Miller was Queen of Swing

As dancers go, Norma Miller, dubbed “The Queen of Swing”, was among the greatest entertainers to appear on stage in the 20th Century.

Miller was born December 2, 1919 in Harlem, to Barbadian immigrants Alma, a maid, and Norman, a shipyard worker who had also been in the army. Her father died from pneumonia a month before her birth. Norma had an older sister named Dot.

Despite the financial struggles of her mother to pay their rent, Norma was still enrolled in dance classes from a very young age. She was a student at the Manhattan School of the Arts.

At the age of five, she was performing at amateur nights in theaters. Miller knew she wanted to be a dancer very early on. “Black girls didn’t have many outlets. You had laundry. You had hairdresser. Or teacher. Now, I didn’t qualify for none of those. I could dance, I just could do it naturally,” she said in an interview.

Miller and her sister liked to practise the moves they observed among patrons of the Savoy, a sprawling, integrated dance hall where the likes of the great Duke Ellington and Count Basie performed for crowds of swing dancers. At the time, Miller was too young to enter the ballroom, but the dance that would become her signature was flourishing there.

The Lindy Hop, named after the aviator Charles Lindbergh, “married swing music’s traditional eight count with the fast-paced, free-form movements of African-American dances at the time.

One Easter Sunday in 1932, 12-year-old Miller was dancing on the sidewalk when she was spotted by famed Lindy Hopper “Twistmouth George”

Ganaway, who brought her into the Savoy to dance with him. Of that experience, she said: “He just threw me up; my feet never touched the ground.

People were screaming and he put me on top of his shoulders, walked me around the ballroom . . . and put me back outside.

“Greatest moment in my life and I’m excited, excited, and I’m gonna go home and tell my mother and my sister — and then I said ‘no, I better not say nothin’.” Miller subsequently began entering and winning dance contests, which opened up new horizons for her.

In 1934, Miller became the youngest member of an elite dance troupe Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, founded by Herbert “Whitey” White.

She worked with the legendary choreographer Frankie Manning, who had a defining influence on the development of the Lindy Hop, and began touring across the United States, Europe and South America.

Along with her fellow Lindy Hoppers, Miller appeared in the 1937 Marx Brothers’ comedy A Day at the Races, which earned an Academy Award nomination for choreography for its Lindy Hop sequence. She also danced in the 1941 madcap comedy Hellzapoppin’, in which Miller, who played a cook, can be seen spinning, leaping, twirling and flipping with her partner Billy Ricker.

The advent of World War II signalled an end to the Lindy Hop’s heyday, as trends in music and dance began to change. After Miller’s partner was drafted to the military, she left the Lindy Hoppers and the troupe disbanded soon after.

In the years following the war, Miller founded her own troupe — the Norma Miller Dancers — which toured the United States and Australia, and subsequently accompanied Count Basie on a national tour. In 1957, she joined the Cotton Club Revue, which featured the jazz entertainer Cab Calloway and a 48-member, all-black cast.

The group performed regularly in Las Vegas and Miami Beach, though they were not always welcomed due to their skin colour.

“The day of our big dress rehearsal, there were headlines in the Miami Sun telling [nightclub owner] Murray Weinger that they didn’t want his coloured show on the beach,” Miller recalled in her 1996 memoir, Swingin’ at the Savoy: The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer, co-written with Evette Jensen.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Miller pivoted to comedy, performing alongside Redd Foxx. When interest in the Lindy Hop began to resurge in the 1980s, Miller began dancing for audiences once again.

From February 1972 until 1974, Miller travelled around Vietnam, performing her solo comedy routine for American troops in the Vietnam War. In 1977, she produced a show at the Village Gate in New York and then moved back to Las Vegas, where she starred in and produced shows.

In addition to a rich and long career as a dancer, Miller became a seminal historian of swing dance.
Her biography, Swingin’ at the Savoy: A Memoir of a Jazz Dancer, documented the swing dance era, and her recollections on Ken Burns’ Jazz documentaries provided a first-hand account of the Harlem music and dance scene. She taught swing dance, including master classes at Stanford University and the University of Hawaii, and also choreographed dance scenes in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Debbie Allen’s Stompin’ at the Savoy.

From May 9–11, 2014, Miller performed for the first time in Italy at the “L.O.T. (Lindy Old Timers) event” in Montesilvano, beginning a collaboration with the Italian Swing Dance Society that lead to five years of concerts, festivals, conventions, recordings and books. From 2015 to 2018, Miller wrote new lyrics and songs that were arranged and recorded with the Italian Billy Bros. Swing Orchestra.

In December 2016, the CD A Swingin’ Love Fest with Norma Miller was issued with the Orchestra.
From September to October 2017, at age 98, she was on a European tour with the Orchestra, consisting of seven concerts in Italy, Slovenja, and Denmark.

From August to October 2018, she was on an Italian tour with the Billy Bros. Swing Orchestra, performing in Pescara, Perugia, Genova, Milano, and Palermo. On October 21, 2018, Miller performed a last concert at the Teatro S. Cecilia in Palermo; she was almost 99.

Near the end of her life, Miller travelled to the seaside village of Herräng in Sweden to oversee Lindy Hop enthusiasts at a dance camp there.

She was reportedly bemused at how far the dance’s popularity had travelled.

“I said: ‘You’ve got to be kidding talking about some goddamned Lindy Hop in Sweden,” Miller told Sago of the Times.

Miller had planned to celebrate her 100th birthday at the camp but it was not to be On May 5, 2019, Miller died from congestive heart failure at the age of 99. She had just produced new music.

Miller never married. (Adapted)