Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America

Chapter 2 - Up, Up, and Away

⢇CHAPTER 2 : UP, UP, AND AWAY In a 1937 article titled “What Is This Thing Called Swing?” Billy Rowe, writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, declared, “Swing is the blues on roller skates, the old fox trot in the heat lap of a marathon; it’s dance time TNT.”1 The upbeat tempo of swing music and jump blues reflected and embodied the newer, faster tempo of urban, mechanized twentieth-century American life. Now, in the 1930s, music and dance made the superpowers of speed and defiance of gravity available to everyone. The music critic Stanley Dance compared a swing band to “an airplane taking off after roaring down a runway.”2 And jump dancers who took the horizontal sweep of swing dance to vertical tosses and leaps almost felt as if they could fly. Trains, planes, and automobiles were elements of a nearly unfathomable change in the pace and spaces of American life. They made it possible to live differently, in different places, to get there in a different, noisier way and at a new and different speed. As such technologies became more and more a part of daily life, they occupied simultaneously more cultural space and vocabulary, because Americans needed to experience the new modes of transportation and technology in as many forms as possible just to take in what was happening in their rapidly accelerating universe. In Swinging the Machine, Joel Dinerstein suggests that a culture assimilates mechanical and technological changes by absorbing them physically—by putting the sounds of machines into our music, for instance, or by mimicking the movement of machines in our social dances and stage productions.3 People literally “incorporate” change: we make it part of our bodies, our corporeality. Dinerstein makes a powerful argument for the importance of African American music and dance in helping Americans comprehend the ever-accelerating tempo of modern life. Rail travel accelerated the pace of modern life: the railways of the late nineteenth century moved so fast that travelers spoke of “flying.” But airplanes redefined high-speed travel and gave it a new dimension—upward. The history of flight is astonishingly short, and because of the rapid curve from inception to development, and also because traveling through the air was 22 C H A P T E R T W O unprecedented, air travel was even more challenging to the American psyche than the train had been. American aviation began just at the turn of the twentieth century through the ingenuity of Orville and Wilbur Wright, from Dayton, Ohio. Their first experimental aircraft, launched in the summer of 1899, was a kite with a five-foot wingspan. One year and $15 worth of materials later, the Wrights had finished building their first piloted plane, a biplane with a seventeen-foot wingspan, tethered with ropes to two men on the ground. The longest glides of that first season were about one hundred yards, and those depended on a lot of help from the ground crew, who ran alongside the plane and lifted the wings when they tipped. Within a year the glider had grown to a twenty-two-foot wingspan, but the results were so dismal that Wilbur Wright predicted flight would not occur within his lifetime. Even so, Orville accepted an invitation to present his findings to the Western Society of Engineers in 1901. His modest paper, “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” was widely reprinted and hailed as the new standard of design for aircraft. Field tests, which in those days invariably resulted in a crash, were tough on pilots and planes. So the Wright brothers built a wind tunnel in their bicycle shop, and throughout the next year, with the aid of hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes, metal shears and sheets of tin, they tested various designs and gathered data for lift and drag equations. By 1903 the Wrights had dramatically increased the wing area to 510 square feet, with a wingspan of a little more than forty feet, and had added a four-cylinder, twelve-horsepower engine and a propeller. The pilot lay prone on the lower wing and steered the airplane by shifting his hips from one side to the other. The brothers tested this plane—a biplane built of spruce, ash, and unbleached muslin—in four flights on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills, about four miles from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The famous first flight lasted twelve seconds and traveled 120 feet. On his final flight that day Wilbur managed a...