History of Swing: The Music and the Dance, from the 1910's to 1945

For several extraordinary decades, jazz was not a minority art or a museum piece. It was simply the popular music in the United States: the sound of the whole country's Saturday night. Ballrooms held four thousand people. Teenagers queued before dawn. And on the greatest dance floor in the world, in Harlem, working people by day became, by night, the most brilliant dancers alive. Swing is, from the beginning until today, an African American art form.

A History of Swing tells that story whole - from the ring shout and the field holler to the last chorus before bebop - and tells it, unusually, as the history of a music and a dance. The two were never separable. A Lindy Hopper's triple-step syncopates against the beat exactly as a trumpet does. This book treats the floor and the bandstand as one conversation, because that is what they were.