak and write. Discrimination on linguistic grounds
(25:01):
is one of the last widely socially acceptable forms of
discrimination at the moment. Standard varieties of language are associated
with certain admirable qualities like education, reliability, and intelligence, and
non standard varieties are associated with not being these things,
and by extension, speakers of these varieties are often seen
to be uneducated and reliable and unintelligent people are still
(25:25):
discriminated against today. But the and our and ourbur decision,
along with ground versus board and Park, gives me hope
that things can get better. She Ali then apologizes for
this email being so long. I don't apologize, It's got
so much good information in it. Thank you, thank you
so often. I'm like, they have multiple reasons that I
(25:46):
wanted to read this email. Um. One is that I
don't think we called out very specifically in that episode
that a lot of the kids that were put into
special education at the point we were talking about definitely
had it had more to do with, uh, like not
being able to under understand what was said to them
in the classroom than about intellectual ability at all. Um.
(26:10):
Disproportionately Black students were in special education classrooms, uh at
that point. The other reason was that doing a dissertation
about the nasty things that people say to each other
about the way they speak and right reminds me of
an episode that Holly and I did h on our
prior podcast Pop Stuff, about how terrible it is to
(26:32):
correct other people's grammar on the Internet. Yeah, and a
lot of that episode was about how that there's a
portion of people who are literate and have good literacy skills,
and they take their literacy for granted. But then there's another, uh,
huge chunk of people who have problems with those basic
(26:54):
literacy skills, and there's like a huge disconnect and being
able to communicate. Uh, and then take for granted that
everybody has the same verbal and reading skills, which is
not true. Uh So, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other subject, where at
History Podcast at Houston Works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
(27:16):
on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler is missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on
Pentriest at pentriest dot com slash missed in History. We
have a spreadshirt store which contains lots of shirts and
phonecases and things like that. That is at missing history
dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn
more about what we've talked about today, you can come
to our website and you can put the word jazz
(27:38):
into the search bar, uh and you will find the
article how jazz Works, and that's at how stuffworks dot com.
Or even come to our website which is missed in
history dot com, and you will find show notes for
this and our other episodes. You will find an archive
of every episode that we have ever done. And I
might put together a blog post with some cool clips
of Frankie Manny dancing because it is amazing to watch.
(28:00):
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com. Missed in History dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how stepp works dot we m m
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from works
dot Com. Hello and welcomed the podcast. I'm Tracy Eagleson
and I'm Holly Frying and today we are picking up
the second half of our story about Frankie Manning, who
(00:21):
was one of the most prominent figures in the world
of Lindy hop uh. This started out as a hobby
but then became his career. Starting in six Frankie Manning
became a professional dancer and choreographer with Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
and this group performed at the Alhambra Theater as part
of reviews. They also toured and they danced for films.
(00:44):
One of the places they performed was at the Cotton Club,
and this was a whites only establishment that had mostly
black entertainers. It was known for hosting some of the
best and most influential jazz performers that existed at the time.
The Lindy Hoppers danced with swing bands Count Basie and
Cab Callaway, and even though they've done plenty of performing
(01:04):
before that, performing at the Cotton Club made Frankie feel
like a real dancer, just because the establishment had a
certain level of prestige, and at the same time, Frankie
also started to resent it. Most of the time, the
Lindy Hoppers did not have top billing, They were lesser acts,
and the stars often looked down on them. So he
made up his mind to change people's attitudes about Lindy
(01:26):
Hop and to stop thinking of the dancers as raggedy.
He started dressing immaculately and encouraging his fellow dancers to
do the same. As their fame spread, their tours took
them farther and farther from New York, as well as
touring all around the United States. In seven, the Cotton
Club Show went to Europe to tour France and England.
In addition to their regular performances, they gave a royal
(01:49):
command performance for King George the sixth and the future
Queen Elizabeth the Second. According to his autobiography, when she
got to him in the receiving line, she extended her
hand to shake his, and he was so flustered by
this gesture that he curtsied to her instead of bowing.
That makes me wonder what kind of hilarious comments were
(02:09):
made on the royal side of that game after the fact,
What and there were from his point of view, there
were running jokes about that afterward. I'm sure it is
not the first time someone had awkwardly, uh made an
embarrassing gaff in front of her, and certainly it's happened
many times since. In Frankie and the Troop toured Australia
(02:33):
and New Zealand for a year where they performed a
production called The Hollywood Hotel Review. And this was a
major production and it was very well received by both
critics and audiences. The Lyndi Hop Troupe were the only
black members of the cast during this Australian and New
Zealand's tour, and they saw very few other people of
(02:53):
African descent while on the tour. So while Frankie wrote
of being treated very warmly in Australia, he also wrote
that he saw Australia's Aboriginal people being treated the same
way that black people were back home in the United States.
And after they got back, he and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
performed in the nineteen nine World's Fair, but Frankie only
(03:13):
did so for a day. The ten and twelve show
per day schedule was just too much. I think this
is the only time that he was like, I can't.
That's a lot of shows to do in a day,
especially if you're doing physical stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So from
there though, he in the Street performed in the Broadway
productions Swinging in a Dream, which is a swing version
(03:36):
of a Midsummer nine stream in nine. I wish there
were archival video of this. If there is, maybe someone
will tell us about it, because that sounds incredible to me.
But they also performed at Radio City Music Hall in
the film Radio City Reels, and in the film Hell's
a Popping. They toured with more jazz greats like Billie Holiday,
(03:57):
Ella Fitzgerald and Bilbo Jankles Robinson. In the late nineteen thirties,
Frankie started trying to break away from the gender dynamics
that were part of the Lindy Hop at the time,
as well as ballroom dance in general. Because male dancers
did the lead parts and female dancers followed their direction.
The male dancers got all of the acclaim and also
top billing, but the female dancers were just as good
(04:20):
as the male dancers, they just had a different skill set.
So Frankie started actually teaching his female partners to lead
steps so that they could do them together for a while.
White these Lindy Hoppers were the headliners at the Club Alabama,
and they were such a big draw that the club
built a whole show around them, which Frankie staged. This
(04:42):
was a total departure from being thought of as the
raggedy swing dancers that the rest of the show looked
down on. This was a huge departure from being the
raggedy dancers that the rest of the performers looked down
on that we talked about earlier in the show. About
a month into their run, Frankie got a telegram from
Herbert Whitey White, who the dancer the dance troup had
(05:02):
been named after, saying that they've been contracted to go
on a tour in South America. They were once again
very well received by the audience in Rio, although the
audience shouts for more sounded like booing in English, so
there was some confusion. Uh They did so well though
at their original six week run that it was extended
and expanded to tour around South America. But a couple
(05:26):
of days into all this, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and
the United States entered World War Two. This meant that
Frankie and the rest of the troop wound up stranded
in Rio for months. They needed to get a commercial
flight back home. That seats were really hard to come
by because all of the other Americans in that hemisphere
(05:46):
were also trying to get back home. Their trip home
eventually required bribery, and they got back to the United
States after ten months of being away. They were so
broke after being stranded and after their bribery that they
had to do to get back home, but they had
to work in Florida to be able to afford to
get back to New York at all. And while they
(06:09):
were still in Florida trying to earn this money just
to get back to New York, Frankie's mother wrote him
and let him know that he had actually been drafted.
We'll get to that. After a quick break for a
word from a sponsor, Frankie was drafted in ninety three.
He went back to New York to prepare for the army,
at which point his professional relationship with Herbert White and did.
(06:31):
After all the effort of getting back to the States
and then back to New York, Frankie no longer had
the money to pay Whitey for his commission for the
South American Tour, and Whitey was of course extremely angry
about this, but Frankie, of course had legitimately needed that
money to get everyone home to safety. They only worked
together a couple of times afterward. After joining the United
(06:54):
States Army, Frankie served in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan.
He spent a very few pages in his autobiography talking
about his time in the army, but in them he
talks about facing racism, horrific experiences, well deployed, and occasionally
performing with the USO when they asked for soldiers to
join the show. He had actually tried to get into
(07:15):
the Special Services, which was where some of the biggest
name entertainers served, but he apparently didn't have the right
connections or enough name recognition. He hadn't wanted to join
the army at all because he knew he wouldn't be
able to dance anymore as long as he was there,
and after he returned to civilian life in ninety six,
it turned out to be a lot harder to return
(07:35):
to his former work. The nation's musical tastes really changed
after the war, and the news styles of music just
weren't as suited to Lindy hop as jazz and swing
had been. He just couldn't get the feel for the
bebop and rock and roll music that overtook jazz in
the post four years. Although he founded a new troupe
(07:55):
called the Kangaroos for several years and did still do
some dancing and performing, engagements were much shorter and they
were not nearly as lucrative as they had been in
his prior career. He managed to tour with other prominent names,
including Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. But it
was much harder than it had been in the years
before the war. The old ballrooms started to close or
(08:18):
change their focus, and one day Frankie heard about an
Arthur Murray dance school that was teaching Lindy hop. He
went there out of curiosity to see what it was like,
and it wasn't a dance that he recognized at all.
Frankie eventually met Gloria Holloway, who would eventually become his wife.
He would have two children with Gloria, in addition to
another son who had been born in nineteen thirty two,
(08:40):
and he supported his family through a job at the
post Office. The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem closed in nineteen
fifty eight. Frankie's mother died in nineteen seventy five, and
Frankie and his and his wife divorced in nineteen seventy six.
In the early nineteen eighties, a swing dance revivals started
to germinate in cities around the United States. Larry Schultz
(09:04):
and Sandra Cameron invited a group of Lindy Hoppers who
had frequented the Savoy to their dance studio. The husband
and wife team encouraged those dancers to teach swing dancing
to a new generation of dancers. Frankie went to a
couple of reunions, and while he thought it was nice
to see everyone, he really didn't think that swing dancing
was making a comeback at that point. But then one
(09:26):
day he got a call from a woman named Aaron Stevens,
and she said that she and her dance partner had
been studying with Lindi Hopper al Men's before his death
in nine and she wanted to know if Frankie might
work with the two of them when they were in
New York on an upcoming trip. And at first he
said no, but she was very persistent, so he finally agreed.
(09:48):
Frankie watched the two with him dance and you thought
they were pretty good. He said they had soul and
he thought maybe he could help them get a little better.
So this event sparked and Frankie manning the desire to
teach Lindi Hop to more people. By this point, he
was past the age of eighty. Frankie credited the two
of them with changing his life. So then he started
(10:10):
touring again all over the world, this time teaching Lindy
Hop and other swing era dances, and some of his
students had learned by watching the old movies with Lindy
Hop scenes in them. He taught people, and he taught
people how to teach. He also found work as a
choreographer all over the world, including for the Alvan Ailey
(10:31):
Dance Theater. In nine he won a Tony Award for
his choreography in the Broadway musical Black and Blue. In
one he was asked to work on Spike Lee's biopic
of Malcolm X, and at first he said no because
he was about to go out of town for a month,
but they asked again when he returned from his travels.
He wound up teaching the company, helping select the dancers
(10:52):
and showing them some of the film's Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
had start in. He later worked on a made for
TV movie called Stomping at the Savoy. He earned numerous
awards and acclaim for his work, and he continued to
teach until very late in his life. He died on
April two thousand and nine at the age of ninety four.
(11:14):
At this point, you may be asking yourself, Jacy, why
did you tell us that this was a wedding episode?
And we're going to talk about why that is after
another brief word from a sponsor. So we kicked off
this two parter with a story about how people started
asking us for wedding episodes after we put up a
picture from our office holiday party on our Facebook and
Twitter in which Holly was exclaiming over my engagement ring.
(11:36):
And so if you tuned in for that part, you
might be wondering what all of this has to do
with weddings. And here's the answer. The venue for our
wedding was built in the nineteen twenties. All right, fiance
and I have both learned six counts swing dancing. I've
also learned Charleston and Lindy Hop, so we've been talking
about whether to have swing dancing at the wedding, but
(11:57):
I have some hesitations about that, and scifically, what I've
been wrestling with is whether that feels like an appreciation
and celebration of Lindy Hop or an appropriation of a
culture that isn't mine. Now, I know that mentioning cultural
appropriation at all means that there are some people right
now who are about to stop listening and start writing
us an angry email. And if this describes you, all
(12:19):
I ask is that you please listen to the rest
of what we say before you start the angry typing.
You know, warm up your fingers. It'll be fine. Um.
One of the common misconceptions about cultural appropriation is that
people who argue against appropriation are saying that anytime someone
does something that came from another culture, it's bad, and
(12:40):
that is really not the case. When two cultures come
into contact with one another, there's inevitably going to be
an exchange of ideas and beliefs and practices, and there
are examples of one culture influencing another in a positive
way all over history. So it's not innately a bad thing.
It doesn't come with that baggage inherently. But sometimes what
(13:01):
happens is that a dominant culture takes something that a
marginalized or disenfranchised culture created and then uses it and
sometimes even profits from it without ever having considered the
implications of what is actually happening in that equation, or,
to be more direct, one culture that's subjugating another culture
takes that culture's innovations and inventions as their own, and
(13:23):
that is cultural appropriation, and that is what we're talking
about here. So African American vernacular dance was developed and
shared among Black people in joke joints and rent parties
and ball rooms for decades and for decades as knowledge
of these dances spread beyond Black communities, white communities also
adopted them as their own. And as we talk about
in Part one, these social dances were a really important
(13:46):
part of black culture, and black culture was at this
point the target of segregation, discrimination, and extreme racism. So
to black communities, these dances were often really about social
connections and community pro side and having a venue for
free and creative expression outside of all of these societal
issues that they had to deal with all the time,
(14:08):
and sometimes it was even a form of political resistance.
But many of the white people who later learned these
dances were completely ignorant of all that history and meaning,
and instead it just seemed like a fun and popular
thing to do. That is on my experience when I
first started studying swing dancing. Even during the heyday of
the swing era, the Lindy hop that predominantly white audiences
(14:31):
saw in motion pictures and stage shows was often a
lot different from how people experienced it in a social setting.
Sometimes these films and stage productions were choreographed by a
long time Lindy hoppers themselves, but directors and other choreographers
who worked on these films a lot of time toned
back what was happening to be a little more choreographed
(14:52):
and a little less improvisational. And if you watch any
of these films, you will probably notice that the dancers
in musicians in the dance scenes are often dressed as
maids and waiters and delivery boys and other service staff,
and this basically is to give them a reason to
be in the movie at all, because they don't have
speaking roles with the other actors in the film so
(15:14):
there has to be something that makes their presence there
makes sense, and the thing is that they are in
service jobs. This is not necessarily true of every uh movie,
old movie that has let me happened then, because some
of them were basically movie versions of theatrical reviews. But
ones where there's a Lindy hop scene in a film
that has a story. A lot of times that story
(15:35):
is as a story about white people with white actors,
but the dance scene is suddenly a group of black
people dressed for work. So swinger and dances spread into
white communities so thoroughly that for a lot of people
myself included saying the Charleston conjures up an image of
a white flapper with bobbed hair and a straight waisted dress.
(15:58):
But flappers didn't invent the Charleston. Black people did. Anger
and resentment about white people stealing something black people created
is a recurring theme in literature from the Harlem Renaissance
and beyond, and these are discussions that are continuing today. Recently,
Amandalas Stenberg, the actress who played ru in The Hunger
(16:19):
Games and Macy Irving and Sleepy Hollow, among other roles,
released a YouTube video about white celebrities appreciating black culture
more than they appreciated black people. It's a really incredible
video and we will link to it in the show notes,
and it ties into this whole conversation of the Lindy
Hop and it's particularly relevant now because in the swing
revival that started in the nineteen eighties and nineties, this
(16:41):
new generation of dancers was, at least in the United States,
overwhelmingly white. From my own experience, apart from one South
Asian teacher, all of my swing teachers were white, and
the dancers that every dance menu where I danced were
also overwhelmingly white. But here's another case of whether the
question of whether Lindy hop is culturally appropriative is pretty nuanced.
(17:05):
In Frankie Manning's autobiography, he writes over and over about
the racism and discrimination that he experienced as a black
dancer and a black person. But the Lindy Hop revival
kept the dance from dying out, and Frankie himself, for
more than a decade of his later life, devoted himself
to sharing this dance with as many people as possible.
(17:25):
He found absolute joy in this dance, and he wanted
to share that joy. From the introduction to his two
thousand seven autobiography, Cynthia Millman, who collaborated with him on it, wrote, quote,
as much as Frankie appreciates the new found recognition of
his talent and accomplishments, by far his greatest greatest pleasure
comes from the opportunity to share the dance he loves
(17:46):
so much with a new generation of enthusiasts, young and old.
So given how happy he ultimately was about the swing revival,
the verdict does I haven't decided what to do or
whether to have swing dancing at my wedding, but I
know I definitely can't do it unless my guests also
learned something about its history too. So will we be
(18:09):
getting uh, some sort of history crib notes with our
invites if you decide to. I'm like, maybe we'll have
a little essay about Lindy hop in people's little gift bags.
I don't know. I don't know the answer. Yeah. There
(18:29):
there are definitely some cases where you can look at
somebody's use of another culture and and sort of go, well,
that's really gross and weird. And this is a case
where the history of it is so long, and there
are so many different facets of it that it's a
it's I don't think there's a very easy answer. And
if there is an easy answer, then there are pieces
of it that are not really be being examined. Uh
(18:51):
About how especially how people who thought that this dance
had died and was gone got to participate it in
it again, uh and share with other people when they
were older. So the jury is still out. Will you
share with our listeners when you make this decision so
we'll all know? Uh? Maybe I'm okay. I might do
it after the wedding. Seems fair because well, the the
(19:14):
whole subject of appropriation has so many pieces to it,
and it's so like if you are thoughtful about it,
there's so many different things to consider. And I know
from experience with our inbox that regardless of what the
decision is, there will be people who are unhappy about it.
(19:35):
And I prefer not to get hate mail about my
wedding until after it's over. Until after it's over. And
it's interesting because you know more and more in recent years.
I hope it's a good indicator that people are being
more thoughtful about historical context. That there have been a
number of weddings that have come up sort of you know,
you'll see articles about them in your social feed about like, hey,
(19:57):
this that probably didn't mean to be this way, but
they weren't thinking about what they were doing, and it
involves some appropriation, and you also don't want to be
that person, right. One of my favorite examples of that
is actually I don't remember which which one of the
wedding blogs that it was on, but it was a
woman who had put up pictures of her wedding and
it had Native American themes to it and there was
a peace pipe and I think it was a sort
(20:19):
of a fusion also of Scottish heritage, and uh, the
somebody wrote this blistering comment about how it was culturally
appropriative and she never should have used Native American symbols
in her wedding, and she was like, do I need
to get out my tribal identification card for you, because
if there's someone who's being racist here, it's definitely not me.
(20:43):
Because the reason they had had this particular wedding was
because that she was like part of a specific drive
and her fiance then husband was Scottish. Like the person
who had made this blistering comment was just assumed that
that was not the case. So with that, to on
(21:05):
with that, with that weighty topic of cultural appropriation, I
have some listener mail perfect. Our listener mail is from
Ali and Alice, says Dear Holly and Tracy. I've recently
listened to your series of podcasts on US civil rights
cases that it had something to add that I thought
might be of interest to you. I am a PhD
(21:25):
student in Melbourne, Australia. Side note, I cannot say that
like someone from Australia, I sound like an offensive caricature
of an Australian when I try. I researched language discrimination.
While listening to your podcasts, I couldn't help but think
of what is known to linguists as the ann Arbor
Decision and thought you may be interested in it if
(21:47):
you've not already heard of it. I'm not sure how
familiar most Americans are with the trial known officially as
Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children at All versus
and Arbor School District Board. And if you are, please
feel free to ignore this email and go back to
making excellent podcasts. They get me through many hours of
data entry involving my thesis project. The trial is well
known to linguists, largely due to an article published in
(22:10):
nineteen eight two by socio linguist William Labov. Much of
what I'm about this how You comes from that article.
The an Arbor Decision was a lawsuit brought against the
Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School, the n R School Board,
and the Michigan Board of Education on behalf of fifteen
children from the Green Road housing project in an Arbor.
In July seven. The school had declared the Green Road
(22:31):
children quote learning disabled, quote emotionally disturbed, and as having
quote behavior problems these terms obviously not mine, and had
put the children into special education classes. The plaintiffs in
the case argued that the children's lack of academic success
was a result of a language barrier. They claimed the
children were speakers of Black English, which is known nowadays
(22:53):
as African American Vernacular English or a a V, rather
than the standard English being used in the classroom. The
try addressed the legitimacy of the claim that a a V.
Was the distinct variety of English rather than simply bad English,
and several linguists were asked to testify, including labof This
was because Title twenty of the US Code, Section sevent
(23:14):
three f protects the educational opportunities of individuals in the
face of linguistic barriers the failure by an educational agency
to take appropriate action to overcome linguistic barriers that impede
equal participation by its students in in instructional programs. On
July twelfth, nineteen seventy nine, the presiding judge found for
(23:34):
the plaintiffs and the school board were required to submit
a plan detailing how teachers would be helped to identify
speakers of African American Vernacular English and the steps that
would be taken in order to teach these students standard English.
Following the Antarbor decisions, several school districts across the US
implemented literacy programs to help break the language language barrier
(23:54):
for speakers of African American Vernacular English, giving them access
to the education and social mobility that they had previously
been denied. While the case played out a linguistic debate,
the judge in the case recognized that the problem was
a result of quote unconscious negative attitudes formed by teachers
toward children who spoke Black English and the reactions of
(24:15):
children to these attitudes. To quote Labolf quote, the main
problem was a cultural and political conflict in the classroom,
not a linguistic one. You both seemed quite disheartened that
that quasi segregation and discrimination were still an issue in
the United States. Another reason I wanted to write to
you about this case was because while the Antarbor decision
happened many years ago, to me, it proves that things
(24:37):
can still improve if the problem isn't immediately fixed as
we may have hoped. Relegating children's to special education classrooms
helped maintain a kind of segregation in the years following
Brown versus Board, as I believe you mentioned, and this
decision helped fix that. I spend my days reading transcripts
of nasty things that people say to each other about
the way they speak and write. Discrimination on linguistic grounds
(25:01):
is one of the last widely socially acceptable forms of
discrimination at the moment. Standard varieties of language are associated
with certain admirable qualities like education, reliability, and intelligence, and
non standard varieties are associated with not being these things,
and by extension, speakers of these varieties are often seen
to be uneducated and reliable and unintelligent people are still
(25:25):
discriminated against today. But the and our and ourbur decision,
along with ground versus board and Park, gives me hope
that things can get better. She Ali then apologizes for
this email being so long. I don't apologize, It's got
so much good information in it. Thank you, thank you
so often. I'm like, they have multiple reasons that I
(25:46):
wanted to read this email. Um. One is that I
don't think we called out very specifically in that episode
that a lot of the kids that were put into
special education at the point we were talking about definitely
had it had more to do with, uh, like not
being able to under understand what was said to them
in the classroom than about intellectual ability at all. Um.
(26:10):
Disproportionately Black students were in special education classrooms, uh at
that point. The other reason was that doing a dissertation
about the nasty things that people say to each other
about the way they speak and right reminds me of
an episode that Holly and I did h on our
prior podcast Pop Stuff, about how terrible it is to
(26:32):
correct other people's grammar on the Internet. Yeah, and a
lot of that episode was about how that there's a
portion of people who are literate and have good literacy skills,
and they take their literacy for granted. But then there's another, uh,
huge chunk of people who have problems with those basic
(26:54):
literacy skills, and there's like a huge disconnect and being
able to communicate. Uh, and then take for granted that
everybody has the same verbal and reading skills, which is
not true. Uh So, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other subject, where at
History Podcast at Houston Works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
(27:16):
on Twitter at missed in History. Our tumbler is missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we're also on
Pentriest at pentriest dot com slash missed in History. We
have a spreadshirt store which contains lots of shirts and
phonecases and things like that. That is at missing history
dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn
more about what we've talked about today, you can come
to our website and you can put the word jazz
(27:38):
into the search bar, uh and you will find the
article how jazz Works, and that's at how stuffworks dot com.
Or even come to our website which is missed in
history dot com, and you will find show notes for
this and our other episodes. You will find an archive
of every episode that we have ever done. And I
might put together a blog post with some cool clips
of Frankie Manny dancing because it is amazing to watch.
(28:00):
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com. Missed in History dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how stepp works dot we m m
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy Wilson
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