Background Blues dancing originated in the dances brought to America by enslaved Africans, who followed
sub-Saharan African music traditions. There is no documented evidence across the history of pre-colonial
sub-Saharan African dance for sustained one-on-one mixed-gender
partnered dancing; African cultures apparently considered this type of dancing to be inappropriate.
Slavery in the United States had a great deal of influence on
African-American dance, as people from widely disparate African cultures were thrown together during enslavement. As a result of this, their specific cultural traditions, including dances, were often lost or blended into a creolized African-American dance style. This dance style was also influenced by elements of British-European dances brought to the United States by European immigrants. Dance moves were passed down through generations of African Americans, revised and reworked, ultimately resulting in a specific African-American dance vocabulary. Over time, African-American dance became more formal than its African predecessors, but more energetic and dynamic than European dances. During the
post-Reconstruction period of approximately 1875–1900, as
Jim Crow Laws were passed in the
American South, dance steps began to lose their association with religion and spirituality and became thought of as purely secular. The dances of working-class and lower-class black people relinquished some of their Euro-American characteristics. Dances in this era became associated with the expression of pleasure and sexuality with one's partner, and the importance of communal group dancing was de-emphasized. The African style of dancing while bent over moved towards a more upright stance less tied to agrarian references and to facilitate partner connection.
Development of blues music " by
W. C. Handy, sheet music cover, 1914
W. C. Handy, who wrote some of the first published
blues songs, documented an early experience he had with blues music at a dance that took place in
Cleveland, Mississippi, around 1905. A local band consisting of three Black men with battered string instruments played a "haunting" song: "The dancers went wild." Later, Handy described a crowd's enthusiastic response to his own band playing blues music in 1909: "In the office buildings about, white folks pricked up their ears. Stenographers danced with their bosses. Everybody shouted for more." Later, he incorporated elements of
habanera music into his blues music, because he had observed that Black people danced even more enthusiastically when these elements were present. In 1914, he played the song "
Saint Louis Blues" for the first time. At the time, the
tango was fashionable, so he used a tango-style introduction before transitioning suddenly into a blues style. As Handy recalled, after a moment's hesitation, the audience threw themselves into the dance with abandon. At this point, blues began to come into its own as a genre. A tune called "Slow Drag Blues", composed by Snowden, was recorded c. 1915–19 by
Dabney's Band. According to Albert Murray, blues-idiom dance movement has nothing to do with sensual abandonment. "Being always a matter of elegance [it] is necessarily a matter of getting oneself together. Practitioners of this style do not throw their bodies around; they do not cut completely loose. A loss of coolness and control places one squarely outside the tradition." Dancing to blues music was sometimes called "
slow dragging", a term that was used by Black dancers in Chicago through the 1940s. By the 1960s, the term "belly-rubbing" had gained acceptance. In the 1970s, both Black and white people began to refer to very close slow dancing between couples simply as "
slow dancing". The degree of affection the partners had for each other generally determined how closely the partners danced, and there were widely varying levels of proficiency and styles of footwork. In fact, the very nature of a vernacular dance culture ensures the survival of socially and culturally useful or valuable dances. Many of the steps specific to dances associated with popular blues songs of the 1920s were adapted for new musical structures in jazz, and new dance forms such as the
lindy hop. Early African-American blues dances were very simple in their core movement and allowed for a wide variety of musical interpretation, embodying a black aesthetic approach to rhythm, movement and melody which permeated black music. They were often a simple one-step or
two-step and though some movements may have been adapted and integrated into some mainstream popular dances, blues dancing as a distinct dance genre and social practice never became a specific focus for white America in the way that dances such as the
Lindy Hop and
Charleston have. ==Blues dancing style==