Beautiful, Sexy, Silly, Savvy

In Search of the Shimmy, I discover the Black Bottom & Josephine Baker

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May 03, 2025

CONTINUED FROM:
IN SEARCH OF MISSING BLACK MUSES - The shock of learning just how much was omitted from my earliest dance history instruction.

…Therefore, today I want to tip my top hat to a population that gets sorely overlooked in their contribution1 to what belly dance became in the US.2
You can't study this aspect of dance history without acknowledging the influence of vaudeville, burlesque, and the faire/circus scenes on both the American Cabaret styles that I learned, and the Renaissance Faire legends who would give birth to the many Tribal Belly Dance styles that came out of California. (1) 3
You also can't study Modern and Jazz Dance history without acknowledging those same roots…
Finally, you can't study Vaudeville and Jazz without acknowledging the descendants of African slaves in the United States.
Oh, wait. What am I saying?
Of course you can. We've been doing that for more than a century.
Which is why, when I went hunting for the earliest ways in which I filled in the gaping abyss left by the belly dance instruction I was missing — specifically while researching the cross-pollination between flappers, vaudeville, and belly dancing—I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole that ended up where it always ends up:
Orientalism
Black Lives Matter
All Lives Matter
Exotification
Erotification
Appropriation
Appreciation
The Big White Weenie
And We White Dancers.

My journey started here:

Did you see that? It was right there, amidst all those flying legs, flapping knees, and hot-hot-feet. Just a little flash here and a little flash there, but that's what I was looking for.

The Flapper Fringe Addiction.

In other words, the quintessential cross-pollination dance: THE SHIMMY.

"A dance so naughty it had to be banned!"

In some versions, they focus more on what belly dancers consider a shoulder-shimmy, in contrast to our gazillion isolated hip-shimmies, but it’s exactly what I was hunting for.

In my original video search, the Shimmy led me to this fringe-licious, booty-shaking number by Mildred Melrose:

As I was watching, I got to musing. Once Miss Melrose had finished making me squeal, I got to scrolling. And scrolling and scrolling and scrolling fruitlessly. Because seeing the name of this dance—the Black Bottom—paired with the words "real" and "original" had raised my Spockly eyebrow.

After all, this chick is as pasty as my peachy-white bottom. With all the booty shaking and cheeky bum-slappery, combined with the segregation and erasure practices of the era in question, I wondered if the name referenced literal Black bottoms, or some other reference I didn't know, or if it was a coincidental hue in the crayon box.

As it turns out, it was made famous in a song by Jelly Roll Morton referencing an area of Detroit. But there are even older incarnations. This is one of those many aspects of dance and music history that’s a little fuzzy to pinpoint exactly.4

Well, wherever its first appearance, the Black Bottom is an early 20th Century dance with African roots. It later became a mainstream craze that even overtook the Charleston and appeared in Hollywood movies.

The Charleston itself has a similar history. So does the Lindy Hop. (We’ll come back to those.) Wouldn't ya know it, so does the Shimmy. Because all those flappers didn't only start shaking their stuff after watching Little Egypt and her descendants from the 1893 Chicago World Expo. (1, 2)

Although many of my belly dance teachers mentioned people like Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Isadora Duncan (3) as having contributed to the divergent ways Americans forwarded belly dancing in the US, not one of them ever mentioned this type of Black American inheritance in a belly dancer's bread & butter move: the Almighty Shimmy.

But in the US, a lot of other people were shakin' it besides the Hoochie-Coochie dancers from the "Exotic East." Turns out that, yes indeedy, the Shimmy does have a double inheritance. We also learned it from...you know...ahem, “those people we don't like to call 'Artistic Founders'" whose ancestors were yoinked against their will from a little further south in the same continent as Egypt.5

🤨

FLAPPIN’ FRINGE

At the turn-of-the-20th-century, the Puritan-hangover, post-Victorian era had voracious needs. Those who shed their corsets and raised their hemlines (Flappers)6 were wrestling with many damaging restrictions to human expression that still plague us to this day.

World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 had demonstrated just how short and precarious life could be. They needed to shake—it's a biological response to stress, not limited to humans.7 They needed to move and stretch and breathe and jump in so many ways they "weren't supposed to do"—not in ballet, not in the waltz, certainly not off the dance floor. They needed the rights to learn and grow and speak and work. They needed mobility and the freedom to choose their own path. They needed to express their luscious, sexual cores without shame, fear, or loathing.

They also needed to acknowledge and treat with celebratory gratitude those shunned, segregated, oppressed members of their ranks who had the solutions they so desperately needed and took advantage of: the ancient healing power of dance and music.

Unfortunately, some European guys had decided to classify their scientific discoveries according to "race" and divvied humans up by skin hue. Some other people who wanted free labor and land so they could cash in on AllTheCrops and acquire AllTheMoney wielded those findings as weapons to continue that ancient fallacy: Dark = Bad, Light = Good.

Because if individuals are "inferior"? Well, sheeeee-it. Weren't they born for our exploitation, just like all the other animals, plants and resources of this planet? No harm, no foul, right?

🤬

(Have no clue what I'm talking about? Please. Do. Your own. Research.)

So alas, even though slavery was technically no more in the US during the Roaring 20s, there was still the way things actually functioned. Beyond lynchings and segregation signs, there were things like the unofficial "two-colored rule" whereby Black artists could not appear onstage alone.8

Therefore, it is no surprise that in my all my sleuthing for the Shimmy, this is the closest I could find to any Black dancers of the period doing the Black Bottom (and oh, how the racist snark abounds):

Did you see that though?

There’s another bread-and-butter belly dance move — the Arabesque footwork to switch sides, drawing that little half-circle with the toes, just without any torso undulations over the top of it.
Or add a bounce, then fling it around to a Saidi tune.
We’ve even got the little circular hand-flourishes that belly dancers do all the time.
And gee, “the swing”—that foot flick out to the sides that’s still present in earthy folkloric styles. Three guesses which continent a bunch of these folk styles come from...
“The box,” too - make it bouncier, add a cane and some hip-hikes, and…

EGYPTIAN CANE DANCE

This is the dancer who made me fall completely in love with raqs assaya - the Egyptian women’s cane dance. (In contrast to the tahtib, the men’s warlike stick dance that assaya pokes flirty fun at. Being a martial artist trained in a variety of stick styles, short to long, hooked to straight, as well as a fusion dancer who flips birds at conventions, I may…on occasion…swipe moves from the guys as well.) 9

Check out the number of cross-pollinations to that Black Bottom vid.

There are so many reasons why certain styles of belly dance came so easily to me, why they felt so familiar, and why it was a natural process for me to fill in the blanks of my missing instruction. Because they share so many cross-over moves with other forms I’d already studied: Modern, Jazz, Swing, and various entertainment hall styles.

Of course, this is also why I don’t always look “right” — because I didn’t always learn these moves from belly dancers. I just saw them doing something similar to a move I’d already been doing, copied it, and put my own twist on it.

Badum-tek!

What else was I gonna do? Stop dancing because I’d lost my teacher and only had sporadic or videographed access to others?

Bwahahahah! Good one.

THE CHARLESTON, THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE & JOSEPHINE BAKER

Alas, I couldn't find any original footage for the Mess Around. But check out this Charleston move!

Look just a little familiar? This is a move I was taught as a standard of belly dancing, only with a closer stance. Sometimes the emphasis is on the heel drop, and sometimes it has heavy pelvic drops with it. Yet this is not a move that dominates any Egyptian silver screen belly dancing I ever encountered.

So did we get it from other influences like Turkish Oryantale or Egyptian folkloric? Or was this another add-in from our local turn-of-the-20th-century dances? Perhaps both, like the Shimmy? I'm curious now.

But that's a Scheherazadean topic for another time.

Back to the Shimmy Hunt and 1930s Harlem. The clip below shows a few more Black dancers, but the ratio is still glaringly disproportionate (ahem, especially in the Cotton Club seating). (1)

For today's cross-pollination hunt, I am most interested in the second dance clip, around six minutes in. The twists, the hip circles and bumps, the scarves, and that little foot flick reminiscent of the one I learned in Egyptian cane dance. Seeing things like this always makes me curious if they come from a dance out of context, a fusion of styles, or if they were developed in different places of the world like scientific discoveries that simultaneously occur continents apart.

I soooo wish I knew how they introduced this number and what music they're dancing to.

Here we go! Here we can see some of our original Black shimmy-shakers in this Harlem Renaissance number.10

So no shit, there I was, making my eyes bleed as I collected all this black-and-white footage when I stumbled upon one of my late-comer dance Muses, the performer who inspired this entire series. She is a rare example in the mainstream arts and entertainment of the 1920s: a Black, female soloist. Know why I was able to find a boatload of footage of her?

Because this is the legendary Josephine Baker performing the Charleston after she had gotten out of the United States of Jim Crow—she was in Paris when she made it big.

Now, true, I've known her name, but mostly as a singer, which is what her later career revolved around. Seeing her dance this way in her early days...

Ugh. Okay fine. You have to head over to YouTube to watch it now. It is worth the trek.

Oh, that smile! The humor. The immense personality. All that goofy showstopper play wrapped around fabulous dancing in the form of a sexy, gorgeous woman...

All I could think was—holy banana-skirts, Batman! I'm looking at one of my great-great-dance-grandmothers, and someone who should have been an inspiration to me for all these years!

My acting exploits had always slanted toward musical theater. While it's true that, as the years passed, I grew into my sacredly sensual side, and later allowed myself to express the darker and more painful, powerful tales of my heart through dance, my first love since I was very young was melodramatic, over-the-top, comedic shtick. Extra bonus if it could be done through dancing and singing.

Later, once I hit puberty and especially after I left my parents' house, I began looking for ways that females could be powerful and smart, plus feminine and sexy. Hence, why I tried belly dancing when I was nineteen.11 It really would have made my day to have seen more experienced dancers proving that I could throw goofy in there, too.

The author in her black-and-white fur trimmed mantle with long, dangly jester hood. Crossed eyed with her tongue sticking out. — *"Dance with your body, not with your face, Izzy!" (Tell that to La Baker!)*

So upon seeing that Charleston clip of Josephine Baker, I HAD to know who this glorious woman was as a dancer. In a documentary about her, “The First Black Superstar,”12 Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Author of The Black Dancing Body, described her as "beautiful, sexy, silly, and savvy all at the same time.”

As I was about to discover, La Baker was so much more...

UP NEXT:
CHAIN BREAKER, TREND MAKER, MIND WAKER - Falling in Love With Josephine Baker

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist

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