Struttin' / Fishtail

Struttin' and the fishtail sit together as the display end of the blues repertoire, where the dancer's own body is the instrument rather than the couple's shared axis. The Spurlock Museum places Struttin' in Memphis in the 1940s and 1950s, danced to faster Delta blues in an inward-leaning embrace that opens enough space between partners for syncopated footwork. Its ballroom cousin, the Strut, is associated with New Orleans jazz-blues and keeps the close hold while adding a rolling, showy motion through the upper torso and flowing turns. The fishtail names the hip action itself: a figure-eight tracing through the pelvis that scholars connect directly to West and Central African movement retention, and which appears in the same family as snake hips. Both can be danced solo, and both were carried into performance — Earl Snakehips Tucker, who worked the Savoy Ballroom, Connie's Inn and the Cotton Club before his death in 1937, built a stage act on precisely this hip articulation and is the best-filmed exponent of the idea, though his snake hips is a theatrical relative of the social fishtail rather than the same thing. The vocabulary connects blues to vernacular jazz solo dance and to the strutting traditions that fed the cakewalk.