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Name | Cakewalk |
thumb|George Walker, Aida Overton Walker, and Bert Williams link arms and dance the cakewalk in the first Broadway musical to be written and performed by African Americans, In Dahomey. thumbnail|right|Painting from 1913 thumbnail|right|1915 sheet music cover (late for cakewalk music): "Ebony Echoes: A Good Old-Fashioned Cake-Walk" by Dan Walker. New York, NY: Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. The cakewalk or cake walk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around". At the conclusion of a performance of the original form of the dance in an exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, an enormous cake was awarded to the winning couple. Thereafter it was performed in minstrel shows, exclusively by men until the 1890s. The inclusion of women in the cast "made possible all sorts of improvisations in the Walk, and the original was soon changed into a grotesque dance" which became very popular across the country. The fluid and graceful steps of the dance may have given rise to the colloquialism that something accomplished with ease is a 'cakewalk'.