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"Quick-Ref": #7 "Tangos" - #9 "European" songs - #12 for "Torch" songs, - #13 "Dixieland", - #15 "Flappers" |
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Internet Explorer: Right click on the link and then select "Save Target As..." Netscape: Right click on the link and then select "Save Link As..." All files have been Digitally Re-Engineered by Mr. Verne Buland, our Staff, and others. The ladies hiked their skirts, cut their long tresses and bobbed whatever remained, rouged their cheeks, and got down and dirty with the new Jazz music. In elegant ballrooms, gaudy dancehalls, and in their own living rooms, they danced the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Shimmy, the Tango, and almost anything else with a 4/4 beat. The changes in women's clothing and hair styles were drastic. The girls "parked" their corsets when they went dancing, because the new, energetic Jazz Age dances required women to move freely, -something the "old ironsides" didn't allow. Pantaloons and corsets were replaced with underwear called "step-ins." The waists of 'Flapper' dresses were dropped to the hipline. Starting in 1923, the ladies began wearing rayon stockings ("artificial silk") which the Flapper often wore rolled over a garter that was below the knee. Here's the musical advice they were receiving.
This Coca Cola Advertisement shows the "modern" style. The girls used lip rouge to give their lips a "cupie-bow" look and they tucked their bobbed hair into Cloche Hats. They adopted the "garçonne" ("little boy") look that was instigated by French designer Coco Chanel. In 1923, the Broadway musical 'Runnin' Wild' opened with a song by Black pianist composer James P. Johnson callled The "Charleston"; sung by Elizabeth Welch. Curiously, the tune didn't catch on with the public until the all-Black cast of "Running Wild" appeared in "Florenz Ziefeld's Follies of 1923". No other dance epitomizes the spirit and joyous exhuberance of the 1920's more than the All during the 1920s, the dance was the Flapper's delight. The ladies danced it by themselves, with a partner, or in a group. It became an international craze. Even Hollywood had Betty Boop, the cartoon Flapper. (Cartoonist: Max Fleischer. The character was named in honor of singer Helen Kane, the "Boop Boop a Doop" girl. Scroll down and listen to Helen "Booping" her heart out with "I Want To Be Loved By You") "Tin Pan Alley" turned out hundreds of "Charleston" variations, and Charleston contests, were a regular part of Dance halls and hotels everywhere. Hospitals began receiving patients complaining of "Charleston knee." Interestingly, the Stodgier ballrooms tried to discourage the frenetic "Charleston" by posting signs that read simply, "PCQ" ("Please Charleston Quietly"). Today, in our mind's eye, we visualize Flappers with their knock knees, crossing hands, and flying beads dancing the Charleston. However, the editors of the May 1920 edition of the 'Atlantic Monthly' saw the dance in a different light. "....flappers "trot like foxes, limp like lame ducks, one-step like cripples, and all to the barbaric yawp of strange instruments which transform the whole scene into a moving-picture of a fancy ball in bedlam." One of the more successful variants, a dance called the "Black Bottom", was first introduced in the 1926 Broadway edition of George White's "Scandals Listen now to a 1926 version of the
Artists John Held Jr. (the quintessential caracaturist of the Roaring 1920s Jazz Age) first used the "Flapper" expression, while creating the image and style of the flapper by drawing young girls wearing Galoshes. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald described the ideal flapper as "lovely, expensive, and about nineteen." Eventually, all of the earlier dances lost popularity and the Foxtrot became the preferred dance. Here's an early Strut variation (Although not credited on the cover, the artwork is very obviously that of John Held Jr, and the 'girl' is the quintessential Flapper of the Roaring '20s Jazz Age.) The Charleston dance had been performed in American Black communities since 1903, but didn't become internationally popular until the 1923 Broadway musical debut. ( Musicologists have traced the dance back to Blacks who lived on an island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina (ergo: "Charleston"). The "Charleston" is a sprightly 4/4 time dance with syncopated rhythm. From the male point of view, the dance consists of stepping forward with the left foot, while also moving the left arm forward and the right arm backwards. then bring the right foot up to the left, just tapping the floor. The right foot then steps backward, and the left foot moves ever futher back behind the right foot and just taps the floor, while the arms also reverse their positions. Then repeat. You're dancing the Charleston. In 1929 the stock market crashed and the world was plunged into the Great Depression. The frivolity and licentious behavior of the time ended. However, much of the flapper's changes remained. The Flappers had broken away from the Victorian image of womanhood. They dropped the corset, chopped their hair, dropped layers of clothing, wore make-up, created the concept of dating, and became a sexual person. These ladies had created a "new" more "modern" woman. --- Murray L. Pfeffer
Here's a photo of Helen Kane, (née: Helen Schroeder, b. August 4, 1903, New York (The Bronx), NY, USA. d. Sept. 26, 1966, New York (Queens), NY, USA) some sources say b. 1904. With her large eyes, bobbed hairdo, and "painted Cupie Bow" lips, she was one of the quintessential Flappers of the late 1920s. It was while playing the Palace Theatre in New York, that she interpolated a scat phrase -- " he likes to Boop Boop A Doop" -- into the song "That's My Weakness Now", and became an overnight star. Later, Grim Natwick, an illustrator for Hollywood's 'Fleischer Studios', used Kane as the model for his studio's most famous Cartoon creation, "Betty Boop". When she was just 15 years old, Kane was already working professionally, touring the Orpheum Circuit with the Marx Brothers. She would go on to become a world-wide star. Interestingly, during the height of her fame -1928-1930- Kane made 22 song recordings. Between 1930 and 1951, she made only five more, including a re-release of "I Wanna Be Loved by You". Sadly, Kane developed breast cancer and underwent surgery in 1956. She would eventually receive two hundred radiation treatments as an outpatient at New York's famed 'Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital'. Helen was age 62 (or 63) when she died in her apartment. Her (3rd) husband Dan Healy was at her bedside.
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"Roll 'em Girls, Roll'em"
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or Jazz Age Songs
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4
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15
16
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"Quick-Ref": #7 "Tangos" - #9 "European" songs - #12 for "Torch" songs, - #13 "Dixieland", - #15 "Flappers" |