Shim Sham

I love the shim sham... but I agree I like the big apple bettter. IT IS MORE CHARLSTON BASED and there are some variations that I have seen. In different regions people make-up thjere own version of the big apple. but there is one basic one that like, everyone knows.

Shim sham is done I know like everywhere i florida and they the exchanges they do the shim sham and the big apple at least once.. they even do swing reuda in some places.

I think the hard thing about the shim sham, when yuo are first learning, is remembering the steps and then once you have the steps , the order of the steps. It is really fun though even when everyoen doesn't know the steps. That's how yuo learn, I mean if yuo haven't taken a class, then you have to just get out there.

ONCE YOU DO IT IS WORTH IT THOUGH.,
-TRUST ME
AMBER D.
 
suek said:
3. I don't know the name of the third version; just saw a couple of people doing it recently. It looks even more difficult that the first two.
Click to expand...

This is probably Al Minn's and Leon James' Shim Sham... by far the hardest, and coolest I've seen.
 
Believe it or not, I ended up here because Billy Gussak, the drummer for Bill Haley and the Comets, who went to the Julliard School of Music, was known to listen to music at the Sim Sham Club in Harlem when he was a young man. And as I was looking into that, I found this...

According to tap dancer Howard “Stretch” Johnson, whose sister was one of the featured dancers at the Cotton Club in the early 1930s the Shim-Sham or Shimmy was invented by chorus line dancers at the 101 Ranch on 140th Street in Harlem. The shambling nature of the steps, especially the first eight bars, and the fact that females were played by men was reflected in the contraction “shim.”

There's more there, which kind of explains why this version of the origin doesn't have traction in the mainstream, and you will most likely be able to see the references in the wikipedia article when I post them there.

This is not exactly consistent with the standard narrative that Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant invented the shimmy routine.

I also kept running across the quote from the Stearns "Jazz Dance" describing it as "a one-chorus routine to a 32-bar tune, with eight bars each," consisting of the double shuffle, crossover, an up-and-back shuffle and then another move, characterized as "falling off a log."
 
Oh no! We do the Shim Sham every single week at my local dance. Everyone gets super psyched about it when the certain song comes on. The experienced people run right up to the speakers and the newbies stand in the back struggling to keep up. It's so fun though! Even if I am one of the newbs that's just learning it. :)
 
This is from "Tap Dancing America."

There was, for example, the one-chorus routine called the shim sham shimmy. While Leonard Reed claims to have created this routine combination with his partner Willie Bryant, it is more likely that it evolved in collaboration with the female chorus of the Whitman Sisters troupe.

In the late 1920S, Reed and Bryant were playing the black vaudeville TOBA circuit with the Whitman Sisters. "We needed a quick finale, so simple and easy to do," said Reed about the dance they first called Goofus.

To the tune of "Turkey in the Straw," the one-chorus routine was danced to the thirty-two-bar tune with eight bars each of
the double shuffle,
crossover,
Tack Annie, and
falling-off-the-log-all of which are standard jazz dance steps.

Reed remembered that the chorus girls liked "Goofus" so much that they added their own feminine embellishment on the exit step with a shimmy-a quick and flirtatious shaking of the shoulders." When Reed and Bryant made it to New York in 1931 to perform at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre, they discovered that the dance had already caught on and was a favorite at a club called the Shim Sham. There it was regularly performed by a female chorus to the new name ofthe shim sham shimmy. The Harlem Opera House announced its stage show, Shim Sham Shimmy Champions, "Harlem's newest sensational dance craze, the 'Shim Sham Shimmy,' with the five winning couples in person.?"
Since that time, literally hundreds of dancers, unknowing of the dance's origins in the female chorus, have made their own versions ofthe shim sham. Performed throughout the twentieth century at the culmination of performances, the shim sham is regarded as tap dance's national anthem.

I also noticed that Leonard Reed passed away, at the age of 97, just a few months after d nice made his post. The New York Times noted that "Mr. Reed was born in Lightning Creek, Okla., on Jan. 7, 1907. He was of black, white and Choctaw descent."
 
They teach the Frankie Manning version at my Swing dance every now and again, learned it, then forgot half of it. It's done mainly by the really serious competitive crowd.
 
Frankie's Shim Sham:


Al & Leon's:


Dean Collins':


Lineup of contemporary instructors:


Skye & Naomi's take:

 
Wait, wait, there are more.

Slip slop (they are goofing off in the beginning, stick with it):


Hat trick:


Tap version:

 
I love teaching the shim sham. Once I had taught to a class of deaf students-who happen to learn the routine faster than any other class I taught- the routine is a classic.
 
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