Question 1

What does “shim sham” mean?

Accepted Answer

A short tap routine built as a finale the whole cast could do together — and then the whole club. The closest thing swing has to a shared anthem.

Question 2

Where does “shim sham” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black vaudeville. Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant built it in the late 1920s while working for the Whitman Sisters on the T.O.B.A. circuit out of Chicago, and called it "Goofus," danced to "Turkey in the Straw." Marshall and Jean Stearns, whose Jazz Dance was built on interviews with the dancers themselves, record the Three Little Words spreading it at Connie's Inn in Harlem in 1931, where the whole club would join in. Reed died in 2004 and the Washington Post obituary named him its originator. The routine is now taught in swing scenes worldwide, usually with no attribution at all and often credited vaguely to the Savoy or to Frankie Manning, who taught it but did not make it. The Whitman Sisters, the longest-running and highest-paid act on the Black vaudeville circuit, are almost never named. How it got the Shim Sham name is genuinely disputed — Stearns credits the Three Little Words at Connie's Inn, Reed said it came from the Harlem club where he worked, and a third account credits Joey Lewis. The archive records the dispute rather than picking a winner.