
Broadway singer and dancer Ruth Tester demonstrates a fun dance to perk up your day in this promo image made of her on stage at the Lyric Theater in New York City. Tester appeared in a handful of productions beginning in 1924, and logged one silver screen appearance in 1929’s Makers of Melody. In this shot she’s doing the Black Bottom Dance, which was a pre-Jazz Age invention that originated in the New Orleans black community, and during the 1920s filtered from segregated dance halls into wider culture. If you have any swing dancing friends they may know all about this. You can see the Black Bottom several places online. Here’s one link to the popular version, and here’s an alternative link to the alleged real dance.