After doing a bunch of reading and digging, these are some of the important things I’ve learnt about lindy hop in the 1970s and 1980s.
The New York Swing Dance Society doesn’t get the props it deserves for running parties that got people out and dancing (including Frankie and Norma and other OGs).
Community spaces – bars, clubs, church halls, social clubs, basements – were where lindy hop lived during these decades. It didn’t die. It was busy.
Norma Miller was really important. She was the sort of person who’d make sure people like Frankie went out to dance to a band (1983), and got a whole gang of OGs together for a party at Sandra Cameron’s studio (1983).
“In April 1983, at Norma’s suggestion, Larry Schultz and his wife, Sandra Cameron, had invited about thirty Savoy Lindy Hoppers to a little get-together at their dance studio. It was wonderful to see everybody, and we had a ball catching up and dancing with each other. We were all out there clowinging around, trying to remember our old routines.” (p225 Frankie Bio)
She put on shows with OGs starring in the early to mid 80s, she trained up new Black dancers. She did that thing that still holds lindy hop (and communities!) together today: she introduced people to each other.
Mama Lu Parks was another of those important women, putting on gigs, running performance groups, getting shit done.
The stories I’ve heard in the past about the 1980s were mostly about white men ‘discovering’ Frankie or Al Minns or Norma and convincing them to ‘come out of retirement’. But it was Black women who were keeping relationships alive, bringing people together, and getting shit done. AS PER USUAL.