After the Swing Era and World War II, American social dancing cooled down in the late 1940s, in a shift from dance bands to concerts in night clubs.  This was due to many factors — musician union fees that made big bands unaffordable, the undanceable aesthetics of bebop cool jazz, and a generation of post-war veterans with the new priority of settling down and raising a family.

But teenagers still liked to dance.  Teens' dancing during the 1950s was widely varied in steps and styling.  Most of it was still swing-based, but swing had been diverging into local styles and regional variations each decade for thirty years.  In one high school it might be low and smooth; in another, wild and angular.  In some areas it was constant swing moves, while in others it was dancing with steps in place, simply holding your partner's hand, with no swing moves.  Other innovations are listed below.

One incentive for new variations was the rebelliousness of the time — teens didn't want to dance like their parents who were actively disapproving of their lifestyle, so they invented a wide range of step and style replacements.  Another motivation for change was the music.  Rock'n'roll simply called for different styles of dancing, some of which mirrored the strong backbeat of rock.

Terminology was just as varied as the dancing.  This was called jitterbug, or swing, Lindy, the rock'n'roll, boogie-woogie or Bop.  The word Bop was new then, so almost everything was called the Bop.  But that word usually referred to a family of low swiveling Charleston-like steps danced in place, sometimes without a partner.

Some teens sought out African American sources for new steps and styles, sometimes from their black maids or from the cooks at a summer camp, and especially from black teens at high school and local dances, which started to become possible after a 1954 desegregation ruling.

Another source of new dance styles was from television.  Daily soap operas were finished by 3pm, and local stations needed programming to fill the void until evening shows began.  Since teenagers got home at that time, local stations hired radio DJs to play popular teenage music as cameras televised teens dancing.  One of the first was Bandstand on Philadelphia's WFIL-TV (1952) hosted by former radio DJ Bob Horn.  When he was fired after a drunk driving arrest in 1956, Dick Clark was selected as his replacement.

The increasingly wide regional diversification of dance styles reversed on August 5, 1957, when Clark convinced ABC to broadcast his show nationally, becoming American Bandstand.  Suddenly teens from coast to coast were seeing and copying the way the kids in Philadelphia danced, and that regional style soon became a national dance style.  Three years later, the same thing would happen with the Twist, and from then on, teenagers got most their dances from television.


Other dances:  In addition to the many styles of swing, there was also the Stroll, the solo version of Bop, Chalypso (American Bandstand's name for teen cha-cha), the line dance Madison (soon followed by the Hully-Gully), the Bunny Hop, various kinds of slow dancing, and more.  The dance later known as the Twist was also done by teens in the mid-fifties, years before Chubby Checker made it a hit in 1960.  (Watch the 1957 film Rock Baby Rock It  for a good example.)