Entry · catalog no. 4204
black bottom
/ /ˌblæk ˈbɑɾəm/ /blak BOT-um
noun · Nashville, Tennessee · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A jazz-era dance built on hip and shoulder work — bent knees, a crouched torso, stamping on the offbeat, hands slapping the backside, hopping forward and back. Danced alone or in a line.
“Is you learnt dat new Black Bottom yet?”
2.
The Black neighborhood the dance was named for, and by extension the same-named Black districts in Nashville, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
“Fourth Avenue, down in the Black Bottom.”
Origin & Attribution
Black jook joints in the South, and Zora Neale Hurston settled the question in print in 1934. Writing in Nancy Cunard's anthology Negro, she dismissed the press stories — including the one about black sticky mud on the bottom of the Mississippi — and named the place: "the dance really originated in the Jook section of Nashville, Tennessee, around Fourth Avenue. This is a tough neighbourhood known as Black Bottom — hence the name." She was equally direct about who got the credit. Ann Pennington and George White took the dance national in George White's Scandals of 1926, and Hurston wrote that it was "just about as Negro as caviar or Ann Pennington's athletic Black Bottom," adding that the dancers who knew it in its cradle looked at the Broadway version and asked each other whether they had learned the new one yet — proof, she said, that it was not their dance. Perry Bradford, a Black composer, had published printed instructions for it in 1919, and the Black show Dinah carried it publicly before White bought the routine.
1919
Perry Bradford publishes "The Original Black Bottom Dance" with instructions
1926
Jelly Roll Morton records "Black Bottom Stomp"; George White's Scandals takes it to Broadway
1934
Hurston names Nashville and calls the Broadway version what it was
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Nashville, Tennessee · 1900s
Spoken by
Black Southern jook-joint dancers; Nashville, then the Black stage
$BLACKBThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical107 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1919
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
"Characteristics of Negro Expression," Zora Neale Hurston, in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard — essay · 1934
book
■
"The Original Black Bottom Dance," Perry Bradford — sheet music · 1919
published
■
"Black Bottom Stomp" — Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, Victor 20221 — song · 15 Sept 1926
song
■
+ Cite a source"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" — Ma Rainey and Her Georgia Band, Paramount — song · 1927
song
See also