Madison

The tradition & historical record

The Madison is a novelty dance that was popular in the late 1950s to mid-1960s. ¹

It was created and first danced in Columbus, Ohio, in 1957. The local popularity of the dance and record in Baltimore, Maryland, came to the attention of the producers of The Buddy Deane Show in 1960, which led to other dance shows picking it up. The Madison is a line dance that features a regular back-and-forth pattern interspersed with called steps. Its popularity inspired dance teams and competitions, as well as various recordings, and today it is still sometimes performed as a nostalgic dance. The Madison is featured in the John Waters movie Hairspray (1988), and it continues to be performed in the Broadway musical Hairspray. Both the film and the musical feature one of many songs released during the Madison "craze" in the US. The jazz pianist Ray Bryant recorded "Madison Time" for Columbia Records in 1959. Billboard stated that "The footwork for the Madison dance is carefully and clearly diagrammed for the terpers." The Ray Bryant version was the version featured in the film Hairspray. The other popular version was by Al Brown & The Tunetoppers. Another version was recorded by radio presenter Alan Freeman for Decca Records in 1962. An example of an album featuring music for the Madison is The Madison Dance Party (1960) by Al Brown's Tunetoppers with calls by Al Brown. ¹

The dance is performed by a large group in the original (non-musical) version of John Waters' Hairspray (1988). In Monsieur Ibrahim (2003), Lola Naymark does a Madison-like dance at 42 minutes and at 1 hour 18 minutes a group of Turkish youth appears to be doing a facsimile of the dance as well. The song by Olivier Despax and the Gamblers is featured. In The Go-Getter (2007), Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel and Jena Malone all dance the "Madison" as an homage to Godard's Bande à part. The film Le Week-End (2013) ends with the main characters Nick and Morgan dancing in the midst of the café recreating the scene from Bande à part. Episode 3, "Other People, Other Rooms", of the Hulu miniseries 11.22.63 (2016) (based on the 2011 Stephen King novel 11/22/63) features students and Sadie Dunhill doing The Madison. In the Netflix series Maniac (2018) episode 5, the characters played by Rome Kanda, Emma Stone, and Jonah Hill dance the Madison. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Madison (dance)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Madison is novelty dance that was popular in the late 1950s to mid-1960s, 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. ²

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²