- BluesDancers just naturally like to move around to the blues, which is good. Blues music is packed with mood & style & attitude, and it's a total hoot to get into that, slinkin' and slouchin' and oozin' round the floor. But blues also has intricate rhythm and finesse. The music provides a rich, intricate structure, which seems to pass a lot of folks by, beyond them finding a basic beat to do their thing to. I'm here to tell you that if you really tune into that rhythm & structure, blues dancing is even more fun, and new possibilities get opened up to you. We think blues dancing should express the intricate rhythms of blues just as much as the mood & style.
There's no such thing as "the" rhythm of the blues. The rhythms of blues music vary greatly from region to region, artist to artist, song to song, sometimes within a single song. No single type of blues dance could possibly fit such a wide array of musical styles and rhythms. We teach four different blues dances that give you plenty of options for dancing to all kinds of blues - what we play and what you'll hear if you go to live blues events.
Traveling blues
We've taught traveling blues since the beginning of Waltz etcetera. We used
to call this dance one-step, but what we do has very little in common with the
perky bright-eyed vintage dance called one-step; traveling blues is a better
name. Traveling blues slinks, slides, and oozes around the dance floor with
style and panache. You cover ground, sure, but there's nothing perky about it.
The simplicity of traveling blues makes for limitless possibilities for play,
improvisation, and style. This dance calls out to you to make it your own.
Blues cha-cha
Music that fits traveling blues also fits the bluesy version of cha-cha we've
developed over the years. Blues cha-cha incorporates all the great styling of
traveling blues then adds in Latin spice. Once you get a good sense of both
traveling blues and blues cha-cha you'll find you can go from one to the other
with ease and aplomb, never missing a beat. It's just a matter of counting to
eight (blues is almost always a matter of counting to eight).
Blues foxtrot
Slower blues tunes call out for different kinds of steps. Blues foxtrot is a
step created just for slow blues that lets you move around the floor to slower,
sultrier blues music that's too slow for regular traveling blues. It's a traveling
two-step that's based on the waltz rhythm hidden in our favorite blues tunes
(see below).
Blues rumba
Those same slow & sultry blues tunes are also perfect for blues rumba, a
non-traveling dance that's the most playful and expressive of all the blues
dances. Going from blues foxtrot to blues rumba and back again in the same song
works like magic once you've got your feet moving to that inner waltz rhythm.
So without further ado:
As we listened more closely to our favorite blues tunes, we discovered that these tunes have waltz hidden deep inside 'em; they have a triple meter, what music geeks call a compound meter. If you listen close, you can hear that the underlying beat isn't "one-two" or "one-two-three-four" but a fast "one-two-three, one-two-three." It's easier to hear in slower tunes, but it's there in most of the blues music we love. If you try waltzing to that triple beat, you'll look (and hopefully feel) flat-out ridiculous: you're frantically spinning around like a top, and the music is slinking and slouching, just easing along in a sweet funky groove. There are exceptions, of course: some of our favorite "waltzes" are actually triple-meter blues tunes slow enough to waltz to. Is it blues? Is it waltz? Sure! Who cares? Let's dance!
What we've done is to create and adapt steps that acknowledge the compound rhythm, and then use it rather than ignoring it. We play with it! Lots of these tunes have traditionally been danced three-to-one: take one step for 123, take another step for 456, for a step pattern of slowww, slowww, slowww, slowww. That's what the more musical among us were doing back at the sock hop, when they played The End of the World or some other slow dance at the end of the evening, and you clutched your honey and the two of you rocked back and forth from one foot to the other. Almost all those great old slow dance songs are blues tunes and ballads in this kind of rhythm, by the way. And there's nothing wrong with dancing like that! But that step doesn't really use the triple beat, it doesn't play with the rhythm. Plus that kinda dancing limits partner choices for some dancers, eh?
Anyway, we played, experimented, and came up with rhythm patterns intuitively, just trying to fit our dancing to the music. Turns out the phrasing patterns we came up with - patterns of combining, separating, and emphasizing beats - are the same ones used by blues and jazz drummers and bassmen when playing this music. Without realizing we were doing it, we naturally adopted the phrasing of the rhythm section for our dance steps. So these steps are truly born out of this music, and fit with it seamlessly.
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