"I used to love to watch her dance the Grizzly Bear/I guess she's gone to Frisco, to dance it there..."

There really is a dance called the Grizzly Bear, which I didn't know until yesterday, though I've heard the lyric quoted in the post title hundreds of times. "Grizzly Bear" by The Youngbloods was in the stack of singles next to my record player in the 1960s. I happened to play this video of it:



Before they play the song, Dick Clark interviews Jesse Colin Young about it, and he says: "I'm a ragtime freak, and... this is about a dance in the 1890s called the Grizzly Bear where people used to hug each other and jump." Dick Clark is amazed: "An actual dance?" Yes, there was "a club in San Francisco called The Grizzly Bear."

Here's an NPR article from 2015, "Dirty Dancing In The Early 1900s":

[T]he Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear and other so-called "animal dances" of the early 1900s... shocked America and had polite society crying shame, shame, shame....

"Wilson Banned Ball Fearing Turkey Trot," was the New York Times headline on Jan. 13, 1913. According to the report, the Inaugural Committee was told that the president-elect wanted to cancel the usual Inaugural Ball because he "feared there would be indulgence in the turkey trot, the bunny hug and other ragtime dances and thus provoke what might amount to a National scandal."... Later in the month, Wilson characterized such reports as "ridiculous," but the ball was canceled....

[According to the] 1924 book The Social Dance... "The 'Boll Weevil Wiggle' and the 'Texas Tommy Wiggle' are danced in close personal contact intended to arouse sex feeling. The 'Grizzly Bear' encourages the closest and most violent physical contact for the same purpose... The 'Turkey Trot, 'Fox Trot,' 'Horse Trot, 'Fish Walk,' 'Dog Walk,' 'Tiger Dance,' and the 'Buzzard Lope,' are all imitative of the lower animals in their sex life, sex desire, sex excitement and sex satisfaction; and these things are in the minds of the dancers who understand the meaning of the animal dances."

Oh, don't just about all dances represent sex?  Sex isn't a special "lower animals" activity. But it made me wonder whether there were "animal" dances in the 1960s when I was listening to "Grizzly Bear." Answer: Yes. There was The Monkey, demonstrated by the great Smokey Robinson (and possibly requiring censorship in the modern age):



And here's "Monkey Time" — as performed by Major Lance on "Shindig" (in perhaps 1964). Keep your eye on the dancers way in the background. I found this disturbing enough to begin to question whether it was intentionally racist at the time, but I see the song was written and produced by Curtis Mayfield, so that's the end of the inquiry for me.

Anyway, the subject of this post is dances named after animals, and the possible objections to them.