Headlines, North America

/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE: Swinging Seniors Step Into People’s Hall of Fame

Rebecca Kessler

NEW YORK, Nov 9 2004 (IPS) - The Swinging Seniors of Harlem are keeping the shim-sham shimmy and the dance traditions of the jazz age alive.

The group of African-American former chorus girls, ages 82-93, who worked in the jazz clubs of the 1930s, 40s and 50s came together in 1980 for a second twirl in show business. The Swinging Seniors have performed at community centres and schools as well as Radio City Music Hall, and on national television.

The group’s members now include Thelma Prince, Ruby Riley, Ludie Jones, Tempy Fletcher, Eleanor McQueen, Myrtle Hawkins and Juanita Boisseau, all stars of the clubs of New York and beyond in the days of swing.

The Swinging Seniors and Tina Pratt, 69, their unofficial organiser and a dancer herself, are being inducted into the People’s Hall of Fame by City Lore, a New York-based organisation that works to preserve the city’s cultural traditions.

Since 1993, City Lore has honoured, among others, artists, craftspeople, a juggler, jazz musicians, a quilter, preservationists and actors of many nationalities and cultural traditions by inducting them into the Hall of Fame.

Inductees are "ordinary people whose contributions have been extraordinary," and otherwise unrecognised, according to the group’s criteria. They are awarded a "token of esteem," a large bronze cast of a New York City subway token.

"I didn’t realise it was so great. Now as I look back on it, it was quite a bit of history," says Swinging Senior Eleanor McQueen of her dancing career. She has lived in her apartment in Harlem’s Washington Heights – lined with sepia photos and news clippings of smiling beauties from her years on the chorus lines – since 1943, and grew up in the neighbourhood.

McQueen began taking dance lessons at age two at the Grace Giles Studio on 131st and 7th Avenue, where she learned tap, toe, ballet and acrobatics. After graduating from high school in 1941, she and a friend went to West End New Jersey, where she intended to become a waitress at The Plantation jazz club.

The club needed a dancer for their chorus line instead, and McQueen filled the opening, launching her dancing career.

She and her fellow Swinging Seniors danced in the flourishing nightclubs of Harlem and Manhattan, including, she recalled, The Cotton Club, The Apollo, Club Harlem, The Paramount Theatre, Club Zanzibar with its chorus line, the Zanzibeauts, and with the Savannah’s Savannah Peaches. Several of them performed in Broadway theatre productions.

Their dancing careers took the women to the country’s jazz hubs, including on the circuit of the Theatre Owners Booking Association (aka "Tough on Black Actors," for its difficult working conditions) which included clubs in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York.

Jones and Riley also travelled internationally with USO shows, performing for members of the U.S. military during the Second World War.

The Swinging Seniors worked with the legendary entertainers of the jazz and swing era, including Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billy Daniels, Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Moms Mabley.

McQueen singled out Count Basie as an example of what good music meant to the dancers: "When you had him playing your music, he really had you dancing without a doubt."

Like many of the chorus girls, she stopped dancing as the jazz clubs faded. McQueen began a nursing career in 1961, retiring in 1991.

The Swinging Seniors still perform together now and then, when their aging members are healthy enough. At 83, McQueen walks with a cane, but her passion for dance is undiminished.

"I can hardly walk now but if the music strikes up…" she kicks up her feet to an unheard beat, adding, "once a dancer, always a dancer."

According to Steve Zeitlin, a folklorist and the executive director of City Lore, "Culture emerges from the bottom up and not from the top down."

"We live in a world that is very dominated by celebrities," he says explaining the motivation behind the People’s Hall of Fame, adding, "We wanted to create an event that honours people in a different way, and recognise that what makes New York great is not just the celebrated individuals who have become symbols of the city."

Founded in 1986, City Lore has a staff of folklorists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists. This year the group will also begin recognising places of local significance city-wide, such as bookstores, vistas, parks, record stores and movie theatres, through its "Place Matters" programme.

Pratt of the Swinging Seniors said being recognised by the Hall of Fame feels great: "I’m elated! I’m really elated!"

This year’s other inductees include Aurelia Fernandez and Margarita Larios, honoured for their efforts to preserve and promote their native Mexican culture.

As members of Mano a Mano, part of the Centre for Traditional Music and Dance, they have been holding Mexican folk-art and culinary workshops at libraries, museums and schools throughout the New York region and organising traditional dances and celebrations for more than 10 years.

The pair helped organise and participated in the annual Halloween Parade, Day of the Dead festivities and Mexican holidays and celebrations such as las Posadas.

The Hall of Fame is also honouring Reverend Deacon Edgar W Hooper for his work at St Augustine’s Church on New York’s Lower East Side, where he has laboured to restore, preserve and interpret the "slave galleries," cramped rooms where African Americans were made to sit during church services in the 19th century.

St. Augustine’s now has the largest African-American congregation on the Lower East Side.

Terry Marone and the Actors’ Equity Association Committee on Chorus Affairs will be inducted for keeping alive the tradition of the Gypsy Robe, which is bestowed on a Broadway chorus member during a production’s opening night.

The robe is elaborately embellished with mementos from the show and passed on at each opening night in an elaborate good luck ritual that dates to 1950.

"Mosaic Man" Jim Power has been creating mosaics from broken dishes and tiles on lampposts, walls and birdhouses throughout the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village for 20 years, and will also be inducted into the People’s Hall of Fame.