Cakewalk

The Cake-Walk or Cakewalk was a dance developed from the "Prize Walks" held in the late 19th century, generally at get-togethers on slave plantations 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.

As a plantation dance

The authors of Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance reported that an early 1950s experiment with African guests turned up "no worthy African counterpart" to the Cakewalk.

First person accounts

In the 1981 article "The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality" Brooke Baldwin cites "an almost exhaustive compilation of those accounts which have been found so far". This compilation consists of eyewitness accounts by ex-slaves from Virginia and Georgia recorded by WPA researchers in the 1930s, along with second hand accounts from other sources. Baldwin notes that "when the researchers of the Federal Writer's Project of the WPA interviewed aged ex-slaves in the 1930s, there was no longer any need to suppress information about the happier moments of slave life."

Cakewalk (Oscar Peterson composition)

Cakewalk is a jazz composition by Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, one of his best known originals. A live version of the song appeared on his 1981 album Nigerian Marketplace. He performed it live on numerous occasions in a group. He played it with the Oscar Peterson trio live at the Berlin Philharmonic on July 2, 1985. He opened with it live in Tokyo in 1987 with Joe Pass and Dave Young. It also featured on his 2004 album A Night in Vienna. Biographer Alex Barris noted that Peterson often played "Cakewalk", a "rollicking profane stride", in contrast to his delicate "The Love Ballade".Coda Magazine remarked that it gave Peterson the opportunity to show off his stride piano chops.

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Cakewalk (carnival game)

Cakewalk (or cake-walk) is a game played at carnivals, funfairs, and fundraising events. It is similar to a raffle and musical chairs.

Numbered squares are laid out on a path. Tickets are sold to participants, with the number of squares in the path equal to the maximum number of tickets sold. The participants walk around the path in time to music, which plays for a duration and then stops. A number is then called out, and the person standing on the square with that number wins a cake as a prize (hence the name).

During the 1930s, the English poet John Betjeman described St Giles' Fair in Oxford as follows:

It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles' … is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves.

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