{"id":8399,"date":"2015-02-06T00:01:23","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T05:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=8399"},"modified":"2015-02-06T17:58:19","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T22:58:19","slug":"censoring-philly-street-dance-after-the-shimmy-ship-had-sailed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2015\/02\/censoring-philly-street-dance-after-the-shimmy-ship-had-sailed\/","title":{"rendered":"Censoring Philly Street Dance after the Shimmy Ship had Sailed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Police<\/a>
Joseph Kiefer and the Philadelphia Police Band, City Hall Tower, 1918. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThose moaning saxophones,\u201d fretted John R. McMahon in the Ladies’ Home Journal<\/i>, \u201ccall out the low and rowdy instinct.\u201d And with degrading names like \u201cthe cat step, camel walk<\/a>, bunny hug, turkey trot,\u201d McMahon figured jazz dance mocked the dignified traditions of social dance. Most insidious of all was a move they called the shimmy. \u201cThe road to hell is too often paved with jazz steps,\u201d McMahon wrote in an article titled, \u201cUnspeakable Jazz Must Go!\u201d<\/p>\n

The shimmy rode in with Spencer Williams\u2019<\/a> popular song, \u201cShim-Me-Sha-Wabble,” from 1917. Within a few years, the shimmy had just about taken over White America\u2019s dance halls and cabarets; thriving on stage, in recordings, all the while shaking America\u2019s sense of decency.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith hardly any movement of the feet,\u201d described singer and actress Mae West, dancers \u201cjust shook their shoulders, torsos, breasts and pelvises.\u201d West introduced her version of the shimmy to New York in the Fall of 1918, and a year later her image appeared on the sheet music<\/a> for “Ev’rybody Shimmies Now.<\/a>” While the shimmy amused people, its boldness also shocked them. Even West conceded there was \u201ca naked, aching sensual agony about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1919, the shimmy dominated American music publishing, recording and performing. The Ziegfeld Follies featured it that year on Broadway. Gilda Gray introduced the shimmy to Philadelphia in the \u201cShubert Gaieties\u201d at the Chestnut Street Opera House, suggesting that if she hadn\u2019t exactly invented the move, she owned it on stage. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether my shoulders were made to express the shimmy,\u201d Gray told the Inquirer<\/i>, \u201cor whether the shimmy was made for my shoulders to express.\u201d<\/p>\n

America danced to \u201can explosion of shimmy tunes\u201d and \u201ceveryone seemed to jump on the shimmy bandwagon\u201d writes Rebecca A. Bryant in “Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America<\/a>.” The most famous, “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate<\/a>,” would be joined by the “Shimmie Waltz,” “Let Us Keep the Shimmie,” “Shimmying Everywhere,” “You Cannot Shake That Shimmie Here.” Irving Berlin\u2019s “You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea,” worried that Prohibition might kill the shimmy. But banning alcohol didn\u2019t slow the shimmy. Philadelphia soon shook to its own song: \u201cAll the Quakers Are Shoulder Shakers (Down in Quaker Town).<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Others joined the scandalized Quaker on the cover of \u201cShoulder Shakers,\u201d chiming in with their opinions about the shimmy. \u201cDancing Masters Join Clergy to Purify Dance,\u201d read one headline, \u201cInternational Association Blames Wave of Vulgar Dancing on Song Writers.\u201d \u00a0Before long, from New York<\/a> to San Francisco, moral authorities wanted to, and sometimes managed, to ban, restrict or censor the shimmy.<\/p>\n

\"All<\/a>
“All the Quakers are Shoulder Shakers (Down in Quaker town).”\u00a0 (Duke University Libraries – Historic American Sheet Music.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Gilda<\/a>
Gilda Gray performs the Shimmy, 1931. See 9:02. (YouTube.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe insidious thing,\u201d wrote the Inquirer<\/i> in an article confirming \u201cthe shimmy dance has been barred from Philadelphia,\u201d is that \u201cwhen one dancer starts the whole place must start, until the room rocks with the shimmy dance. It is more insidious than champagne, it is more insidious than drugs.\u201d In the suburbs, the Lansdowne Club designated chaperones as \u201cshimmy sleuths” assigning them to break up \u201cthe bunny-hugging and too affectionate \u2018toddling.\u201d In the city, the task of policing the city\u2019s 4,000 licensed dance halls proved more challenging.<\/p>\n

The solution? Dancing\u2014and censoring\u2014in the streets.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolice Dance Censor Taboos Street Shimmy,\u201d read the headline before the first Philadelphia street dances of 1919. Sergeant Theodore S. Fenn, assured that dancers \u201cwill do nothing \u2018suggestive\u2019 by way of street dancing while I am around\u2026Philadelphia will dance with her feet, and her feet only. The Quaker City\u2026will not be disgraced by the ‘shimmy’ dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the dancers had other ideas. When 15,000 jammed the Parkway to dance to the Police Band<\/a>, reported the Inquirer<\/i>, they were \u201chappy in jazzing and shimmying\u2026in\u2026one jostling, swaying mass of sweltering humanity, in which a censor, if there had been one, would have had about as much change of imposing his ideas as the proverbial snowball.\u201d Dancers \u201ctoddled and shimmied, dipped and slid to their hearts content\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Someone needed to train police in anti-dance tactics and prevent \u201ccheek-to-cheek dancing, abdominal contact, [the] shimmy [and the] toddle.\u201d Enter dance master Miss Marguerite Walz, who would instruct 54 officers \u201cto keep their eyes peeled for violators of the \u201cNo Shimmy\u201d rule\u201d while the Police Band played on. During their first outing, just \u201ca few couples drew the attention of the censors, but policemen would step forward and touch one of the offenders on the shoulder and that was the end of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or so it seemed. The very next year, the \u201cHip-Dip\u201d \u201cwiggled its way into local terpsichorean circles,\u201d complained Miss Walz. During a visit to South Philadelphia High School, she noticed the \u201cHip-Dip\u201d and other \u201cnew and very undesirable dances,\u201d including the \u201cFlapper Flop,\u201d the \u201cDebutante Slouch\u201d and the \u201cWindmill Stride.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dance censorship, it turned out, would be a never-ending game of \u201cwhack-a-mole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0(Articles consulted: \u201cUnspeakable Jazz Must Go!\u201d by John R. McMahon, Ladies’ Home Journal<\/i>, December 1921; In<\/em> The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>: \u201cPhiladelphia Sneezes at Shimmy Dance,\u201d January 18, 1919, page 3; \u201cPolice Dance Censor Taboos Street Shimmy,\u201d May 7, 1919, p.3; \u201cDancing Masters Join Clergy to Purify Dance,\u201d June 13, 1919, p. 16; \u201cAnother Creator of the Shimmy,\u201d October 19, 1919, p. 8; \u201c\u2019Sedate Dancing Only\u2019 Lansdowne Club Edict,\u201d January 15, 1921, p. 19; \u201c18,000 at City Dance Miss Walz, Censor, Finds Few Violations of \u2018No Shimmy\u2019 Rule,\u201d July 29, 1921, p. 3; \u201cNew Dances Banned. South Phila. High Girls Promise to Eschew Latest Steps,\u201d March 29, 1922, p. 16; “\u2019Hip Dip\u2019 Appears Here at City’s Public Dance,\u201d July 14, 1922, p.3.)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThose moaning saxophones,\u201d fretted John R. McMahon in the Ladies’ Home Journal, \u201ccall out the low and rowdy instinct.\u201d And with degrading names like \u201cthe cat step, camel walk, bunny hug, turkey trot,\u201d McMahon figured jazz dance mocked the dignified traditions of social dance. Most insidious of all was a move they called the shimmy. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}