Word: craze
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...fashion to say that Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" started the ragtime craze; that the blues came in when William Christopher Handy took "St. Louis Blues" North; that George Gershwin took jazz into the concert rooms. No one ever accused Composer Kern of starting anything. He has simply written a great many songs of which people never seem to tire, polite, modulated tunes reflective of the musical study he put in in Germany. And he was the first to use saxophones popularly, in 1913.* Smoothly played they seemed to suit his music...
...went into Cuba's interior and studied the primitive rumba dance, a series of writhings and twistings too lewd for fastidious eyes. A modified version of the rumba, the danzon, is the craze in Havana, a potential craze in the U. S. It has easy, lazy steps and, in its authentic form, an interim of a minute or so when the tempo changes and dancers stop for conversation or for the lady to sway...
...thought the whole idea was stupid, sacrilegious. But finally there came a boom. The whole country became lightning-rod-minded. In 1885 a body of scientific men studied the Washington Monument, already hit a few times, and recommended conductors for it. Wide-awake salesmen made a racket of the craze, slapping useless pieces of metal on roofs. Gradually people became aware of the fact that lightning was striking even where the so-called rods were. The rods were thereupon denounced as expensive folly. About the turn of the century, "lightning rod salesman" became synonymous in New England with "horse thief...
...years, the Dancing Masters of America enjoyed their season of greatest prestige five years ago when the Charleston craze was at its zenith. Before that the Dancing Masters had been comparatively a small organization. But the impetus given dancing by the crazy Negro jazz-jig was felt by hordes of people who had never before trod a ballroom floor. Schools by the hundreds mushroomed all over the land. Applicants deluged Dancing Masters for membership. Today they are the largest professional group in the world...
Reasons given for the decline: "The sport craze," "churchianity" instead of "Christianity," radios, motorcars, modernism in religion, expensive denominational programs, out-of-date evangelistic sermons and methods. The Far West provides almost no soul business, the East very little. Only region still reasonably profitable: the Mid-West...