Norma Miller

Norma Adele Miller, born December 2, 1919, in Harlem, New York City, and known as the "Queen of Swing," was an American Lindy hop dancer, choreographer, actress, author, and comedian who died on May 5, 2019. Her parents, Alma and Norman, were both originally from Bridgetown, Barbados; her father, a shipyard worker, died from pneumonia a month before her birth, and Miller was named in his honor. Her mother, a charwoman, enrolled her in dance classes from a very young age despite financial hardship, and by age five Miller was performing at amateur nights in theaters. She had one older sister, Dot.

Miller grew up on 140th Street in a tenement apartment that overlooked the Savoy Ballroom. Through her fire escape window she watched dancers perform the Black Bottom, the Shimmy, the Charleston, and the Shim Sham, while the house band — led by Chick Webb and featuring singer Ella Fitzgerald — provided the music. She practiced what she observed in her living room and school gymnasium. On Easter Sunday in 1932, while dancing outside the Savoy, she caught the attention of Twist Mouth George Ganaway, described as the greatest dancer at the Savoy, who brought her inside to dance for the first time before she was escorted back out.

Miller attended the Manhattan School of the Arts on the Upper West Side and danced at the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino on Sunday afternoons. In 1934, she and her high school dance partner Sonny Ashby won the Savoy Lindy Hop Contest at the Apollo Theater. The following day, Herbert "Whitey" White, the dance master at the Savoy, hired her as the youngest member of his troupe, Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. In 1935, Miller competed in the Harvest Moon Ball at Madison Square Garden and subsequently embarked on a seven-month European tour. The following year, Whitey's Lindy Hoppers toured the United States with headliner Ethel Waters.

In 1937, while the troupe was touring California, Miller made her film debut in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production A Day at the Races, alongside the Marx Brothers, Allan Jones, and Maureen O'Sullivan. She danced and sang in the number "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm," which featured singer Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington's orchestra. Choreographer Dave Gould received an Academy Award nomination for the dance sequence. Following the tour, Miller was hospitalized for fatigue until her eighteenth birthday in December 1937.

After rejoining Whitey's Lindy Hoppers in 1938, the group competed a second time in the Harvest Moon Ball, that year hosted by Ed Sullivan. Miller and her partner placed in the top three, and Sullivan invited them to perform on Toast of the Town, later known as The Ed Sullivan Show. The troupe appeared in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin', where Miller played a dancing cook, performing flips, slides, kicks, splits, and lifts. Following that production, the group traveled to Rio de Janeiro; the attack on Pearl Harbor prevented their return home, and they remained in Brazil for ten months, nearly depleting their resources.

Miller's Broadway career ran from 1939 to 1943 and encompassed three productions. She appeared in the musical Swingin' The Dream, the play Run, Little Chillun, and Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939. In 1942, she joined Whitey's Lindy Hoppers on a three-week tour with Cootie Williams and Pearl Bailey that included stops at the Apollo Theater, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., and the Royal Theatre in Baltimore. She departed the group over payment disputes, and the troupe disbanded shortly afterward when its male members were called into military service during World War II.

In 1943, Miller studied multiple modern dance styles, taking classes in the Martha Graham style taught by Sophie Maslow, the Hanya Holm style taught by Mary Anthony, and classes with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. To fund her studies, she worked as a producer for Smalls Paradise, a Harlem nightclub. She subsequently toured Canada and the United States and spent time in Los Angeles before returning to New York in 1946.

From 1952 to 1968, Miller directed and toured with the Norma Miller Dancers and Norma Miller and Her Jazzmen, both of which included Frankie Manning's son Chazz Young and her long-time partner Billy Ricker. In 1954, the group toured nationally with Count Basie. Two years later, Miller was based in Miami, where she performed comedy shows with Cab Calloway and George Kirby, produced by Mervyn Nelson. In 1959, she relocated to Las Vegas, where she lived for much of the 1960s and 1970s, performing with Redd Foxx and Sammy Davis Jr. It was Foxx who encouraged her transition to comedy.

From February 1972 until 1974, Miller traveled throughout Vietnam performing her solo comedy routine for American troops. In 1977, she produced a show at the Village Gate in New York before returning to Las Vegas to star in and produce additional shows. She moved back to New York in 1982 and to Las Vegas again in 1990.

Beginning in the 1980s, Miller became a central figure in the swing revival, teaching master classes at Stanford University and the University of Hawaiʻi. In the mid- to late 2010s, she divided her time between Fort Myers, Florida, and Italy. Her first Italian performance took place May 9–11, 2014, at the L.O.T. event in Montesilvano, initiating a five-year collaboration with the Italian Swing Dance Society that produced concerts, festivals, conventions, recordings, and books. Between 2015 and 2018, she wrote new lyrics and songs arranged and recorded with the Italian Billy Bros. Swing Orchestra. A CD titled A Swingin' Love Fest with Norma Miller was issued in December 2016. At age 98, she completed a European tour in the fall of 2017 spanning seven concerts in Italy, Slovenia, and Denmark, and her final concert took place on October 21, 2018, at the Teatro S. Cecilia in Palermo. A CD featuring six additional songs with the Billy Bros. Swing Orchestra was produced posthumously in 2021. Miller never married.