"Swing dance" is a group of dances that developed with the swing style of jazz music in the 1920s-1950s, the origin of the dances predating popular "swing era" music. The most well-known of these dances is the Lindy Hop, a fusion of jazz, tap, breakaway, and Charleston, which originated in Harlem in the early 1920s, but includes a number of other styles such as Balboa, Shag, West Coast Swing, and Boogie Woogie to name a few.

 

While the majority of swing dances began in African American communities as vernacular African American dances, some swing era dances such as West Coast Swing and the Balboa developed in white communities. Swing dance was not used as a blanket term for this group of dances until the latter half of the twentieth century. Historically, the term "Swing" referred to the style of Jazz music, which inspired the evolution of the dance