Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, circa 1925-1979

This sizable sub-series includes interviews with jazz dancers and others (boxes 4-6;20); clippings; descriptive files on jazz dances (boxes 23-24); named dance files (box 7-8); dance topic files (boxes 8, 20, 23, and 24) and photographs (boxes 8-9). Many of the vintage photographs were obtained from the artists themselves; later photographs portray lecture/demonstrations presented by Stearns in the 1950s and 1960s. Included in this sub-series is a marked-up typescript of the manuscript (box 3).

Stearns began his work on jazz dance when some of the early pioneers were still living. This sub-series also contains a mix of interview notes and correspondence with around 125 dancers and other jazz figures, making this a vital primary source in the history of twentieth-century vernacular dance. Clippings are supplemented by Stearns's notes, correspondence and unpublished articles by other. Among the topics covered are black modern dance, blacks on Broadway and historical accounts of dance and jazz dance. Clippings files give profile his research on over fifty dances. Many of the 112 photographs in this sub-series were given to Marshall Stearns by the artists themselves. All are notated by dancers or dance team names; few are dated. The photos in this sub-series are those that were collected for the book. Other examples of jazz dancers can be found in Series 2: Educational Programs, Lectures, Symposia and Broadcasts, most notably in photographs of Music Inn events and four contact sheets of dancers Leon James and Al Minns with Stearns on the set of a 1959 broadcast of Camera Three on CBS.