Shimmy On Down! The Polish Origins of a Classic Dance Move

cabaret-tom-moore-gilda-grey-1927-photo-lmpc-gettyimages-1137076093.jpg, default, Tom Moore and Gilda Grey, 1927, photo: LMPC / Getty Images, Shimmy On Down! The Polish Origins of a Classic Dance Move

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In the first two decades of the 1900s, a new swinging, scintillating dance style began to take America by storm. Popularised in songs, on stages and in films during the era, and arousing widespread interest – as well as controversy – the shimmy, as the dance became known, is now one of the most recognisable symbols of the Roaring Twenties.

What’s more, of the many legends about the origin of the dance, one of the most famous has a Polish American dancer named Gilda Gray at its heart.

From Poland to Hollywood

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Picture of Europe for July 1772, anonymous British print, photo: British Museum

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The beginning of this story is, in fact, one of migration – and it goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Polish lands had been partitioned and divided up amongst the neighbouring Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires.

Since the partitions (in the 1700s), significant waves of emigration had scattered the Polish diaspora across the world. Notable Polish communities were established in England, France, Germany and Switzerland, and they grew after attempted uprisings in 1830-1, 1848 and 1864. By the turn of the century, many Polish families were leaving their homelands to find new lives in the West.

And, for hundreds of thousands of Poles at the time, the United States also became a new home.

The exact number of Poles who settled in America between the 19th and 20th centuries is unknown: according to an Immigrant Commission report from 1911, many Polish emigrants were listed as Russian, Austrian or German, with other emigrants incorrectly classed as Polish. Nevertheless, the report notes significant numbers of Polish emigrants in both urban and rural areas:

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The census returns for 1900 give a total of 687,671 persons one or both of whose parents were born in Poland. This would mean, according to [Waclaw] Kruczka’s method of calculation, a Polish population of more than 1,720,000 (first and second generations) in 1900.

As Rosemary Wallner notes, many early Poles who emigrated had limited skills or education, with several travelling out of Polish lands by horse-drawn cart. Dominic A. Pacyga also notes that later, there were fiery ‘disputes over what it meant to be a Pole in America’ – disagreements which had ‘roots […] in the historical social structure of the multi-ethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’.

But many Poles also began to have a significant impact on cultural life in America. And by the turn of the 20th century, a veritable roster of Polish-American émigré stars was taking stages and screens by storm. They included Polish Shakespearian star Helena Modjeska; director and actor Richard Boleslawski – one of the first proponents of method acting (initially called Stanislavski’s system) in the States; and the ‘Vamp of the Silent Screen’ Pola Negri.

Another was Gilda Gray.

Gilda Gray – Golden Girl

Thumbnail — Full-page advertisement promoting Gilda Gray of the Ziegfeld Follies, from ‘Variety’, 15th September 1922, p. 31, photo: Wikimedia Commons / public domain

Zesty, enigmatic, with a coquettish glint in her eye and head of immaculately coiffured blond curls, Gray was the very image of an early 20th-century starlet.But the beginning of her life was vastly different – as well as more tragic – and remains shrouded in some mystery.

According to her birth certificate, Gray was born Marianna Michalska in the small village of Rydlewo – now in central Poland – in 1895, and immigrated to the States with her parents in 1903.

Other sources suggest she was born a few years later, and her parents were killed in a revolution, with Gray later adopted by Maksymilian (Max) and Wanda Michalski (née Kuras), and immigrating to the states with them.

Nonetheless, by the early 1900s, Gray was in America – and in 1909, she entered into a pre-arranged marriage with a concert violinist.

However, with dissatisfaction in her love life, and with a desire to pursue a career in performance, she began singing and dancing under the name Mary, or May, Gray. She travelled to the Polish American heartland of Chicago, and later to New York – where she met singer, vaudeville star, and ‘The Last of the Red Hot Mamas’, Sophie Tucker.

Incidentally, Tucker had also immigrated to the States from Eastern Europe, with her Jewish family leaving the town of Tulchyn for America in 1887. Tucker, born Sofia Kalish, began to support Gray’s burgeoning career, and recommended that she change her name to Gilda, with the name allegedly plucked from a character in a magazine. Following Tucker’s support, Gray gave a number of stage performances, including in J. J. Shubert shows. She was eventually hired to perform in the renowned Ziegfeld Follies in 1922 – an extravagant stage show, part-Broadway and part-variety, which was modelled on the Parisian Folies Bergère. The Follies attracted leading performers of the era, including Josephine Baker, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor and Louise Brooks.

On posters for the Follies, she was advertised as ‘Gilda Gray – Golden Girl’, who performed ‘hits on the five senses’ and made audiences ‘dance with her songs – and – sing with her feet’.

The Polish American Shimmy Queen

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1920s dancing, photo: public domain

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But the most significant moment in Gray’s career came around 1919 – when, allegedly, Gray performed the shimmy to American audiences for the first time.

In July, she gave an interview to Variety about the new dance:

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The original shimmy dance has never been properly introduced in New York. I know for I studied the dancing characteristics of the Indians for a long time and they are really responsible for the shimmy which they labeled the ‘Shima Shiwa’. There have been continual efforts on the part of this dancer and that one, with each declaring that his or her version is the ‘original.’ There is no doubt but that the shimmy dance as it was constructed by the American Indians...would have a greater popularity were it done right.

The shimmy was 1920s-style vivacity to a tee. Flirty and exuberant, and all in the shoulders and the hips, it involves the frenetic shaking or gyrating of the upper and lower parts of the body at differing speeds and rhythms.

According to another story, in fact, the name of the shimmy itself came from Gray, who – in her distinctive Polish accent – once described her dancing technique as ‘shaking her chemise’ (or, as she pronounced it, ‘shimee’.)

Gray’s claim has, however, since been disputed, with historians and other contemporary artists noting that other shimmy-inspired songs predated her performances.

In 1917, Spencer Williams wrote a hit entitled Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble; whilst other hits, including I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, and Everybody Shimmies Now (performed by Mae West) were also produced in the period.

In 1969, in an interview with Life magazine, West maintained that she had been the ‘first one to do shimmy dancing on stage’, inspired after watching black dancers in Chicago.

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I did the shimmy on the road in vaudeville, and then I did it on Broadway in a musical called Sometime, by Rudolf Friml. Ed Wynn was in it. Sophie Tucker had seen me in that and she put Gilda Gray in a show of hers doing the shimmy. Gilda Gray did a movie and they billed her that she created the shimmy. And she started telling the story that it was a native dance. And she’s Polish.

Jill Watts notes that West’s more comic version of the shimmy didn’t meet with success in vaudeville:

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[It] was dangerous […it] contained multiple meanings. It thrilled […] but it also mocked that thrill.

Instead, it was yet another star, and West’s rival, Bee Palmer, who was revered for her shimmy, which – as Watts describes – was ‘an exhibition of white female sensuality’. But according to Frank Cullen, Florence Hackman and Donald McNeilly’s Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America, it was the Polish American Gray who particularly:

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became defined by the novelty of the shimmy. Other vaudeville and nightclub stars claimed to have introduced the shimmy […] but they had many other talents to sustain them and dropped the shimmy-sha-wobble, as it was also known, before the novelty could leave them behind.

And – regardless of the true provenance of the dance – Gray certainly played a crucial role in popularising the shimmy in America, and became known as the ‘Shimmy Queen’. Shimmies ran the cabaret circuit, made it to the circus, to dance halls, and to films, gyrating its way into American popular culture.

‘A ripple here, a quiver there, a shudder or two,’ Gray once famously described, ‘and then I shake all the way up from my feet with everything.’

The Arts waxed lyrical, describing her as a ‘remarkable Polish lady who, for shaking herself nightly in Mr. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” of a season or two ago, became at once the highest paid dancer which the theatre ever has known’. And in 1922, Vanity Fair claimed she performed ‘the most expert shimmy in the world’ – whilst also noting that she had ‘momentarily abandoned her Tahitian rhythms for Russian’ in a show at the Rendezvous, performing dances directed by Russian choreographer Michel Fokine.

The shimmy – ‘that improper motion of the body’

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Poster for the film ‘Cabaret’, photo: Wikimedia Commons / public domain

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In many photographs from the era, Gray is pictured in little more than a bodice and sparkly tassels or feathers – typical shimmy garb – pulling suggestive poses and smirking at the audience.

But the titillating overtones of the shimmy didn’t go unnoticed. Ralph G. Giordano writes that whilst Gray received praise for some of her film roles, in a review of The Devil Dancer in January 1928, Time magazine wrote that Gray’s name:

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has always been a synonym for that improper motion of the body, the shimmy […she] is to be seen whirling about in the innocuous curves of the devil dance.

And it wasn’t just Gray who was attacked for the salacious style of the shimmy. The dance itself – with its audacious bodily movements, wild and naughty – was quickly classed as obscene, with local areas and dance halls banning the number, and some performances even becoming the subject of court cases.

Rebecca A. Bryant writes that many of the criticisms levied against the dance were based on its associations ‘with female sexuality’:

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Mae West constructed a seductive stage persona as a woman who abandoned constraining Victorian attitudes toward sexuality, openly flaunted her sensuality, and admitted to enjoying sex. She also shimmied. Gilda Gray cultivated a sensual stage image as well, dancing in revealing, exotic costumes reminiscent of Tahiti, Egypt, and Tibet. The sexy image of the "vamp," or femme fatale, popularized in the 1910s and 1920s by sultry screen actress Theda Bara, became attached to the shimmy.

Noting its associations with another maligned music style, jazz, Bryant adds that even in 1919, the dance had been:

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banned in many U.S. cities, including San Francisco and Cleveland. Restrictions on public dancing in New York City were tightened that year, discouraging patrons from dancing the shimmy in cabarets. In November 1919 the National Association of Dancing Teachers voted that the shimmy was the “most vulgar and dangerous” of all American dances.

Ken Finkel also explains that in Philadelphia, the setting for the song All the Quakers Are Shoulder Shakers (Down in Quaker Town), many locals were appalled by the dance:

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“The insidious thing,” wrote the Inquirer in an article confirming “the shimmy dance has been barred from Philadelphia,” is that “when one dancer starts the whole place must start, until the room rocks with the shimmy dance. It is more insidious than champagne, it is more insidious than drugs.”

In Chicago too, there was a police crackdown on the shimmy. In December 1920, the Brooklyn Daily Times announced that the Dance Caprice dance hall had been raided after reports that a ‘suggestive’ Chicago version of the dance was being performed, turning the hall into a ‘disorderly house’. Later that month, the paper reported that:

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The ‘Chicago Shimmy’ is doomed to go. This is the prophecy made by police and dancing authorities, and as a result thousands of men and women of this borough who have been indulging in that latest shivery terpsichorean fad will have to return to dance less extreme. Is the ‘Chicago Shimmy’, the latest dance sensation, one that can be countenanced either in private or public, and possible for execution without the loss of one’s respect and that of one’s friends, or is it a contortion of the art of dancing, immoral and shocking as claimed by no less authorities than the vice squad of the Police Department, suggestive and improper and a menace as claimed by social hygiene reformers?

According to the website Sandy Brown Jazz, some newspapers ran pieces claiming the health benefits of the shimmy – whilst noting that it had been ‘outlawed as a dance’.

Giordano notes that several magazines of the era also ran criticism of other new dancing styles, including an article in Atlantic Monthly, which protested that flappers ‘trot like foxes, limp like lame ducks, one-step like cripples, and all to the barbaric yawp of strange instruments…’

But, writes Bryant, the shimmy was still

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embraced […] as both an exhibition dance and a social dance. Amateurs performed the shimmy on dance floors in cabarets and dance halls, signaling socially important shifts in American views of female sexual autonomy.

And, in fact, the shimmy also eventually made it to Poland too – a country enamoured with new dancing styles and sexual freedoms. Several shimmy-inspired numbers were composed by famous musicians – such as Jerzy Petersburski – and performed by cabaret lead Zula Pogorzelska, including Czy Pani Mieszka Sama? (Do You Live Alone, Miss?), Nie Namawiaj, Bo Ulegnę (Don’t Persuade Me, or I’ll Give In) and Pod Sukienką (Under Her Dress). The shimmy also merged with another well-known interwar style to create the shimmy-fox.

Gilda Gray’s shimmy success was also mentioned in the Polish press: on 30th May 1928, Kurjer Warszawski penned a short article about one of her latest films, the 1926 Aloma of the South Seas:

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Gilda Gray (actually Marjanna Michalska), who came out of a family of Polish emigrants […] as Queen of Broadway, inventor of ‘Shimmy’, the first star of the ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ cabaret, a favourite of the New York audience. But it was only the cinema that made her known to the world: Gilda’s film debut in Aloma was a great triumph for our compatriot […] Gilda Gray, as ‘Aloma’, captivates with sincerity and a peculiar charm.

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Trans. JB

The future life of the Shimmy Queen

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The Great Ziegfeld, photo: Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images

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And the Polish-American dancer at the heart of the story still went on to have a successful career – although most of her achievements were associated with the glitzy, liberated world of the Roaring Twenties. Throughout the decade, Gray starred in numerous shows and films, including the aforementioned Aloma of the South Seas and The Devil Dancer, and was also immortalised in sensuous ceramic sculptures by Waylande Gregory, who studied her dance style whilst watching her perform in Cleveland – after she refused him a modelling session.

But by the 1930s, as Cullen, Hackman and McNeilly note, Gray’s career was dissipating.

She appeared in one sound film in the 1930s, Rose-Marie, but frequently suffered financial hardship, as well as health concerns.

However, as noted in the Library of Congress World War II Companion, during World War II Gray also formed the Show Girls Unit of Civilian Defense – set up to teach female theatre stars about the correct course of action in a blackout or air raid, and how to support children.

Speaking to The Courier-Journal in 1942, she explained:

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When Hitler sends his Blitz to Broadway […] we’ll be ready. Many show girls speak several languages, others are mothers and know how to handle children. Most of them drive cars. There are plenty of things we can do in an emergency.

She also recalled her own fears after spending a year in London during air raids, saying:

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I never shook in a shimmy […] like I shook in my first air raid.

And during World War II and in the Cold War, she allegedly also supported Polish citizens, raising money for their education and emigration.

Gray died in 1959, aged 64.

Written by Juliette Bretan, Mar 2021

_{Sources: United States Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 22 (1911); 'Shaking Things Up' by Rebecca A. Bryant, in ‘American Music’, 20 (2002); ‘Vaudeville, Old & New’ by Frank Cullen, Florence Hackman, Donald McNeilly (2007);‘Polish Immigrants, 1890-1920’ by Rosemary Wallner (2003); ‘American Warsaw’ by Dominic A. Pacyga (2019); 'The Original Memphis Five' by Ralph Wondraschek; Ken Finkel, 'Censoring Philly Street Dance after the Shimmy Ship had Sailed', in The Philly History Blog; sandybrownjazz.co.uk.}

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