The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers of African Americans on plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were chalkline-walk, and the walk-around. It was originally a processional partner dance performed with comical formality.
Following an exhibition of the cakewalk at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the cakewalk was adopted by performers in minstrel shows, where it was danced exclusively by men until the 1890s. At that point, Broadway shows featuring women began to include cakewalks, and grotesque dances became very popular across the country.. The fluid and graceful steps of the dance may have given rise to the colloquialism that something accomplished with ease is a "cakewalk".
The National Museum of American History points to the Grand March, a European style couples dance as the inspiration, noting that movements were creatively personalized with the inclusion of twists, shuffles and high kicks from African dances. Plantation owners would often welcome the contest and present the prize cake to the winner as a way to still exhibit authority.
The cakewalk is a lively, partnered vernacular jazz dance that features high-stepping kicks, struts, slides, and an erect upper body tilted backward.
As a plantation dance Firsthand accounts The cakewalk was influenced by the ring shout, which survived from the 18th into the 20th century. This dance style was often part of African American enslaved peoples' religious ceremonies and involved shuffling the feet counterclockwise in a circle (ring) formation and reciting spirituals in a call-and-response format with others outside of the ring. There is extensive first-person testimony from emancipated enslaved people about the culture and dancing they developed among themselves on the plantations, including the dances that developed into the cakewalk... Louise Jones spoke of "Sech dancin' you never seen before. Slaves would set de flo' in turns, an' do de cakewalk mos' all night." Georgia Baker said that she sang cakewalk songs as a child, and was amused that as an adult, she "would be cakewalkin' to de same song.". Estella Jones described nighttime parties with elaborate dress, some of which were attended by the slaveowners, who would judge the dancing and award cakes to the winners..
Secondhand, oral-tradition accounts James Weldon Johnson, born in 1871, recounted a cakewalk at a ball in his 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912, Chapter 5, p. 50
Some secondhand accounts of the cakewalk describe it as a subtle mockery of the formal, mannered dancing practiced by slaveholding whites. The enslaved people would dress in handed-down finery and comically exaggerate the poised movements of minuets and waltzes."Cakewalk King", Ebony, February 1953. Vol. 8, p. 100. These accounts describe any slaveowners in attendance as unaware that they were being mocked. One man recalled such a dance that his childhood nanny had described to him: "Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better." A 1981 article by Brooke Baldwin concludes that the cakewalk was meant "to satirize the competing culture of supposedly 'superior' whites. Slaveholders were able to dismiss its threat in their own minds by considering it as a simple performance which existed for their own pleasure".Baldwin 1981, p. 211.
Entertainer Tom Fletcher, born in 1873,. wrote in 1954 that his grandparents told him about the chalk-line walk/cakewalk as a child, but had no information about its origins.. In their version, "there was no prancing, just a straight walk on a path made by turns and so forth, along which the dancers made their way with a pail of water on their heads. The couple that was the most erect and spilled the least water or no water at all was the winner."Jacqui Malone, Steppin' on the Blues, University of Illinois Press, 1996, p. 19. . He describes it being "revived with fancy steps by Charlie Johnson, a clever eccentric dancer" and becoming known as the "Cake Walk"..Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970, California: National Press Books, 1972, p. 207. .
Alternative explanations It has been suggested that the cakewalk originated in Florida, with the war dances of the Seminole Tribe. Ethel L. Urlin, writing in the book Dancing, Ancient and Modern (1912), described these dances as consisting of "wild and hilarious jumping and gyrating, alternating with slow processions in which the dancers walked solemnly in couples," which she believed grew into the cakewalk style. The Encyclopedia of Social Dance echoed this, stating that the dance spread from Florida to Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and eventually New York, with the development of Florida into a winter tourist destination in the 1880s.Albert and Josephine Butler, Encyclopedia of Social Dance, 1971 and 1975. Albert Butler Ballroom Dance Service. New York, NY, p. 309 in 1975 edition. no ISBN or other ID.
The authors of Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance reported that an informal experiment with African dancers undertaken in the 1950s turned up "no worthy African counterpart" to the cakewalk.. The same book noted eyewitness reports of dances from South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria that bore a resemblance to the cakewalk, with no elaboration..
In his book How to Tell a Story and Other Essays originally published in 1897, Mark Twain briefly mentions the cakewalk:
Our negroes in America have several ways of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites anywhere. Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly popular with them. It is a competition in elegant deportment. They hire a hall and bank the spectators' seats in rising tiers along the two sides, leaving all the middle stretch of the floor free. A cake is provided as a prize for the winner in the competition, and a bench of experts in deportment is appointed to award it. Sometimes there are as many as fifty contestants, male and female, and five hundred spectators. One at a time the contestants enter, clothed regardless of expense in what each considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the vacant central space and back again with that multitude of critical eyes on them (...) The negroes have a name for this grave deportment-tournament; a name taken from the prize contended for. They call it a Cake-Walk.
Lack of detail/consistency in explanation of the cakewalk's origin It is believed that the satirical nature of the cakewalk led to its being overlooked by archivists. Many of the members of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration who were tasked with recording information about culture of enslaved people assumed that the cakewalk was simply frivolous entertainment. As such, they never asked their interviewees (former enslaved people) to elaborate on the singing and dancing traditions in which enslaved people would participate. This runs in opposition to the researchers' interest in “slave spirituals” and religious practices, where interviewees were often asked to demonstrate examples from those traditions. As Baldwin argues:
The interviewers willingly believed that slaves could express a child-like faith in the white Christian God (whites had not yet guessed at the hidden-revolutionary meanings of spirituals), but they could not conceive of blacks participating in a rich cultural life independent of European forms. Thus they felt no need to press the ex-slaves for further explanations of remarks which hinted that such a culture indeed existed.
It is also likely that as the cakewalk was appropriated into white culture, it lost much connection to its history. Even if white people had once perceived it as a threat, they were able to dismiss that notion "by considering it as a simple performance which existed merely for their own pleasure. To coopt the cakewalk, physically seize control of it, was within the power of whites who ‘owned’ the blacks with whom they lived."
Brooke Baldwin's 1981 article claims that, failing to successfully turn the cakewalk into a white art form, it instead was heavily degraded by white caricaturists. They spun the narrative of the cakewalk as a mediocre emulation of white culture, further clouding its true origins as satire of slaveowner aristocracy: "Cakewalkers were made to appear ludicrous." This idea of the cakewalk became so prevalent that for a long time, the "cakewalk clown" was the mainstream view of the dance and black culture as a whole. It is only recently that researchers have begun correcting that perspective to set the record straight.
Cakewalk in minstrelsy, musicals, and as a popular dance Amiri Baraka in Blues People explained the strangeness of a “slave dance” covertly mocking white slaveholders that later was adopted by whites unaware of the mockery: "If the cakewalk is a Negro dance caricaturing certain white customs, what is that dance, when, say, a white theater company attempts to satirize it as a Negro dance? I find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing themselves a remarkable kind of irony—which, I suppose, is the whole point of minstrel shows.".
An exhibit at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial featured Black people singing folk songs and doing an old dance called the "chalk-line walk" in a plantation-like setting.. The dance was "done in the original fashion", as described by Fletcher.
In 1877, performer-showmen Harrigan and Hart produced "Walking for Dat Cake, An Exquisite Picture of Negro Life and Customs" as a feature sketch at New York's Theater Comique on lower Broadway.DON'T GIVE THE NAME A BAD PLACE, New World Records 80265 Types and Stereotypes in American Musical Theater 1870–1900. Richard M. Sudhalter.
Thereafter it was performed in minstrel shows, exclusively by men until the 1890s. In the 1893 production of The Creole Show, which ran from 1889 to 1897, Dora Dean and her husband Charles E. Johnson were a hit with their specialty, a cakewalk danced as partners.Bernard L. Peterson, A Century of Musicals in Black and White: An Encyclopedia of Musical Stage Works By, About, Or Involving African Americans, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993. p. 92. , . Their production had an African-American cast, and featured women dancing, which was revolutionary for the time.. The inclusion of women "made possible all sorts of improvisations in the Walk, and the original was soon changed into a grotesque dance” that became very popular across the country.
A Grand Cakewalk was held in Madison Square Garden, the largest commercial venue in New York City, on February 17, 1892.Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895, University Press of Mississippi, 2002, pp. 205, 206. Retrieved May 19, 2011. The Illustrated London News carried an 1897 report of a cakewalk at a barn dance in Ashtabula, Ohio, written by an English woman traveler. This version was more of a procession and less of a dance: "Just before the ball was declared finished a long procession of couples was formed who walked in their very best manner around the room three times before the criticizing eyes of a dozen old people, who selected the best turned-out pair, and gravely presented them with a large plum cake.Giles Oakley, The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues, Da Capo Press, 1997, p. 31. , .