Book Reviewed: Everybody's Doin' It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 by Dale Cockrell

Boogie Nights: Domestic Revolution in 19th century New York Author Dale Cockrell focuses on music and popular dance forms to narrate the social history of Manhattan in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century. It is a historical study of popular music and dance that identifies a connection between uninhibited sex and dancing which included gay sex, orgies, and interracial sex. These were widely promoted in Manhattan bars, brothels, and dance halls where sale of sex for cash was endemic. Social dancing was one of the ways that sex and music were linked. This book looks at race, class, popular culture, and sexuality, which includes the centrality of African-American musical culture, the sexual attitudes and behavior of working-class Americans, and the anti-vice crusaders like Anthony Comstock, Rev. Charles Parkhurst, and others who paved the way for urban Anti-Vice Commissions of the early twentieth-century that targeted these gathering places that facilitated inter-racial socializing which were believed to be inherently immoral. When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, he visited several bars in the Five Points area of Manhattan, just east of today’s Centre Street & north of Worth Street, a neighborhood which at the time had both large black and Irish populations. Tap dancing was invented here by combining Irish step-dancing and African rhythmic patterns. Another account of musical life by journalist George Goodrich Foster gives an even more vivid picture of the musical and sexual atmosphere. The author tries to correlate these anecdotes to illustrate how musical exuberance, dancing and sexual acts occurred. The 1987 movie Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey exploited a cultural banality of people’s feeling about dancing and sex. Boogie Nights, the 1997 film about a young nightclub dishwasher who becomes a porn star ties the cultural myth about dancing halls and sex. The Argentine tango, a musical genre and accompanying social dance originating at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires around the same time as the emergence of ragtime in New York. The author points out that ragtime, a new musical, and dance form was composed by black musicians, to be played in dance halls and brothels was rarely written down but it is the first identifiable style of jazz. Many of these places were multi-racial venues, known also as “black and tans” which the vice crusaders campaigned against. This devastated the City’s nightlife and undermined many of its musical venues. It targeted black-run clubs to racially divide the social life. Everybody’s Doin’ It is a follow-up from Cockrell’s previous book, Demons of Disorder. This book integrates the history of working-class culture and openness of sexuality in New York. The author is musicologist and not a social historian. He traces the birth of jazz music in the dance halls and dives of New York City, but the book chapters do not flow well from one to another, and images and illustrations shown in this book has white folks in the dance hall and never shows a mixed gatherings of blacks and whites.