Entry · catalog no. 4206
snake hips
/ /ˈsneɪk ˌhɪps/ /SNAYK-hips
noun · the Black South, then Harlem · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
A dance and a way of moving: the hips and pelvis rolling and popping in a fluid, snaking line while the torso stays quiet and the feet stay nearly planted. Kin to Ballin the Jack, and traced by the dance historians back to the ring shout and patting juba.
“He did not travel an inch and the whole room was watching his hips.”
2.
The stage name of Earl Tucker, the Harlem dancer who made it famous at Connie Inn and the Cotton Club.
“Butter Beans and Susie, Bo-Jangles and Snake Hips are the only performers of the real Negro school it has ever been my pleasure to behold in New York.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Southern vernacular dance, older than its Harlem stardom and older than the man usually credited with it. The standard account has the dance named after Earl Snakehips Tucker. It is the other way round. Tucker was born in Baltimore in 1906; Spencer Williams, a Black composer, had a piece called "Snake Hips" recorded by the Georgians for Columbia on 15 May 1923, when Tucker was sixteen and unknown. The dance named the man. Zora Neale Hurston watched him work and wrote in 1934 that Snake Hips and Bojangles were among the only performers of the real Negro school she had ever seen in New York. Tucker can still be seen dancing it in the 1930 short Crazy House and in Duke Ellington Symphony in Black, released in 1935. He died in 1937 at thirty. A Gullah-Geechee origin is sometimes asserted; the archive found no evidence for it and does not record it.
1923
Spencer Williams "Snake Hips" recorded by the Georgians, Columbia A-3864
1934
Hurston names Snake Hips among the only real performers she has seen
1935
Tucker dances it on film in Symphony in Black
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
the Black South, then Harlem · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Southern dancers, then Harlem nightclub and vaudeville performers
$SNAKEHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded103 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1923
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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Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
"Snake Hips," Spencer Williams — composition, recorded by The Georgians, Columbia A-3864 · 15 May 1923
song
■
"Characteristics of Negro Expression," Zora Neale Hurston, in Negro: An Anthology — essay · 1934
book
■
Crazy House — film short · 1930 (Tucker credited on screen as Snake Hips)
film
■
+ Cite a sourceSymphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life, Duke Ellington — film short, Paramount · 13 Sept 1935
film
See also