Written and copyright by Harri Heinila
First, a note about George Snowden’s birthday. Mike Thibault approached me regarding the correct date of birth. According to the “Certificate of and Record of Birth” from the NYC Municipal Archives, George Hughes Ellsworth Snowden was born on July 5, 1904. The place of birth was in Lower East Side, which is similar to what Snowden told Marshall Stearns in 1959. I confirmed the certificate from the NYC Municipal Archives. Therefore, it seems that we should celebrate George Snowden on July 5. However, we can assume that Snowden wanted to be celebrated on July 4 when he mentioned his date of birth to Stearns. Thus, now in 2020 and later, we can celebrate him on both July 4 and 5. In addition, it has been 92 years since the Manhattan Casino / Rockland Palace dance marathon was ended by health officials on July 4, 1928. George Snowden and Mattie Purnell were among the four couples who survived until the end of the marathon. As they also devised the Harlem Lindy Hop in the dance marathon, there are reasons for the July 4 as the date for the celebration.
Second, an update to George Snowden and Mattie Purnell’s role in the beginning of the Lindy Hop. How Snowden and Purnell created the Lindy Hop and what was their alleged role in the naming of the dance was discussed in my doctoral dissertation, “An Endeavor by Harlem Dancers to Achieve Equality : The Recognition of the Harlem-Based African-American Jazz Dance Between 1921 and 1943”. In the dissertation, see the chapter, ‘4.1 The Savoy Lindy Hoppers’ First Generation: George Snowden – The Unsung Hero’. You can find it at
In one of my articles, I also discussed the relation between the Harlem Lindy Hop and the ‘lindy hop’ dances prior to the Harlem creation. The article can be found at
Also, the late jazz dance historian Terry Monaghan discussed the beginning of the Lindy Hop in his George Snowden article that you can find at
http://jassdancer.blogspot.com/2012/10/shorty-george-snowden.html
In my dissertation, I quoted the New York Amsterdam News article from August 8, 1928, which reports on a show in which George Snowden and Mattie Purnell performed after the dance marathon. The article says that
One dance number in the show deserves special mention. It is called “Walk That Broad.” The number is [led] by George Snowden and Mattie Purnell…This clever pair were forced to respond many encores for “Walk That Broad” and for their “Lindbergh Hop”.
In my analysis, I wrote that this implies the “Lindy Hop” was not named at the time, and Snowden and Purnell may have called their invention as “Walk That Broad” or they called it “Lindbergh Hop”, and the “Walk That Broad” was a different dance. There is evidence for the fact that Snowden and Purnell did not name their invention in the dance marathon as the “Lindbergh Hop” or with any other name, and the invention was actually named later as the “Walk That Broad” that was renamed as the “Lindy Hop” by September 1928. You can read more about my conclusions in my dissertation on pages 139-141. In addition to the evidence, also an article in the Tattler on August 10, 1928 states that
[George Snowden and Mattie Purnell]…gave their interpretation of the “Lindbergh Hop” and how. But they stopped the show Monday afternoon with a dance called “Walk That Broad”, a fantastic conglomeration of steps of their own creation.
This gives more support to the claim that the “Walk That Broad” was actually the “Lindy Hop” Snowden and Purnell created in the dance marathon between June and July 1928, but they did not name the creation in the dance marathon. The naming of the dance as the “Lindy Hop” took place at the time when their dance was mentioned for the first time in public on September 12, 1928.
I quote in my dissertation (see its page 141) also another The New York Amsterdam News article from the time of the dance marathon, in which it is stated
[Snowden and Purnell[ have a little specialty dance of their own which they mix up with the ‘Lindbergh Hop’ and feature during practically every dance period, especially in the evenings.
So, all this combined to the analysis in my doctoral dissertation strongly suggest that the “Walk That Broad” was their unnamed invention in the dance marathon, which was named afterwards as the “Walk That Broad”, and it was renamed as the “Lindy Hop” by September 1928. This is also a conclusion Terry Monaghan did in his aforementioned article, but there are no footnotes in his article, so we cannot ascertain his sources and how he ended up with the conclusion. However, this is how Terry stated in his Snowden article:
Following the marathon, Snowden and Purnell apparently were considering calling their dance innovation Walk That Broad. By September though Snowden had rechristened it The Lindy Hop when appearing in Harlem’s Lincoln Theatre, with a new partner, Pauline Morse.
Later, Terry corrected this statement in a discussion that took place on the Yehoodi.com. He said that we do not know whether it was Snowden or someone else who renamed the “Walk That Broad” as the Lindy Hop for the Lincoln Theatre event. The Yehoodi.com has deleted the discussion, so it is no more available in public. However, I have a copy of the discussion.
Despite the evidence piles up for supporting the Harlem Lindy Hop as George Snowden and Mattie Purnell’s creation, and the lack of evidence for they named the dance with any name in the dance marathon, there still are many of those who insist that George Snowden named the Lindy Hop in the dance marathon, and the Harlem Lindy Hop was created prior to the dance marathon by unknown Harlemites who possibly were from the Savoy Ballroom or they were white dancers outside Harlem. No one has presented any convincing evidence for these claims. There are “historians” who have pushed these unproven claims, and who, for some reason, have been very silent regarding my and Terry’s conclusions. Instead of substantiating their claims with a reasoning that is based on an adequate analysis of the earlier research and on using sufficient sources, they have rather pushed their misinformation. Therefore, the confusion about who created and named the Harlem Lindy Hop has continued, and loads of misleading statements, particularly regarding Snowden’s role in the naming of the dance in the dance marathon, circulates on the Internet. As my and Terry’s research on the Lindy Hop has been available for free to anybody who is interested in it, there is no excuse for ignoring our input in the issue. Real researchers and historians build on the earlier research, in addition to sufficient sources, and are able to make appropriate corrections with explanations why those corrections are needed.
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