Mura Dehn's research took her to dancehalls, the streets of NYC, to Black churches, to the segregated southern United States and the Caribbean. She was the only person allowed to record the dances inside of the Savoy Ballroom in New York City where jazz/swing proliferated, flourished, fostered. The manager, though leery of a white woman filming African American dance finally allowed her if she set up the camera in a corner and didn’t disrupt the patrons. Those particular films are some of the only footage available of the originators and the innovators of the form.

          In her eighties, Dehn walked the streets of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx filming the dancers and asserting jazz through hip-hop were on a social/street dance continuum. She wrote that they were not only acts of expression using movement and rhythm, but also political resistance, social commentary, and the embodiment of ideology.

        Jazz dance and music were grounded in innovation, individualism and improvisation, the sound and movement espoused liberation, freedom, and creativity, the American ethos. The book is also an anthology containing almost 50 mini-bios of her dancers, revealing what it was like for great African American social, jazz, and tap dancers and musicians in the 20th century. The most fulfilling aspect of the book, for me, is these artists are now in ink, named - for posterity's sake.