Frankie Manning: the Passion, Part I

it's hard not to find a photo of Frankie displaying his sheer delight at what he did

 
This is the first half of an article that is featured in its entirety on the Frankie Manning Foundation's website but I shall also be sharing the second half of it here next month!

The Frankie Manning Foundation recently asked me to contribute an guest post about Frankie and being given such a broad remit for such an important figure was a little daunting as there are already plenty of easily accessible resources that detail all of the key events in his life (and, as ever, Wikipedia provides a good place to start). But it occurred to me that something was rarely presented in many of the emotionally-neutral chronological pieces on his life and that was a prominent mention of his pure and unbridled passion for lindy hop.

By all accounts, Frankie had a gregarious personality and a genuine knack for teaching but had these not also also been allied to a radiant passion it is likely that lindy hop would not be as popular as it is today, and I felt that this was something that deserved to be more celebrated.

I have spent many years in education, first as a student and now working at a university, and along the way I've met academics who have really affected me - mainly for being fantastic but occasionally for being completely awful and the key distinction between those groups was either an abundance or absence of passion for their own field.

The great educators just bubble with excitement for what they do and entice you to feel the same way. Some have more traditional methods whilst others head off on the most amazing technicoloured tangents but no matter what they say, it sticks, and you can only become infected by their zeal.

The not so great ones, however, occasionally challenge your natural instinct to keep breathing and I can remember one particularly prosaic lecture where, in an attempt to entertain myself, I assembled a variety of confectionery items and other things with labels still attached and set about deciphering barcode. The raw excitement of that lecture has somewhat obscured my memory of what it may have been about but I know that by the end of it I could look at the thickness and arrangement of the lines and determine the numbers that should be typed beneath them.

These may seem like slightly random anecdotes but I share them because they are genuinely relevant and not only to the university lecture theatre but to teachers in a wide variety of disciplines and that includes dancing. Truthfully, I have not yet encountered any apathetic lindy hop teachers (who I have found to all have an infectious contentment with their lot) but I have found it to be the case in other styles. It's not that such teachers don't have a passion for dancing but it seems that this passion is not something they want to risk sharing with their students, and to borrow a sporting analogy: the best athletes don't always make the best coaches.

Frankie, however, not only seems to have been a fantastic dancer but was also able to translate that into being an excellent proponent of the hobby he loved so dearly.

As a newcomer to the lindy scene, having only started dancing last year, I had never had the opportunity to learn from or even meet Frankie, so I can only share second-hand stories. Nonetheless, what really comes through from the people I know who met him, learned from him or danced with him is how utterly happy lindy hop made him and how Frankie had a steadfast desire to share his elixir. And so, with this in mind, I chatted with a few folk I know who took it from his hand and drank deeply.

Potentially, there are plenty of people I could contact who had well known connections with the man himself but I have specifically sought out the ones who have directly influenced me in my brief but blossoming relationship with lindy hop and whose passion to continue Frankie's legacy has been clearly apparent to me.

Swing Belfast's Bahia Ma'ani (L), and (R) Frankie Manning at the far left of a Whitey's Lindy Hoppers lineup

There's no better place to start than in my own home city of Belfast (which, along with London and Manchester, was one of the venues for Frankie's first visit to the UK as part of a Whitey's Lindy Hoppers tour in 1937) where I have benefited from the effervescent tutelage of Sharon Matchett, Richard Turner, Adib Ma'ani-Hessari, and Bahia Ma'ani at Swing Belfast and it is Bahia who had first-hand experience of Frankie's passion when they shared a dance at a social celebrating his birthday.

I can well imagine Frankie being seriously in demand in any social never mind the one on his birthday and Bahia admitted that this also happened to be fairly early on in her lindy career so the usual fears of inadequacy at first socials were likely further magnified by the status of the person she was dancing with, which is probably why, Bahia confesses, she was too scared to speak to him. But that didn't stop Frankie from beaming at her throughout and putting her at least a little more at ease.

By itself, a single dance may not illustrate much but Bahia remembers being amazed, not only by his obvious joy and the gentleness of his lead, but how Frankie kept getting up and going despite the high energy demands of a night of dancing and even in his old age it was clear that his passion for lindy hop had kept him young and healthy when other octogenarians were developing more sedate proclivities for crosswords, velcro and beige.

[... the rest of this article can be read on the Frankie Manning Foundation website]