The couple stood in front of the counter. “Are you Frankie Manning, the dancer?”
“No sir,” he said. “I’m Frankie Manning, the postman.”
There’s not many people who have their best years twice. After working for three decades in a New York City post office, Frankie Manning could be sure the world had forgotten about him. And it had, except for the two people standing in front of him asking if he could teach them to dance. Little did he know the last years of his life would be spent ushering in the worldwide revival of the lindy hop, a style of West Coast swing he helped pioneer 50 years earlier.
A mixture of jazz, tap, breakaway and Charleston, the lindy hop contains both individual and solo elements, and was especially popular among the African-American communities. It combined the improvisation of black dancing with the eight-count structure often found in European dances. It’s a social dance, meaning it is meant for the masses to enjoy rather than a select few who might have the skills to perform it. It’s often danced to music by jazz artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and Count Basie.
As a child in the 1920s, Frankie’s mother sent him to his grandparents’ farm in South Carolina. On Saturdays, the hired hands and locals all gathered on the farm to play music with harmonicas and washtub basses. Frankie’s grandmother encouraged him to dance with the weekly crowd. Living in Harlem, Frankie’s mother would later bring him to rent parties, where black tenants booked bands and passed the hat in order to raise money for food and accommodation. These neighborhood parties were where jazz music and swing dance developed together through sometimes informal experimentation. After attending these parties, Manning would go home and practice dancing in his room with a chair or broom as a partner.
When he got older, Manning went to the Savoy every evening, the only integrated ballroom in New York. He eventually became a dancer on “Kat’s Corner,” the part of the floor where exhibitions and competitions were held. In 1935, he stunned the crowd in a dance competition against George Snowden, the inventor of the term “lindy hop.” With his partner Frieda Washington, Manning performed a “back-to-back roll,” which was the first aerial move in swing dancing. Soon after, he joined Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a professional tour group that traveled around the world and starred in several films. Manning was the group’s unofficial choreographer.
Then, however, World War II started. Many of the male dancers, including Manning, joined the armed services. By the time the war was over, swing dancing had been forgotten. Rock ’n’ roll had taken over, and no one danced the lindy hop any more. Needing to support his family, Manning took a job in the post office, where he worked for the next 30 years.
In 1982, a former member of the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers had started to teach the dance to a group of students. Before he died three years later, he mentioned to his students that there was one other member still living in New York. Two students sought out Frankie Manning and asked him to teach them, after which they returned to California to spread the dance along the west coast of the U.S. That same year, Manning was asked to work with a group in Sweden. Many of his students in turn taught the lindy hop to others. Before long, the lindy hop revival of the 1980s was in full swing, taking Manning around the world to teach and dance in the same way he had in the 1930s.
Frankie Manning, having put in 30 years for the United States Post Office, eventually had one of the most productive late-stage careers ever. At the age of 75, he won a Tony Award for choreographing the musical Black and Blue and, in his late 80s, was a recipient of the U.S.’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts: a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was inducted into the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame the year he died. On his birthdays, Frankie Manning danced with one woman for every year of his life. He did that until his 94th birthday, which was his last.
Frankie Manning is known as the ambassador of lindy hop, for without him the dance may very well be extinct. Dance rooms around the world celebrate his birthday, April 27, as International Lindy Hop Day. Having lived through many changes in the U.S., he thought the world would be a better place if everyone danced. He spent his life trying to make that possible, and the Frankie Manning Foundation continues that work in his memory.
Not a bad legacy for a postman.
Ryan Dennis is the author of The Beasts They Turned Away, a novel set on a dairy farm. His website is Ryan Dennis.
