George Snowden
American dancer
George "Shorty" Snowden (July 4, 1904 – May 1982) was an African American dancer in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Snowden was best known for his improvisational dance style.
He and his partner Mattie Purnell invented the Harlem Lindy Hop in the dance marathon at Harlem's Rockland Palace between June and July 1928. Snowden and Purnell's invention was based on the breakaway pattern which they practically rediscovered via an accident in the dance marathon. There existed various Lindy Hop dances around the U.S. since Charles Lindbergh's flight over the Atlantic Ocean in May 1927, which were not connected to the Harlem dance. The Harlem Lindy Hop was not the first of the Lindy Hop dances, but it was probably the only one which survived in the long run.
Snowden is sometimes inaccurately credited with coining the name 'Lindy Hop' for a popular partner jazz dance of the day. As there is evidence for his role in creating the Lindy Hop, there is no proper evidence for the naming of the dance. The term ‘Lindy Hop’ in connection with Snowden and Purnell's invention was used for the first time in public in September 1928 when Snowden was advertised to perform in the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem. Whether it was Snowden or someone else who named the Lindy Hop for the newspaper advertisement is unclear.
“George Snowden” enters the record as american dancer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what George, Snowden and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Snowden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.