Buzzard lope

The Buzzard Lope is a traditional Southern States dance. It was first noted in Georgia in the 1880s, and became widely popular in Minstrel Show repertoire, alongside the cakewalk and juba dance. It seems to have originated in African American slave communities, possibly as an adaptation of a similar West African dance. Dancers stretch out their arms like birds of prey and do a shuffle step and a little hop around a piece of cloth on the ground, which represents the carrion. People on the sidelines clap and pat their thighs. It has also been said to be a representation of "a turkey buzzard getting ready to eat a dead Mule (some report a Cow)", performed with a comic sensibility known as hokum. Reference is made to the dance in the penultimate line of the American blues/folk song "Johnny Brown":¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Buzzard lope”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Buzzard lope is type of dance, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶