1920s: Selvin's Novelty Orchestra: Dance-O-Mania

Selvin’s Novelty Orch. – Dance-O-Mania, Fox Trot (L.Wolfe Gilbert /J. Cooper) Victor 1920 (USA)

NOTE: Ben (Benjamin Bernard) SELVIN (1898 – 1980) American violinist, dance bandleader and record producer. He was known as the Dean of Recorded Music. Born to a Jewish-Russian family in USA, Selvin started his professional life at age 15 as a fiddle player in NYC night clubs. In the age of 20, he founded his own dance ensemble called the Selvin’s Novelty Orchestra. Within one year, in 1920 his band’s rendition of the novelty fox-trot “:Dardanella” became a nationwide hit and its recording sold allegedly in six million copies (Selvin denied the 6 million total describing the actual sales of “Dardanella” as 150,000 discs). That enormous success put Selvin’s band immediately on the top of the recorded dance orchestras during the Roaring Twenties and through decades of his career Selvin never denied his reputation as the biggest-selling dance band leader in the first quarter-century of recorded music in USA. One reason for this prolific output is that he recorded for dozens of different record labels during this productive time in the industry, using a different name for each label. His output has been estimated at 13,000 to 20,000 song titles. In 1963, he was awarded a gold disc by the Recording Industry Association of America that was presented to Ben Selvin on his retirement on in March 1963.
This early Selvin’s recording is accompanied by the slideshow illustrating several novelty dances of the late 1910s. These few years before onset of the shimmy-charleston dance craze of the 1920s, was the birthplace of the couple dances characterized by imitations of the animal trot, such as the iconic Grizzly Bear, Turkey Trot or the most popular of all: Fox Trot. This last dance together with the Rag-Time dance became inspirations for the dance madness of the Roaring Twenties, starting with the shimmy from c. 1922 through the charleston and black bottom in the mid-late 1920s. From all those dances, only the fox-trot as well as tango – which went on its own way towards the unimaginable international success – proved during the pass of time to have been robust dance inventions of the early 20th Century and are still danced all over the world to this day.

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