Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor
Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen)

Sherrie Tucker

Abstract: The Hollywood Canteen (1942–1945) was the most famous of the USO and USO-like patriotic
nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations during World
War II. It is also the subject of much U.S. national nostalgia about the “Good War” and “Greatest Gen-
eration.” Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the Hol-
lywood Canteen, this article focuses on the ways that interviewees navigated the forceful narrative terrain
of national nostalgia, sometimes supporting it, sometimes pulling away from or pushing it in critical
ways, and usually a little of each. This article posits a new interpretative method for analyzing struggles
over “democracy” for jazz and swing studies through a focus on “torque” that brings together oral history,
improvisation studies, and dance studies to bear on engaging interviewees’ embodied narratives on ideo –
logically loaded ground, improvising on the past in the present.

There is No Color Line at This Coast Canteen

–Chicago Defender, January 30, 1943

What does it mean to have a body that provides an
institution with diversity?
–Sara Ahmed, On Being Included1

Democracy! That’s what it means, Slim! Everybody
equal. Like tonight! All them big shots, listening to
little shots like me, and being friendly!

–Sgt. Brooklyn Nolan, Hollywood Canteen (1944)

The Hollywood Canteen (October 3, 1942–
November 22, 1945) was the most famous of the
thousands of uso-like nightclubs where civilians
entertained military personnel during World War
II. Patterned after New York’s Stage Door Canteen,
the club featured volunteers who hailed mostly
from the guild and unions of the motion picture
industry, including glamorous stars like Rita Hay-
worth, Deanna Durbin, and Hedy LaMarr. Bette
Davis was the president of the Hollywood Can-

SHERRIE TUCKER is Professor of
American Studies at the University
of Kansas, Lawrence. She is the au –
thor of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands
of the 1940s (2000) and coeditor of
Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz
Studies (with Nichole T. Rustin,
2008). Her articles have appeared
in such journals as American Music,
Black Music Research Journal, and
Critical Studies in Improvisation.

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teen; John Gar½eld was vice president. In
its own time, the Hollywood Canteen be –
came a powerful backdrop for publicity
photos of movie stars appearing patriotic
by jitterbugging to swing music with sol-
diers, feeding them, signing autographs,
and gen erally being friendly and gener-
ous with their time, beauty, and fame.
The Canteen remains one of the most rec –
ognizable articulations of swing as a sym-
bol of the United States, its jitterbugging
soldiers and glamorous hostesses epito-
mizing a selfless, innocent “Greatest Gen-
eration,” a uni½ed nation of “Good War”
nostalgia.

Yet the Hollywood Canteen is also
remembered as the site of conflict when
Canteen board members fought over
whether people could dance across race
lines. When challenged by those less
keen on integration, Bette Davis and John
Gar½eld, along with members of the seg-
regated locals of the Los Angeles musi-
cians unions, threatened to pull their
support. While the “knockdown drag out
½ghts” about integrated dancing (in seg-
regated Hollywood) might suggest that
all was not well at the dance floor of the
nation, the narratives that circulated
about these battles served to prove that
the Hollywood Canteen was an especially
democratic space. Such civil rights angles
dominated Canteen coverage in the na –
tional black press, popular front press,
and Down Beat, while mentions of race-
mixing at the Canteen were absent from
the mainstream press.2 The democratic,
integrated dance floor became promi-
nent in biographies and autobiographies
of celebrities of the era, and is well cov-
ered in scholarship by historians of jazz
and swing, World War II, and Los Ange-
les, as well as in World War II documen-
taries and museum plaques.3 Nonethe-
less, the lasting image in national mem –
ory is the white jitterbugging starlet and
soldier.

This article is part of a larger study in
which I take the dance floor of the Holly-
wood Canteen as a lens for exploring
swing culture as war memory in the United
States. By war memory, I am thinking of
the cultural repository that literature
scholar Marianna Torgovnick has called
the war complex, or the particular ways
that national memory of World War II
continues to express, for many Ameri-
cans, “how we like to think of ourselves
and to present ourselves to the world,
even at those times when the United
States has been a belligerent and not-
much-loved nation.”4 The Hollywood
Canteen is part of a larger package of nos-
talgia of uncomplicated American good-
ness during World War II that has played,
and continues to play, a powerful role in
constructing national memory and re –
cruiting patriotic identi½cation (even for
those too young to remember the war).
What explains the persistent appeal of
swing dance, and what alternate narra-
tives are forgotten when swing memory
as war memory is the only one remem-
bered? Of the sixty people I interviewed,
most of the white participants remem-
bered an integrated dance floor, while
most people of color remember a segre-
gated, or partially segregated, space.
Nearly everyone thought the Canteen
had something to tell us about democracy
in the United States. It is in the push and
pull of those multiple, contradictory, dif-
ferently embodied orientations to Holly –
wood Canteen memory that I’ve found a
new way to dance as a swing scholar in –
terested in music, race, and democracy.

This essay focuses, in part, on Amiri
Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones) grammatical
intervention indicated in the title of his
Blues People essay “Swing: From Verb to
Noun.”5 In this piece, Baraka identi½es
effects of cross-cultural musical travels
from black to white America by tracking
the historical route of swing from some-

Sherrie
Tucker

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142 (4) Fall 2013

Swing:
From Time
to Torque

thing African American musicians did with
pulse and forward motion in big band
music in the late 1920s through the 1930s,
to the static commodity that became
known as Swing, a brand name genre that
after 1935 spoke primarily to mainstream
white America (and middle-class black
America), and that largely withheld pro½ts
and jobs from African American musi-
cians. In the war years, swing was not
only a brand, but a kind of national anthem
for the United States, then ½ghting for
world democracy with segregated armed
forces, segregated blood supplies, and a
social, legal, material, and spatial land-
scape entrenched in uneven and incon-
sistent rules about race that white people
often were oblivious to. The Hollywood
Canteen, with its iconic jitterbugging
hostess and soldier, functioning as war
memory about a Greatest Generation
conceived as diverse, but nearly always
depicted as white, would seem to epito-
mize the noun-side of Baraka’s analysis.
But my adherence to Baraka’s verb/noun
analysis was challenged by conversations
with diverse former Canteen-goers, who
told wildly different stories about their
bodies on the late swing era dance floor.
Poet and novelist Nate Mackey’s 1995
twist on Baraka’s essay, “Other: From
Noun to Verb,” helps our understanding
with an alternative grammatical inter-
vention, moving the concept of other,
rather than swing, from noun to verb
form.6 Mackey intended to shake up
institutional multiculturalism “redress”
projects that “nounify” aggrieved com-
munities as “others” for the institution to
assist, manage, and include. A multicul-
turalism project that seeks to diversify
white space by including others resem-
bles what race scholar Sara Ahmed has
called the hospitality model of diversity, in
which “whiteness is produced as host, as
that which is already in place or at home.
To be welcomed is to be positioned as the

one who is not at home.”7 Mackey argues
for a practice that would remember that
other is what people do; it is not what peo-
ple are. Drawing a distinction between
two verb forms of other, he identi½es 1)
artistic othering as a practice of “innova-
tion, invention, change on which cultural
health and diversity depend and thrive”;
and 2) social othering as “the centralizing
of a norm against which otherness is
measured, meted out, marginalized.”8
The cultural verb “to swing,” then, is but
one of many examples of artistic othering
practices of African Americans, people
who have been subjected to social other-
ing. Guests and volunteers at the Holly-
wood Canteen did and experienced both.
Social dancing and its music are both
social and artistic practices–and dancers
who swing to music that swings may navi-
gate social othering and artistic othering
in dynamic tension, even in the most
noun-destined times and places. Writing
about another dance floor in her book
I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a
Practice of Freedom, dance and movement
scholar Danielle Goldman argues that
although New York’s Palladium was
unique in its integration in the 1950s, it
was still “not a ‘free’ space where every-
thing was equal and anything was possi-
ble.” But rather than taking evidence of
contradiction as occasion to debunk the
integrated dance hall, Goldman empha-
sizes the importance of attending to mul-
tidirectional desires and interpretations.
In her analysis of improvised dance as a
“practice of freedom,” she acknowledges
that a “variety of constraints imposed by
racism, sexism, and physical training
shaped how people moved,” and that one
dancer’s experience of a powerful mo –
ment, “while meaningful in many ways,
[was] neither shared by, nor identical for
the dance hall’s many patrons.”9 For
Goldman, to let go of an assumption of
“sameness” or consensus of dance expe-

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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rience does not diminish the political
power of dancers’ abilities to “interact
with constraints,” and in fact, it com –
prises “the possibility for meaningful ex –
change.”10 The contradictions and incom –
patibilities of dance floor memories at
the Hollywood Canteen are absolutely
necessary to understand its democratic
potential.

An assumption of sameness dominates
the either/or noun-verb dichotomy in
scholarship on swing’s ability to repre-
sent American identity. For African Amer –
ican studies scholar Perry Hall, the polar-
ized analyses are that: 1) swing was an
unusually integrated cultural formation,
expressing populism and multiethnic,
multicultural, and interracial mixing as
particularly American; or 2) swing repre-
sented a blatant example of white Ameri-
can appropriation of black American cul-
ture.11

Rather than arguing one side or the
other, I am interested in swing’s capacity
to slip between these poles. If, as cultural
and gender theorist Inderpal Grewal has
argued, America continues to be imag-
ined as simultaneously multicultural and
white, both within the United States and
from the perspective of other nations,12
then the easy slide between swing as either
multicultural populism or white domina-
tion de½nes its symbolic potency. How
neatly the popular national narratives
about swing musicians who pioneered
the integration of a segregated industry,
and patriotic jitterbug dancers who inte-
grated the dance floor, ½t what historian
Nikhil Pal Singh has called “civic myths
about the triumph over racial injustice”
that have become “central to the resusci-
tation of a vigorous and strident form of
American exceptionalism.”13

When swing culture is narrated as
America’s “triumph over racial injustice,”
it drowns out critical opportunities for
examining continuing inequalities. Per-

haps it is precisely swing’s dual history as
musical melting pot and crime scene of
appropriation that positions it to acquire
such a seductive national memory as uni-
versally American and democratic. What
if swing excels as a national music, not in
spite of, but because of its ability to mean
different things to many people, while
also signaling a uni½ed wartime America?
Although the image of the idealized sol-
dier-hostess jitterbugging couple was
presented at the time (and rolled out
many times since) as a nostalgic repre-
sentation of national unity and American
likability in a time of war, the former
Canteen-goers that I talked to often nar-
rated the hinges of noun and verb forms
of swing and other. Listening to former
Canteen-goers remembering their young
swing-dancing bodies is one way to re –
member connections between the dance
floor and the commotion against its sur-
face, to explore in swing memory the ten-
sions of America as the many and the one.

When swing scholarship shifts from

music to dance, the analytic center tends
to pivot from time to torque. “To swing,”
de½ned by jazz and swing scholars who
focus primarily on music, tends to apply
to conjugation of rhythm, tempo, pulse,
and the forward motion often, but not
always, achieved in the emphasized sec-
ond and fourth beats of the four-four
rhythm. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead de –
scribes swing as a “headlong, but relaxed
sense of propulsion, as if the music was
skipping down the sidewalk. It often
relies on small surges and hesitations, on
placing a note or accent just in front of or
behind where a metronome or tapping
foot would put it.” But, he adds, “Count
Basie’s bassist Walter Page could place
his notes squarely on the beat and swing
like crazy.”14

When dance scholars talk about swing,
however, we enter a world of physics, the

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142 (4) Fall 2013

Swing:
From Time
to Torque

“centrifugal force, torque, and momen-
tum” that “keep the partners spinning
smoothly.”15 Historian Lewis Erenberg
has emphasized the role of the “intimate
communication” of the “dance’s hand
clasp,” necessary in order to ensure “that
the couple could survive the centrifugal
force and the obstacles of the dance.”16
Jazz historian Howard Spring has argued
that it was this new “more physical” way
of dancing–involving more parts of the
body and more movements per measure
(four instead of two)–that spurred the
new musical approaches to rhythm and
timbre in the music that became known
as swing.17 Swing dance scholars often
identify the radical reworking of “ball-
room conventions of leaders and follow-
ers” into what historian Terry Monaghan
called a more “mutually assertive” rela-
tionship.18

Many scholars have highlighted the
“breakaway” as the de½ning property of
the lindy hop and jitterbug, representing
the integration of individual and com-
munity, improvised solo and ensem-
ble–the dance version of what has been
celebrated as the democratic principle of
jazz. “In most couple dances (the waltz
and the foxtrot, for instance),” writes
phi losopher Robert Crease in his explo-
ration of Hollywood representations of
the lindy hop, “the partners hold each
other closely enough so that they generally
need to do identical footwork with re –
verse parity lest they tread on each
other’s feet.” What was radically new in
the lindy, then, was the “development of
the breakaway,” which “made possible a
flexible couple dance with room for
improvisation. Partners could do mark –
edly different steps–even ones unknown
to and unanticipated by one’s partner–
as long as the basic rhythm was pre-
served.”19 It was the “continuous rhyth-
mic play” and “driving reciprocal dy –
namic” of dance part ners that Monaghan

identi½ed as swing’s “aesthetic articula-
tion of cultural equity.”

To onlookers, the lindy or jitterbug
may look like a back-and-forth, in-and-
out motion. But to dancers, “swing” is
less like the sway of a pendulum, and
more like what would happen if you
could “swing” that pendulum at the end
of a string around and around over your
head.20 The heavy end becomes airborne
and seems almost weightless only when
you achieve the optimum combination of
force, rotation, and distance. Swing it too
placidly and it doesn’t get off the ground.
Swing it too hard and the string slips out
of your hand and the pendulum flies
through the neighbor’s window. But
swing it just right, just fast enough, with
just enough bend to the arm to adjust the
speed for the weight–torque it accurately–
and you and your dance partner achieve a
greater level of turning power than either
could achieve alone.

In their book Physics and the Art of
Dance: Understanding Movement, physicist
Kenneth Laws and dance pedagogue
Arleen Sugano de½ne torque as “a kind of
force that causes a rotation, like the hand
turning a screwdriver or two hands turn-
ing a T-shaped wrench to tighten bolts on
a car wheel.”21 For solo dancers, torque
is applied to the floor through the feet,
one pushing one way and one the other.
In partner dance, the floor and feet still
do this work, but in relation to the torque
dancers apply to one another. Like a
physicist, the experienced swing dancer
appears to defy gravity, not by ½ghting it,
but by knowing its rules, and using this
knowledge to accurately apply the laws
of turning power, weight, velocity, dis-
tance, and shape. The swing, then, for
the lindy or jitterbug, is not all in the
rhythm, the tempo, or even the steps.
Swing is in the crouch, bend, lean,
weight, speed, balance–torque. Music
that swings, for experienced swing danc –

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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ers, is music conducive to the achieve-
ment of torque.

Writer and performer Brenda Dixon
Gottschild has observed that although
the dance was “gender-democratic” in the
relatively shared athleticism of the lead
and follow, race democracy was limited
when white rebellion was projected onto
black survival. She argues that the lindy
hop was titillating to white youth “in
flight from the Protestant ethic” in ways
it could not be to African American youth
living “on the edge, literally and ½gura-
tively.”22 The same pivot points that con-
tributed to the lindy’s “potential to
undermine and subvert racism” and that
led to integration of racially segregated
space (“almost always in the black com-
munity”) also rendered swing culture
ripe for white primitivist titillation. For
white dancers socialized in a culture that
constructed blackness as undisciplined,
ecstatic, and prone to sexual abandon,
the swing-out was about letting go of all
control, missing altogether what was
new in the lindy for black dancers.23 By
the 1940s, the shift from the lindy to the
jitterbug (amid other changes accompa-
nying the mainstreaming of swing)
sometimes obscured its origins in black
culture. But even this cross-cultural am –
nesia could not prevent the flow of
“primitivist” associations for many white
social dancers (and ½lm directors) who
often saw the jitterbug as pulling out the
stops, rather than as a communicative
partnership between a (more) democra-
tized lead and follow that sought flight
through balance.

Among other things, the Hollywood
Canteen was a democratically conceived,
explicitly patriotic, mostly white, sup-
posedly integrated dance floor in a segre-
gated white part of Los Angeles (a
sprawling city, most of which was, in the
1940s, permeated with racially restrictive
housing covenants). What desires ani-

mated the dance of people blocked by
restaurant and nightclub admission poli-
cies, as well as the people who were largely
unaware that Los Angeles was segregat-
ed? Many different cultural associations,
embodied experiences, and skill levels
were brought to dance. An exuberant
lead who learned from the movies might
fling his protesting partner around like a
rag doll, while a flight-ready follow may
never snap her partner out of his self-
conscious two-step (one interviewee
called it “the GI shuffle”). But it was also
possible to achieve mutually enjoyable
(though differently experienced) torque:
to connect with another through touch
and feel, ½nd the point of connection in
which bodies move one another, impro-
vising across shared or different orienta-
tions (including degrees of resistance,
centers of gravity, and mass) and strike a
balanced pattern of tension and release
that maintained “I” and “we,” the indi-
vidual and the collective–what we might
call the physics of swing democracy. The
breakaway didn’t facilitate this on its
own. Neither did the couple steps. The
swing is in the torque, without which the
breakaway and coupling have no connec-
tion. At the Hollywood Canteen, and else –
where, dance floor democracy is collabo-
rative and physical and not guaranteed.

How might we reconceptualize the ar –
ticulation of democracy and swing cul-
ture as the torque as practiced on the
unsteady dance floor, and not in the reas-
suring rocking motion of the pendulum
swing or in the patterned opportunities
for relative freedom and individualism in
the breakaway? How do we speak of
torque in relation to social power imbal-
ances of race, gender, class, sex, and
rank? Is there a way to store past torque
for the future, in self-narrative, for exam-
ple, in stories of improvised moves on the
dance floor? Nostalgia is emptied of
torque. But some ways of remembering

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142 (4) Fall 2013

Swing:
From Time
to Torque

and telling turn the nostalgia into some-
thing else, through tone and gesture,
humor, and critique. How do people
apply turning power to narrative per-
formances of memory? Sometimes, the
torque is in the telling.

One dancer narrates her body dancing in an

unexpected way: perhaps she breaks the rules,
dances across race. Somehow this breach cre-
ates an even more democratic dance floor nar-
rative than if there hadn’t been a rule to break.
Another would-be dancer describes the impact
of rejection on the “inclusive” dance floor,
maps what it should have been like as a vision
of democracy. Another compares the Holly-
wood Canteen with another, even more demo-
cratic dance floor in a more racially inclusive
neighborhood of Los Angeles. Another ascribes
the democratic achievement of the Hollywood
Canteen to the radicals on the staff, rather
than to the inherent niceness of Tom Brokaw’s
Greatest Generation.

Literary scholar and oral historian
Alessandro Portelli argues that the point
of oral history is not to replace “previous
truths with alternative ones,” but to lis-
ten to them together, for how “each pro-
vides the standard against which the
other is recognized and de½ned.”24 Lis-
tening to the oral narratives in relation to
one another, to the of½cial story, and to
archival documents, I am not sifting evi-
dence for a preferable version of the past.
Instead, I listen for relationships–pulling
together and pushing apart–to better
understand the persistence and perfor-
mativity of swing culture as war memory.
I hear the “of½cial” memory of the Hol-
lywood Canteen in virtually every inter-
view; sometimes in unison with it, some-
times in dissonance, and usually a little of
each. Oftentimes, there is some point at
which I hear the familiar tune torqued in
the telling, in which the teller leans away
from the of½cial memory, applying a bit
of pressure that changes its direction or

meaning. From my own dance as an
interviewer, researcher, scholar, and
writer, I try to pick up new kinds of criti-
cal engagements with swing culture as
war memory. Instead of reifying or
debunking the nostalgia, I listen for what
happens to the nostalgia in Canteen-
goers’ narratives as they tell me about the
club, as well as the social, geographical,
and historical ground navigated on their
way to, through, and out of it, and how
they connect that with the present mo –
ment of the interview. I ask for the
dance–then try to follow–though I am,
of course, the one who initiates, records,
and analyzes the event. I ask questions.
They answer. But they also ask questions
and I answer. I try to lead in such a way
that I eventually follow, I want to fol-
low–at least until I return to my of½ce,
where I will write about the event with-
out my partners’ input. But in the mo –
ment of the dance, my listening/follow-
ing body sends intended and unintended
responses to my partners, who read me,
perhaps changing directions as a result
of something that happens between us–
a laugh, a missed joke, body language
read as interest or disinterest–as my
partners narrate order into the disorder I
initiated when I ask them to share mem-
ories of their visits to the Hollywood
Canteen.

I careened out of each interview re –
thinking the jitterbugging soldier-hostess
dyad, not as a closed symbol of the na –
tion, but an opening for thinking from
more than one side, and even more than
two sides. For dancers, the dyad was serial
and temporary, moving from one partner
to another in gendered roles of “lead”
and “follow.” I did not literally dance
with my interviewees, but I did interact
with them in their homes, apartments,
retirement facilities, and over the phone,
seeking connection on the narrative
ground of dance. We tested each other’s

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responses and moved accordingly; inter-
preting each other in the moment, trad-
ing questions and answers, follow-up
questions and stories. I felt myself pulled
into many relationships and orientations
to swing’s national potency in the 1940s
and the present, meanings that never
stray too far from the race of space and
bodies, be it multicultural bodies in color-
blind space, blatant segregation, or the
defeat of the color line. My interviews
with former Canteen dancers often felt
like what sociologist Black Hawk Han-
cock has called embodied practices of
race.25
“Are you black or white?” asked Mel

Bryant, within the ½rst ½ve minutes of
our ½rst telephone conversation about the
Hollywood Canteen.

So far, I had been leading. I initiated the
call (referred by his sister, trumpet player
Clora Bryant, whom I had interviewed
many times for my book on all-woman
bands). I introduced myself, and told him
that his sister had mentioned that he had
attended the Hollywood Canteen while
on leave from the Marines. He said yes,
this was true. I asked him if I could inter-
view him for my book (yes, again). Then
I asked him if the dance floor was inte-
grated, as reported in the black press, the
musicians’ union magazine, and Down
Beat.

“Don’t you believe it, Sherrie,” he re –

plied. “Don’t you believe it.”

I hadn’t believed that a dance floor in
Hollywood at that time could be easily
integrated, and I was eager to learn more
about how the Hollywood Canteen fell
short of its stated goals. I knew that Mel
had been a Los Angeles-based actor for
most of his life, and that he would have a
unique perspective as an African Ameri-
can military guest who would have
already known the limits of segregated
Hollywood within the social geography

of Los Angeles, in which most people of
color lived south of downtown and east
of Main in what was, in the 1940s, known
as the Eastside, but is today known as
South L.A. Feeling we were on the same
page, I asked my usual follow-up ques-
tions: “What happened? What were the
rules?”

This is where Mel took the lead.
“Are you black or white?” he asked.
“I’m white,” I said.
Somehow, I got the sense that this didn’t
surprise him. But my racial identi½cation,
once said aloud, became a mutually con-
scious part of our interaction. Our inter-
view turned in different ways than if I
had been able to continue to abstractly
sense myself as racially neutral (a white
habit, and a researcher habit, intensi½ed
by the telephone). Now, as Mel gave me
an answer, it was in the context of what
had become an overtly cross-racial dance.
“For black people, integration isn’t just
about rules. It’s about body language and
a look on the face. There doesn’t have to
be a rope across the room. No one has to
say anything for you to know when you
are not wanted.”26

I am not the ½rst white person Mel had
explained this to in his lifetime. Asking
me to racially identify had a performative
function in our conversation, shifting the
concept of racial integration out of the
realm of policy or intentions and into the
realm of embodied knowledge. My ques-
tions about “what happened” and “what
were the rules” did not get at his embod-
ied experiences, memories, or what he
had to say about the dance floor at the
Hollywood Canteen. Race at this point in
the interview has to do with different ori-
entations to the question of what consti-
tutes an integrated social space. What Mel
had to say about his memories of the dance
floor did not ½t the framework I present-
ed, in which a club was either integrated
or segregated, where we could name

Sherrie
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142 (4) Fall 2013

Swing:
From Time
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what was happening and pin down the
rules.

In asking me to racially identify, Mel
reoriented our conversation so that it had
room for his embodied knowledge, shaped
by a Jim Crow childhood growing up in a
small segregated Texas town, a career as
an actor spent moving through predomi-
nantly white crowds in a racially marked
body, basic training with other black
recruits under white of½cers at Montford
Point, a furlough spent trying to recon-
nect with his new hometown and inter-
rupted acting career in Los Angeles, and
memories of his long postwar acting
career. To white Canteen-goers, the pres-
ence of a lone black body moving through
an otherwise apparently white crowd
could be seen as evidence of integration
(interpreted as either a symbol of America
or a caution of un-Americanism in Holly-
wood, depending on the viewers’ visions of
how racial difference and democracy
were interconnected–both interpretations
had currency during World War II). But
from the perspective of the person or per-
sons whose burden it is to integrate the
room, this same event could register as ev –
idence of white space, a lack of integration.
Mel is explaining to me, explicitly as one
black person explaining something to
one white person, how, from the perspec-
tive of a black person, the text of the
crowd–the “body language” and “look
on the face”–could indicate a segregated
space, even if a black Marine was wel-
comed into the club. This kind of segre-
gation could pass as integration to most
white people in a Hollywood night spot.
“The Hollywood Canteen is something to
be remembered, and something to be re –
gretted,” said Mel. “It was a different thing,
a wonderful thing to have a place where
soldiers could go, but it wasn’t integrated
in an equal way.”27

I emerged from this ½rst of two tele-
phone interviews with Mel Bryant, turn-

ing in a new direction. Instead of stand-
ing with Mel, facing an imperfectly inte-
grated Canteen, I had turned toward him
and listened from my body across the
phone lines to his telling of his embodied
experience. Considering his dance floor
perspective helps me to factor body lan-
guage and facial expressions into the
social geography of memory at the Holly-
wood Canteen as a together-but-unequal
democratic space–an acutely accurate
portrait of U.S. notions of integration as
“democracy,” writ in Mel’s memory of
moving through racially differentiated
Canteen space. The transmission of body
language and facial expression is, admit-
tedly, limited in a phone interview. To
speak of visual transmission over the
voice-concentrated medium of the phone
added another layer of embodied aware-
ness–not more or less intimate–but a
recon½guration of the contact points of
intimacy to our conversation.

The next time that Mel and I spoke, he
set his Hollywood Canteen memories
within a longer trajectory organized
around his life as an actor and singer. He
told of leaving Denison, Texas, after his
high school graduation in 1942, strug-
gling to ½nd housing (“skid row”) and
work (a busboy in a cafeteria) in Los
Angeles, and being “discovered” by ma –
jor ½gures of black Hollywood, actor
Mantan Moreland and actor/agent Ben
Carter, who helped him land the title role
in the mgm patriotic short ½lm Shoe
Shine Boy (1944). At the same time that
the pathway he had hoped and struggled
for was rolling out to meet him, the
impending interruption of military ser –
vice loomed. He enlisted in the Marines,
hoping to be trained in Southern Califor-
nia, but was sent to a segregated black
training camp in North Carolina. When
Mel returned to Los Angeles on leave in
1944, he arrived as a Marine on a fur-
lough, but also, importantly, as an actor

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who had made one movie and hoped to
renew contact and resume his Hollywood
career.

Mel’s stories of Montford Point, like
his stories of Hollywood, tell of navigat-
ing courses paved in paradox, maddening
combinations of possibility and restric-
tion. He weaves in and out of Montford
Point and the Hollywood Canteen as he
tells me about that time; and indeed,
there are more intersections than one
might imagine. A movie star acquain-
tance from Hollywood–Tyrone Power–
was serving as a Marine in North Caroli-
na at the same time as Mel. In one story,
Mel tells how his friend, the famous actor,
took him to see the swimming pools at
nearby Cherry Point where the white
Marines were based. This is a story of his
friendship with a big star, but it is also a
story of segregated and unequal condi-
tions for black Marines. Montford Point
also had a pool, he tells me, but black
Marines couldn’t use it, only the white
of½cers.28

The proximity and restrictions from
swimming pools and movie stars at Mont-
ford Point mirror his stories of placing
himself again and again in restricted Hol-
lywood, where he is successful, well-
liked, but always out-of-bounds. On
leave in Los Angeles, he stayed as a guest
in the home of the black actor and agent
who had discovered him, Ben Carter.
Wearing his Marine uniform, he boarded
the Red Car and rode west and north to
the Hollywood Canteen. His voice is slow
and low when recounting his approach.

The Canteen was a very strange place. You
know, you’d go up to the front door, like
usually you’d go with two or three other
buddies in the service. And they would sit
you down on one side of the building, and
the whites on the other side of the building.
And the ½rst time they did that, I was won-
dering what was going on. Are they leading
us to slaughter? I thought they were going

142 (4) Fall 2013

to drop us off in a pit or something. We
couldn’t dance with any of the stars.29

Sherrie
Tucker

Slaughter. Pit. Word choices, rather than
the even keel of his measured speech and
baritone voice, conveyed the anger and
hurt he ascribed to unequal togetherness.
I asked if there were black hostesses on
the nights he was there, to which he re –
plied, “No, no. Oh, no.”

“So you’re describing a kind of segrega-
tion?” I asked, still on a mission, it seems,
to classify the place as inclusive or exclu-
sive.

“That’s what it was,” said Mel, “segre-
gation. Bette Davis, she tried her best to
break it down. She was all against it. But
the powers-that-be won out.” Again he
advised me to take stories about integra-
tion in Hollywood with a grain of salt.

I’ve heard some of those tales about how
we were welcome anywhere. The Ambas-
sador Hotel is there in Hollywood. I went
to see Lena Horne there. The man took me
and sat me right in the kitchen almost. I
couldn’t see Lena for the kitchen.30

I returned to the question of rules and
policy, only this time I was more careful
to work it as one dimension of the unpre-
dictable, improvised volunteer setting of
unequal togetherness he had described in
our ½rst conversation. Did rules factor
into body language, facial expressions, and
being led to a far corner of the room?

“There had to be a rule, Sherrie, for it to
be that blatant. It was so obvious that we
were separate. Like later on they said, ‘sep-
arate but equal,’ but we weren’t equal.”
He was, of course, paraphrasing the now
historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision that overturned legalized segre-
gation in the United States, a reminder
that legal precedent would not incorpo-
rate this logic until a decade after his
Canteen visits and military service.

“If it was really equal, it wouldn’t need

to be separate,” I echoed.

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Swing:
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“No,” said Mel, “We’d be all together.”
As we wrapped up our conversation,
Mel talked about his later movies and tele –
vision shows, his relentless efforts to
integrate professional and public spaces
in Las Vegas and Hollywood throughout
his career, and the lingering exclusions.
Painful among his postwar examples was
his story of being denied entry when he
tried to see his former Marine Captain,
Bobby Troupe, perform at a Hollywood
nightclub.

Just before we hung up, I pulled us once
more toward the Hollywood Canteen. I
asked Mel if he remembered any black
volunteers at the club, celebrities perhaps.
He paused for a minute. “I remember
Louise Beavers said she was going out
one night, but I don’t know if they let her
in or not.” He chuckled. “I’m sure they
must have. Surely they wouldn’t turn her
out. Because she had just done that pic-
ture, Imitation of Life with Claudette Col-
bert, where she played the black lady that
made a fortune for the white woman.” He
laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure they let her in!”31
The rhetorical mode again: a critical,
not literal spin, as I took it, but one that
torqued the either/or of the together-but-
not-equal basis of inclusion that Mel
connected with the Hollywood Canteen
within his broader repertoire of World
War II memories. Black people were al –
lowed in these together-but-not-equal
spaces (the Canteen, Hollywood, the mil-
itary), but only within the same social
relations as depicted in the movies: never
equals, always at the service of white peo-
ple. The uncomfortable tangle of a soldier-
actor relegated by race to the far corners
of the room excludes him, even while it
includes him in a space that was adver-
tised at the time, and celebrated for de –
cades afterward, as the apex of progres-
sive movie star-soldier hospitality. His
presence may have supplied evidence for
some dancers that the Canteen was sim-

ply and easily integrated. But Mel, through –
out our interview, has pushed back at this
interpretation, applied torque by expos-
ing the torqueless results of a democratic
dance of the colorblind leading the color-
blind. He reads others reading his body,
and he narrates the contradictions of
Canteen inequality: it is wonderful on
the one hand, and hierarchical and racial-
ly exclusive on the other. The Canteen is
rendered a barely open door–like that of
the mgm commissary, the lounge in the
Ambassador hotel, casting calls in the
motion picture industry–one that had to
be used again and again, under uncom-
fortable and sometimes humiliating cir-
cumstances, if it was ever going to pro-
vide entry. To perform, in our interview,
the stickiness of this door seemed a way
for Mel to write/right himself as an actor
on the democratic dance floor. This
together-but-not-equal integration, as
remembered and narrated by Mel, in –
cluded being allowed in (unlike most
Hollywood nightclubs), then being led to
certain parts of the club with other black
servicemen, not being allowed to dance
with the stars, feeling more tolerated
than welcomed, and not seeing any black
hostesses.

Mel’s narrative of not dancing torques
the inclusion model of integration, turn-
ing Hollywood (and U.S.) democracy to
face the contradictions of unequal to –
getherness. Some stories about achieving
torque on the dance floor also “torque
back”: when people narrate dance floor
memories in such a way as to channel
expectations of the typical telling of dem-
ocratic dancing, and then lean at a bit of a
different angle, bend the knees a little
more, shift the play of pattern and sur-
prise, turning it into something else. These
are the moments when narrative pressure
applied to the dance floor of the nation
produces a different kind of dance floor
democracy.

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Jeni LeGon (born Jennie May Ligon) was

a well-established dancer in theaters and
movies, a chorus line organizer, and a
dance teacher when she began receiving
calls to bring her chorus line and dance
students up from the Eastside to the Hol-
lywood Canteen two or three times a
month between November 1942 and April
1943. She was still a well-known dancer
and dance teacher when I ½rst inter-
viewed her in 2004. In her late eighties,
she was enjoying her celebrity amid the
tap revival. She maintained an active
schedule, giving workshops around the
world, and speaking about her long ca –
reer that spanned from the chorus line of
the Count Basie Orchestra in the early
thirties, to seasons on black vaudeville
with the Whitman Sisters, to an on-and-
off relationship with the motion picture
industry, dictated by the limits of success
in Hollywood for black artists. Her dance
sequences were often truncated or cut, a
pattern she attributes to the jealousy of
powerful white women stars who did not
wish to be upstaged.

In 1941, she helped her brother, Alfred
Ligon, purchase books in preparation of
opening the ½rst black bookstore in Los
Angeles, and she ran her dance school out
of the same building on East Jefferson in
the Central Avenue District. It was in the
midst of her varied career training danc –
ers, putting acts together, and perform-
ing in clubs, theaters, and movies that
someone called her up and asked her to
bring her chorus line to volunteer at the
Hollywood Canteen. “They just called me
directly and asked me if I could bring the
girls down. At ½rst I objected.” As she
recalled, the caller explained that the Can –
teen “needed black girls to dance with
the black boys. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t
like that.’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s the
rules,’ or something like that.” She thought
it over and decided to take her dancers up
to Hollywood. “I ½gured, well, the boys

were putting their lives on it, so it didn’t
hurt us to do that, you know. I didn’t like
it particularly.”32

Jeni narrated her integration of the
hostess-side of the Canteen as a moral
compromise. She agreed to dance, not in
order to approve of the Canteen as a sym-
bol of democracy, but to support black
soldiers who would otherwise be ignored
in a club that white liberals viewed as
integrated. Importation of black host-
esses for clubs in locations where black
people did not–and were not allowed
to–live was a common solution for some
white-dominated usos and uso-like
Canteens that “welcomed” soldiers of
color, while at the same time preventing
mixed dancing. Although the black press
vociferously critiqued the many Jim Crow
canteens that turned black soldiers away,
the same newspapers did not fault those
that called upon black hostesses to inte-
grate the dance floors of clubs in white-
restricted areas such as Hollywood.
Instead, the readiness of black communi-
ties to supply last-minute hostesses was
celebrated as an expression of the Double
Victory campaign, combating racism at
home and fascism abroad. For example,
in a March 1943 story in the California
Eagle, the secretary of the segregated
black musicians union local 767, Florence
Cadrez, was congratulated for securing
“Mates for Sailors” when a Canteen Of –
½cer of the Day called her up with the
emergency alert that “90 Negro sailors
were arriving at the Hollywood Canteen
in two hours.” Cadrez was able to rustle
up “30 Negro girls” who “were ready and
waiting when the sailors arrived.”33

But in recounting the integrated Holly-
wood Canteen’s dependence on the lengthy
commutes of black women from the East –
side on an on-call basis, Jeni’s narrative
takes us to the other side of that phone
call, to the point of view of a black dancer
and actress. To secure black “mates” for

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142 (4) Fall 2013

Swing:
From Time
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black men is cause for hesitation because
of the racist history that constructs black
men as predators of white women. The
labor of all hostesses was to cheerfully
entertain all military guests, but while
some white interviewees told stories of
dancing across race without incident,
others spoke of being instructed not to
dance across race, and even of a shore
patrol of½cer who beat up black men who
danced with white hostesses. By this
logic, the labor of imported black host-
esses ensured same-race democratic danc –
ing, enlisting black hostesses in the service
of whiteness that can see itself as inclu-
sive. But, as Jeni told me in our interview,
the city had far more welcoming places
for black soldiers–not in Hollywood, but
in the Eastside. “They could come to the
black clubs, in the black neighborhood,
which was Central Avenue, of course. We
had a whole bunch of clubs and they
could come there and have a ball if they
wanted to, you know. But the Hollywood
Canteen was supposed to be top dog . . .
so, naturally everybody wanted to go . . .
because it was Class A.”

But one night . . . there was one white boy on
the floor dancing with different girls and
they weren’t dancing very well, and I was
dancing with one of the black boys, and
[the white boy] was watching me and I was
watching him because he was such a damn
good dancer. So, anyway, what turned out
was that he came and asked me to dance
with him and I said sure. And we went out
and started jittering, and everybody on the
floor moved out and let us take the floor
and we just had a ball. And he and I danced
all over that bloody room that time. And
everybody just stood back and cheered and
carried on, and it was really fun. I mean,
you know, just the black and white thing
and that was the end of it, but this particular
night, we showed them it just didn’t have
to be that way. We were just rhythmically
wedded, you know what I mean, we just

danced similarly and we were good together.
And so that’s what it was. He’d throw me
out and I’d come back, we’d do the boogie,
all that sort of business. It was just a fun
thing, and we were having such a good
time, he and I, you know, enjoying one an –
other’s ability to do the things that we could
do together, not having seen one another
or known anything about one another
before.

I heard Jeni’s telling of this story as an
artistic othering in which she animates
her younger self at the Hollywood Can-
teen as a political actor who torques her
intended role as an othered political
action ½gure. She narrates herself and her
dance partner as modeling alternative
notions of democracy on the dance floor,
while other national subjects watch and
cheer. In saying yes to the white soldier,
not because she “can’t say no” but because
she thinks he is a damn good dancer, she
is saying no to a nation that imagines
black male predators and white female
prizes. And in narrating this dance as tak-
ing place in a segregated environment,
she says no to Hollywood’s claims to col-
orblindness. While critical of the of½cial
story, Jeni’s story also highlights a utopi-
an vision of interracial jitterbugging at
the Hollywood Canteen, albeit from the
point of view of a black woman exercis-
ing agency. Dance floor democracy, in her
telling, is not guaranteed. It is achieved in
the moment, among a small set of danc –
ers attuned to each other’s moves and a
crowd of appreciative onlookers, within
and against and despite constraints. And
it is achieved in the interview, as she
torques back in what she chooses to tell
the academic, whose questions, inflec-
tions, and responses also exert energy in
this transaction.

Mel Bryant and Jeni LeGon are just

two of sixty former Canteen-goers who
shared with me their very different narra-

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Sherrie
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tives of navigating the swing dance floor
of the nation sixty-½ve years after the
fact. As I listened to former Canteen-goers
traverse the social geographies of memory,
narrating in the present their youthful
swing dancing bodies moving through
patriotically charged space, I could usually
pick up some strains of the uni½ed feel-
good version of World War II swing nos-
talgia (pitched at different volumes); but
I also heard it actively pushed and pulled
by narrators approaching it through
unique orientations to its social geogra-
phy. Even those whose memories most
resembled the sentiments expressed by
nostalgia offered insights into the differ-
ence it makes to imagine an embodied
point of view from one or the other side
of the jitterbugging couple.

In our interviews, former Canteen-goers
danced with and against the footsteps of
that idealized jitterbugging couple. A

Hollywood Canteen analysis that could
include them all would torque the of½cial
story through differentiated dance floor
travels, yielding both less and more room
to move. In telling the dance floor of the
nation as a place where some bodies
achieve flight, some bodies are grounded,
and some bodies are injured, we accom-
modate more restrictions, but also more
interpretative space, more unexpected
turns, more critique. In fact, one could say
that in their differences, dissonances, and
sporadically achieved torque, the Canteen
interviewees achieve more democracy–
if the goal of a democratic dance floor is
not only to divide people in half and
match (some of ) them in ideologically
appropriate paired units of lead/follow,
but also to create a space where all orien-
tations pull, all touches transmit and
receive signals, and all bodies and power
relations are weighted into the equation.

endnotes

Author’s Note: This article is drawn from my forthcoming book, Dance Floor Democracy: The
Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke University Press). I am very grateful
to Ken Wissoker and the anonymous readers for all their feedback about this project. I am
also grateful to all the interviewees, as well as the copanelists and participants at confer-
ences, talks, and seminars, all of whom have turned me in ways that helped me get this work
off the ground at key moments. A special thank you to Christopher Wells for the dance les-
sons, both theory and practice. Thank you also to Duke University Press for permission to
publish this section in article form.

1 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 2012), 49.

2 See, for example, “No Jim Crow at Calif. Canteen,” Afro-American, May 8, 1943; “Bette Davis
Upholds Mixed Couples at Movie Canteen,” Chicago Defender (national edition), January 9,
1943; and “Canteen Heads Have Row over Mixed Dancing,” Down Beat, April 15, 1943, 1.
3 James Spada, More Than a Woman: An Intimate Biography of Bette Davis (New York: Bantam
Books, 1993), 193; Bette Davis with Michael Herskowitz, This ’N That (New York: G.P. Put-
nam’s Sons, 1987), 128; and David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 161–162.

4 Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005), 2.

5 LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, “Swing: From Verb to Noun” (1963), reprinted in The LeRoi
Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991),
33–50.

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Swing:
From Time
to Torque

6 Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gab-

bard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 76–99.

7 Ahmed, On Being Included, 43.
8 Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” 76–77.
9 Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2010), 22.

10 Ibid., 54.
11 Perry A. Hall, “African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation,” in
Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, ed. Bruce H. Ziff and Pratima V. Rao (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 31–51.

12 Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, 2005), 19.

13 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Un½nished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 17.

14 Kevin Whitehead, Why Jazz?: A Concise Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10.
15 Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture

between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 258.

16 Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52.

17 Howard Spring, “Swing and the Lindy Hop: Dance, Venue, Media, and Tradition,” American
Music 15 (2) (1997): 191; and Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American
Vernacular Dance (New York and London: Schirmer Books, 1979), 315–316.

18 Terry Monaghan, “Stompin’ at the Savoy–Remembering, Re-Enacting and Researching the
Lindy Hop’s Relationship to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom,” in Dancing at the Crossroads: African
Diasporic Dances in Britain: Conference Proceedings, ed. Caroline Muraldo, Mo Dodson, and
Terry Monaghan (London: London Metropolitan University, 2005), 36.

19 Robert P. Crease, “Divine Frivolity: Hollywood Representations of the Lindy Hop, 1937–
1942,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995),
209–210.

20 Ethnomusicologist Christopher Wells experiences this difference between what looks linear
from the outside and what he experiences as a dancer as a “tension and release feel,” in
which even the slotted send-out associated with West Coast style is hardly linear, but built
from the gathering and sending of energy. Christopher Wells, conversation/demonstration,
Charlotte, North Carolina, April 2012.

21 Kenneth Laws and Arleen Sugano, Physics and the Art of Dance: Understanding Movement, 2nd

ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 70–71.

22 Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance (Westport,

Conn., and London: Praeger, 1996), 56, 22.
23 Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 258–268.
24 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral

History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), viii–ix.

25 Hancock was speaking of predominantly white revivalists in the 1990s. See Black Hawk Han –
cock, “American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination,” Ph.D. dissertation, Uni-
versity of Wisconsin-Madison (2004). See also Eric Usner, “Dancing in the Past, Living in
the Present: Nostalgia and Race in Southern Californian Neo-Swing Dance Culture,” Dance
Research Journal, Congress on Research in Dance 33 (2) (2001): 87–111; and Juliet McMains and
Danielle Robinson, “Swinging Out: Southern California’s Lindy Revival,” in I See America

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000, ed. Maureen Needham (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2002), 84–91.

Sherrie
Tucker

26 Mel Bryant, telephone interview with author, July 25, 2000.
27 Ibid.
28 Mel Bryant, telephone interview with author, October 28, 2000.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Jeni LeGon, telephone interview with author, November 26, 2004.
33 “Flo Cadrez Gets Mates for Sailors,” California Eagle, March 17, 1943.

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