The Foxtrot originated in the summer of 1913, created by Vaudeville actor Harry Fox (born Arthur
Carringford in Pomona, California.)
On his own at age fifteen, he joined a circus for a brief tour then briefly played professional
baseball. A music publisher liked his voice, hiring him to sing songs from the boxes of vaudeville
theaters in San Francisco but, after the San Francisco earthquake and the fire of 1906, Harry Fox
decided to give New York a try. Appearing in various vaudeville shows in the New York area, he
teamed up with Yansci Dolly of the famous Dolly Sisters in a Hammerstein act. At the same time, the New York Theatre, one of the largest in the World, was being converted into a movie house and decided to try vaudeville acts between the shows. They selected Harry Fox and his company to put on the dancing acts.
At the same time, the roof of the theatre was converted to the Jardin de Danse, and the Dolly sisters were featured in a nightly revue, where the dance was born.
Compared with today's standards, the original Foxtrot was moderately fast, simple and unrefined. It was the rise to fame of Vernon and Irene Castle's exhibition dances that led the elite of the dance world to try to capture the fox-trot's unusual style of movement, and it wasn't until the early 30's that Foxtrot began to take on the smoother and more flowing quality we recognize in today's dance.
It was also necessary to evolve a form of the dance that could express the slow syncopated 4/4 rhythm yet remain "on the spot." This did not mean that the "traveling" fox-trot was dropped, but the "on the spot" dance could by done in both small, crowded spaces and larger ones where throngs of dancers can participate. Various bands and individual musicians were experimenting with and perfecting the new sounds and beats, and the "on the spot" dancing became known, appropriately, as crush, then rhythm dancing.
The Foxtrot is now the most common of the social dances and is easily the most significant development in all of ballroom dancing. The combination of quick and slow steps permits more flexibility and gives much greater dancing pleasure than the one-step and two-step dances it replaced. There is more variety in the fox-trot than in any other dance, and while at the outset one of the simplest of dances, it is ultimately the most challenging.