A 19th-century dance of black American origin, popularized and diffused through imitations of it in blackface minstrel shows (especially their walk-around finales) and, later, vaudeville and burlesque. It seems to have originated in slaves parodying their white owners’ high manners and fancy dances. The name supposedly derives from the prize (presumably a cake) given to the best dancers among a group of slaves, but it may go back little further than the 1890s, when ‘cakewalk contests’ among dancing couples were organized as public entertainments in northern American cities. Although no specific step patterns were associated with the dance, it was performed as a grand march in a parade-like fashion by couples prancing and strutting arm in arm, bowing and kicking backwards and forwards (sometimes with arched backs and pointed toes), and saluting to the spectators (see illustration). The cakewalk was popularized and refined through the all-black musicals of the late 1890s (notably Will Marion Cook’s Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk, 1898) and the dancing of Charles Johnson and the vaudeville team of Bert Williams and George Walker, who gave it international fame in the early 1900s through their performances in In Dahomey (1902) and In Abyssinia (1905). The novelty of the dance in Europe was such that the London production of In Dahomey (1903), at first without a cakewalk, later had to include it through popular demand, and Debussy included it as the ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ in his Children’s Corner (1906–8). It was associated with a syncopated music akin to ragtime, of which the most phenomenally successful example was the march/two-step by Kerry Mills, At a Georgia Camp Meeting, recorded many times, beginning in 1898, by Sousa’s band. The popularity it achieved led to its acceptance in the white social milieu and eventually, to the incorporation of some of the cakewalk steps into white American dance forms. Elements of it have also remained in musical theatre, as in the rousing title choruses of Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! (1964) and particularly Mame (1966), with its southern setting and ragtime-derived rhythm.
W.M. Cook: ‘Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk‘, Theatre Arts, xxxi (1947), 61; repr. in Readings in Black American Music, ed. E. Southern (New York, 1972), 217
M. Stearns and J. Stearns: Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968)
L.F. Emery: Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, CA, 1972)
E.A. Berlin: Ragtime (Berkeley, CA, 1980/R 1984 with addenda)
H. WILEY HITCHCOCK, PAULINE NORTON