Tag Archives: Frankie Manning

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Shim Sham Shimmy

I had to choose shim as my Ragtag Daily Prompt today because I am relearning the Shim Sham!

I learned it years ago, but forgot it. Now the dance group that I hang out with on Fridays does the Shim Sham as the end of their dance evening. This is a line dance but it’s a line dance from Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. It started from tap dance. “At the end of many performances, all of the musicians, singers, and dancers would get together on stage and do one last routine: the Shim Sham Shimmy.” Here.

I am learning it from this teaching tape. The individual moves are not that hard, but it is fast and it’s the transitions that I really have to work on. It is fast enough that it has to be memorized and automatic, I can’t think about the next step.

Frankie Manning was an American dancer, instructor, and choreographer. Manning is considered one of the founders of Lindy Hop, an energetic form of the jazz dance style known as swing. I got to take lindy hop classes with him in the 1980s in the Washington, DC area, when swing and lindy hop were having a revival. It is still going on, and what better exercise is there than dance?

And the photograph is Jonathan Doyle and friends playing in late March 2023. I love dancing to live music!

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BIRGing in Memories

Let’s see, I am thinking of famous people, not just that I’ve seen (from a distance) but that I know or knew:

Frankie Manning, one of Whitey’s Lindyhoppers who danced lindyhop at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. He came to teach at the Savoy Swings Again dance weekends in West Virginia in the 1980s. He came to Port Townsend, too, for the dance camps here. I got to dance with him years ago and took classes and watched demonstrations. Hooray for him!

Bernice Reagon Johnson PhD, both for being an historian at the Smithsonian and for being the leader of Sweet Honey in the Rock for 40 years, and it’s still going! Ok, I don’t know her, but she is from my Washington, DC stomping grounds and I love that group.

Darryl Davis, for being an African American man who made appointments with KKK Grand Dragons to talk to them to try to understand. And some have quit! And he’s a fabulous Baltimore blues man and he and his band played at our wedding in 1989. He ran the Centrum Blues Fest for years too.

Ted talk here and music website here: https://www.daryldavis.com/.

Musicians and activists and dancers, that seems to be who I want to BIRG about!

And the photograph is from our wedding.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: BIRGing.