Getting started with music for Lindy Hop

People have been asking me a lot lately where to get some of the music I play at dance nights. The problem though, is not how or where to get it, but what to get. Like most swing DJs, I spend a lot of time listening through albums and picking out individual tracks to use – and sometimes the pickings can be very slim. It’s not unusual to find nothing I want to use, or only one or two tracks. It’s rare that I find an album with more than four tracks that I want to use for DJing, no matter that the album might be filled with incredible music. Sometimes I wonder if I’m too picky. My main criterion is simply this: if a track makes me want to get up and dance, I’ll use it.

This does make it hard to recommend any individual albums to people asking that question. So as an early effort to help with the problem, I’ve made a short list of tracks that have seen a lot of play on Lindy dance-floors over the years. These will all be instantly recognised by swing DJs and experienced Lindyhoppers, and some are considered overplayed (with good reason) – but they’re all well-known, all are great to dance to, they are fairly beginner friendly, and they’re all great tracks in their own right. And they’re all available on iTunes, eMusic, Amazon and other such download services. This isn’t any kind of comprehensive guide to swing music… but it should serve as a good starting point.

You can listen to them courtesy of an 8 track.

[8tracks url=”http://8tracks.com/mixes/235250″ width=”350″ height=”350″ ]

Here’s the list: