Question 1

What does “buck dance” mean?

Accepted Answer

A solo percussive step dance, Black and Southern, in print by 1840. Now taught at fiddle conventions as Scots-Irish heritage.

Question 2

Where does “buck dance” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black plantation South, before 1840. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence is 1840, in the New York sporting weekly Spirit of the Times — a date after which the dance was already circulating, not the date it began. Bruce E. Baker, writing the entry for the Encyclopedia of North Carolina in 2006, states plainly that buck dancing originated among African Americans during the era of slavery, and ties it to the North Carolina Piedmont and later to the blues. It is kin to the pigeon wing and to juba, and it was a recognized plantation dance before minstrelsy took it onto a stage. The sequence afterward is: buck dance, Black and vernacular, attested 1840; then buck-and-wing, the commercial stage hybrid, attested around 1888; then tap. Constance Valis Hill opens Tap Dancing America with a buck dance challenge between Bill Bojangles Robinson and Harry Swinton at Brooklyn's Bijou Theatre on 30 March 1900. The etymology of buck itself is not settled and the archive leaves it open — the candidates include buckra, Gullah usage, and nineteenth-century American English buck for a Black or Native man, and none is documented to a primary source.