The Texas Tommy, The First Jazz Swing Dance (information & three film clips from the early 1900s)

Richard Powers, Jan 11, 2015

An amateur film shot in San Francisco around 1910, showing the one-step in a dance hall, then the Texas Tommy in the street, then another couple doing the Texas Tommy in an indoor dance hall. The Texas Tommy was the earliest version of swing dancing. The most famous of the African American Texas Tommy dancers - Johnny Peters - traveled to New York (Harlem) in 1911, where the transplanted Texas Tommy became popular, mostly as a vaudeville act, then evolved into an easier social dance version at the Savoy Ballroom (1926), which then became the Lindy hop by 1928. Watch Shorty George Snowden and his Savoy Ballroom dancers dance the 1929 version in "After Seben" and the roots of the Texas Tommy are apparent.

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents information about the "Texas Tommy".

This post also showcases two historical film clips of that dance from the early 1900s.

The "Texas Tommy" is the first Jazz Swing dance.

The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, and aesthetic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to the unknown creators of this dance. Thanks also to the film makers,  all those who are featured in these film clips, and the publisher of these film clips on YouTube.  Thanks also to all those who are quoted in this post. 

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INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEXAS TOMMY
Excerpt #1
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Tommy_(dance)
"The Texas Tommy is a vigorous social dance for couples that originated in San Francisco in the early twentieth century.[1]

History

After the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the Barbary Coast, the red-light district of the city, was rebuilt and given new life as a tourist attraction, a place of dance halls, theaters, shops, and restaurants. Dance exhibitions and variety shows designed to attract tourists replaced prostitution as the chief business of the area. Many of the dance crazes that swept America during the 1900s and 1910s originated in this section of San Francisco.[2] The Thalia, the largest and most popular dance hall on the Pacific coast,[3] was the birthplace of the Texas Tommy.[4] ("Tommy" was a slang term for prostitute.)

Around 1910, the Texas Tommy was a hit at a lowlife hot spot called Purcell's, a Negro cabaret, but it became respectable when it was danced at the upscale Fairmont Hotel, the most popular venue for ballroom dancing in San Francisco.[5] Who invented the Texas Tommy is obscure. Most likely the signature moves of the dance were being performed by patrons at Purcell's, and some innovative visitor adapted them for the ballroom floor. Some historians say that Johnny Peters, an African American, developed the Texas Tommy some time before 1910. In any event, after sheet music for "The Texas Tommy Swing" was published on 1 February 1911, the Fairmont's house band frequently played the song for its patrons. It was not long before the Texas Tommy was danced on Broadway, in Ziegfeld Follies of 1911, performed by Vera Maxwell, Harry Watson Jr., and the ensemble.[6] It was also included as a number in Darktown Follies, an all-black musical produced Off-Broadway in 1913.[7] Peters and Ethel Williams, who were masters of the dance, executed it on stage, as they had done regularly at the Fairmont.[8]"

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Excerpt #2
[Pancocojams Editor's Note: This is a small portion of an excerpt about the performance of various dances including Ballin' The Jack and the Texas Tommy in 1913 Black American off-Broadway production Darktown Follies. Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2021/12/ballin-jack-jazz-dance-three-film-clips.html for a longer quote about Ballin the Jack from that book.]

from Black Dance, by Lynne Fauley Emery (1973; second, revised edition, Princeton Horizons Book) This excerpt is from the chapter titled "From Minstrelsy to "Darktown Follies". This excerpt is given as is, including ellipses "...", except for source citations. 
[page] 2014
...."Besides Ballin' the Jack, Downtown Follies had a wide variety of dancing. There was some tap dance done by Toots Davis and Eddie Rector, a Cake-Walk finale, and a dance called the Texas Tommy/ Ethel Williams, one of the stars of Darktown, told Marshall Stearns that the Texas Tommy

...'was like the Lindy but there were two basic steps- a kick and hop three times on each foot, and then add whatever you want, turning, pulling, sliding. Your partner had to keep you from falling-I've slid into the orchestra pit more than once.' "   
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Here's some information about "Darktown Follies" Off-Broadway musical that is mentioned in that Wikipedia article:
From  https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/darktown-follies-lafayette-theatre-harlem-1913 "Darktown Follies (Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1913)", by Melissa Templeton, 09/05/2016
"One of the earliest large-scale musical revues to be created and performed by an all-Black cast, Darktown Follies premiered in 1913 at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Darktown Follies exhibited qualities common to minstrel shows of the period with its episodic musical numbers and large group finale. The plot, however, focussed on a romantic storyline between two Black characters, which was rarely seen in minstrel performances. Darktown Follies introduced dances, like Ballin’ the Jack (which would eventually become a popular dance on Broadway) and the Texas Tommy (a predecessor of the lindy hop) to the New York stage. Darktown Follies helped launch a trend of White artists traveling to Harlem in search of new material for their own productions. The show foreshadowed the development Black musicals like Shuffle Along (1921) and was an important precursor to the artistic renaissance that would define Black modernism in Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s."

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SHOWCASE FILM CLIP #2: Texas Tommy Swing Dance - 1914

 Objet D'Art, Sept. 19, 2017

Interior of a black dance hall with band and dancers (probably in San Francisco.) - Variations of the Texas Tommy Swing Dance and Ballin' the Jack

Prelinger Archives: [Gould Can 5423.4]
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Here's one comment from that YouTube video's discussion thread:
ragtimist, 2019
"That's Sid LeProtti's So Different Orchestra playing in the background. Though this looks like it was shot outdoors, it might have been shot at Purcell's Dancehall on Pacific St. in the Barbary Coast section of S.F." **** SHOWCASE FILM CLIP #3 - Texas Tommy Swing Dance 1915 

mark kihara,  Apr 2, 2021

"The Texas Tommy Swing dance was only done to specific songs, the most famous song was King Chanticleer." - Peter Loggins, Dance Historian

Using the AI restored footage from GlamourDaze, I have added more period appropriate music.  This 1912 recording of "King Chanticleer" is by Prince's Band.

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