Blue Moon Swing annual Soul dance returns! Once the kiddies are sugared up and done with Halloween, it’s time for you to celebrate with your own feet. This month at Blue Moon Swing: celebrate All Soul’s Day with a Soul-dominated evening of swing dancing. Thursday, November 1st. Location: Rusty’s, 405 E 7th Street (@ Trinity), downtown Austin.
What the heck is Soul anyway? More on that at the end of this post.
What’s New This Month?
It wouldn’t be an All Soul’s Day dance without an angel to look over us. And we’ve got one of the biggies. He may keep his wings under wraps, and have a bit of a Devil-may-care look, but Angel Figueroa will be joining us, as patron saint of your …. soles. Dance starts at 7.30 for casual warm-up, with a beginner lesson with Angel at 8.00 and open social dancing as long as someone is on the floor.
As always, everything is on me, except your bar tab. Please consider buying a few drinks so that the establishment loves us. Under 21 welcome accompanied by a supervising adult.
What Is Soul?
Soul music is a combination of R&B and gospel sounds that began in Memphis in the late 50s. It’s different from R&B due to Soul’s greater emphasis on vocalists and its merging of religious and secular themes. This merging united Blues, a musical style that celebrated human sexual desire, with Gospel, oriented toward spiritual inspiration, to create Soul which tends to tell stories of human romantic love.
Why does this matter to dancers? Well, Soul marks the beginnings of a musical movement that lead directly to what we differentiate today as Lindy versus West Coast Swing. To a Westie, Soul feels like “classic swing” and is a blast to dance to — and anything earlier sounds too early to feel very west coast-ish. To a Lindy hopper, Soul feels more like “groove lindy” and is also a blast to dance to — and anything later sounds too contemporary to feel very lindy-ish. Of course, back then it was all just “swing”, but Soul is where we retrospectively look back and say “aha! here is where the two paths started to diverge!”. Without Soul, everyone reading this might otherwise just be out bowling.
Soul eventually dominated the non-Rock’n’Roll music scene in the 1960’s and led to movements such as Neo-Soul, and Funk. But Soul itself never really went away. For fun: try listening to early recordings of Sam Cooke (“the man who invented Soul”), Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown from the 50’s and 60’s and then immediately put on a song by contemporary artists like Mary J. Blige, Anthony Hamilton, Joss Stone, or Raphael Saadiq. The strong similarities will jump out at you.