We’ve all heard that the name Texas Tommy used to refer to a whole dance rather than a single move as we use it now but I didn’t realise until recently that there are videos of the dance. Have a watch of the video below. You can probably spot steps and moves you recognise from lindy hop, shag, or balboa. This video inspired me to do a bit of research on the Texas Tommy.
The Texas Tommy was danced to ragtime music. Other ‘rag dances’ of the time were mostly novelty solo dances mimicking animals. In contrast the Texas Tommy was an intricate 8-count breakaway partner dance. It became hugely popular for a few years around 1912 after appearing on Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1911 and the Darktown Follies of 1913. However it originated on the other side of the US in a red-light district of San Francisco known as the Barbary Coast. In the early 1900s San Francisco was a diverse and thriving city known for its dance halls.
A club called Purcell’s seems to have been instrumental in exposing new dances from the San Francisco slums to a wider audience. The club was African-American owned and operated but also attracted a lot of white folks who wanted to keep up with the latest dance trends. Entertainers would go there specifically looking for new dance moves to take back to the stages of New York. As the Texas Tommy became more popular it caused a bit of a controversy—teenagers were eager to embrace the scandalous new trend but high society adults were a bit concerned about this vigorous dance with a salubrious name (“Tommy” was a slang term meaning prostitute).
Some historians consider the Texas Tommy to be the first swing dance and understandably so you can see the influence of the Texas Tommy in the swing dances that came later.
Further reading:
Swing Dance Leeds 