The same book noted eyewitness reports of dances from South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria that bore a resemblance to the Cakewalk, with no elaboration. The authors of Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance reported that an informal experiment with African dancers undertaken in the 1950s turned up "no worthy African counterpart" to the Cakewalk. The Encyclopedia of Social Dance echoed this, stating that the dance spread from Florida to Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and eventually New York, with the development of Florida into a winter tourist destination in the 1880s. Urlin, writing in the book Dancing, Ancient and Modern (1912), described these dances as consisting of "wild and hilarious jumping and gyrating, alternating with slow processions in which the dancers walked solemnly in couples," which he believed grew into the cakewalk style. It has been suggested that the cakewalk originated in Florida, with the war dances of the Seminole Tribe. The couple that was the most erect and spilled the least water or no water at all was the winner." He describes it being "revived with fancy steps by Charlie Johnson, a clever eccentric dancer" and becoming known as the "Cake Walk".
In their version, "there was no prancing, just a straight walk on a path made by turns and so forth, along which the dancers made their way with a pail of water on their heads. Įntertainer Tom Fletcher, born in 1873, wrote in 1954 that his grandparents told him about the chalk-line walk/cakewalk as a child, but had no information about its origins. Slaveholders were able to dismiss its threat in their own minds by considering it as a simple performance which existed for their own pleasure". One man recalled such a dance that his childhood nanny had described to him: "Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better." A 1981 article by Brooke Baldwin concludes that the cakewalk was meant "to satirize the competing culture of supposedly 'superior' whites. These accounts describe any slaveowners in attendance as unaware that they were being mocked. The slaves would dress in handed-down finery and comically exaggerate the poised movements of minuets and waltzes. Some secondhand accounts of the cakewalk describe it as a subtle mockery of the formal, mannered dancing practiced by slaveholding whites. The cakewalk was influenced by the ring shout, which survived from the 18th into the 20th century. As a plantation dance Firsthand accounts The fluid and graceful steps of the dance may have given rise to the colloquialism that something accomplished with ease is a "cakewalk". At that point, Broadway shows featuring women began to include cakewalks, and grotesque dances became very popular across the country. It was originally a processional partner dance performed with comical formality, and may have developed as a subtle mockery of the mannered dances of white slaveholders.įollowing an exhibition of the cakewalk at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the cakewalk was adopted by performers in minstrel shows, where it was danced exclusively by men until the 1890s. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around". The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on Black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern United States. 1915 sheet music cover (late for cakewalk music): "Ebony Echoes: A Good Old-Fashioned Cake-Walk" by Dan Walker.
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