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Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965

The chapter in this book on vernacular dance grew out of my aim to contribute to fields beyond those of radio studies and popular music studies in which I had established myself. Although the analyses build firmly on work I had published in 2006 on dancing and music culture on the Northern Soul scene, my objective was to make a distinctive contribution to the emerging, and long neglected, area of vernacular dance by integrating approaches developed within media and cultural studies. The records at the heart of the British Northern Soul culture were produced during this historically-specific and often neglected moment in US cultural history. While there had been some work on television dance parties of the late 1950s and early 1960s by the book editor, the so-called ‘fad dances’ and the associated pop music on which they are built are treated as trivial forms within cultural history, popular music studies and analyses of vernacular dance. My analysis draws upon a reinterpretation of the bi-racial pop music of the time, a theorisation of ‘fads’ as culturally important in terms of late ’50s and early ’60s ideas of modernism and the transmission of black culture to white teenagers in the US, and a revision of the widely held contention that dances of this time represented a significant shift to individual, rather than collective, dance. By combining analysis of dance movement, an understanding of the changing structures of US radio and television at the time, and the context of US youth culture during the time of the civil rights movement, my objective was to open up the way ‘fad dances’ were represented and understood.