Aida Overton Walker and the cakewalk’s broad cultural appeal

Aida Overton Walker became famous for popularizing the cakewalk. What kind of dance was it, and why did her version succeed? Those are the questions to keep open. Being told that a performer was acclaimed doesn't yet explain what she accomplished.

The dance existed before Walker. African Americans developed it before the Civil War, drawing on West African ceremonial dances and preserving cultural connections within slavery. Gliding steps and improvisation are examples of features it retained. We don't need to memorize every movement, but we should distinguish the dance's origins from Walker's later work with it.

The second paragraph adds another ingredient: European dance forms. Instead of the large groups and separate-sex dancing described as African features, the cakewalk developed a high-kicking procession of couples. This wasn't simply respectful borrowing. Enslaved people used exaggerated walks to mock the dances and self-important manners of slave owners.

Here's the irony: features introduced to make fun of European Americans later helped the dance appeal to European Americans. The borrowed elements could attract the very audience associated with the original target. The purpose of adding a feature and its eventual effect on an audience needn't be the same.

Then the parody runs in the other direction. European American stage performers parody the cakewalk, and their versions help shape its further development. We now have a dance drawing from African traditions, satirizing European behavior, and then changing through European American parodies of it. That's the layering described as “mimetic vertigo.” The phrase names this complicated history; it isn't a new step Walker invented.

Why spend so much time on that history? The third paragraph explains that the mixture helped the dance reach a broad audience. Turn-of-the-century society was changing through industry, cities, immigration, and social mobility. An art form needed to be many things to many people. The cakewalk's complexity helped it meet that challenge.

Now we return to Walker. Her success depended on addressing different, sometimes conflicting expectations within her interpretation of the dance. Let's keep the three audiences and their reasons separate.

Middle-class African Americans often found the cakewalk disreputable, especially given the parodies circulating at the time. Walker won them over by refining it and emphasizing its fundamental grace. She highlighted a quality the dance already had, rather than simply telling this audience to enjoy being mocked.

Middle- and upper-class European Americans were unsettled by rapid cultural change. They valued art they considered authentic as a source of stability. Walker appealed to them through a version widely acclaimed as especially authentic. That's the audience's perception of authenticity; it doesn't establish that she restored an untouched original dance.

Newly rich industrialists and financiers wanted something else. Its grand flourishes helped them celebrate their new social rank. The same dance could offer grace to one audience, authenticity to another, and a display of status to another.

My first main-point prediction is that Walker succeeded because she made the cakewalk appeal to different groups. But that alone leaves out much of what we just read. The dance's complex origins and layers of parody helped make that broad appeal possible. Walker capitalized on those possibilities; she didn't create the dance from nothing or undo its mixture of influences.