Cakewalk - Cakewalk in Minstrelsy, Musicals, and As A Popular Dance

Cakewalk in Minstrelsy, Musicals, and As A Popular Dance

An exhibit at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial featured blacks singing folk songs and doing an old dance called the "chalk-line walk" in a plantation like setting. The dance was "done in the original fashion", as described by Fletcher. In 1877 performer-showmen Ernest Hogan and Edward Harrigan produced "Walking for Dat Cake, An Exquisite Picture of Negro Life and Customs" as a feature sketch at New York's Theater Comique on lower Broadway. Thereafter it was performed in minstrel shows, exclusively by men until the 1890s. In the 1893 production of "The Creole Show", which had opened in 1889, Dora Dean and her husband Charles E. Johnson made a hit dancing the cakewalk, their speciality, as partners. During its run from 1889 through 1897, this show played to crowds in Boston and New York at the old Standard Theatre on Greeley Square, one of the first productions to discard blackface makeup. The production had a Negro cast with a chorus line of sixteen girls, and at a time when women on stage, and partner dancing on stage were something new. The inclusion of women in the cast "made possible all sorts of improvisations in the Walk, and the original was soon changed into a grotesque dance" which became very popular across the country.

A Grand Cakewalk was held in Madison Square Garden, the largest commercial venue in New York City, on February 17, 1892.

The Illustrated London News carried a report of a barn dance in Ashtabula, Ohio in 1897 and written by an English woman traveller. "The origin of that expression "taking the cake", had previously been an enigma to me, if I had ever thought about it before, but it was suddenly in an unexpected and most practical way (revealed to me)." Just before the ball was declared finished a long procession of couples was formed who walked in their very best manner around the room three times before the criticizing eyes of a dozen old people, who selected the best turned-out pair, and gravely presented them with a large plum cake.

In July 1898 the musical comedy "Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk" opened on Broadway in New York. Will Marion Cook wrote ragtime music for the show. Black dancers mingled with white cast members for the first instance of integration on stage in New York. Cook wrote, "My chorus sang like Russians, dancing meanwhile like Negroes, and cakewalking like angels, black angels! When the last note was sounded, the audience stood and cheered for at least ten minutes. This was the finale which Witmark had said no one would listen to. It was pandemonium... But did that audience take offense at my rags and lack of conducting polish? Not so you could notice it!"

"Dusky troopers march & cake walk" was written by Will Hardy and published in 1900. Sheet music covers for more cake walks can be viewed here.

Scott Joplin mentioned the cake walk in his folk ballet "The Ragtime Dance", published in 1902.

"Let me see you do the rag-time dance,
Turn left and do the cakewalk prance,
Turn the other way and do the slow drag -
Now take you lady to the World's Fair
And do the rag-time dance."

Performances of the "Cake Walk", including a "Comedy Cake Walk" were filmed by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1903. Prancing steps were the main steps shown in the "Cake Walk" segment, which featured two couples, and a solo dancer. All dancers were African American. 1903 was the same year that both the cakewalk and ragtime music arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Leaning far forward or far backward is associated with defiance in Kongo. "We are palm trees, bent forward, bent back, but we never break." Another interpretations of these motions were "melting" to the beat, or protecting what is new (leaning forward) with the past (leaning back). The appearance of the cakewalk in Buenos Aires may have influenced influenced early styles of tango.

"Cakewalk King" Charles E. Johnson, who, with his wife Dora Jean, achieved fame cakewalking throughout the United States and Europe described his kind of dance as "simple, dignified and well-dressed".

The Cake Walk was more fluid and imaginative than the established two-step, it was nevertheless a regularized form, more improvisational than its previous form, but highly formalized compared to later dances such as the Charleston, Black Bottom and Lindy Hop.