Frankie Manning didn’t invent the “Lindy Hop”, but he was instrumental in making it popular. The Lindy Hop was a “street dance”, i.e., something invented by the dancers themselves, rather than more elite dancing instructors. (In that respect it shares with the sophisticated Argentine Tango, which grew out from its origins in brothels.) It was being developed at the Savoy ballroom in Harlem (a black ghetto in New York City), and got named the Lindy Hop by one of the dancers there (Georges “Shorty” Snowden) when he was asked by a journalist what its name was, who groped for an answer and found it in the headlines about Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Lindy went national and became higher class (and its name was changed to Jitterbug), particularly with Benny Goodman and big band swing starting in 1936. Frankie Manning wandered by the Savoy in 1929, and soon became a passionate Lindy dancer and the ambassador for it … to the extent that he was worshipped around the world for his artistry. Frankie’s favorite song was Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings”, which seems slow to Wilddancer for Lindy Hop, but you can see hundreds of folks doing it in a tribute video made on his 88th birthday. We at Wilddancer had been dancing for 10+ years when we saw a swing dancer do a back flip onto his hands, and back onto his feet during a “For Dancers Only” program at Stanford University on April 14, 2000 by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. It must have been Frankie Manning, who would have been “only 86” at the time. And he was 89 when he astonished a crowd in Sweden.
