A century ago, when jazz was all the rage

A CENTURY ago, a craze for jazz dancing began sweeping the world - and Cork did not escape its giddy grip.

Commercial dance halls had started to spring up in the 1920s, and the new jazz scene was an integral part of them.

As far back as December, 1923, Castlehaven Hall was appealing to patrons to ‘Dance!, Dance!, Dance!’ and ‘Come in your thousands’. The names of halls evoked Hollywood glamour: The Pearl and The Crystal in Blarney Street, while the Americano on Mary Street held its inaugural dance on November 10, 1927.

Their owners vied for clientele by boasting of top class facilities, maple floors, offers of transportation, spot-prizes, and booking popular bands.

Dance tutors sprang up, such as Mr F.A. King in Skibbereen, a Queen’s Hall gold medallist - “the only certified professor of dancing south of Dublin”.

At Skibbereen Young Men’s Society annual dance in its town hall on February 14, 1925, publicity centred on the “London Havana Frisco Band of nine instruments… with full jazz effects”, while “the spacious maple dancing floor is undoubtedly one of the best in Munster”. Supper was provided.

The Southern Star in January, 1925, stated: “Ireland seems to be more than ever in the grip of jazz dancing. Dublin has had a surfeit of it and in the most remote parts of Ireland ‘jazzing’ holds the floor.”

It was assumed - perhaps hoped in some quarters - it would be a fleeting phase, but by 1925 jazz dancing almost eclipsed cinema in popularity, and fears were illustrated by a polemic satire in the Longford Leader in 1925

When the devil came to Erin

from his chambers down in hell.

Where the Harrys, and the Bessies,

And the Cromwells, curse and yell:

He tried all the tricks of Satan,

Patrick’s children to ensnare,

But he failed in all his efforts

Till he started jazzing there.

At a leap year event in Skibbereen in 1924, women “danced rings around the eligibles” until the early hours, moving to ‘Moonlight Flits’ and the ‘Blues’. The music was under the direction of local school master Mr J. Daly, a pillar of the community who clearly had no issue in upsetting the Catholic Church.

Skibbereen Cinderella Dance Club offered practice dances in the town hall on Tuesdays and Thursdays, ‘season tickets, Ladies 5s, Gents, 6s - no onlookers allowed’.

One Cork jazz fan wrote: “I have but just returned from an all-night dance, I am still intoxicated with the mirth, music and merriment of last night; I still feel the dazzling beauty and the bewildering brilliancy of the scene.”

Up to 100 couples attended an all-night dance in Macroom on January 20, 1929, under the auspices of the motor drivers’ group. It was claimed: “Those motor drivers have such a way with them, the ladies find them irresistible”.

Light illuminated the venue until midnight and a description is rendered of a Guard Gantly among other patrons singing while the changeover from electric lights to gas lamps was in place.

At the annual dance of Dunmanway Amusements Committee in St Patrick’s Hall in 1929, credit went to “our local Power Station for the artistic manner in which the hall was illuminated and turned into something unimaginable”.

A commentator in the Southern Star that year chronicled the onset of dance season: “Our social scene presents itself through press announcements of innumerable dance dates. The shop windows too proclaim the advent of the slow-mating, sliding season and dainty shoes and dainty dresses direct the footfall movements of the fairer sex.”

Jazz never fizzled out - the annual Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is proof of that.