Dance Card: West Haven High School, 1910

I'm always happy to find dance ephemera from my home state of Connecticut, and this dance card is particularly local: it's from a 1910 Junior-Senior Dance at West Haven High School, whose current incarnation is less than ten miles away.  Today is the last day of classes for WHHS, though I don't think it's in the same building as in 1910.  In celebration, let's talk about what the students there were up to 104 years ago. 

West Haven was settled in 1648 and was the landing site for a British attack during the Revolutionary War.  In 1910, it was not yet an independent town but a part of neighboring Orange.  The "Informal" Junior and Senior Dance for the classes of 1910 and 1911 took place on Friday, June 17th, 1910 at West Haven Town Hall. 

This is a used card, with the last names of partners scrawled in pencil next to most of the dances.  I would have guessed this to be a girl's card since there are only last names with no "Miss" attached to them.  However, the name "Arthur" is written above the dance list; possibly this is the card owner's name.

As on the 1906 Phi Lamda Epsilon card I posted some years back, the dance program is dominated by the popular waltz and two-step, which constitute eight and seven, respectively, of the eighteen dances on the card.  The other three are more interesting.  Two are "Paul Jones" mixers, probably similar to the 1903 Round Two-Step or possibly the 1910s Castles' Paul Jones.  In 1910 the music would most likely have been a two-step.  The remaining dance is a three-step, one of the more obscure dances of the early twentieth century, and one with which I am increasingly intrigued.  The card-owner doesn't seem to have danced it, as no partner is listed.

I find it a striking contrast with today's youth culture that the high school students are doing pretty much the same dances as their parents would have.  The program is up-to-date for 1910 in having lost such vestiges of the nineteenth century as the quadrille or schottische, but with no one-step I would not exactly call it fashion-forward.

Of even more interest to me is that this card (as is not uncommon) names not only the dances but the music for each.  I immediately recognized three of the tunes: "Mesmerizing Mendelsohn Tune", "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now", and the infamous "Yama Yama Man", all relatively new in 1910.   I also looked up "Motor Girl" out of sheer curiosity.  I haven't researched all the others, but here's a little about those four:

"That Mesmerizing Mendelsohn Tune" is a famous Irving Berlin composition from 1909 or 1910.  Famously, it was likely played on the Titanic.  There's a lovely, melancholy recording of it on Ian Whitcomb's Grammy-winning album Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage, possibly the only CD whose liner notes have brought me tears.  The album is now available for download, and an audio clip for "Mendelsohn" (along with many other tunes of this era) may be heard on its Amazon page.

For centuries, dance music has been drawn from the theater.  Following that tradition, "Motor Girl" was probably taken from the eponymous Broadway musical comedy.  A lovely sheet music cover and lyrics for this piece are online at The Authentic History Center, from which I've borrowed the image at left.  The entire score (with lyrics) is available via Google Books.  "Motor Girl" marks the still relatively new age of the automobile in the same way "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine" celebrates the dawning of aviation.

"Yama Yama Man" has become attached in American vintage dance circles to the Castles' schottische, a cute little choreographed sequence dance, but the tune actually has a rather interesting history.  It originated in a 1908 musical in which vaudeville dancer Bessie McCoy performed a sort of creepy-clown routine while singing it, a performance which made her a star.  This would be only a historical footnote had not teenage would-be Broadway dancer Irene Foote started performing McCoy's routine as an audition piece.  Irene, of course, is better known by her married name, Irene Castle, the female half of the world-famous dance couple of the early 1910s.  This bit of her personal history was picked up for the 1939 film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, in which Ginger Rogers (as Irene) performs the Yama Yama Man routine for a bemused Fred Astaire (Vernon).  Since the film was supervised by Irene herself, presumably that performance is accurate. 

A 1909 recording of "Yama Yama Man" by Ada Jones is available for streaming or download at the Internet Archive.  The very informative Wikipedia page on "Yama Yama Man" also notes that in the 1949 film Look for the Silver Lining, the song becomes a sort of musical-performance equivalent of a matroyshka doll: "June Haver plays Marilyn Miller imitating Ginger Rogers imitating Irene Foote imitating Bessie McCoy's performance".

"I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now" also originated in a musical, in 1909, and became wildly popular.  There are many, many recordings of the tune, though finding one played at dance tempo without artistic pauses may be a challenge.  It was the title piece for a a 1947 movie-musical biography of its composer, Joseph Howard.  By odd coincidence, that film starred none other than June Haver, presumably not performing "Yama Yama Man"!

I suspect that with a little digging it would be possible to recreate the entire musical program of this ball, though I doubt I could get current WHHS students to cooperate in the dancing.

Here's a full set of images of this dance card, for Yuriy the curious.  Click to enlarge.

Comments

[bodhi]

Very interesting.

In this program there is no sequences. In 1910... Not populair?

[Susan de Guardiola]

As far as I can tell, not very popular in this area of the USA. I think the only ones I have ever seen on a New England (northeastern USA) dance card are the Danish Dance and the Berlin, back in the 19th century.

Outside of New England, the Bon Ton in Middletown, New York, and the Rye Waltz in Las Vegas, Nevada, but both are 1890s. I do not have enough dance cards from other regions to draw conclusions about this.

There are sometimes dances like the Caprice, Knickerbocker, Varsovienne, etc., on New England cards from the 19th century, but those are not sequence dances in the same sense.

[bodhi]

Thank you, Susan!