Shim Sham dance tutorial

Want to get moving? Here's Krissy showing you how to dance a solo jazz routine called the Shim Sham.

The Shim Sham started out as a tap routine choreographed by Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant in the late 1920s.  By the 1930s it was being performed at venues all over Harlem, often as the finale of the show, with dancers, singers, and musicians all joining in.

Why do I know it as a swing dancer? In the 1930s a group of dancers at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem (the only integrated ballroom in New York, that's a story of its own) picked it up and would sometimes dance it off on the sidelines of the ballroom.  This is notable because this is the same group that famously developed the Lindy Hop, which is one of the most well-known forms of swing dancing today.

Fast forward to the 1980s, one of those dancers, Frankie Manning, expanded the original dance into the form that I will teach you, and began teaching it to the swing dancing community in earnest.  Nowadays it's done all over the globe.

The song I dance it to here is Tuxedo Junction, performed by Erskine Hawkins.