Decoder Ring · 2026-06-03 · 49 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
19 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Australia's beloved Nutbush - a line dance performed to Tina Turner's 1973 hit "Nutbush City Limits" - is so embedded in national culture that generations of schoolchildren have learned it in PE class, yet almost no other country on Earth does it. Decoder Ring's investigation reveals how this peculiar tradition emerged at a pivotal moment: 1973, the exact year Australia renounced its White Australia Policy and declared itself officially multicultural. Dance historian Erika Okamura, cultural studies professor John Stratton, and others trace how Australian education departments, seeking to modernize a colonial British dance curriculum that had become stale, latched onto Tina Turner's song because its lyrics about a small town ("church house, gin house, schoolhouse") resonated with Australia's bush mythology. The dance itself likely derives from the Madison, a 1950s African American line dance that spread globally via television, though the Australian version bears little resemblance to the original. What emerges is a story about how official policy, cultural timing, and a perfectly positioned song created an enduring national identity marker - one that baffles foreigners and unites Australians across generations.
The Nutbush became embedded in Australian culture through official education policy starting in 1974, when progressive PE teachers introduced Tina Turner's "Nutbush City Limits" as a modern alternative to boring colonial British dances, and it subsequently spread through teacher training colleges and state curricula.
The earliest documented instance was around February-September 1974, when a relief teacher at Yarrallama Primary School near Canberra taught the dance to nine-year-old Fiona Chateur and her classmates.
No; when filmed performances of Tina Turner dancing to "Nutbush City Limits" show no resemblance to the iconic Australian steps, suggesting the choreography came from elsewhere, likely adapted from the Madison, a 1950s African American line dance.
The lyrics reference a small town with "church house, gin house, schoolhouse, outhouse," which aligns with Australia's mythic self-image as a bush and country culture, despite over 75% of Australians living in cities.
The song was released in 1973, the same year the Australian government renounced the White Australia Policy and declared Australia officially multicultural, creating space in schools for African American music and progressive new dance ideas.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
This episode contains zero actionable insights for any B2B operator. Every claim is about the cultural and choreographic history of an Australian line dance, with no transferable business knowledge whatsoever. It is substantive journalism in the wrong domain entirely.
It activates something primal. It is like a, uh, Pavlovian response where you're just sort of taken to the dance floor without even realizing you're doing it.
And of course, the idea that like, we think we have invented this thing and actually we've just stolen it from a bunch of other cultures, bits of American music, bits of dancing from Denmark and black culture and line dancing and country music and it's become the most famous thing in the country
The investigative method shows genuine intellectual curiosity - tracing the Alley Cat to a Danish composer, disproving the Madison connection, and surfacing the gay-club origin story - but every original conclusion reached is about dance anthropology, not business thinking. No frameworks, no contrarian takes, no first-principles reasoning applicable to any business context.
They do not have a single step in common. They're not facing one wall throughout. It is not complicated. There is not a caller.
she used to dance a lot to the Nutbush in the, uh, gay clubs in uh, Melbourne. And she said the host of Countdown, Molly Meldrum, spotted her and her friends dancing the Nutbush in this gay club
Guests are credible sources for this specific story - a Stanford dance historian, cultural studies professors, a gay Scottish immigrant eyewitness - but not one is a B2B practitioner of any kind. The entire guest roster is irrelevant to any business operator's professional development.
Richard Powers is a dance historian at Stanford University.
John Stratton is a professor of cultural studies at Adelaide University in South Australia.
The episode is genuinely well-evidenced within its domain: specific dates, chart positions, archival education-department records, named venues, and identified individuals. This specificity earns a marginal score, but every data point concerns dance history rather than anything a B2B operator could use.
it only made it to number 87 in December 1973 before dropping off the charts almost immediately. But then something really unusual happened more than a year later in 1975
I found the steps to the Alley Cat printed in an issue of Ballroom dance magazine from March 1965
The producer demonstrates solid investigative craft: he tests theories against expert opinion rather than accepting them at face value, asks genuinely specific follow-up questions, and structures a multi-source investigation that productively dismantles its own earlier conclusions. This is the episode's strongest dimension, though it remains irrelevant to B2B learning.
Do you remember at all what she looked like?
Not that I don't trust Jeremy's eyes, but he's not a dance expert and neither am I. So I put this to dance historian Richard Powers
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
In Australia, no wedding or school dance is complete without the Nutbush, Australia’s unofficial national dance. The Nutbush - a simple line dance to the song “Nutbush City Limits,” by Ike and Tina Turner - has become as stereotypically Australian as kangaroos, boomerangs, and Vegemite. And yet, hardly anyone outside of Australia even knows the Nutbush exists. Here at Decoder Ring, we certainly didn’t - until we started getting emails from Australians asking us to investigate its origins. How did an American song become the soundtrack for an Australian national tradition? Who invented the iconic steps, and why does every Australian know them? Our producer Max Freedman put on his dancing shoes to get some answers. The global, century-spanning story of the Nutbush involves Australia, Tennessee, Denmark, primary schools, gay discos, and demonstrates that even the goofiest cultural touchstones can go surprisingly deep. In this episode you’ll hear from culture journalists David Mack and Angus Kidman ; Nutbush researchers Panizza Allmark and Jon Stratton ; dance historians Erica Okamura and Richard Powers ; Dr. Fiona Chatteur, Jeremy Santolin, and Brian Kerr. This episode was written and
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Willa Paskin: Before we begin, this episode contains some adult language. A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine had to fly home for a wedding. He had to fly a long way home.
David Mack: I am David Mack. I'm a Slate contributor and freelance writer. As you can hear from the accent, I am from Australia, but I have learned to harden my Rs. Living in the US for the last 12 years now.
Willa Paskin: David's friend getting married was a fellow Aussie, but the guests were from all over the world.
David Mack: This is a friend of mine who used to live in London, and he also lived here in New York. So he had friends from New York that flew over with me to go to this wedding.
Willa Paskin: In so many ways, the wedding was totally familiar to the non Australians. It had all the typical beats, ceremonies, speeches, first dance, cutting the cake. But then, about 30 minutes before the end of the night, when everybody had a few drinks in them, the DJ put on a particular song by Ike and Tina Turner. David knew what song it was from the very first fuzzy scratch of the guitar. And he knew what he had to do.
David Mack: It activates something primal. It is like a, uh, Pavlovian response where you're just sort of taken to the dance floor without even realizing you're doing it.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: A church house, gin house, a schoolhouse, outhouse.
Willa Paskin: David wasn't alone. All around him, he saw the dance floor filling up with Australians organized in parallel lines.
David Mack: Looked around to everybody else and are, uh, we doing this? We're doing this. Your leg starts moving, your other leg starts moving, and all of a sudden you're line dancing.
Willa Paskin: 25 was a speed limit as one. They stepped left, they, they stepped right, they stepped back and forward, hitched up. Each knee gave a little kick and jump to turn 90 degrees. And then they repeated it all.
Max Friedman: They got enough food for the old town.
David Mack: And all the foreigners just were like, what is going on? They're looking at the Australians saying, like, what are you all doing? And the Australians are like, well, you're just witnessing something very beautiful right now. So just sit back and enjoy.
Willa Paskin: What they were witnessing was Australia's unofficial national dance, the nut bush.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: Um, here in Australia, the nutbush is a cultural staple.
David Mack: Aussie tradition states that when you hear
Max Friedman: this song, you must start dancing. It's whipped out at every school disco, every wedding, bar mitzvah, you name it, it's there.
Speaker E: Uh, you're born. You learn to walk, you learn to talk, you learn to do the knucklesh here in Australia.
Max Friedman: And it's that simple. I think it should be part of the citizenship test.
Willa Paskin: Imagine if the Macarena or the Electric Slide was also somehow the national anthem, that's the Nutbush. It's so baked into Australian culture, David has no idea when he first danced it.
David Mack: That's like asking me if I remember the first time I saw color. Like, it's just always been a part of my life. I don't.
Max Friedman: I don't.
David Mack: Yeah, it's in our DNA.
Willa Paskin: Every country has its own unique cultural traditions, traditions that can seem odd from the outside, and yet this one is striking enough that even Australians themselves wonder about it. How is it that an amped up hokey pokey called the Nutbush danced to a song by the very American Tina Turner came to be so close to the Australian national heart?
David Mack: Isn't this crazy? Like, we're the only people that do this? Like, uh, isn't that weird?
Willa Paskin: This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. In the last few years, we've received a number of emails from different Australians asking us a question about the Nutbush. And I have to be honest, we have been particularly intrigued by these emails because none of us here at Decoder Ring had ever even heard of the Nutbush. This, despite it apparently being a tradition as stereotypically Australian, is throwing some shrimp on the barbie. But we love to be given a juicy assignment. And so our, uh, producer, Max Friedman, put on his dancing shoes to get some answers. What he learned is that the Nutbush is far more than a simple line dance. It's a window into Australian history and identity and how even the goofiest cultural touchstones can go surprisingly deep. So today on Dakota Ring, why are Australians so nuts about the Nutbush? Our producer Max Friedman has put in heaps of hearty yaka to learn as much as he can about this Aussie classic. He's got you from here, just like Willa.
Max Friedman: Uh, I had never heard of the Nutbush until I started working on this story. I don't think I'd ever even heard the song it's danced to. Don't get me wrong, I like Tina Turner as much as the next guy. I sang Proud Mary at karaoke just a couple of weeks ago. I love Tina's version of Acid Queen. Simply the best is impeccable 80s cheese. But nutbush city limits, I don't know her and I'm not alone. Americans who encounter the Nutbush in the wild are often very confused.
David Mack: What is up, uh, with the Australian obsession with the song Nutbush City Limits by Tina Turner?
Willa Paskin: The whole country of Australia somehow banded together to all learn One random line dance to a song that isn't even Australian.
Max Friedman: Nobody else in the world knows this choreo, but here you get taught it,
David Mack: like in school, like when you're little.
Max Friedman: In fact, you do. Every Australian kid, it seems, has learnt the numbers. I did it in year seven at school.
Erika Okamura: Yeah.
Max Friedman: And it was part of our physical education as part of pen.
Speaker G: We had, like, entire sections of the day just dedicated to, like, nut bush
Max Friedman: rehearsals where the whole class would get caught.
Speaker H: Yeah.
Max Friedman: Oh, damn. Generations of Australians from every corner of the country remember learning the Nutbush in school. And I don't mean they picked it up from other kids on the playground. Grown ups made the decision to provide Nutbush instruction in class. All right, are you ready, guys? Yes. To put this in American terms, imagine if the Macarena was part of every state's PE curriculum, right next to sit ups and running the mile. And it had been that way for decades. And thus the Macarena had become enshrined in our national character. To me, that would be pretty weird. So how did this happen to Australia with the nutbush? When and where did it start? Well, as I learned, the dances taught in Australian schools have been used to shape a sense of what it means to be Australian for a long, long time. For as long as Australia has been a country. Australia 1901. At last the nation was united. We were no longer just south, uh, Australians or Queenslanders, Victorians or West Tralians, New South Welshmen or Tasmanians. We were Australians as a new nation at the start of a new century. Australia was no longer under the total control of Great Britain. It now had the power to write its own laws and to forge its own education system.
Erika Okamura: Australian state education departments, they're getting things rolling, right? And they're thinking, okay, what is going to be in the curriculum?
Max Friedman: Erika Okamura is a dance historian who's researching Australian schools during this period. And she says that armed with their sudden new autonomy, education departments decided to keep doing whatever the British were doing.
Erika Okamura: They're very closely following British practices. There's a lot of reverence to the motherland, the empire.
Max Friedman: So Australian states adopted British curricula, including a new syllabus for physical exercise, which appended a bunch of traditional British folk dances. Things like maypole dancing, English country dancing and morris dancing, which involves wearing jingle bells on your feet, waving handkerchiefs around and hitting sticks together.
Erika Okamura: Some of the women who were in charge of girls, girls physical education even went to Great Britain to learn English, and morris dances, brought those back to Australia.
Max Friedman: The Choice to import British dances from thousands of miles away was part of a larger official vision of what this new country called Australia should be forever an outpost of the British race in the South Seas. And the government imposed this vision with a set of strict immigration laws known as, literally, the White Australia Policy. White Australia was a way of life and would be defended to the last man so long as we possibly can.
Speaker H: We ought to aim at having a homogeneous population.
Max Friedman: The White Australia policy meant that only northern Europeans would be allowed to migrate to Australia with a, uh, heavy favoritism towards Brits. Meanwhile, indigenous Australians were excluded from basically all aspects of white Australian life. So teaching British folk dance in state schools was part of the larger state project of constructing Australian identity as fundamentally British. But after World War II, all of this very slowly started to change.
Erika Okamura: There's like a collective mind shift after the war, a realization that maybe Australia does have something valuable to offer in terms of our own traditions. What is Australian folklore? What are Australian folk tunes? What are Australian folk dances?
Max Friedman: So folklorists started to go out into the bush to collect homegrown folk songs and folk dances, what were called bush dances. To be clear, Bush, uh, dances do not come from the indigenous peoples of Australia, even though they have some of the oldest recorded dance traditions that we know of. Bush dances, rather, were descended from the dances that settlers brought over from Europe, but they had evolved over a century or so into something uniquely Australian.
Erika Okamura: Dance is always dynamic. Dance is always changing. It's going to meld and mix, and it's going to become something different. So it's within this era that we see the rise of bush dance bands and ultimately the integration of bush dancing into state schools.
Max Friedman: As this was happening in the 50s and 60s, other things were changing too. The indigenous civil rights movement began to gather momentum, and immigration laws were loosened little by little to let in non Europeans.
John Stratton: So by the early 70s, you have this major change taking place in the population of Australia itself.
Max Friedman: John Stratton is a professor of cultural studies at Adelaide University in South Australia.
John Stratton: What happens is the Labour Party gets in and you get a major political transformation.
Willa Paskin: Yes, it's done.
John Stratton: And in that context, you get that shift from this idea of this white settler, uh, heritage that we should all be proud of to a more immediate Australia, an Australia that accepts African American music, and in that sense, an Australia that accepts Tina Turner.
Max Friedman: And the year that Ike and Tina Turner released Nutbush city limits, 1973, that's the very same year that the Australian government finally renounced the white Australia policy and declared that Australia was officially a multicultural nation. So this song comes out right at the exact moment when Australia is ushering in reforms in every area of life, including in education. Teachers were auditioning all sorts of progressive new ideas to see what worked. And one of those ideas seems to have been a line dance to a Tina Turner song. And I talked to someone who was there when it happened.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: I remember clearly dancing the nutbush in my primary school when I was about nine years old. Would have been between February 74 to probably September 74, sometime there.
Max Friedman: Dr. Fiona Chateur grew up on a nature reserve outside Canberra and we used
Dr. Fiona Chateur: to catch the bus into Yarrallama Primary School every morning, which was a good hour or hour and a half trip.
Max Friedman: One fateful day when she got to PE class, she didn't see her usual teacher. It was someone new, actually two someones, a pair of relief teachers or substitutes.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: One of them, she was teaching us the dance and the other teacher didn't know the dance. The lady who was teaching us the nut bush was teaching the other lady how to do it. No idea where she came from, don't remember her name.
Max Friedman: Do you remember at all what she looked like?
Dr. Fiona Chateur: The lady who didn't know the nutbush had glasses and wavy dark hair. Short. The lady who knew the nutbush had mousy coloured hair and it was straight and she was a little bit thinner.
Max Friedman: Whoever this mystery mousy haired lady was, she stood on stage at the front of the school hall to demonstrate the steps. Then she put a record on.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: Church house, gin house, a schoolhouse.
Max Friedman: And did you know who Tina Turner was?
Dr. Fiona Chateur: No idea.
Max Friedman: But before long, Fiona and her classmates were moving and grooming. Step to the right, to the right, to the left, to the left. Back with the right foot twice. Back with the left foot twice. Up with the right knee twice. Up with the left knee twice. Kick right, kick left, legs out, cross turn. This was nothing like the traditional folk dances for Fiona's regular teacher taught like the Scottish reel or the Pride of
Dr. Fiona Chateur: Aaron, not completely different.
Max Friedman: Those were dances in a circle. This was dance in the line. Those were partner dances. This you could dance on your own. Those were fusty. This was fun. Did you like it?
John Stratton: Yeah, love it.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: We all loved it.
Speaker G: Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: There's a lot of things I don't remember. It was 51 years ago, but I do remember learning the nut bush, um, because it was something special for us.
Max Friedman: Fiona's memory is the earliest account anybody has been able to find of the nutbush being taught in an Australian school. So that Mousy haired lady who visited her school that day was likely one of, if not the first person to teach this dance to kids. In any event, she wasn't the last.
John Stratton: Relatively fast, basically everywhere was teaching the Nutbush.
Max Friedman: This may have started with a few rogue teachers here and there, but John Stratton's research suggests that the Nutbush quickly became something more official.
John Stratton: It was being taught each in teach
Max Friedman: training colleges, it was being shared at conferences, it was being written into state curricula.
John Stratton: Bureaucrats are going like, what can we do to get the kids interested in moving again, you know, and in dancing. Oh, right, you know, here's this song, so let's have a dance that will go with it.
Max Friedman: Knottbush City Limits is about a town in western Tennessee, but in many ways the song was perfect for this new, officially multicultural Australia. It's got funky guitars and a hard 4, 4 stomp beat that makes it easy for anybody to dance to. It has the currency of black American culture, but also, incredibly, a title that sounds like it belongs in Australian schools right there alongside Bush songs. The music itself couldn't be more different, but they share that crucial word.
Speaker J: We're so familiar with the bush. It's part of a, uh, lexicon talking about the Bush that I had thought that, oh, um, is this an Australian town?
Max Friedman: Penica Olmark is a professor of cultural studies at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. She's written two papers with John Stratton about the Nutbush, and she says it's not just the word nutbush that makes the song resonate with Australians, it's the
Speaker J: lyrics of the song. The myth of Australia is that we live in country towns. So the song Nutbush City Limit, starting with church house, gin house, school house, outhouse, it seems so Australian.
Max Friedman: More than 75% of Australians today live in major cities. But Australia's self image is still closely associated with the country, the Outback, the bush. It reminds me, honestly of the United States, where people love to talk about rural America as the real America.
Speaker J: So Tina Turner singing about this small town. It resonates with the mythic Australia, what the real Australia is.
Max Friedman: This is the thing about Nutbush City Limits that's sort of amazing. It arrives as a modern alternative to Bush songs, but speaks to the same mythic idea of Australia up to and, uh, including the name of the town, which becomes, of course, the name of the dance. So I think I now have a pretty good idea of when and why the Nutbush became embedded in Australian culture. The dance was introduced at a moment of massive social and political change in Australia to spice up a dance curriculum that was a legacy of Australia's white colonial past and worse, boring the kids. But what about the dance itself? Was it phys ed teachers who came up with the iconic steps? If not, where did they come from? The search for the steps to the Nutbush is going to bring me home to America. Then off to Scandinavia and back again. Our choreographic crusade continues after the break. Jeremy Santelin is a videographer in Brisbane, and until recently, he never really thought about the Nutbush as something with an origin or something he had to learn. It just was.
Speaker H: The Nutbush has been an ever present part of my life. It's kind of like the national anthem, but in dance form it's just always there.
Max Friedman: So when Jeremy took his four year old son to a kid's dance party thrown by the local police citizens youth club, sure enough, on came Tina Turner's Nutbush City limits.
Speaker H: And some girls start dancing to it with the steps that we know as the Nutbush. And my son was still grooving away, having a little dance. He was having a great time, but he was kind of looking at these girls and he wasn't doing the steps that they were doing. And I felt at that moment, uh, oh, I've failed as a parent because I've not taught my son the steps to the nut bush. I got home that night and I thought, okay, we better solve this problem. Gotta teach him the steps to the Nutbush. I gotta make sure I teach him the right steps.
Max Friedman: So to get it right, he decided to go straight to what he assumed was the source, Tina Turner herself. Our show opens right now with the exciting Ike and Tina Turner review. And they are wonderful. So let's have a look. Tina was a totally unique physical performer. Think of Proud Mary, one of her biggest hits and probably my personal favorite Tina Turner song. It's impossible to hear it without seeing Tina's moves in your head. Impossible to sing along without imitating Tina with your whole body. So Jeremy assumed the Nutbush came from her as well. But when he went on YouTube to watch live performances of Nutbush City limits, he noticed something strange.
Speaker H: Whatever I watched that was featuring Tina Turner and Ike, there was no steps that resembled the Nutbush dance that we know. So that got me thinking, if it doesn't come from Tina Turner, where does it come from?
Max Friedman: Researchers John Stratton and Penita Allmark had the same question. Remember, they had concluded that the rise of the Nutbush dance in Australia was fueled by official school Policy. So they dug into Education department archives and within the Nutbush related materials, they kept coming across references to another dance called the Madison.
John Stratton: What you find in a lot of Education Department publications is a recommendation to teach the Madison to Nutbush city limits.
Speaker J: There were some teacher education manuals, and some of them call it the Nutbush or some call it the Madison. But it seems like it was the
John Stratton: same sense in South Australia. They were very clear that the dance you did to Nutbush city limits was the Madison, and they taught the Madison.
Max Friedman: So what's the Madison? It's Madison time.
Speaker J: Hit it.
Speaker G: So the Madison, we don't know exactly where it was, started around 1957 in the Midwest. Mostly, we believe it was Columbus, Ohio, an African American club. We don't know why it was called a Madison. And it was the first line dance.
Max Friedman: Richard Powers is a dance historian at Stanford University.
Speaker G: You are shoulder to shoulder with others in a lateral line. You might have, oh, six or seven, eight people in a line, and then another line and then another line, all facing the same wall for the whole dance.
Max Friedman: And the Madison was called, meaning you had a caller telling you the steps. Think of square dancing or the cha cha slide.
Speaker H: Now when I say here that I
Max Friedman: want the big strong m, erase it and back to the Madison. So the Madison was created in black clubs. It was black band leaders like Ray Bryant who recorded the song and called the Steps. But it reached white America thanks to the relatively new medium of television. Okay, here is the big dance of this season. Hal Brown and his version of the Madison give me a big strong line. Uh, teen dance shows like the Buddy Dean show in Baltimore and Bandstand out of Philadelphia put the Madison on screen for anyone and everyone to try out for themselves.
Speaker G: So that was a new way of transmission of social dancing. Uh, before then, it was more like word of mouth and people physically traveling from one town to another, that takes a long time. But seeing something on television and doing it, that's instantaneous.
Max Friedman: So the Madison quickly spread not just across the United States, but all over the world. There's a famous scene in Jean Luc Godard's classic 1964 film Band of Outsiders, where our three heroes dance a modified Madison. So if it made it to France, the Madison could have very plausibly traveled to Australia too, where education department departments then began to officially recommend teaching it with a song called Nutbush City Limits, a pairing that would become so common, Australians would begin to call the dance formerly known as the Madison, simply the Nutbush. There's just one problem with this story. The Madison and the Nutbush look nothing alike. Richard Powers, though he has an encyclopedic knowledge of social dance, is an American, and therefore was not familiar with the Nutbush until I got in touch with him. But he watched some videos and he gave me a very decisive verdict.
Speaker G: They do not have a single step in common. They're not facing one wall throughout. It is not complicated. There is not a caller. I say they have almost nothing in common with the original Madison other than doing footwork, which just about every dance in the world does footwork.
Max Friedman: But remember, the reason I started looking into the Madison to begin with is that there's all this paperwork from Australian education departments and teacher trainings calling what we know as the Nutbush the Madison. If it's not the Madison, why was everybody calling it that? Richard has a theory.
Speaker G: So this goes back to the French. The French use the word Madison as a generic term.
Max Friedman: In other words, any line dance in France will be called Le Madison.
Speaker G: So if in Australia, and I don't know this one way or the other, but if in Australia Madison is a generic term that means line dance, in that case, yes, that is a Madison as opposed to the Madison.
Speaker H: I don't know why the Madison is referenced as a connection to Nutbush. I don't think it looks similar at all.
Max Friedman: That's Jeremy Santelin, the dad from Brisbane you heard from earlier. He became obsessed with tracking down the true origins of the dance that became the Nutbush.
Speaker H: Once I discovered that it's not the Madison, it got me wondering. What do the rest of the world do at weddings or birthday parties or discos? What's the equivalent of the nut bush in other countries?
Max Friedman: So he started digging around online for novelty dances from around the world, watching video after video to see if any might provide a clue. And then he found something.
Speaker H: And I went, oh, my God.
Speaker K: Come on.
Max Friedman: It's Alley Cat time.
Speaker H: That looks very similar to the Nutbush
Max Friedman: to the right and the left to the left. Now right back twice. Now left back twice. The dance is called the Alley Cat. It's a line dance. And to Jeremy, the steps looked almost identical to the knot bush.
Speaker H: It's just slower. Uh, Grandma could do it nice and easily.
Max Friedman: The Alley Cat did not start its life in Australia or in an African American club or on American TV or in America at all, but with a jazz pianist. In Denmark. In 1961, a Danish composer named Bent Fabricius Bier began hosting a TV show called Omkringe, um, Flugel, or in English, around a piano. He composed and performed the theme song himself.
Speaker J: Um,
Max Friedman: And the following year, an American record company decided to release it as a single. Though the company insisted on simplifying his name to bent fabric, they didn't like the title of the song either, and they changed it to Alley Cat. After it was released in the US in 1962. Alley Cat became popular enough that pretty soon someone developed a dance to go along with it. It's not clear exactly who. I found the steps to the Alley Cat printed in an issue of Ballroom dance magazine from March 1965, which says only by way of attribution that the dance originated in the New York City area. The Alley Cat was subsequently taught in many American PE classes and became a staple at American bar mitzvah parties, such as, for example, my dad's. And if Jeremy's eyes were right, a sped up version of the Alley Cat had made its way to Australia.
Speaker H: I couldn't believe that I had stumbled upon what to me seemed like this is the origins of the nutbush. And it's a dance I've never heard of. It's a dance that no one I know in Australia has ever heard of, but yet here it is with almost the exact same steps to our national, uh, dance.
Max Friedman: Not that I don't trust Jeremy's eyes, but he's not a dance expert and neither am I. So I put this to dance historian Richard Powers, who is, in general, fairly circumspect about things like this.
Speaker G: We dance historians have often been guilty of seeing two dances which are similar in some way and presuming that one led to the other, and this is not necessarily true at all. We have so many examples of human beings just thinking of the same thing.
Max Friedman: I figured he would give me the most informed and objective opinion as to whether the nutbush simply is the Alley cat. So I showed him instructional videos for the two dances, one after the other. So here's the Alley Cat instructional video
Speaker G: that I. I've not seen this one. Good.
Max Friedman: Start with your right foot. Here we go. One, two, two. Right.
Speaker G: Yeah, definitely I see the connection to the nut bush.
Max Friedman: With your left foot, take your right knee.
Speaker G: Absolutely, yes. Steps in place. Look at that.
Erika Okamura: Right knee.
Speaker G: 1. I would definitely see the nut bushes related to that. Yep.
Max Friedman: I am now prepared to say this part of the case is closed. The dance, now known to all Australians as the Nut Pocket bush was created by Americans sometime between 1962 and 65, possibly right here in New York City. The dance was called the Alley Cat to go along with a tune called the Alley Cat by a Danish cat named Bent Fabric. Somehow that dance made its way to Australia. Maybe the Alley Cat traveled along the international bar Mitzvah circuit. Or maybe an American gym teacher shared it with their Australian counterpart. But somewhere along the way, this dance mistakenly conflated with the Madison, hooked up with Tina Turner's Nutbush City Limits. And that coupling, that's where I want to shuffle off to next. How did this dance get married to this song specifically? For a long time I assumed the alchemist who first put the two together must have been a PE teacher. Someone like that relief teacher with the mousy brown hair who made such a memorable visit to Fiona Chateau's school outside Canberra. But then I found someone with a story that suggests maybe that pairing happened in a space very far away from primary schools. When we come back was the Nutbush born in a gay bar? When Jeremy Santelin began his quest for the origins of the Nutbush, he just wanted to learn the right steps to teach his young son. But by the time he discovered the Alley Cat, he was way, way down the rabbit hole. He would not be content until he'd uncovered every clue he could. And he found one in an old episode of an iconic Australian TV show called Countdown.
John Stratton: This is Countdown throughout Australia on ABC Television.
Speaker H: Countdown was a very popular and long running music show in Australia. Think of it like Top ah of the Pops was for the uk. Countdown was our slightly, um, more raucous
Max Friedman: live version of that on December 5, 1976. The featured guests were Australian heartthrob John Paul Young and Scottish heartthrob's the Bay City Rollers. But what caught Jeremy's eye was how the show opened on four young dancers in street clothes, two men, two women, energetically stumbling their way through what looks an awful lot like the Nutbush. It's not even the whole song, just a snippet of it.
Speaker H: That was in 1976. They're doing that dance. It's interesting. They don't even know the steps that well. It's quite fresh.
Max Friedman: Jeremy believes this is the earliest instance of the dance being performed on television. So obviously he wanted to figure out how it got there. He managed to actually track down one of the dancers in the video and he reached out and he asked her,
Speaker H: she said she used to dance a lot to the Nutbush in the, uh, gay clubs in uh, Melbourne. And she said the host of Countdown, Molly Meldrum, spotted her and her friends dancing the Nutbush in this gay club and uh, invited them onto the show.
Max Friedman: She said she didn't know who had started it, but she gave Jeremy a clue. Research Annabelle's disco circa 70s Melbourne. So that's what I did, which is how I found Brian Kerr.
Speaker K: My name is Brian Kerr. I live in a little town called Howard in Queensland. Now, uh, I've retired here. It's a small village, and very much like the small village in Scotland that I grew up in before I migrated to Australia.
Max Friedman: The year was 1975. Brian arrived in Melbourne just a couple of days after his 20th birthday.
Speaker K: Basically, I, uh, wanted to get away from Scotland, uh, as far as possible. And Australia seem furthest place. Look, growing up gay in Scotland in the 60s and 70s wasn't, um, fun. It was deadly serious. And, uh, when I got to Australia, it wasn't much better, but the weather was good. At least homophobia was in sunshine.
Max Friedman: When Ryan first got to Melbourne, he lived in a boarding house in what was then a rough neighborhood called St Kilda. Someone from the Australian government actually helped him move in.
Speaker K: There was this big migration guy. He must have been about 8 foot tall, built like a brick, um, outhouse. And he took me to the window of the room I was going to stay in, and he pointed across the road to a pub called the Prince of Wales. And he said, uh, son, you do not go to that pub. It is full of faggots and dykes. And I couldn't wait to get rid of him so I could rush across the road, walked in the door, and I felt completely at home. I thought, I've arrived. Here are my people.
Max Friedman: The Prince of Wales pub was where you'd go for a drink, but if you wanted to dance, the place to be was Annabelle's. It was in an old Victorian gentleman's club with a huge space upstairs known
Speaker K: as Blades offered Go up these stairs, uh, being watched by all the men at the bottom, which I thought was a great thing. I walked into this huge room. In the middle was the height of technology. We had the biggest mirror ball you ever saw there with lights shining at it. And so that made all these lights go around the room. And I'd never seen anything like it.
Max Friedman: They danced ABBA and hits from local acts like Skyhooks and Marcia Hines. And all these years later, he remembers very clearly seeing the Nutbush for the first time.
Speaker K: When Nutbush came on, a small number of people hit the dance floor dancing this dance to it. A very simple dance. At first it was only like half a dozen, but the next week I went back, there were about 30 people on the floor. And then the week after that, the whole floor was filled with people dancing the Nutbush. I remember asking people, how did you all know this? How do you. I said, we were taught this dance in primary school. A lot of them that was the moves to their primary school warm up exercises.
Max Friedman: In other words, the steps were so simple any child could do it.
Speaker K: So it transferred to the nut push very well. And I thought this was great. Before you know it, as soon as the, uh, opening notes of Nutbush came on, the whole dance floor was packed by gay men laughing and dancing to, uh, Nutbush. Life didn't get better than that.
Max Friedman: I think Brian's testimony suggests we need to amend our history of the Nutbush in a couple of important ways. Firstly, given that Brian's fellow dancers, who were adults in 1975, knew the moves from primary school and Nutbush city limits didn't even even exist when they would have been at the age to attend primary school. That means Australian kids must have been dancing to the Alley Cat future Nutbush years before Tina Turner ever recorded the song. In fact, I found Australians who remember doing these same alley cat moves in school to other songs altogether, including a local hit from 1970 called the Pushbike Song and a Joan Baez cover of the Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Sure, why not? But the notion that the Nutbush as we know it today was created by teachers, that the marriage of the Alley Cat to Nutbush City Limits took place in a classroom, well, that seems like it's only part of the story. Based on what Brian told me, it's certainly possible that some kid learned the Nutbush in PE class, came home and showed it to his older brother or his fun uncle or his dad, and they brought it to the gay clubs. But maybe it's the reverse. Maybe the Nutbush was created at a place like Blades, where some young gay men who remembered these simple moves from school paired them with a new song by the fabulous Tina Turner. Maybe there was then a gym teacher who happened to patronize gay discos where they saw the Nutbush and thought it would be fun for their students. So which came first, the schools or the discos? We may never know for sure, but here's what we do know. The song Nutbush City Limits was not actually a hit in Australia when it was first released. It only made it to number 87 in December 1973 before dropping off the charts almost immediately. But then something really unusual happened more than a year later in 1975, after phys ed teachers had started dancing to the song in schools and after gay men had started to dancing to it in bars, Nutbush City Limits made an unlikely return to the Australian charts and kept climbing through 1976. The song went all the way to number one in the state of Victoria, home to the city of Melbourne, where Brian Kerr was dancing the Nutbush at Blades. I asked Brian if he thinks other Australians have any idea about the role the gay community played in the birth of the Nutbush.
Speaker K: I don't think that they do. Certainly young people wouldn't care, but I don't think people really know about its origins.
Max Friedman: It wasn't long before the Nutbush grew stale in gay clubs. HIV AIDS came along, Disco was dead, the Nutbush was corny, the Nutbush was straight, the Nutbush was for kids. But the Nutbush persisted across Australia for decades. And its longevity has a lot to do with someone we've been all about ignoring up to now. The woman who wrote and performed the song Nutbush City Limits. Well, I'm Tina and I was born in Nutbush. Uh, Tina Turner grew up in the 1940s in Nutbush, Tennessee, where she worked the cotton fields alongside her parents. Church house, gym house, highway number 19. People keep the city clean, they call it that foot. Nutbush City Limits was one of the first songs Tina wrote for herself. But she was already a veteran of the music business by then. She'd been putting out hit records for more than a decade with her husband and bandleader, Ike Turner. But the year that Nutbush City Limits was propelled to its peak popularity in Australia, 1976, that was also the year when everything changed for Tina Turner herself. The divorce was clean cut. I got nothing, no money, no house, no car.
Speaker E: So 1976 is this crucial moment in TV's creed because she finally splits up with Ike Turner. They'd been performing together for, uh, you know, nearly 20 years at that point. They'd always been seen as this double A. And she was left with these massive level of dance.
Max Friedman: Angus Kidman is an Australian journalist who has written about Tina's time down Under.
Speaker E: For the most part, she wasn't recording and the records she was recording weren't selling very well. Her money making strategy throughout that period was touring. So she was scrambling to tour and she would take any gig that she could. She was playing lots of corporate gigs in the States. She was playing lots of supper clubs, lots of casinos, anyone that could have her. She had to do whatever she could do to make money.
Max Friedman: This was a heartbreaking low point. It appeared in the moment that to escape an abusive marriage, Tina had Had to sacrifice her stardom. What happened next is one of the most famous comeback stories in music history. But what's not so famous is how important Australia was in that story.
Speaker E: Every couple of years, she would come to Australia and she would do a massive number of gigs in the course of three or four weeks. There was one point in 1980 where for 14 days in a row, she was doing two shows a day.
Max Friedman: At this point, Tina had been dropped by her American record label, but not by her Australian label. In 1980, she released a single which only ever came out in Australia and New Zealand. Are you breaking my heart?
Speaker E: There was this belief that, okay, yeah, she, she was seen as a viable act.
Max Friedman: And key to her viability in Australia was the Nutbush, a dance that had been spreading across the continent for at least five years by this point.
Speaker E: When you look at advertisements from this era, they're always going to mention that Nutbush is one of the songs she's going to perform. Like that was a, uh, song that was going to have to be in her set list no matter what.
Max Friedman: So Australians were loyal, and Australia was lucrative through the dark years of Tina's career. But that's not all. When she finally got out of those dark years, it was with the help of one particular Australian, her manager, a man named Roger Davies. Roger said to me, what do you want? I had a dream. My dream is to be the first black rock and roll singer to pack
Dr. Fiona Chateur: places like the Stones, those people that.
Max Friedman: Packing those kind of places, you know.
Speaker H: You know, when you meet an artist,
Max Friedman: if they have got something that grabs you, and obviously it did to me.
Speaker H: And she was also incredibly determined.
Max Friedman: Roger helped Tina change her image, got her a new recording contract, and even brought her the song that would become the biggest hit of her career.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: What's love got to do?
Speaker E: Got to do this also co written by an Australian. So there's no getting away from the Australian connections. By the beginning of 84, she'd become like, the biggest pop star in the world. It was quite a rapid reinvigoration once that song really took off.
Max Friedman: What's love got to do With It? And when she was at the very top, she didn't forget Australia. She kept coming back. Uh, first she joined the most enduring Australian film franchise, starring in Mad Beyond Thunderdome. What's this? You think I don't know the law?
Dr. Fiona Chateur: Wasn't it me who wrote it?
Max Friedman: Then? Starting in the late 1980s, she became the face of an even more important Aussie institution. National Rugby League, Winfield cup, the big games never look so good. Her iconic rugby commercials ran for years on Australian TV. And here she is on the field for the 1993 grand final, essentially the Australian Super Bowl. Hello, Sydney. You can hear thousands of Australian rugby fans singing along.
David Mack: When I was growing up in Australia, I could not have thought of a more famous person in the world than Tina Turner.
Max Friedman: That's David Mack, the slate writer, who you heard from at the very beginning of this episode.
David Mack: It was like Tina Turner and Princess Diana. Those were the most famous people I could have thought of as a child. And, uh, if there's one thing Australians love, especially at that time, it was when Americans paid attention to us.
Max Friedman: I tell you, that country has been terrific to me, actually. You haven't thought of being naturalised in Australia? I think I am already.
David Mack: So the idea that Tina Turner, this global rock star, um, clearly loved Australia, loved this Aussie guy she was working with, was so glad that she'd found this niche. We loved her back.
Max Friedman: Tina seems never to have actually danced the Nutbush herself. Some people have claimed she didn't even know about it, but I found at least one short interview clip that suggests she did.
Willa Paskin: I still have fun, actually, especially here
Max Friedman: in Australia, because the kids made a dance for me, like the last trip and it's still going strong. Um, it's a little hard to understand, but what she says is, I still have fun here in Australia because the kids made a dance for me and it's still going strong. If anything, the Nutbush today is more popular than ever as a symbol of uniquely Australian culture. That's why there's been so much interest in its origins.
David Mack: I would say in the last 10 years, we've become aware that this is something only we do.
Dr. Fiona Chateur: I only recently learned that this is
Max Friedman: a dance that we only do in Australia. Wait, so who made it up, then? PE teachers, school teachers. That's where I learned it. Tina Turner doesn't do the nut bush.
Speaker G: She doesn't do the nut bush.
Speaker J: Nope.
Max Friedman: When Tina Turner died in 2023, many Australians expressed their grief by. Well, you know. Thousands of Aussies will attempt a new world record in memory of the late and great Tina Turner at Birdsville's Big Red Bash tomorrow.
John Stratton: Boot scoot.
Max Friedman: And festival goers are limbering up to
Willa Paskin: dance the Nutbush on the edge of the Simpson Desert.
Max Friedman: This year, they're hoping to muster 5,000 plus dancers, breaking last year's record of 4,084. So we just got the world record for a dance that only we do.
Speaker G: Yeah,
Max Friedman: you can often hear that bit of Self deprecating humor in the way Australians talk about the nutbush. If they take pride in this dance, that's all their own. It's pride with a strong whiff of irony. And in reporting this story, I learned a delightful bit of Aussie slang that helped me understand this sensibility. The word daggy. Daggy means kind of awkward, corny, uncool. But daggy can also be endearing. The nutbush today is undoubtedly taggy, but that is not necessarily an insult.
David Mack: It is an easy dance that anyone can learn within two rounds. It's just this group spirit all at once at a party where we're all doing the same thing, we're all laughing, we all know we look like idiots, but this is bonding us together over something really stupid and easy and fun. And that's pretty Australian, to be honest, to sort of to let your hair down, to kind of know that it looks stupid, but just do it anyway.
Max Friedman: I explained to David everything I'd learned about the history of the nutbush. The story you've just heard. Some of it he knew, some of it he didn't.
David Mack: Australian, uh, gaze. Yep, thank God for us.
Max Friedman: But as a whole, he told me it made sense.
David Mack: And of course, the idea that like, we think we have invented this thing and actually we've just stolen it from a bunch of other cultures, bits of American music, bits of dancing from Denmark and black culture and line dancing and country music and it's become the most famous thing in the country, is like probably the most Australian thing of all, to be honest. I love Australia. It's brilliant. But we do have a history, I would say, of taking things from somewhere else and then making them our own. But look at us 50 years later. We're still going strong.
Max Friedman: You know, I too live in a country with an ugly colonial history whose culture is cobbled together from a bunch of other cultures. And so I've come to admire this attitude towards the nutbush. My fellow Americans, in this semi quincentennial year, we really don't need to take ourselves that seriously. We can love our stupid traditions and laugh at them too. A church house in house. School house, outhouse. This is Dakota Ring. I'm Max Friedman.
Willa Paskin: And I'm Willa Paskin. Uh, please consider signing up for Decoder Ring. Plus you get to skip all the ads and listen to episodes of Decoder Rings Back, our new feature in which I answer a listener's question. With that listener, you can sign up on the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visit slate.com decoder ring this episode was written and produced by Max Friedman. It was edited by Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Decoder Ring is also produced by me. Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Thank you to Jeff Miners and Nick Enga, who runs an amazing resource called the Library of Dance and the Dakota Ring. Listeners who wrote to us about the Nutbush, Sarah Ridley and Julian Grace interview. Clips with Tina Turner and Roger Davies come from the 2021 documentary Tina, which you can watch on HBO. Max, if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringslate.com or you can leave us a message on our answering machine. The number is 347-460-7281. We really appreciate hearing from you guys and we will see you in two weeks.
