"Charleston" is a 1923 song by James P. Johnson, with words by Cecil Mack, written to accompany the Charleston dance. It premiered on 29 October 1923 at the New Colonial Theatre in New York, in the black Broadway musical comedy Runnin' Wild, where Elisabeth Welch performed it. Johnson drew on the music of South Carolina dockworkers, and the dance takes its name from the city of Charleston. The tune popularized its rhythm in mainstream American dance music, and the dance peaked in popularity in 1926 and 1927. The best-known early recording is a 1925 version by the Golden Gate Orchestra, inducted into the National Recording Registry. The song appears in films including Roxie Hart (1942), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Midnight in Paris (2011). Musically, its rhythm, the first bar of a 3-2 clave, became widely used in jazz comping, and its harmony is a ragtime progression, I-III7-VI7-II7-V7-I. A jazz standard in the key of B flat, it has been widely covered, mostly as an instrumental.
