Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance

by Janet Borgerson, Jonathan Schroeder

Overview

When Americans mamboed in the kitchen, waltzed in the living room, polkaed in the pavilion, and tangoed at the club; with glorious, full-color record cover art.

In midcentury America, eager dancers mamboed in the kitchen, waltzed in the living room, Watusied at the nightclub, and polkaed in the pavilion, instructed (and inspired) by dance records. Glorious, full-color record covers encouraged them: Let’s Cha Cha Cha, Dance and Stay Young, Dancing in the Street!, Limbo Party, High Society Twist. In Designed for Dancing, vinyl record aficionados and collectors Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder examine dance records of the 1950s and 1960s as expressions of midcentury culture, identity, fantasy, and desire.

Borgerson and Schroeder begin with the record covers—memorable and striking, but largely designed and created by now-forgotten photographers, scenographers, and illustrators—which were central to the way records were conceived, produced, and promoted. Dancing allowed people to sample aspirational lifestyles, whether at the Plaza or in a smoky Parisian café, and to affirm ancestral identities with Irish, Polish, or Greek folk dancing. Dance records featuring ethnic music of variable authenticity and appropriateness invited consumers to dance in the footsteps of the Other with “hot” Latin music, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and Hawaiian hulas. Bought at a local supermarket, department store, or record shop, and listened to in the privacy of home, midcentury dance records offered instruction in how to dance, how to dress, how to date, and how to discover cool new music—lessons for harmonizing with the rest of postwar America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262044332
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	10/19/2021
Pages:	552
Sales rank:	1,091,453
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Janet Borgerson is Wicklander Fellow at DePaul University. Jonathan Schroeder is William A. Kern Professor in the School of Communication, Rochester Institute of Technology. They are the authors of Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (MIT Press), named a best book of 2017 by the Financial Times and a best music book of 2017 by Vinyl Factory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Invitation to the Dance 21
2 The Drum 59
3 Let's Learn to Dance 79
4 Time for Dancing 99
5 Folk Dances 117
6 Fashion: Dressed for Dancing 139
7 Calypso 157
8 Latin 175
9 Designed for Dancing 193
10 Let's Go Out! 201
11 Waltz 221
12 Tango 233
13 Rhumba 245
14 Dream Dancing 253
15 Mambo 261
16 Merengue 273
17 Cha-Cha-Cha 283
18 Limbao 303
19 Hula 313
20 Square Dance 327
21 "Set Your Polka Feet A'Dancing" 343
22 Belly Dance 257
23 Mixing it Up: Hybrid Albums 375
24 The Twist 389
25 Dance Craze: Rock and Roll, Discotheque, and Soul 405
26 Dancing over a Lifetime 439
27 Let's Have a Dance Party! 451
Notes 475
Bibliography 507
Index of Records 527
Index 533

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"An intriguing look at social dance culture through a material lens. For scholars and aficionados of mid-20th-century popular culture.” — Library Journal

“From hula to rock and roll, belly dance to square dance, tango to Polish polka, Borgerson and Schroeder provide a treasure trove of information, research, and warm memories!”
—Anthony Shay, Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies, Pomona College
 
“Dance music LPs of all styles and nationalities were prized possessions in my family’s home, and this cover collection reminds me of the infectious sounds streaming from the record console and the joyful music that filled the air with happiness.”
—Steven Heller, cochair MFA Design, School of Visual Arts, New York
 
“Midcentury Americans sure did love that living-room shimmy. This beautifully illustrated compendium reveals the long-forgotten cosmopolitanism and playfulness of Cold War America. It also makes you want to dance. Who could ask for more?”
—Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

Finalist for the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, Dance Studies Association, 2022
Finalist for the Prize for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, 2022
Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year, 2022

Editorial Reviews

"An intriguing look at social dance culture through a material lens. For scholars and aficionados of mid-20th-century popular culture."
—Library Journal
 
“A fascinating yet approachable read and a gorgeous feast for the eyes.”
—Christine Green, (585) magazine

“The authors do important and entertaining work informing readers how the convergence of dancing and music—and album cover art—impacted American identity at midcentury.”
—Joe Maita, Jerry Jazz Musician

From the Publisher

10/01/2021

It's often said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture; the same holds true for writing about the cover art of dance-focused albums, which is part of what makes this new graphic arts volume so interesting. The record covers explored here often say less about the music within than about the social and cultural settings of their creators and audiences. Borgerson (business and cultural studies, DePaul Univ.) and Schroeder (visual communication, Rochester Inst. of Technology), who together wrote Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America, tread lightly over some of the resulting implications, though they do remark on the Orientalism of belly dance record covers and the rarity of depictions of interracial social dancing on any record covers at all. Perhaps the authors' extensive commentary—on the suburbanization of the United States, racial segregation, and the exoticization of cultures from Egypt to Hawai'i—is too much for a book like this to bear and still retain its focus on visual depictions of popular dance in mid-20th-century America. If many of those visual depictions are complicated by questions of appropriation, assimilation, and representation, that only supports the authors' contention that the record cover ought to be taken seriously as an artistic medium. The thematic orientation of the chapters resists chronology, but nonetheless one detects a through line from formal partner dancing to the shimmies and shakes of rock and roll and disco. VERDICT An intriguing look at social dance culture through a material lens. For scholars and aficionados of mid-20th-century popular culture.—Genevieve Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma

Library Journal