These accounts describe any slaveowners in attendance as unaware that they were being mocked. The slaves would dress in handed-down finery and comically exaggerate the poised movements of minuets and waltzes. Some secondhand accounts of the cakewalk describe it as a subtle mockery of the formal, mannered dancing practiced by slaveholding whites. The cakewalk was influenced by the ring shout, which survived from the 18th into the 20th century. As a plantation dance Firsthand accounts The fluid and graceful steps of the dance may have given rise to the colloquialism that something accomplished with ease is a "cakewalk". At that point, Broadway shows featuring women began to include cakewalks, and grotesque dances became very popular across the country. It was originally a processional partner dance danced with comical formality, and may have developed as a subtle mockery of the mannered dances of white slaveholders.įollowing an exhibition of the cakewalk at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the cakewalk was adopted by performers in minstrel shows, where it was danced exclusively by men until the 1890s. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around". The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on Black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern United States. 1915 sheet music cover (late for cakewalk music): "Ebony Echoes: A Good Old-Fashioned Cake-Walk" by Dan Walker.
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