From the Archive

The History of Lindy Hop: From Harlem to the Revival

By Lindy Hopper, Editor

Lindy Hop was created by African-American dancers in Harlem at the end of the 1920s, conquered the world in the swing era, nearly vanished, and was brought back by its own pioneers. This is that story.

Harlem in the 1920s

To understand Lindy Hop you have to start in Harlem in the 1920s, the decade of the Harlem Renaissance. Black writers, musicians and artists were transforming American culture, and the neighbourhood's ballrooms were packed with young dancers who wanted something faster and freer than the polite partner dances of the day. Jazz was evolving quickly, and the dancers evolved with it.

The raw materials were already there. The Charleston was a national craze. Dancers in Harlem had developed the breakaway, in which partners released their closed hold to improvise apart before reconnecting. There were older steps too, such as the Texas Tommy, and the rhythmic vocabulary of tap. Out of this mixture, in the second half of the 1920s, came a new dance with a distinctive swinging, circular movement. Dance historian Brenda Dixon-Gottschild describes the breakaway as the forerunner of the Lindy, and points out that early film of the breakaway survives from 1929.

How it got its name

The best-known story credits George "Shorty George" Snowden, a dancer barely five feet tall who was the reigning king of the Savoy Ballroom. In 1928 Snowden competed in a dance marathon in Harlem. According to the account he gave jazz historian Marshall Stearns in 1959, a Fox Movietone newsreel crew filmed the event, and when a reporter asked what he was doing with his feet, Snowden replied that it was "the Lindy".

The name was in the air. In May 1927 Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic, and newspapers were full of "Lindy hops" across the ocean. Several dances were named after the flight that year, and historians are careful to say these were not the same as the Harlem dance. What matters is that Snowden's word stuck to the dance Harlem was already doing, and "Lindy Hop" it became. Snowden himself was later honoured by Count Basie, who recorded a tune called "Shorty George".

The Savoy and the big bands

Lindy Hop's spiritual home was the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue, which opened in March 1926. It was a block long, had two bandstands so the music never stopped, and admitted Black and white patrons alike at a time when segregation was the norm. Its dancers set the pace for the rest of the city and, eventually, the world.

The music fed the dance and the dance fed the music. Chick Webb's orchestra was the Savoy's favourite house band, with the teenage Ella Fitzgerald as its singer from the mid-1930s. Webb famously took on Benny Goodman's orchestra in a battle of the bands at the Savoy in 1937, and Count Basie's band the following year. By the mid-1930s swing was the popular music of America, and bands led by Goodman, Basie, Artie Shaw, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington carried it across the country on records and radio. Wherever swing went, Lindy Hop, often called the jitterbug, went too.

A new generation: air steps and ensembles

In the early 1930s a younger group of Savoy dancers pushed the Lindy in new directions. The most influential was Frankie Manning, who in 1935 introduced the first Lindy Hop air step, an over-the-back flip performed with his partner Frieda Washington in a contest against Snowden. Manning also pioneered synchronised ensemble routines, in which several couples danced the same choreography together.

Many of these dancers performed under the banner of Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, a troupe organised by Herbert "Whitey" White, a Savoy bouncer. They won contests including the Harvest Moon Ball, toured Europe and South America, and appeared in Hollywood films. Their scene in the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937) and their dazzling routine in Hellzapoppin' (1941) remain the most-watched Lindy Hop footage ever filmed, and generations of dancers have studied them frame by frame.

Savoy style and Hollywood style

As the dance spread, it took on local accents. The style danced in Harlem, now usually called Savoy style, was energetic, circular and driven by improvisation; even then it was never one fixed thing, because every dancer had a personal flavour. In California, Dean Collins, who had danced at the Savoy before moving west in the 1930s, became associated with a smoother, more upright look later called Hollywood or smooth style. Both survive in today's scene.

War and decline

The Second World War scattered the original dancers. Many of the young men were drafted; Whitey's troupe broke up in 1942, and Frankie Manning went into the army the following year. At the same time, American servicemen carried the jitterbug overseas, including to Britain, where it helped shape jive (see our article on swing and jive in Britain).

Back home, the conditions that had sustained the big bands were disappearing. In 1944 the United States introduced a 30 per cent federal excise tax on nightclubs with dancing, later cut to 20 per cent, and "No Dancing" signs went up in venues across the country. After the war, clubs hired smaller groups and filled their floors with tables. Jazz musicians turned to bebop and cool jazz, which were made for listening. In the 1950s rock'n'roll took over the dance floors, and the dance itself was simplified into new forms such as East Coast Swing. The Savoy closed in 1958 and was demolished the following year. Most of the original Lindy Hoppers, Manning included, took ordinary jobs and stopped dancing.

The revival

Lindy Hop never quite died. Louise "Mama Lou" Parks, a former Savoy hostess, kept training competition dancers for the Harvest Moon Ball. In 1981 London Weekend Television paid to restage one of her events at Smalls Paradise in Harlem, and a late-1982 episode of ITV's The South Bank Show featuring Parks sparked a wave of interest in Britain. In London, Terry Monaghan and Warren Heyes met at her workshops and formed the Jiving Lindy Hoppers in 1983.

In New York, the Savoy veteran Al Minns began teaching again in 1982, and his students went on to found the New York Swing Dance Society in 1985. Two dancers who had studied with Minns, Erin Stevens and Steven Mitchell, tracked down Frankie Manning in the mid-1980s and persuaded him to teach. Meanwhile in Sweden, three young dancers who would become the Rhythm Hot Shots travelled to New York in 1984 to find Minns and bring him to Stockholm. After Minns died in 1985, they invited Manning instead. Sweden's Herräng Dance Camp, held every summer, became a pilgrimage site where Manning taught for years.

The revival gathered pace. Manning won a Tony Award in 1989 for co-choreographing the Broadway show Black and Blue. The late-1990s neo-swing boom brought new bands and new dancers, and the first "Lindy exchange", a weekend of travelling between cities to dance, took place in December 1998. Today Lindy Hop is danced on every continent, and dancers celebrate World Lindy Hop Day each year on 26 May, Frankie Manning's birthday.

Remembering who made it

It is worth saying plainly: Lindy Hop is an African-American art form, created by Black dancers in Harlem and kept alive by them through decades when the wider world had moved on. Norma Miller put it simply when she said the original dancers did not want others taking their dance. Learning the history, and crediting the people who made it, is part of dancing it well. For a newcomer's overview of how the dance actually works, start with What is Lindy Hop?

Find a class near you

The story of Lindy Hop is still being written on dance floors every week, and you can join in. The quickest route is our near-me finder, which shows classes and socials closest to your postcode. If you would rather start from scratch with a structured course, browse beginners' courses, or look through the full list of classes across the UK. Bring comfortable shoes and a sense of humour; the rest comes with practice.

Ready to try it? Find a beginners' class or browse Lindy Hop classes across the UK.

Sources

Last reviewed 2026-10-23.