The Shim Sham was originally a tap routine created by Leonard Reed and his partner Willie Bryant. Leonard Reed began his career as a dancer after winning Charleston competitions as a teenager. He learned tap dancing from other dancers that he toured with on the Black theatre circuit. The tap routine was originally called “Goofus”. Reed and Bryant came up with it in the late 1920s as a finale for the Whitman Sisters review. The simple dance caught on and by the early 1930s it was used as a finale in several Harlem clubs with all the performers and musicians joining in and adding their own styling. Sometimes the audience was invited to join in as well. There are a variety of different stories about how the name was eventually changed to the Shim Sham Shimmy but one of the clubs it was regularly performed at was called Dickie Wells’s Shim Sham Club so the idea that the name came from this club seems the most likely to me.

At some point the Shim Sham Shimmy tap routine made its way to the Savoy where at least a few dancers started doing it as a line dance without taps. Dean Collins came up with a version the he used as a performance piece around 1938. Al and Leon’s Shim Sham first appeared in The Spirit Moves (filmed in 1951). The version that most of us are familiar with which is done as a group line dance in Lindy Hop scenes all over the world was created by Frankie Manning in the late 1980’s specifically for Lindy Hoppers. The tap routine also lives on and appears to still be widely taught and performed.

In this video is from 1955 Leonard Reed is actually the host (he had a long and varied career in show business) but its a great clip which includes the tap Shim Sham (starting at 2:28)