Dancers step up Big Apple history campaign

08/05/03 by JEFF WILKINSON

Dancers step up Big Apple history campaign

Memories of dance, Columbia club are 'almost all gone,' says organizer of tribute effort
By JEFF WILKINSON
Staff Writer

The Big Apple was the Electric Slide of 1937, a phenomenon that swept the country and then faded almost as quickly as it bloomed.

It all started with black teenagers and young adults inventing dance moves at The Big Apple nightclub on Columbia's Park Street.

But the swing dance - which was so raucous, some clubs banned it - ended up in New York City. There, it spread like a housefire across the nation, fueled by black choreographers, white swing composers and a dance teacher named Arthur Murray.

Some people even claim it gave New York its nickname.

On Labor Day weekend, dance partners Richard Durlach and Breedlove will kick off a campaign to record the memories and collect memorabilia of the original Big Apple dancers, black and white.

"I want to find the dancers and their memories because they are almost all gone," Durlach said.

The two will conduct workshops and dances at the historic club at the corner of Park and Hampton Streets.

The workshops are part of Historic Columbia's 25th Jubilee, an annual festival spotlighting black history.

The organizers hope to attract at least a few surviving Big Apple dancers to the historic club.

"We would like whoever we locate to trade some steps," Breedlove said.

Headlining the event will be:

?_Lucretia Cayruth, one of the original black Big Apple dancers

?_Betty Wood, a white dancer who gave a demonstration at the Roxy Theater in New York, igniting the craze

?_Choreographer and dancer Frankie Manning, who refined the dance, took it uptown and introduced it to the nation.

"They represent the evolution of the dance," Durlach said. "It will be the first time the three will all be in the same room."

Roger Poston, executive director of Historic Columbia, said the Big Apple was more than a dance craze. Like jazz, it helped bridge the divide between white and black America.

"It was a rich example of blending those two heritages," he said.

"SHINE THE APPLE!"

In 1936, calls of "Rock the baby!" or "Do your thing!" or "Shine the apple!" would ring out most Saturday nights from the old House of Peace Synagogue on Park Street in Columbia.

The former Jewish house of worship had been converted into a black nightclub. And Columbia's black teenagers and young adults were creating something special.

The calls were dance steps, each unique. Couples would take turns in the middle of the circle showcasing their own creations.

In the balcony, white USC students would watch the dancers, then mimic the moves at their own parties.

That white students were in a black club at all was a unique cultural phenomenon of the Big Apple Club. The building formerly housed an Orthodox Jewish congregation, where women worshipped from the balcony.

That made it easy for white kids to get in and see what was happening.

"If it wasn't for that balcony, who knows how all this would have turned out," Durlach said.

Some white students later gave a demonstration at the Roxy Theater in New York.

The dance was picked up by Manning and other black choreographers. And famous big-band songwriter Tommy Dorsey penned "The Big Apple Swing."

Arthur Murray began teaching the new dance, and he expanded his dance studios from one to a string of studios across the nation.

NAME GAME

The dance also set off a discussion that lives to this day: Did New York's nickname, the Big Apple, derive from the dance?

In 1988, the origins of the name made national news when former Columbia Mayor Patton Adams related the story in a New York Times article.

As a result, Adams bet then-New York Mayor Ed Koch some South Carolina barbecue against Hizzoner's New York-style pizza that the dance spawned the nickname.

Koch argued Walter Winchell used the name in a 1927 magazine about Broadway, a full decade before the dance made the migration to Harlem.

The back-and-forth even made David Letterman's late-night talk show.

Adams didn't concede.

So Koch, through an intermediary, sent Adams a bushel of apples, which the mayor accepted as a peace offering.