Topical Tens: 28th July: Foxtrot

Friday 28 July 2017

28th July: Foxtrot

On this date in 1914 the Foxtrot was first danced at the New Amsterdam Roof Garden in New York. Here are ten things you didn't know about the Foxtrot:

The name of the dance most likely comes from the Vaudeville performer Harry Fox, who was the first to perform it for an audience.
Harry Fox wasn't his real name. His real name was Arthur Carringford, but he adopted Harry Fox as a stage name after his grandfather. The young Harry had to fend for himself from the age of fifteen and before getting into Vaudeville he joined a circus and was a Baseball player for a while. Originally from California, showbiz took him east to New York where Harry and a team of dancers were hired to put on acts between shows at a movie theatre.
On 28 July 1914, Harry and his troupe were performing at the New York Theatre. Harry was doing trotting steps to ragtime music, and people referred to his dance as "Fox's Trot."
His dance was seen by some of the foremost ballroom dancers of the time, Vernon and Irene Castle, who started dancing it, too, and from there the dance went on to capture the public imagination.
It's possible that Harry Fox didn't invent the dance, but saw it performed at exclusive African American dance clubs as much as fifteen years earlier.
People loved the dance, but in its original form it wasn't very suitable for dancing at parties and social events. The trotting step was tiring if done for a period of time, and trotting around a crowded dance floor wasn't very practical. Enter Oscar Duryea, who modified the dance and turned the trot into a glide or saunter, and be danced "on the spot".
The dance was brought to England by G.K. Anderson and Josephine Bradley, who won a number of competitions with it, and soon the Brits had the bug, too.
The foxtrot was the most popular dance from then on up until the 1940s. Most of the best selling records were tunes you could dance the foxtrot to. In the 1950s, record companies wanted to categorise rock and roll according to what dance you could do to it. Decca records marketed its early rock and roll records as foxtrots. One of these was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets - so you could say this was the best-selling foxtrot record ever.
Dancing the foxtrot at 120 beats a minute burns 3 and a half calories a minute.
There are a number of variations which include the Peabody, the Quickstep and Roseland foxtrot, and other dances developed from it, such as the Lindy Hop and the Hustle.