Cakewalk

Cakewalk This dance sensation, along with the jaunty music written for it, first appeared in music halls and theaters in the mid-1890s. Its popularity was based on tuneful, lightly syncopated music written for high-strutting, prancing dance steps. It was composer-publisher Kerry (Frederick Allen) Mills who started the rage for this dance music with his first publication, “Rastus on Parade,” in 1895. The tune had the distinction of establishing what soon became a harmonic cliché of cakewalks by…