alain’s dance blog

Tonight, Gabriel - a student in our Intro to Lindy Hop class at Cat’s Corner - asked about the song we dance the Shim Sham to, so I decided to post about it.

The Shim Sham is a solo jazz routine appropriated from tap (the creator was Leonard Reed). We teach it because it’s an awesome way to introduce beginner dancers to jazz movement and rhythm.

Here’s a video of legendary Frankie Manning leading the Shim Sham to Bill Elliott’s Shim Sham Song:

The traditional song that we dance to is Tuxedo Junction, but it is danced to other songs as well. Read this thread on songs for the Shim Sham. The one I play most often is Jimmy Lunceford’s T’aint What You Do (It’s the Way that You Do It).

This entry was posted on August 14, 2007 at 12:27 am and is filed under About the dance, About jazz music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.