Like Bojangles, by 1958 the Savoy had become an institution in the world of entertainment, and like Bojangles, it caught the imagination of thousands upon thousands of people during its 32-year history. The Savoy was a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the “soul” of a neighborhood. It personified a community and an era, and became a monument to the music and dance of “swing.” On its huge and shiny mahogany floor, the Lindy Hop was born, a dance that took the world by storm and would become as seminal as the waltz in the history of social dance. The Lindy Hop, together with countless other dances like the Flying Charleston, the Stomp, the Shim Sham Shimmy, Rhumboogie, Suzie-Q, Big Apple, Black Bottom and the Scrontch, were taken to an extraordinary level of performing perfection at the Savoy. Within its inner circle, great dancers and musicians set trends and styles in dance and music that ricocheted throughout the world. There were other ballrooms and clubs—Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise, The Cotton Club, The Lenox Club, The Kentucky Club, and the downtown clubs on 52nd Street—but there was only one Savoy.

From 1933 until 1946-47 Margot Webb and Harold Norton performed on the Afro-American vaudeville circuits of night clubs and theatres in the Northeast and the Midwest. Known professionally as “Norton and Margot,” they were one of the few Afro-American ballroom teams in history. Their career was emblematic of the frustrations, paradoxes, and double standards which existed for Afro-American artists in the United States. As a ballroom team, they faced the same obstacles as a Dean Dixon or a Marian Anderson: they were traveling on a white road posted with “No Trespassing” signs for the Afro-American. They followed on the heels of the 1920s, which was the golden era of Afro-American vaudeville, of the Cotton-Club-type, posh nightclub, and of “Black Broadway.” They preceded by two decades the civil rights era of the 1960s, when more opportunities became available to Afro-Americans in mainstream (or white) show business. Norton and Webb belonged to the swing era of the 1930s and the 1940s. However, due to the nature of their performance style and the racial tenor of their times, they were either too early or too late for success. It is in this sense that they existed between two eras.

Most scholarly work on Afro-American social dance has been concerned with its structural aspects, primarily the question of African retentions. The work of Melville Herskovits, Joann Kealiinohomoku, Linda Wharton and Jack L. Daniel, Chadwick Hansen, Robert Farris Thompson, John Q. Anderson, Gertrude P. Kurath, Jan Hertzberg, Lydia Parrish, and others has touched on this issue.

Though this approach to the study of Afro-American vernacular dance is far from exhausted, it ignores certain significant aspects of black dance culture. Once it is established that the structural aspects of Afro-American dance are in fact African-derived, the researcher is free to raise questions concerning the function, meanings, and uses of the dance.

The anthropologist-dancer Katherine Dunham has stated that dance has greater tenacity than any other cultural form and that it is the most permanent cultural link with the past. Certainly the dance of Afro-Americans is identifiable on the basis of its continuity with both traditional and contemporary African movement. Until recently, most Afro-Americans conducted their lives in relative isolation from whites. Isolation rather than inherent tenacity may explain the similarity between their dance forms and those of contemporary Africans.

“Disco” summons a variety of images to the minds of urban dwellers in the United States today. Many people think of teenagers carrying portable stereo tape players, sometimes called “ghetto blasters,” and recall how their loud and pulsating presence unceremoniously overwhelms all human life along their path. Some think of chic, glittering couples dancing the night away in dark discotheques. Whatever the image, disco is perceived as a style—of dancing, music, clothes. Disco is a social scene, a fad, a craze.

Disco is also, undeniably, a multi-media phenomenon, depending not only on the direct contact of social relationships but information and services transmitted by different forms of mass media. The movie Saturday Night Fever (1977) was possibly the single most important mass media event in heightening public awareness of disco dancing in the last several years. But every day, networks of media and entertainment industry ideas are negotiated and guided out to the public at large. These negotiations involve interplay between national and local television, the recording industry and local radio, local radio and the public, and then several levels of inter- and intra-community relationships. Popular images of disco are a conglomerate of data from these myriad sources.