Bodies Across the Sea: Circulating Popular Music and Dance at the Turn of the 20th Century

Drawn from my current book project on ragtime culture c. 1890-1920, this research presentation explores the transatlantic U.S./U.K. exchanges of popular music and dance in the long 19th century. I pay particular attention to the touring activities of composer-conductors John Philip Sousa and Will Marion Cook in the early years of the new century and their shared promotion of the cakewalk and its syncopated music. Additional later case studies include British dancers George Grossmith and Vernon Castle, and their transnational circulations of the tango and one-step which likewise drew on the meanings and power of syncopation. Together these performer-composers allow for an engagement with and understanding of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy and its continuation in popular music and dance repertories of the late 19th-century and 20th-century. These four individuals likewise reveal the contingencies and complications of transnational identities and the meanings and uses of “popular” culture.

Susan C. Cook is the Pamela O. Hamel/Music Board of Advisors Director and professor of musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her teaching and research focus on contemporary and American musics of all kinds and demonstrate her commitment to feminist methodologies and interdisciplinary cultural criticism. The author of Opera for a New Republic, she has co-edited 2 volumes of essays, Cecilia Reclaimed and Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Music and Dance, the latter in collaboration with dance historian Sherril Dodds. She has published essays in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Teaching Music History and The Arts of the Prima Donna. Her essay “Watching Our Step: Embodying Research, Telling Stories,” on the gendered and racialized meanings of ragtime social dance won the Lippincott Prize from the Society for Dance History Scholars. Through the Fulbright Senior Distinguished Professor program she held the Walt Whitman Chair in American Culture at Radboud University (Nijmegen NE). Her current research focuses on the local and transnational practices of ragtime dance and musical culture before the Great War.