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Puerto Rico 1926 GG2650-52 Costume Stage halter and grass skirt. Necklaces, bracelets, anklets, flower in hair. TML. N-2. Bellage. Actions Gilda Gray strikes a pose in her dance bra and grass skirt (1). Another pose, attributed to a different photographer, differs by one anklet (2). Commentary The shimmy, a vigorous dance performed by the rapid shaking of the shoulders and especially the hips, originates in black culture in Haiti and America emerges in Afro-American music in the 1910s. One signature song is "The Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble," aka the "Shimmy Shewabble." The cross-over to white performers occurs during the late teens, when performers including Mae West and Sophie Tucker take on the black moves. But it is Gilda Gray who appropriates the shimmy has the key part of her trademark act, dancing first at the Gaieties in New York in 1919 and then the Ziegfeld Follies in 1922. The following year Gray takes her act to Hollywood and shifts to the movies, where she find enormous success, such as her hula dancing in the 1926 film Aloma of the South Seas. Compare her costumes to those of Clara Bow in Hula, the following year (CB2750). Following the 1920s Gray's career goes into decline marked by financial hardships, medical problems, and marriage woes. Source Dance costume from Aloma of the South Seas, Paramount and Bud Fisher Film Corporation, 1926. GG2650 attributed to James Abbe, photographer, downloaded from broadway.cas.sc.edu, Shields Collection. GG2652 attributed to Charles Sheldon, New York, downloaded from grapefruitmoongallery.com. GG2654 is from Daniel Blum, A Pictorial History of the Talkies, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1958, p. 293. 2 pictures. |
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