Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Palais was jive capital of city
I READ your article ‘When city led a merry dance’ on May 6 and a slow smile came upon me as I read about the west end Palais in the cobbled Well Road off the Hawkhill and known to all as Roabies (that was the vernacular pronunciation of the dance hall).
The article said that many of the city’s dancers took their first dance steps to the strict tempo of Victor Sylvester and the like.
In the 1950s a tsunami of sound deluged Dundee. It was called rock and roll. And with rock and roll came a style of dance called jive.
As a youngster in the 1950s, I frequented the Palais, the JM, Kidd’s, the Empress, the Parker Street Jazz Club, a bus jaunt to and from the Chalet, and Roabies.
The JM and Palais would play an occasional rock and roll tune, and the jiving at these dance halls was sedate.
At Kidd’s ballroom the jiving was positively genteel – and then there was Roabies.
At Roabies the early evening dances were nice, slow and romantic with the refrains of Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstein songs.
And then it was jive time. Left of the bandstand, three or four couples were given space, this was the crème de la crème of jiving and the rest of us were the audience. The girls flipped off their flats and the boys in their suede crepe soled shoes faced each other in the traditional dance position.
The music didn’t start – it exploded. ‘They’re really rockin’ in Boston, in Pittsburgh PA. Deep in the heart of Texas, and around the Frisco Bay, all over St Louis, and down in New Orleans, all the cats are gonna dance with Sweet Little Sixteen’.
Chuck Berry had gatecrashed Roabies and the dancers embraced him.
They bopped and they jived, their feet hardly touched the floor as their legs kicked and flicked to Sweet Little Sixteen.
The quick spins, the twirls, the throws, the sheer energy of the music with the dance and dancers was mesmeric.
The west end Palais in cobbled Well Road was the jive capital of Dundee.