Some Fox Trot info, please!

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Juani · #1 Post by **Juani** » Fri Apr 09, 2004 5:43 pm

Hi Everybody!
I'm looking for some information about the origins of Fox-Trot music and dance.
I'm from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and here, in the early years of Tango, the Tango Orchestras use to play Tango as well as "milonga", "vals" and "fox-trot".
For those who doesn't know what milonga is, is easy to explain it saying that is like a "fast tango". The vals (waltz) here is obviosuly 3x4 but instrumented like Tango.
The same thing happens with the FoxTrot. So, I'm traying to find the roots of it, and some names of songs or original foxtrot orchestras. I know that foxtrot dance is the predecessor of Shag dance and I'm looking to draw a line of connection between Shag dance and the way the old Tango dancers use to dance Foxtrot when the Orchestras switch the sytles and plays "fox" on the ballrooms here.
I know some places where the old Tango dancers use to go to dance and they still dancing foxtrot sometimes. Maybe if I go and look I can figure out how the basic step is and understand the sctructure and compare it with collegiate shag...

Ok, If you got (or find) some info, please let me know!

THANKS!!!

yedancer · #2 Post by **yedancer** » Fri Apr 09, 2004 6:28 pm

I think it was invented by some white folks during the late 20's. I could be way off, though.

lindylindsay · #3 Post by **lindylindsay** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 8:35 am

Hola Juani! I will answer you here so other people can read the post... but we´ should talk more in depth before I leave. The foxtrot was ¨invented¨ by Irene and Vernon Castle (and yes they were white). In other words, it didn´t really evolve the way that tango or lindy did. The Castles wanted so create a more ¨appropriate¨ dance for the ballrooms, so they made rules against a lot of the wiggling etc. of the Animal dances that were popular in that era. Maybe we can stop by the old-timers´ milonga before Tuesday!

Toon Town Dave · #4 Post by **Toon Town Dave** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 2:58 pm

I haven't really studied the history of fox-trot in depth but one of the stories I've read was that it was originally performed by Harry Fox in a vaudville production, I forget the year but I think it was in the first decade of the 1900's sometime.

I've also read the Castle hypothesis but they're credited with it a couple decades later.

I don't doubt that the ballroom community would have "created" and codified a dance called fox-trot based on taking easily teachable components from another dances, much like they've done with East Coast Swing, Rhumba and Tango.

As far as music, many of the early swing recordings were labelled as fox-trot. In the 50's, Arthur Murray (well known Ballroom instructor and founder of a national chain of ballroom dance studios) hired Billy May to arrange and record a ballroom music. I think he recorded the non-latin stuff under his own name, but he used a pseudonym for the latin stuff, at least that's whats in the liner notes from my Billy May Proper CD.

jacques_g · #5 Post by **jacques_g** » Mon Aug 28, 2006 1:42 pm

I was taught that Harry Fox is credited for having invented "The Fox Trot"

People originally referred to his dance number as "Fox's Trot".

http://www.centralhome.com/ballroomcountry/foxtrot.htm
http://www.backdoordance.com/foxtrot.htm
http://www.eijkhout.net/rad/dance_speci ... trot1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox

Toon Town Dave · #6 Post by **Toon Town Dave** » Mon Aug 28, 2006 2:12 pm

That's one theory however I think Fox-trot as we know it today is based on the Castles work. From what I've read, they were responsible for sanitizing and teaching a number of the "animal dances" to the upper class white audience. That's not to say the Castles borrowed the initial idea from what Harry Fox was doing.

The Harry Fox story is also more marketable than saying the Castles made it up for the purpose of teaching and earning money.

jacques_g · #7 Post by **jacques_g** » Mon Aug 28, 2006 9:04 pm

Toon Town Dave wrote:That's one theory however I think Fox-trot as we know it today is based on the Castles work. From what I've read, they were responsible for sanitizing and teaching a number of the "animal dances" to the upper class white audience.

I've actually an old black and white video clip of the Castles dancing. The image isn't always clear but from some of their movements on it, there was a bit of a Tango influence in their style.

lipi · #8 Post by **lipi** » Mon Aug 28, 2006 10:26 pm

this is getting off-topic, i think, but i'd love to see that clip. is it digital?

jacques_g · #9 Post by **jacques_g** » Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:22 am

I don't have that clip scanned. It is on a VCR tape. I'm in the process of transferring my VCR dance stuff to DVD. The old clips are trickier because there are lines that sometimes appear on the clips and that causes the device I'm using to record them on my hard disk to crash.

CafeSavoy · #10 Post by **CafeSavoy** » Tue Aug 29, 2006 8:21 am

supposedly this is a clip of them but i can't check since i don't have real audio on this machine.

http://real.nypl.org:8080/ramgen/millen ... HIRL300.RM