Entry · catalog no. 3602
shimmy
/ /ˈʃɪm.i/ /SHIM-ee
noun · The Black South and the Black vaudeville circuit · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A dance in which the shoulders are driven rapidly back and forth — right back, left forward — until the whole torso is quivering, the feet holding more or less still.
“She hit one shimmy on the downbeat and the room came apart.”
2.
Any quick side-to-side shake of the body used for emphasis or play.
“He gave a little shimmy when the beat dropped.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, out of Southern honky-tonks and the Black vaudeville circuit, in circulation well before 1910. Testimony gathered by Marshall and Jean Stearns puts Coot Grant seeing it in a Birmingham, Alabama honky-tonk in 1901, Perry Bradford seeing it in Atlanta under the name the Shake before 1909, and Nettie Compton dancing it in San Francisco in 1910. The name reaches print in 1917 on Black songwriter Spencer Williams's "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble." Correct the record: Gilda Gray, a Polish-born white vaudevillian, is routinely credited with inventing the dance on the strength of a story about saying she was shaking her chemise. She denied ever saying it, credited a Native American source in 1919, and only claimed invention outright in 1927. Mae West wrote that she saw the dance in Black nightclubs and renamed it. Bee Palmer and others claimed it too. Every one of those claims postdates documented Black practice. The etymology itself is unsettled — dialect shimmy for chemise, or plain sound-shape out of shimmer and shiver — and the archive claims neither.
1901
Coot Grant sees the dance in a Birmingham honky-tonk, per testimony later collected by the Stearnses
1917
Spencer Williams publishes "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble" in Chicago, the first print appearance of the name
1922
New York bans the shimmy from dance halls
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
The Black South and the Black vaudeville circuit · 1900s
Spoken by
Black dancers in Southern honky-tonks and on the Black vaudeville circuit, then jazz-age dancers everywhere
$SHIMMYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady17 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
62/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1901
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
1918
search interest spikes
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Spencer Williams, "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble," Roger Graham, Chicago, 1917
sheet music
■
Dancing Times (London), 1918
magazine
■
A. J. Piron, "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate," copyright 1919, published 1922
sheet music
■
+ Cite a sourceMarshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, Macmillan, 1968
book
See also