This great post at Metafilter looks at Dickens’ visit to New York in 1842, when he tired of polite New York society and went slumming, heading to the notorious Five Points area, where he came across the dancing of William Henry Lane, aka Master Juba, “a man of whose dancing a number of historians say is where tap dance began… The dance he did was known as Pattin’ Juba and the first time it’s rhythm–which we think of as the Bo Diddley beat–was used on a sound recording was in 1952, when Red Saunders and his Orchestra, with Dolores Hawkins and and the Hambone Kids recorded Hambone.” Some say the Charleston can be traced back to Pattin’ Juba.
Here’s Dickens, from American Notes:
What will we please to call for? A dance? It shall be done directly, sir: ‘a regular break-down’ . . . Five or six couples come upon the floor, marshaled by a lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly, and the greatest dancer known…. [T]he sport begins to languish, when suddenly the lively hero dashes in to the rescue. Instantly the fiddler grins, and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the landlady; new confidence in the landlord; new brightness in the very candles. Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine. Dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooded legs, two wire legs, two spring legs–all sorts of legs and no legs–what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!
The “counterfeit Jim Crows” are blackface minstrels, at that time the leading form of American popular culture. The New York Herald was outraged at the vulgarity of what Dickens described.
Master Juba appeared at Vauxhall Gardens, and died in London while still in his twenties.
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