October 29, 1923: The Birth of the Charleston

October 29, 1923: The musical Runnin' Wild premieres at the Colonial Theatre in New York, with a tune by James P. Johnson: "Charleston." It inspires the dance of the same name, which becomes every bit as synonymous with "The Roaring Twenties" as the jazz music that inspired it.

Runnin’ Wild was a two-act musical comedy taking place in Jimtown and St. Paul, Minnesota, about the adventures of two likable scamps played by F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The feature tune of the show was "Old Fashioned Love." But what would now be called the "breakout" song was "Charleston," along with its accompanying dance. The show ran through June 28, 1924, but the dance outlived it.

The kicks, and the crossing of the hands on the knees, became an absolute craze. Josephine Baker, the black American entertainer who was even bigger in Europe than at home, became identified with it.

Josephine Baker

The dance caught on with white American audiences when Bessie Love did it in the 1925 film The King on Main Street, and got another boost in 1926 in when she did it in The Song and Dance Man. The 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, with a scene set in 1929, featured a Charleston contest. In the 1980s, when impersonating the film's star, James Stewart, on Saturday Night Live, Dana Carvey would do the Charleston.

The 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain, set in 1927, includes a demonstration of the dance. So does the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, set in the Summer of 1922 -- an anachronism, because that was over a year before the dance's Broadway debut. But that film, and It's a Wonderful Life and Singin' in the Rain, helped to cement the Charleston in the public memory as the dance of the Jazz Age.

The Colonial Theatre was on Broadway at 62nd Street. It hosted black-produced, black-starring entertainment from 1905 to 1925. It was bought, renamed Hampden's Theatre, and became a whites-only theater. In 1932, it became the RKO Colonial Theatre, and a movie house only. In 1951, NBC bought it, and used it as a TV studio until 1971. It became the Harkness Theatre in 1974, showing live entertainment again, but closed in 1977, and was then torn down. A new movie theatre, Lincoln Plaza, opened on the site.

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October 29, 1923 was a Monday. The baseball season had ended 13 days earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the New York Giants in the World Series. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And the NHL season was several weeks away. So there were no scores on this historic day.