Last month a friend invited me to trade songs with him DJing at an Atlanta Lindy Hop social dance. This was my first time DJing for a social dance other than Contra, and I was surprised by what a different experience it was. To that end, this post will be a mix of post-mortem as I’ve done for contra dances, but also a reflection on the differences between DJing for called and non-called social dances.

Prep

Preparation was the first, and perhaps most obvious, place where the two types of DJing vastly differed.

Preparing for Contra requires hours of sorting new tracks, creating mixes, adding hot cues, fixing beat grids, and analyzing song structure. Once the tracks are all analyzed and annotated, I can then create a playlist of mixes and start practicing them.

For Lindy, on the other hand, I can sit down and prepare a basic set in a few hours right before the dance. Sorting any new tracks still needs to be done, but otherwise I mostly don’t have to do any work other than possibly adding a cue point to let me know where to start a track on the rare version where the beginning doesn’t work (ie. live recordings with lots of chatter or applause before and after), and even that isn’t really necessary.

For Contra I normally make a play list with all my mixes in an order that I think will work well, then shuffle that around on the day of the event depending on the dance picked by the caller. For Lindy I chose to make a crate (which differs from a playlist in that there can’t be duplicate tracks and there is no order to the tracks) instead, pull in about 50 tracks (far more than I’d need, especially when trading songs with another DJ) and largely pull from those just to make selection quicker, while still dipping into the rest of my library on occasion when nothing I’d pre-selected fits the current vibe.

Nerves

When a dancer asks if I get nervous before DJing for contra I confidently say “no”. Not out of some toxic sense of bravado or machismo (I hope), or because I think I’m particularly good at it and don’t need to worry (I’m not, and I do), but because I know I’m going to make mistakes and I’m okay with that.

Instead of being nervous I tend to go into problem solving mode:

• “How did I get the dancers 8 beats off the phrase?”
• “Can I jump back to an earlier point in the song to give us more time without it sounding bad?”
• “I haven’t practiced this mix enough, focus on the cue out point coming up.”
• etc.

This apparently isn’t the case when I DJ Lindy. The first time, I was immediately a nervous wreck. This is likely particular to me, of course, but it was still an interesting difference that I wasn’t expecting given how much more technically difficult Contra DJing is. I knew intellectually that the technical side of doing a mix (ie. beat matching, harmonic mixing, transitioning between tunes, etc.) isn’t the important part of DJing, the finesse of picking tracks that the crowd will like is what matters. A DJ who just plays a few contra songs, but chooses them well is a much better crowd pleaser than one who does impressive mixing but picks bad songs. However, when it came right down to it I was still surprised by how much more nerve wracking it was when that’s the only thing you’re being judged on.

At some point I remembered that it’s just a dance and if one of them is bad or doesn’t work, we’ll move on and play another song. If I can’t find something, playing something at random is fine too (not ideal, but fine). Once I accepted this I almost immediately started picking songs quicker and not having to rely on picking something random at the last minute after all. It’s much easier to focus on what will be good when you’re not worried about whether it will be perfect. After that we were able to cover for each other and play off each other, and it made the evening much more enjoyable. If one of us killed the floor, the other would try a different style and bring it back. Doug covered for me, and I was even able to cover for Doug once or twice and revive a somewhat empty floor! None of this is something I’d have to deal with in Contra where my mixes are pre-selected, practiced, and where I’m picking from a much smaller selection of tunes.

Playing to the Dancers

While Lindy may not require the technical skills used when mixing tunes in the same way that Contra does, the dancers also aren’t pre-lined-up as they would be with a Contra or Square dance. If you play a tune no one likes at Contra most everyone is stuck with it for 7 minutes or so until the caller wraps up the dance. The dance may fall a part entirely if the tune is too fast or doesn’t have clear enough phrasing for the dancers or caller to follow along, but generally speaking as long as the track sort of works the dancers will dance to it—and they’ll probably enjoy themselves. There are also fewer dances in an evening, so I suspect dancers feel more compelled to dance every single dance.

With Lindy that’s not the case. Many dancers will wait to hear if your track selection is one that they like before venturing out onto the dance floor, and even those that aren’t deliberately checking the music may not be as inclined to break off their conversations with a friend to go ask someone to dance if the track doesn’t immediately catch their interest.

There is also a several minute break between each tune in a contra dance where the caller teaches the next pre-choreographed dance. This means that if two back-to-back mixes have nothing to do with each other, or sound completely different, no one notices as long as you’ve picked a mix that goes well with the dance. Whereas with Lindy only a few seconds elapse between songs, just enough time for someone to thank their partner and go ask the next person to dance. This means that you have to consider the previous track when selecting the next one: a leap from fast balboa to slow blues is going to be jarring for the dancers and they may choose not to dance. Changing the style requires either gradually shifting between the two over several tracks, or maybe giving a slightly longer pause between songs to let the dancers get the previous style out of their ears and bodies.

Similarly there is a big difference in what music really gets the dancers blood pumping, though I suspect this is specific to these two venues and not to the type of social dancing as a whole.

With the contra venue I DJ for it’s mostly a younger crowd and they’re mostly used to hearing a hand full of local old-time string bands and the occasional high energy (but still traditional) New England style dance band. The contra chestnuts are an important part of the dances history, and sometimes you play them, but they don’t get many people excited.

This means that I can do two things if the energy is feeling low: I can play a track by a band they normally wouldn’t be able to hear that’s a bit more modern sounding, or otherwise has something different and interesting about it, or I can mix in a pop tune they’re familiar with. This is almost like a cheat code: if the energy is low, play a song they know and they’ll get excited and raise the energy of the floor.

With Lindy it’s not quite as simple as that. The reliable floor savers for Lindy are mostly old chestnuts by some of the jazz greats. Modern swing is sometimes played, but sparingly, and pop songs are a definite “no”. People come to the dance expecting a certain style, and they’re unhappy if you don’t stick to it. You have to work within the constraints of the genre, and picking floor savers is much more subtle work that requires carefully watching the dancers and seeing what will make them take to the dance floor on any particular night.

The act of watching the floor and adjusting the set as necessary may be obvious to club DJs and other social dance DJs, but to me it was a new experience, and one that I initially found somewhat paralyzing. For the first few tracks, my friend Doug had to cover for me and play as if he were the solo DJ while I flailed trying to find a track that I thought would work. I hadn’t fully internalized until that moment that in a Contra dance the DJ is picking the music to match the dance, but in Lindy Hop the dancers are picking the dance to match the music, and this may include not dancing entirely! I let the perfect become the enemy of the good and Doug had to pick several tracks in a row even though in theory we were trading songs 1 for 1.

Genre and Form

Sometime after the half I had mostly gotten over my nerves, and most of the newbies had drifted off home. I felt more comfortable trying a few experimental tracks that targeted primarily the more experienced late-night crowd: one a fast blues dance recorded at a legendary local Blues club, and the other two folksy tracks by bands that mostly play contra dances.

I was a bit nervous about these tracks as I didn’t know how they’d be received at this particular dance where the DJs play almost exclusively 30s and 40s jazz and the most modern bands that get any air time tend to be emulating the style of the jazz greats. Luckily they all went over well and filled the dance floor! A few people switched to blues dancing for “Sweet Betty”, while others continued with Lindy. Even better, for “Rhinoceros for Sue” the head DJ for the organization (who schedules everyone else, and therefore was the person to try and impress during the evening) went out on the floor to do some Balboa and came over afterwards and asked me what the track was!

I mention this because this is both a similarity and a difference from Contra. Techno-contra¹ excluded, I largely can’t play anything for a contra dance that’s not in strict 32-bar “AABB” form. I can layer a modern beat or a pop song over a traditional contra tune, or maybe even find pop tunes that more or less stick to contra form and play it alone, but the form has to be there for the dancers (and some callers) to be comfortable.

With Lindy the freedom to play tracks with a wider variety of forms, so long as they respect the history of the dance, was a nice change of pace. That said, mostly it still needs to have a swung beat and I’m more at the mercy of what the dancers like (which is a narrower subset of music in the Lindy scene in my experience, as previously mentioned), so maybe this is more of a similarity than a difference.

Conclusion

Like learning to dance both lead and follow roles (in Lindy), or from either side of the minor set (in Contra): having done two different forms of DJing will, I suspect, make me a better DJ for either type of dance. I really enjoyed DJing for Lindy and was delighted when the head DJ asked if I’d like to start doing it regularly, hopefully I’ll be able to do it more often going forward!

If you’re curious about the set Doug and I ended up playing, the final set list for the evening can be found on Musicbrainz.