hand jive

The hand jive is a dance particularly associated with music from the 1950s, rhythm and blues in particular. It involves a complicated pattern of hand moves and claps at various parts of the body. It resembles a highly elaborate version of pat-a-cake. Hand moves include thigh slapping, crossing the wrists, fist pounding, hand clapping, and hitchhike moves. In 1957, when filmmaker Ken Russell was a freelance photographer, he recorded the teenagers of Soho, London, hand-jiving in the basement of The Cat's Whisker coffee bar, where the hand-jive had been invented by Leon Bell of Leon Bell and the Bell Cats. According to an article in the Daily Mirror, "it's so crowded [at The Cat's Whisker] the girls hand-jive to the band as there's no room for dancing." Russell told interviewer Leo Benedictus of The Guardian that "the place was crowded with young kids... the atmosphere was very jolly. Wholesome... everyone jiving with their hands because there was precious little room to do it with their feet... a bizarre sight. The craze fascinated me. It seemed like a strange novelty; I used to join in."¶

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

hand jive is kind of dance game from the 1950s, 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¶