The hot, sticky air makes it difficult for the dancers to breathe—but they keep going. Sweat glistening on their skin—rich mahogany brown to light peach—doesn’t slow the movement; it will continue at its breakneck, limb-flailing pace until the club closes or until the dancers give in to exhaustion. Whichever one comes first is anyone’s guess, but it’s usually the latter. Until that time, the Big Apple dance is its own power source, feeding off the energy of the crowd. Men and women—sometimes pairing off, sometimes dancing alone—cluster in the center of the club, lightly prancing just off their heels. In unison, the dancers then form a circle, shifting to the side counterclockwise from time to time, giving each other just enough space to continue moving their feet and legs. At times, they wind their bodies in place, moving unpredictably like twisting leaves in the wind. Whether they know it or not, for a moment or two, the dancers are linked back to their ancestors in coastal South Carolina in the previous century and, further back, in West Africa, also dancing—for tradition, for religious beliefs, for sheer joy.
Tonight, however, the patrons of the Big Apple Club in Columbia just want a good time, a brief escape from Jim Crow segregation and the Great Depression. Eventually, the men and the women dancing pair up more consistently, and continue to hop, swing, and truck. The athletic prowess on display is impressive, especially to those watching from a balcony high above the dance floor.
The dancers are black and the faces above are white, belonging to students from the University of South Carolina, mere blocks away, who are curious to see this new and exciting dance they’ve heard about. While the white gaze doesn’t have the same kind of power here as it does on the streets or other white spaces of Columbia, when the students take what they’ve seen back to their campus, it turns out they are able to ignite the dance into an international sensation, if only for a fleeting time.
The significance of American culture is often obscured by the broader strokes of history—the military campaigns and government machinations. Fads come and go so frequently—one sheds a tear for the Macarena of 1996—that we fail to recognize or examine their importance. As an intellectual historian, I have come to realize that even those brief fads from the past can tell us so much about the era in which they were born, gained worldwide fame, and flamed out. The story of the Big Apple dance is one of those, coming as it did at the crossroads of race, culture, and the continuing development of Southern identity during the Great Depression.
The history of an art form crossing American racial and ethnic lines is hardly new or unique. Certainly, the long arc of music history in the United States is filled with examples of white Americans observing creative expression developed (perfected?) by African Americans in an African-American space and riding it (perhaps with some adaptation) to new heights of cultural fame—without those same creators or originators receiving credit or financial reward.
The rise of the Big Apple dance in the 1930s followed the precedent of another dance craze from South Carolina, the Charleston, but the circumstances under which they arose were somewhat different. The Charleston captured the popular imagination during the 1920s, an era of both massive economic growth and widening social ills. South Carolina had suffered early in the 1920s due to the collapse of cotton prices in 1921 and drought conditions throughout the state during the decade. The Big Apple grew during another era of economic, social, and political uncertainty—one that the American South was very much at the center of.