Texas Tommy (dance)

The Texas Tommy is a vigorous social dance for couples that originated in San Francisco in the early twentieth century.

After the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the Barbary Coast, the red-light district of the city, was rebuilt and given new life as a tourist attraction, a place of dance halls, theaters, shops, and restaurants. Dance exhibitions and variety shows designed to attract tourists replaced prostitution as the chief business of the area. Many of the dance crazes that swept America during the 1900s and 1910s originated in this section of San Francisco. The Thalia, the largest and most popular dance hall on the Pacific coast, was the birthplace of the Texas Tommy. ("Tommy" was a slang term for prostitute.)

Around 1910, the Texas Tommy was a hit at a lowlife hot spot called Purcell's, a Negro cabaret, but it became respectable when it was danced at the upscale Fairmont Hotel, the most popular venue for ballroom dancing in San Francisco. Who invented the Texas Tommy is obscure. Most likely the signature moves of the dance were being performed by patrons at Purcell's, and some innovative visitor adapted them for the ballroom floor. Some historians say that Johnny Peters, an African American, developed the Texas Tommy some time before 1910. In any event, after sheet music for "The Texas Tommy Swing" was published on 1 February 1911, the Fairmont's house band frequently played the song for its patrons. It was not long before the Texas Tommy was danced on Broadway, in Ziegfeld Follies of 1911, performed by Vera Maxwell, Harry Watson Jr., and the ensemble. It was also included as a number in Darktown Follies, an all-black musical produced Off-Broadway in 1913. Peters and Ethel Williams, who were masters of the dance, executed it on stage, as they had done regularly at the Fairmont.

Some social dance historians have argued that the Texas Tommy was the first swing dance. The argument is that it was the first social dance using the basic 8-count rhythm of swing dance to include a breakaway step from the closed position of other couple dances of the time. Ethel Williams, who helped to popularize the dance in New York in 1913, described it as a "kick and a hop three times on each foot followed by a slide." The basic steps are followed by a breakaway, an open position that allowed for acrobatics, antics, improvisations, and showing off. Working from an old film of the dance, she also described it as having a basic pattern of "a loose step, hop-kick, step, hop-kick, run, run, run, run" and identified a "useful variation" of four step-kicks that "agrees with the open and improvisational manner that the Texas Tommy was described to have in many of the written references."

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