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Sock Hops were once the rage
By Tom Range, Sr.

After four years of enforced conformity resulting from the scarcities of World War II, America's youth, the teenagers, exploded into what has been called the bobby-sox age. 
The teen "sock hop" describes the formal social occasion of the 1945-1955 era.  In the youth jargon, a "hop" was defined as an informal dance for students and teenagers at which only popular music was played.  The "sock" alluded to bobby socks, long white cotton socks worn by girls throughout the 1940s.  They were worn to a length just below the knee or as anklets with thick cuffs.  The girls usually wore these in conjunction with penny loafers, slip-on shoes with a penny mounted in a little flap on the instep.

Depending upon the formality of the dance, if held in a rented hall rather than in one's home, the girls would dress up, usually by wearing a full skirt, fluffed to the fullest with a number of petticoats.  The skirts often were decorated with embroidered or appliquéd likenesses of poodle dogs.  Why poodles rather than cocker spaniels?  Who is to say?  If the dance was impromptu the girls might show up in their street uniforms: baggy, rolled-up blue jeans and oversize shirts generally borrowed from their fathers or brothers, with the shirttails out and the sleeves rolled to just above the elbow.

The boys attending the sock hops would often show up wearing chino pants, dress shirts with button down collars, jackets and ties usually no more than an inch wide.  Some wore shoes described as "white bucks" (their more hip detractors would call the footwear "fruit boots") with a crew cut hairdo crowning the ensemble. 

The uniform of the rougher male elements included Wellington boots (all the better to stomp you with,) jeans or pegged pants held up by thick garrison belts which, when wielded, served as potent weapons in a rumble with a rival gang.  This costume was topped off by a "d. a." haircut. 

An aberration to the male attire was the zoot suit consisting of pegged pants worn with the waist band drawn up to near the armpit, a jacket extending to the knees, an oversize bow tie and a key chain looping almost to the ground.  A song popular at the time described a zoot suit as having a "drape shape and a reet pleat."  Mercifully, its popularity was for the most part confined to the West Coast.

The songs performed were generally ballads reminiscent of the swing era of the 1930s, plus a few novelty songs.  The bobby soxers danced to "On a Slow Boat To China," "Green Eyes," "I'll Walk Alone" and the silly "Mairzy Doats."  The dance tempos went from the waltz, as in "Tennessee Waltz" to a fast lindy.  The phonograph was the major source of the music.  By 1946 record companies were selling 10 times as many songs as they had a decade earlier; that year RCA Victor and Decca sold 100 million records each.  In 1948 tough plastic 45-rpm and long-playing 33-rpm records made obsolete the brittle old 78-rpm stand-bys.

The post-World War II sock hop era saw the blossoming of the jukebox industry into an $80 million, 400,000-box business that consumed the astonishing total of five billion nickels yearly.  The local malt shop, given a bit of a dance floor, could host a sock hop by letting “the other guy feed that jukebox every Saturday night.”

While the music played at the sock hops, and on TV's "American Bandstand," was eminently suited to be danced to, the youngsters still considered it their parent's music.  They seemed to be ready for more of a break with the Depression-World War II experiences of the preceding generation.  White kids began listening to "race music" on their own portable radios.  Black stations popularized a blend of jazz, blues and spirituals with heavily accented beats.  Race music was so named because such music, during the 1920s through the 1940s, was issued by recording companies on records informally known as "race records," intended primarily for sale to African-Americans.  Only a few black performers made it to mainstream music outlets.  Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots were the leaders.  But these artists conformed their styles to predominantly white audiences.

Then came Elvis Presley and the music industry was transformed.


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