JUMP, JIVE, AND WAIL
JUDGE, MARK GAUVREAU
JUMP, JIVE, AND WAIL Why Conservatives Should Celebrate the Return of Swing By Mark Gauvreau Judge As a leading cultural indicator, it doesn't rank up there with the national drop in crime. But...
...Today it is the young who are professionally observed by an army of well-meaning adults, in settings deliberately set aside for pedagogical purposes...
...To understand why, one has only to step inside the Derby in Los Angeles, the Spanish Ballroom outside Washington, D.C., or any of the other swing clubs that have popped up across the country...
...In the days before rock-and-roll, welfare, and midnight basketball, it was in places like dance halls that kids learned how to behave as members of a larger adult community, and the disappearance of such spots is a large factor in the social chaos that has taken over the country in the last thirty years...
...The prominent black social critic Stanley Crouch recently claimed that if all teen-age girls simply refused to date boys who dressed like pigs, we could re-moralize the culture in one generation...
...has gotten so big that the Gap clothing store is running an ad featuring jitterbuggers lindy-hopping to Louis Prima's 1956 "Jump, Jive, and Wail...
...It was a wonderful life...
...We would go to the Savoy in the daytime and dance with the band while they rehearsed," recalls Manning, who danced at the Savoy during the 1930s and is still dancing at age 84...
...We could at least make the culture better dressed, and that's a step...
...A dim view is taken of people who let their property become an eyesore, of the less-than-human breed who would litter a parking lot with a used paper diaper, of the ethical moron who would look for a pretext to sue somebody in pursuit of unearned or undeserved money, or of someone guilty of not meeting parental duties or responsibilities...
...But judging by the swinging going on at the Derby, America, and other spots popping up across the country, there is at least a chance that we can dance our way into a miracle—the antidote to the past thirty years...
...Dancing by its very nature brings one in contact with a large number of people, but the unwritten laws— encouraged by the high-style of dress and dance—make debauchery unlikely and provide a sense of safety...
...If, as some conservatives believe, manners and morals are as important as rights, this is no small thing...
...Oldenburg goes on to note that this decency often spills into the larger community: Promotion of decency in the third place is not limited to it...
...Unlike the rock-and-rollers who display the civil and sartorial nightmare that is one of the worst legacies of the 1960s, swing dancers like to look and act better than anyone in the room...
...School children would learn how to dance instead of gawking at the Internet...
...For the most part, this kind of control has been missing since youth took over bars and converted dance halls into pot-heavy concert spaces...
...Third places foster conversation with strangers and allow mingling between the generations, something now almost completely lost...
...This is good news for conservatives...
...In 1995, there aired a documentary Swingin' at the Savoy, about legendary dancer Frankie Manning and the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, one of the great dance floors in America before it was demolished to put up a housing project in 1959...
...Then we'd go home, take a shower and come back at night to dance...
...Manning had no social workers or government programs to help him fill time...
...It's only rational to speculate that swing itself is just the latest fad, and that next year the kids will do something different...
...The regulars are not likely to do any of those things roundly disapproved at the coffee counter...
...Soon they'd be dressing well and frowning upon rudeness, drunkenness, and vulgarity...
...It is striking how well-adjusted and optimistic the kids who grew up dancing at the Savoy were, despite the fact that most of them were black and had to struggle through the Great Depression...
...Third places are those casual spots outside both work and home: city taverns, tea gardens, post offices, beauty parlors, and dance halls where citizens can meet, talk, and have fun...
...What is remarkable about a good third place—which the new swing clubs have the chance to become—is the way they encourage our better natures without the intervention of government, academics, or the helping professions...
...At a restaurant called America in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, the Friday night big-band dance draws two to three hundred people, an interesting throng of teenagers and twenty-somethings mixed with senior citizens as well as Gen-X'ers (the baby-boomers, the generation of rock-and-roll, are conspicuously missing), and in over a year there has not been a single report of drunkenness, sexual assault, or even a fight...
...But it's close...
...Perhaps a small, apparently meaningless pop fad like swing could provide the push that helps re-civilize the culture...
...Young people used to be more actively involved in the adult world," Lasch wrote...
...his mentor was Count Basie, who steered the other dancers away from drinking and other destructive behavior...
...Big bands and young neoswing "jump and jive" groups like the Cherry Poppin' Daddies—who are currently receiving airplay on rock radio and selling ten thousand copies a week of their Zoot Suit Riot album—are once again playing the music of Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Louis Jordan, and Cab Calloway in clubs and ballrooms jammed to the walls with jitterbuggers, most of them in their teens, twenties, and thirties...
...Imagine what might happen if swing got so big that it once again became the norm rather than the exception...
...Many items of proper and improper behavior are reviewed in the countless hours and open agenda of rambling third place conversations...
...In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995) the social critic Christopher Lasch noted that one of the worst changes to occur in America since the 1950s is the loss of what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined in 1989 the term "third place" to describe...
...That's what's so exciting about the return of swing from the 1930s and '40s: It suggests the possibility of a return of civilized third places...
...Oldenburg argues that in third places a kind of natural restraint holds sway and "whatever hint of hierarchy exists is predicated upon human decency" rather than wealth or fame...
...If swing takes over pop culture the way rock-and-roll did in the early 1950s, it could do more to repair the cultural damage of the last thirty years than the war on drugs, the Republican Congress, and the Christian Coalition combined...
...For the last few years, America has experienced a revival in swing dancing...
...When one sees the fedoras, saddle shoes, well-mannered patrons, and general air of civility, it becomes apparent that swing has resurrected the night spot as an adult playground where anything less than strict decency is forbidden and shabby manners and dress are frowned upon...
...Indeed, the phenomenon Mark Gauvreau Judge is the author of Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk...
...They had more opportunities to observe adults in unguarded moments...
...Like James Q. Wilson's "Broken-Windows" theory of maintaining social control by preventing small crimes, when a certain level of appearance and etiquette is established, larger problems become less imaginable...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 38
