“Lindy Hopper’s Delight”

As jazz music became popular entertainment nationwide, many dances circulated from social venues to professional floor shows and ballroom stages and then back again to amateur social practice. As musicians built careers playing for social dancers touring with professional dance acts, they learned to structure their performances collaboratively by listening visually to dancers’ bodies. Jazz musicians, and especially drummers, learned to accentuate dancers’ movements and engage them in playful “catching” games while also providing the stable rhythmic framework that encouraged dancers to participate kinesthetically with the music. This chapter explicates the dynamics of such relationships through the career of drummer Chick Webb, whose reputation was built on the strength of his close connection with lindy hop dancers during his tenure as house bandleader at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom throughout the 1930s. Specifically, it explores his close connections with Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a group of talented young dancers who became among the first to adapt this social partnered dance for the professional stage and, ultimately, for Hollywood films. Webb played regularly for elite lindy hop dancers in films, in touring stage shows, for amateur dance contests, and nightly at the Savoy, and his evolving relationship with them throughout the 1930s reveals the fluid boundaries between labor and play through which musicians and dancers co-creatively shaped jazz’s development.