Paul & Sue Loved To Dance
After getting married in 1988, I suggested we go dancing but Sue had never learned. I attempted to teach but alas, mu skills were limited. We began going to the local senior citizens center and after six months we were ready to go out in public. The rest is history.
We Sue passed in Feburary 2020, I was devistated and along. A mutual dance friends told me that Dr. Mary was also alone and to go have dinner with her. I did and a year later we were married and now we enjoy dancing together.
The term "swing dance" is commonly used to refer to a group of dances that developed concurrently with the style of jazz music in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The most well known of which is lindy hop, a popular partner dance the originated in Harlem and is still danced today.
While the majority of swing dances began in African American communities as vernacular African American dances, there were a number of forms which developed within Anglo-American or other ethnic group communities. Balboa is one of the most commonly cited examples.
Dances such as the Black Bottom, Charleston and tap dance travelled north with Dixieland jazz to New York, Kansas City, and Chicago in the Great Migration (African American) of the 1920s, where rural blacks travelled to escape persecution, Jim Crow laws, lynching and unemployment in the South (during the Great Depression).
Swinging jazz music features the syncopated timing associated with African American and West African music and dance — a combination of crotchets and quavers which many swing dancers interpret as 'triple steps' and 'steps' — yet also introduces changes in the way these rhythms were played — a distinct delay or 'relaxed' approach to timing.
Swing dance is now found globally, with great variety in their preferences for particular dances, although Lindy hop is often the most popular.
