Marshall Stearns trusts the story of Shorty George Snowden for the naming of the Lindy. "On June 17, 1928 there was a big dance at the Manhattan Casino (a huge ballroom in NYC). The motive was a new fad:...... Dance Marathons ".
One of the dancers was still on the dance floor when the case was closed by the Board of Health. His name was George "Shorty" Snowden. During one of the short races among the remaining couples, Snowden decided to create a 'breakaway': he swung his partner away and improvise himself a pair of solo steps. In the monotony of the marathon, the effect was "electric", and even the musicians came to life. Shorty had started something new.
At one point, Fox News Movietone came to capture the marathon, and they decided to make of Shorty's feet a close-up view. The general impression was that Shorty was gaga, and his dancing confused. "What do you do with your feet," asked the interviewer, and Shorty, without stopping, replied: "The Lindy." Some sources say that he saw lying an article on the front page in a newspaper. "Lindy hops the ocean" (But that did Lindbergh in 1926....)
Others refer to the flying speed of the dance, where the feet should barely touch the ground ...
In 1926, the Savoy Ballroom opened in Harlem in New York with the famous band of Fletcher Henderson. The dancers combined soon the Foxtrot, Charleston, Black Bottom, and then several popular dances with animal names to fit a new dance with the Jazz music. This dance was soon known as the Lindy Hop (Sadi , 1980, 11/5), named after Charles Lindbergh, who as first made a solo nonstop transatlantic flight that year. The name could be selected because the dancers seemed to fly spending more time in the air but to stand on the floor. In 1934, the dance was described at the Savoy in Harlem by Cab Calloway as "the frenzy of jittering bugs" (scratchy critters) so it quickly became known as the Jitterbug ( Burchfield, 1976, II/425).
According to Frank Werber, a former member of Whitey 's Lindy Hoppers, a group that toured around the world in the 40s, and danced at countless venues and in films, was Jitterbug a down -looking and ridiculing term with which blacks described how whites tried to dance the Lindy. They called the white dancers jitter bugs .
Frank Manning of Whitey 's Lindy Hoppers said, "Lindy and swing are the same. Jitterbug is of the '40 's there. It is faster and jumpier . It was white, like rock and roll was the white version of rhythm and blues. Lindy is softer and smoother. Jitterbug (nerve’s) does not necessarily leaps."
According to Ray Walker, the term Jitterbug carries a stigma. The term was used for people with symptoms of syphilis, itching, chills and uncontrolled twitching. They could therefore not dance monitored. So the name came along. We were Jitterbugs and we accepted the title with grace and tolerant humor. The general public did not. Because our dance was completely new to the public, and so different from anything they had ever seen on the dance floor, we were considered a wild, undisciplined, vulgar mob, overly obsessed with sex (which is not necessarily bad for my view), and with a total lack of manners and morals. That was the general opinion about the swing dancers in the late 1930s, big band music began to dominate, and Jitterbugging was the only kind of dance that was able to participate in this new and exciting music. So we became less and less vilified with the passing of the years. In the 1950's, we refer to ourselves as swing dancers, and the term "Jitterbug" was only occasionally heard."
( What's new? "The youth of today .... " )