Article contents
Jump for Joy: The Jump Trope in African America, 1937–19411
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
Fdormer Boston Celtics player and coach Bill Russell wrote, “People in all kinds of cultures are known to ‘jump for joy’ in moments of supreme happiness. Jumping is an internationally recognized expression of joy, and basketball is a sport organized around jumping.…It's possible for a player to jump because he's happy, but it's more likely that he's happy because he's jumping. I have heard players complain about almost every detail of the game — the rules, the size or color of the ball, the shape or temperature of the dressing room — but I've never heard anybody complain about the fact that the game requires jumping.”
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999
References
Notes
2. Russell, Bill, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (New York: Random House, 1979), 73Google Scholar.
3. Pearson, Barry, “Jump Steady: the Roots of R&B,” in Nothing But the Blues: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Cohn, Lawrence (New York: Abbeville, 1993), 316–17Google Scholar.
4. Stearns, Marshall and Stearns, Jean, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 329Google Scholar.
5. Stowe, David W., Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 193Google Scholar.
6. Scholars Eric Lott and Scott DeVeaux have made compelling arguments for bebop as assertion of ethnicity. See Lott, Eric, “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style,” Callaloo 36 (1988): 597–605CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Deveaux, Scott, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 525–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7. Pioneers of tropological criticism in literature include Baker, Houston A. Jr, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Gates, Henry Louis Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Baker credits Hayden V. White with the idea of tropological thought, from White, 's Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. For the use of this method in analyzing music, see Floyd, Samuel A. Jr, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Kramer, Lawrence, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
8. I thank Veaux, Scott De for the wording (“Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” 553)Google Scholar.
9. Dodge, Pryor, ed., Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge Collected Writings 1929–1964 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 143Google Scholar.
10. Thompson, Robert Farris, “An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance,” African Forum 2 (1966): 85–102Google Scholar; and Chernoff, John Miller, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar.
11. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance; and Malone, Jacqui, Steppin' on the Blues: the Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
12. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 9Google Scholar.
13. Murray, Albert, Stomping the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1976), 196Google Scholar.
14. Riess, Steven A., City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 108Google Scholar; and Peterson, Robert W., Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball's Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 122Google Scholar.
15. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 14, 1935Google Scholar.
16. Kansas City Call, 01 12, 1923Google Scholar.
17. Jares, Joe, Basketball: The American Game (Chicago: Routledge, 1971), 38Google Scholar; and Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 119Google Scholar.
18. Davis, Frank Marshall, Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, ed. Tidwell, John Edgar, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 52Google Scholar.
19. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 28, 1939Google Scholar.
20. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 12, 1936Google Scholar.
21. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 18, 1936Google Scholar.
22. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 97–98Google Scholar.
23. Stewart, Rex William, Jazz Masters of the Thirties (1972; rept. New York: Da Capo, 1985), 164Google Scholar.
24. “Cab Calloway's Basketball Team to Play Miles Brothers, Local Champs, for Charity,” unidentified newspaper clipping (ca. January 1935) from the Cab Calloway scrapbooks, Cab Calloway Archives, Boston University.
25. New York Amsterdam News, 11 21, 1936Google Scholar.
26. Cited in George, Nelson, Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 40Google Scholar.
27. Pittsburgh Courier, 04 8, 1939Google Scholar.
28. Ashe, Arthur R. Jr, A Hard Road to Glory: The African-American Athlete in Basketball (New York: Amistad, 1988), 10Google Scholar.
29. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 98Google Scholar.
30. Clarence Gaines, telephone interview with the author, March 5, 1996.
31. Albert Murray, conversation with the author, August 30, 1996.
32. Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 230Google Scholar.
33. For an extended discussion of this aesthetic and its African roots, including a detailed historiography, see my introduction to Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
34. Erenberg, Lewis A., “News from the Great Wide World: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Black Popular Music, 1927–1943,” Prospects 18 (1993): 487CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 42, 12Google Scholar. See also Lewis Erenberg, A., Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. ch. 4Google Scholar.
35. Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 87Google Scholar.
36. Cited in Susman, Warren I., Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 148Google Scholar.
37. Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1950; rept. Boston: Beacon, 1960), 10Google Scholar.
38. Oldenburg, Ray, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 16Google Scholar.
39. Oldenburg, , Great Good Place, 11Google Scholar.
40. Anderson, Elijah, A Place on the Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
41. See Lhamon, W. T. Jr, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Cockrell, Dale, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
42. “Duke Sets the Pace in Themes,” Afro-American, 07 2, 1938, 10Google Scholar, cited in Hasse, John Edward, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (1993; rept. New York: Da Capo, 1995), 217Google Scholar.
43. Leonard, Neil, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 124, 139Google Scholar; and Hasse, , Beyond Category, 197Google Scholar.
44. Williams, Martin, “The Men Who Made the Music: Fletcher Henderson, The Musician,” in the book accompanying the three-record set The Swing Era, 1936–1937, Time-Life Records STL 341, 1970, 62Google Scholar, cited in Hasse, , Beyond Category, 200Google Scholar.
45. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 14Google Scholar.
46. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 22Google Scholar.
47. Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1969), 498ffGoogle Scholar.
48. Henderson, Stephen, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 44Google Scholar.
49. Erenberg, , “News from the Great Wide World,” 483–84Google Scholar.
50. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 116Google Scholar.
51. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 114Google Scholar.
52. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 255 n. 47Google Scholar.
53. Bolden, Frank, remarks addressed to American Studies Association Conference,Pittsburgh,November 10, 1995Google Scholar.
54. Baker, Russell, Growing Up (1982; rept. New York: New American Library, 1984), 258Google Scholar.
55. Early, Gerald, Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York: Ecco, 1989), 177, 180, 179, 176, 179Google Scholar.
56. For a summary of Du Bois's assessment of the Roosevelt years, see Rampersad, Arnold, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 225Google Scholar.
57. Lawrence W. Levine writes, “For many black Americans the Depression merely intensified an unjust economic situation that had long been prevalent” (Levine, , The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 209)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
58. See Polenberg, Richard, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938 (New York: Viking, 1980), ch. 1Google Scholar.
59. Erenberg, Lewis, “From New York to Middletown,” American Quarterly 38 (Winter 1986): 773CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60. For a discussion of Superman in 1930s America, see Levine, (Unpredictable Past, 227)Google Scholar.
61. Cited in Erenberg, , “News from the Great Wide World,” 494Google Scholar.
62. Fox, Stephen R., Big Leagues: Professional Baseball, Football, and Basketball in National Memory (New York: Morrow, 1994), 15Google Scholar.
63. Major, Clarence, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (New York: International, 1970), 72Google Scholar; and Ellington, Edward Kennedy, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 179Google Scholar. In his introduction to the anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry, Henderson coined the term mascon to describe words such as jump — words with “a massive concentration of Black experiential energy which powerfully affects the meaning of Black speech, Black song, and Black poetry” [italics in original] (Henderson, , Understanding the New Black Poetry, 44Google Scholar).
64. Cited in White, Shane and White, Graham, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 167Google Scholar.
65. “Miss Lucy! / Mama say to send a chew tobacco, / She'll pay you back tomorrow. / Hooray! Let's jump!” (Jones, Bessie and Hawes, Bess Lomax, Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs & Stories from the Afro-American Heritage [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972], 173Google Scholar).
66. Jones, and Hawes, , Step It Down, 48, xiv, 44, 10, 173, 53, 61Google Scholar.
67. It might be worthwhile to explore connections to jumping rope. Roger Abrahams notes in his Jump-Rope Rhymes, “Until relatively recently the ancient pastime of jumping rope was exclusively a boys' activity.” Folklorist William Hugh Jansen observed boys jumping rope in the 1920s, but most agree jumping rope became the provenance of urban girls sometime in the 1890s (Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969]Google Scholar).
68. Mayo, Munah, “All that Glitters,” in Jump Up and Say! A Collection of Black Storytelling, ed. Goss, Linda and Goss, Clay (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 48Google Scholar.
69. New York Amsterdam News, April 29, 1944, cited in Foulkes, Julia L., “Dancing in America: Modern Dance and Cultural Nationalism 1925–1950,” Ph.D. diss. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1997), 153Google Scholar.
70. See Floyd, , Power of Black Music, 70Google Scholar. “The idea was that it would not be Sunday inside if they kept the sun out, and thus they would not desecrate the Sabbath,” says Malone, in Steppin' on the Blues (43)Google Scholar.
71. Wright, John S., “The New Negro Poet and the Nachal Man: Sterling Brown's Folk Odyssey,” Black American Literature Forum 23 (Spring 1989): 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72. Henderson, , Understanding the New Black Poetry, 44Google Scholar.
73. Here Roger Abrahams is referring to one of the principles that Robert Farris Thompson enumerates as defining African music and dance in “The Cool Aesthetic” (quoted in Malone, , Steppin' on the Blues, 5–6Google Scholar).
74. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 5Google Scholar.
75. For instance, in Ethel Waters's “At the New Jump Steady Ball,” “Jump Steady” refers to bootleg liquor.
76. Rust, Brian, Jazz Records 1897–1942 (Chigwell, U.K.: Storeyville, 1969)Google Scholar.
77. Interestingly, Louis Jordan, a jump blues bandleader, made a career of jump tunes and pieces that relied on a shuffle beat, which his drummer achieved by subdividing each beat into three and emphasizing the first and third segments of the beat. Even though the terminology disappeared from titles by the 1940s, the shuffle beat remained in tunes called jump tunes.
78. “A lot of tunes were called stomps, and a lot of bands were called stomp bands,” Count Basie said (Basie, Count, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray [New York: Random House, 1985], 6)Google Scholar.
79. Basie, , Good Morning Blues, 120Google Scholar.
80. “Parlor Social Stomp” (1926), “Jubilee Stomp” (1928), “Cotton Club Stomp” (1929), “Swanee Shuffle” (1929), “Syncopated Shuffle” (1929), “Tough Truckin'” (1935), and “Showboat Shuffle” (1935) are but a few of the Ellington stomp, truckin', and shuffle repertory.
81. Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 97Google Scholar.
82. Albert Murray, conversation with the author, August 30, 1996; and Earl Hines, “Cavernism,” 1933 (Archives of Jazz 3801022). The Earl Hines band broadcast from Chicago as far as Kansas City.
83. Encyclopedia are universally nonspecific in defining jump. Hugues Panassié and Madeleine Gautier's Guide to Jazz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) call it a “synonym for ‘swing’” (156). Kernfeld, Barry in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz calls it a “style of jazz related to swing…a precursor of rhythm and blues” ([London: Macmillan, 1988], 639)Google Scholar.
84. Chilton, John, Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music (London: Quartet, 1992), 63Google Scholar. According to Chilton, Louis Jordan's Tympany Four, his first jump band, made its debut at the Elks Rendezvous, close to the Savoy Ballroom, on August 4, 1938. An announcement in the New York Amsterdam News on October 15 of that year identified the band in print as a “Jump Band” (Chilton, , Let the Good Times Roll, 61, 63Google Scholar).
85. Cited in Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 170Google Scholar. In the documentary film The Last of the Blue Devils, Joe Turner said the piece was based on a Basie standard called “Blue Balls,” which for obvious reasons, Basie renamed. Leonard, Neil, in Jazz and the White Americans, says a “large part” of the piece “was taken from a Don Redman arrangement” (124)Google Scholar. Since Fletcher Henderson generously donated a dozen or so charts to Basie when the band arrived in New York (Redman arranged for Henderson), this genealogy also makes sense, but it doesn't square with Turner's recollection.
86. Albert Murray, conversation with the author, August 30, 1996.
87. Brian Priestley in Jazz: The Essential Companion suggests that the jump bands were the “first to start emphasizing the up-beat…which [was] more pronounced in what became rhythm-and-blues” (Carr, Ian, Fairweather, Digby, and Priestley, Brian, Jazz: the Essential Companion [New York: Prentice Hall, 1987], 274)Google Scholar.
88. Basie, , Good Morning Blues, 196Google Scholar.
89. Dance, Stanley, The World of Duke Ellington (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), 13Google Scholar, cited in Malone, , Steppin' on the Blues, 102Google Scholar.
90. Wells, Dicky and Dance, Stanley, The Night People: Reminiscences of a Jazzman (Boston: Crescendo, 1971), 77Google Scholar, cited in Malone, , Steppin' on the Blues, 102Google Scholar.
91. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 34Google Scholar.
92. Stewart, , Boy Meets Horn, 138Google Scholar.
93. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 33Google Scholar.
94. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 325Google Scholar. According to Stearns and Stearns, the Lindy owes its origins to the Texas Tommy, introduced in 1913, consisting of a kick and hop three times on each foot.
95. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 325Google Scholar.
96. Manning, Frankie in “The Savoy-Style Lindy of Frankie Manning,” Prod. by Jerry Goralnick (New York: New York Swing Dance Society, 1996)Google Scholar.
97. Crease, Robert P., “The Lindy Hop, 1937–1942,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Gabbard, Krin (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 213–19Google Scholar; and Malone, , Steppin' on the Blues, 103Google Scholar.
98. Manning, Frank in “Swinging at the Savoy: Frankie Manning's Story,” Prod. by Rosemary Hemp (Seattle: Living Traditions, 1995)Google Scholar.
99. Most of these films are included in the Smithsonian Archive Collections' Ernie Smith Video Transfer Collection, along with a few not highlighted in Crease's article (“Lindy Hop”). One I especially enjoyed was a 1938 Paramount News silent film showing Leon James and other dancers in a contest at the Savoy Ballroom, exuberantly Lindy hopping to the Roy Eldridge Orchestra, with several over-the-back air steps.
100. Cripps, Thomas, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115Google Scholar; quoted in Crease, , “Lindy Hop,” 215Google Scholar.
101. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 41Google Scholar.
102. Leonard, , Jazz and the White Americans, 143Google Scholar.
103. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 323Google Scholar.
104. Martin, John, New York Times, 01 10, 1943Google Scholar, cited in Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 331Google Scholar.
105. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 329Google Scholar.
106. Press release, Edna Guy Programs, Dance Collection/New York Public Library, cited in Foulkes, “Dancing America,” 137, 161 n. 49.
107. Life 5 (August 8, 1938): 57; and New York Times, May 30, 1938, 13, and May 31, 1938, 18, cited in Leonard, , Jazz and the White Americans, 152Google Scholar.
108. Playbill, Harvard Theatre Collection.
109. Playbill, Harvard Theatre Collection.
110. Playbill, Harvard Theatre Collection.
111. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 332Google Scholar.
112. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 28, 1939Google Scholar.
113. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 333Google Scholar.
114. See Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 327Google Scholar; and Malone, , Steppin' on the Blues, 103–4Google Scholar.
115. Crease, , “Lindy Hop,” 224Google Scholar.
116. Wideman, John Edgar, “Michael Jordan's Great Leap Forward,” in Caponi, , Signifyin(g), 389Google Scholar.
117. Dyson, Michael Eric, “Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” in Caponi, , Signifyin(g), 415–16Google Scholar.
118. Dutton, Kenneth R., The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development (New York: Continuum, 1995), 63Google Scholar.
119. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 110Google Scholar.
120. Ashe, , Hard Road to Glory, 12Google Scholar.
121. Clarence Gaines, telephone interview with the author, March 5, 1996.
122. Calvin Irvin, telephone interview with the author, March 11, 1996.
123. Clarence Gaines, telephone interview with the author, March 5, 1996.
124. Davis, , Livin' the Blues, 232Google Scholar.
125. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 7, 1939Google Scholar.
126. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 11, 1940Google Scholar.
127. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 11, 1940Google Scholar.
128. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 14, 1935Google Scholar, and January 7, 1939.
129. Dyson, , “Be Like Mike?” 411Google Scholar.
130. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 12, 1935Google Scholar.
131. Pittsburgh Courier, 04 8, 1939Google Scholar.
132. Pittsburgh Courier, 04 1, 1939Google Scholar.
133. Bill Russell played on a post — high school all-star team in the early spring of 1952 coached by a maverick named Brick Swegle, who let his players play “Negro basketball,” even though there were only two black players on the team. The white players had the time of their lives. Opposing coaches either complained the tactics were “not cricket,” an interesting Eurocentric metaphor, or vowed the team that lived by the jump shot would die by the jump shot. One coach considered the move so repugnant, he refused to let his players defend against it. Russell's team won that game 144 to 41, and Russell himself pioneered a defensive jump for shot blocking when he entered the NBA in 1956 (Russell, , Second Wind, 64–65)Google Scholar.
134. Coaches Piggy Lambert at Purdue and Frank Keaney at Rhode Island are sometimes said to have developed fast-break basketball in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is difficult to imagine the fast break prior to 1937, when basketball was essentially a half-court game. Further, such coaches as Lambert and Keaney stand out in the history of white college basketball because they were doing something exceptional for white men (Isaacs, Neil D., All the Moves: A History of College Basketball [New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1975], 57–60Google Scholar).
135. George, Nelson credits Luisetti with the jump shot, but I believe he is conflating the one-handed shot with the jump (Elevating the Game, 58)Google Scholar.
136. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 109Google Scholar.
137. Cited in Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 109Google Scholar.
138. Peterson, , Cages to Jump Shots, 109Google Scholar.
139. Isaacs, , All the Moves, 123Google Scholar.
140. Isaacs, , All the Moves, 115Google Scholar.
141. Isaacs, , All the Moves, 262Google Scholar.
142. Isaacs, , All the Moves, 262, 222Google Scholar.
143. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 28, 1939Google Scholar.
144. Pittsburgh Courier, 03 6, 1937Google Scholar.
145. Ashe, , Hard Road to Glory, 20Google Scholar.
146. Ashe, , Hard Road to Glory, 24Google Scholar.
147. Isaacs, , All the Moves, 83Google Scholar.
148. Pittsburgh Courier, 03 13, 1937Google Scholar.
149. Pittsburgh Courier, 02 27, 1937Google Scholar, and March 13, 1937.
150. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 26, 1936Google Scholar.
151. Pittsburgh Courier, 01 28, 1939Google Scholar.
152. For instance, a story about a 1937 Virginia State College win reads, “The second half was a repetition of the first, with the lanky Trojans out-reaching and out-jumping the shorter Shaw team to make all sorts of hair-raising baskets” (Pittsburgh Courier, January 30, 1937). African American players might have also been inspired by such track stars as Jesse Owens, three-time gold medal winner in the 1936 Olympics, and high jumper Gilbert Cruter, who set a new world's record the same year. Cruter's record jump was 6 feet 8¾ inches (Pittsburgh Courier, March 3, 1936).
153. Photos accompanying a Pittsburgh Courier article published in April of 1939 show “Pop” Gates as he “soars skyward over the outstretched hands of Oshkosh guards” to score (Pittsburgh Courier, April 8, 1939).
154. Salzberg, Charles, From Set Shot to Slam Dunk: The Glory Days of Basketball in the Words of Those Who Played It (New York: Dell, 1987), 51Google Scholar.
155. Sachare, Alex, The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame's 100 Greatest Basketball Players of All Time (New York: Byron Preiss Multimedia, 1997), 64Google Scholar.
156. Ryan, Bob, quoted in Ken Shouler, The Experts Pick Basketball's Best 50 Players in the Last 50 Years (Lenexa, Kans.: Addax, 1998), 60Google Scholar.
157. Russell, , Second Wind, 63–64Google Scholar.
158. Gaines, telephone interview with the author, March 6, 1996.
159. George, , Elevating the Game, xvGoogle Scholar.
160. Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem and Knobler, Peter, Giant Steps (New York: Bantam, 1983), 160Google Scholar.
161. Axthelm, Pete, The City Game (New York: Penguin, 1970), 127Google Scholar.
162. George, , Elevating the Game, xixGoogle Scholar.
163. Wideman, John Edgar, Brothers and Keepers (1984; rept. New York: Vintage, 1995), 226Google Scholar.
164. Olly Wilson's remarks on the “soul focal moment” were made at a conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Black Music, New Orleans, 1994. See Wilson, Olly, “Black Music as an Art Form,” Black Music Research Journal 3 (1983): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilson, , “The Association of Movement and Music as a Manifestation of a Black Conceptual Approach to Music-making,” in More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians, ed. Jackson, Irene V. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985)Google Scholar.
165. “A Glimpse of an Old Dutch Town,” Harper's Monthly Magazine 63 (03 1881): 525–26, 535–36Google Scholar, cited in White, Shane, “‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,” in New African American Urban History, ed. Goings, Kenneth W. and Mohl, Raymond A., (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 32Google Scholar.
166. Shippee, Lester B., ed., Bishop Whipple's Southern Diary, 1843–1844 (Minneapolis, 1937), 51Google Scholar, cited in Piersen, William D., “African-American Festive Style,” in Caponi, , Signifyin(g), 420Google Scholar.
167. Piersen, William D., Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 176–77Google Scholar; and Genovese, Eugene D., Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972; rept. New York: Vintage, 1976), 475–81Google Scholar.
168. Mura Dehn, “The Spirit Moves: Jazz Dance from the Turn of the Century to 1950,” manuscript in Dance Collection, New York Public Library.
169. Dickens, Charles, American Notes and Pictures From Italy (1842; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 90–91Google Scholar.
170. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 39Google Scholar; and Chase, Gilbert, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 260Google Scholar.
171. Cockrell, Dale, “Of Gospel Hymns, Minstrel Shows, and Jubilee Singers: Toward Some Black South African Musics,” American Music 5 (Winter 1987): 418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
172. See Toll, Robert C., Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Riis, Thomas L., Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890 to 1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1989)Google Scholar; and Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
173. Cockrell, Dale, “Jim Crow, Demon of Disorder,” American Music 14 (Summer 1996): 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
174. Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 180, 181Google Scholar.
175. Chase, , America's Music, 265Google Scholar.
176. Courlander, Harold, “Dance and Dance Drama in Haiti,” in The Function of Dance in Human Society, ed. Boas, Franziska (New York: Boas School, 1944), 42Google Scholar, cited in Emery, Lynne Fauley, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto: National Press, 1972), 56Google Scholar.
177. W. T. Lhamon Jr. notes the limp as another persistent Legba—Jim Crow characteristic, reappearing in Little Richard's limp and Chuck Berry's duckwalk (Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 255 n. 30Google Scholar).
178. Chase, , America's Music, 264Google Scholar.
179. Wittke, Carl, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1930), 27Google Scholar, cited in Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 43Google Scholar.
180. Cockrell, , “Jim Crow,” 169Google Scholar.
181. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 42Google Scholar.
182. New York Tribune, 1855, cited in Lott, , Love and Theft, 3Google Scholar.
183. Barbadoes v. Bolcolm, Boston Post, March 30, 1840, cited in Cockrell, Dale, “Jim Crow,” 175Google Scholar.
184. Cockrell, , “Jim Crow,” 176Google Scholar.
185. Cockrell, , “Jim Crow,” 168Google Scholar; and Vann Woodward, C., The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1964), 7Google Scholar.
186. Dale Cockrell, conversation with the author, March 6, 1997.
187. Ramshaw, Molly N., “Jump, Jim Crow!”: A Biographical Sketch of Thomas D. Rice (1808–1860),” Theatre Annual 1960 17 (1961): 43Google Scholar.
188. Conner, Edmon S., “An Old Actor's Memories, New York Times, 06 5, 1881, 10Google Scholar, cited in Ramshaw, , “Jump, Jim Crow!” 44Google Scholar.
189. Odell, George C. D., Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), 3: 631Google Scholar, cited in Ramshaw, , “Jump, Jim Crow!” 43Google Scholar.
190. Ramshaw, , “Jump, Jim Crow!” 44, 45Google Scholar.
191. Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 157Google Scholar.
192. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 41Google Scholar.
193. Magriel, Paul, ed., Chronicles of the American Dance (New York: H. Holt, 1948), 40Google Scholar, cited in Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 366 n. 12Google Scholar.
194. Ireland, Joseph, Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860 (New York: B. Blom, 1867), 55–56Google Scholar, cited in Ramshaw, , “Jump, Jim Crow!” 36Google Scholar.
195. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 41Google Scholar.
196. See Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 1Google Scholar; and Epstein, Dena, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 278–86Google Scholar.
197. Johnson, James Weldon, Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926; rept. New York: Viking, 1951), 33Google Scholar.
198. As in this description of an 1864 service, “the women sitting around him, rocking & swaying & throwing up their arms” (Epstein, , Sinful Tunes, 357Google Scholar).
199. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 37Google Scholar.
200. Payne, Daniel Alexander, Recollections of Seventy Years (1886; rept. New York: Arno, 1968), 256Google Scholar, cited in Piersen, , Black Legacy, 173Google Scholar. As for jumping itself as a physical expression of joy, I offer this note: “[James W. C.] Pennington, describing his feelings when he realized that he must be near free soil, said that ‘my spirits were so highly elated, that I took the whole of the road to myself; I ran, hopped, skipped, jumped, clapped my hands, talked to myself.’ [In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain transforms the passage so that] Huck tells us that Jim, seeing one last light that looks like Cairo, says, ‘We's safe, Huck, we's safe! Jump up and crack yo' heels, dat's de good ole Cairo at las', I jis knows it’” (MacKethan, Lucinda, “Huck Finn and the Slave Narratives: Lighting Out as Design,” Southern Review 20 [1984]: 247–64Google Scholar, cited in Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 200 n. 68)Google Scholar.
201. Olmstead, Frederick Law, The Cotton Kingdom, 2 vols. (New York, 1886), 1: 311Google Scholar, cited in Piersen, , Black Legacy, 174Google Scholar.
202. Courlander, Harold, Negro Folk Music, U. S. A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 195Google Scholar.
203. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 31Google Scholar.
204. Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 152, 181Google Scholar.
205. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 232–33, 41Google Scholar.
206. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 100Google Scholar.
207. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 25Google Scholar.
208. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 27Google Scholar.
209. Jones, and Hawes, , Step It Down, 55–56Google Scholar; and Lhamon, , Raising Cain, 255 n. 30Google Scholar.
210. Minstrelsy scholar William J. Mahar believes Jim Crow must have been energetic to attract as much attention as it did. Mahar also suggests it bore the influence of Stepping groups, for in some acts the dance was called Stepping Jim Crow (William J. Mahar, conversation with the author, March 24, 1996).
211. Poster on display in National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee. For more on the National Negro Congress, see Pfeffer, Paula F., A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 32Google Scholar.
212. According to Jazz Records, Ellington recorded one tune with the borderline-jump title “Jumpy” in 1936. The Classics CD (1993) of Ellington's repertory of 1938 includes the tune “The Jeep Is Jumping.” In February 1941, Ellington recorded “Jumpin' Punkins,” and then the band opened in “Jump for Joy.”
213. Willard, Patricia, program notes to Jump for Joy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 1Google Scholar.
214. Ellington, , Music Is My Mistress, 175Google Scholar. Jump For Joy has its roots in the Hollywood Theatre Alliance's “Negro Revue” (Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 2: 1941–1967 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 26)Google Scholar.
215. Ellington, , Music Is My Mistress, 460Google Scholar. Out of Jump for Joy came what Ellington, described as a “feeling of responsibility” that culminated in his long masterwork Black, Brown, and Beige (1943)Google Scholar.
216. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 31Google Scholar.
217. Paul Webster, Ray Golden, and Hal Borne, “I've Got a Passport from Georgia,” manuscript in Smithsonian American Archives, Duke Ellington Collection. I thank Ann Kuebler and Deborah Richardson at the Smithsonian Institution for their assistance.
218. Paul Webster, Sid Kuller, and Duke Ellington, “Jump for Joy,” 1941; manuscript in Smithsonian American Archives, Duke Ellington Collection.
219. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 31Google Scholar.
220. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 21Google Scholar.
221. Davis, , Livin' the Blues, 49Google Scholar.
222. Willard, , Jump for Joy, 21Google Scholar.
223. Oliver, W. E., Herald-Express, 08 8, 1941Google Scholar, cited in Willard, , Jump for Joy, 22Google Scholar.
224. Hasse, , Beyond Category, 248Google Scholar.
225. Murray, , Stomping the Blues, 196Google Scholar.
226. Wright, Richard, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” in American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project (New York: Viking, 1937), 44Google Scholar.
227. For discussion and examples of early resistance, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” and Kenneth W. Goings and Gerald L. Smith, “‘Unhidden’ Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862–1920,” in Goings and Mohl, New African American Urban History.
228. See Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, and Scott, , Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, both cited in Kelley, , “We Are Not What We Seem,” 189Google Scholar. I am grateful to Kenneth Goings for calling this work to my attention.
229. Quoted in Anderson, Jervis, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 9Google Scholar, cited in White, and Graham, , Stylin', 223Google Scholar.
230. Matthews, Ralph, “The Negro Theatre: A Dodo Bird,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Cunard, Nancy (1933; rept. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 195Google Scholar. Surveying Harlem, white heiress Nancy Cunard praised the dance in terms terrifying to those espousing dignity for the good of the race: “The Lindy is the more astounding as it is as violent (and as beautiful)” (Cunard, , “Harlem Reviewed,” in Cunard, , Negro, 49Google Scholar).
231. Davis, , Livin' the Blues, 34Google Scholar. In the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes's jazz and blues poems elicited harsh words from African American intelligentsia. Reviewing Hughes, 's The Weary Blues in 1926Google Scholar, Countee Cullen wrote, “I regard these jazz poems as interlopers in the company of the truly beautiful poems in other sections of the book…I wonder if jazz poems really belong to that dignified company, that select and austere circle of high literary expression which we call poetry” (Cullen, , “Review of The Weary Blues,” Opportunity, 02 1926, 73–74Google Scholar). Hughes's 1927 volume Fine Clothes to the Jew drew disgusted headlines from the Pittsburgh Courier — “Langston Hughes Book of Poems Trash” — and from the Amsterdam News — “Langston Hughes — the Sewer Dweller,” cited in Barksdale, Richard, Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics (Chicago: American Library Association, 1977), 25Google Scholar.
232. Berger, Morroe, “Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture Pattern,” in American Music: From Storyville to Woodstock, ed. Nanry, Charles (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1972), 16Google Scholar. In the same article, Berger noted, “The most prominent chroniclers of Negro achievement in America, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois and Edwin R. Embree, scarcely mention jazz in their books” (16).
233. Berger, , “Jazz,” 15Google Scholar.
234. For a survey of intellectual positions on this issue in the 1930s, see Pells, Richard, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 96–150Google Scholar.
235. Locke, Alain LeRoy, The New Negro (1925; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1970), 4Google Scholar.
236. Dinerstein, Joel has presented a fuller discussion of these ideas in his paper “Depression-Era Chaos and Big Band Swing's New Foundations,” presented at Pew Fellows Conference,New Haven,Connecticut,May 1, 1998Google Scholar.
237. Susman, , Culture as History, 162Google Scholar.
238. Levine, , Unpredictable Past, 92Google Scholar.
239. Scott, , Weapons of the Weak, 288Google Scholar, cited in Goings and Smith, , “‘Unhidden’ Transcripts,” 147Google Scholar.
240. Stowe, , Swing Changes, 194Google Scholar.
241. Even though the correct spelling should have been “tympani,” it usually was not in Jordan's publicity.
242. Chilton, , Let the Good Times Roll, 138, 136, 126Google Scholar.
243. The jump is long lived. Chuck Berry's 1956 “Around and Around” contains the line, “The joint was jumpin' goin' round and ‘round.” Hadda Brooks recorded “Jump Back Honey” in 1952 (Blackhawk Music Company). In 1968, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard's “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (Mirage) recalled the jump blues craze, and Curtis Mayfield's “Jump” became a best-selling record for Aretha Franklin (Atlantic) in 1976. Carolyn Rodgers's poem “Jump Bad” carries some of the political overtones of jumping, when she says “Us Black Folk is gonna have to sho'nuf jump bad to git ourselves liberated from this honkie,” in Brooks, Gewndolyn, Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Detroit: Broadside, 1971), 109Google Scholar. Blues singer Koko Taylor brought back “Jump for Joy” on her 1990 album (Alligator). A women-oriented sports magazine for teen girls called Jump appeared in 1997.
244. Berger, , “Jazz,” 40Google Scholar.
245. Stearns, and Stearns, , Jazz Dance, 24Google Scholar.
246. ESPN Chilton poll, 1997.
247. Murray, , The Omni-Americans (New York: Vintage, 1970) 54Google Scholar
- 1
- Cited by