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Has it been a while since you’ve jumped rope? To get into the swing, find your old rope or unwind a length of clothesline. See what it feels like to jump again—on your own or with friends. One of the beauties of jumping rope? All you need is some space and a little rhythm and your body comes alive. This resource will provide you with some history, techniques, and opportunities to explore Double Dutch further.

Who were the first kids to ever jump a rope for the fun of it? You’d have to take a time machine back thousands of years. Various clues lead to Ancient Egypt and China. From there, it eventually skipped its way to Europe and the Netherlands, and the Dutch are credited with bringing it to North America in the 1600s. One of their jump-rope games evolved into “Double Dutch,” and American kids and teens have been turning twin ropes ever since. Girls in particular took to it, aided by a shift from long dresses to skirts with pantaloons around 1800. 

Double Dutch really took off in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in northern U.S. cities. For many African American girls and young women there, Double Dutch became much more than a game. Using clotheslines, braided rope, and even super-long phone cords, they took it onto the streets where girls might jump from morning till night. The tick-tack-tick-tack of the ropes laid down a beat not only for jumping but for rhymes and game songs that became part of the tradition. Often turned away from guy-dominated sports, girls doing Double Dutch transformed jump roping into a realm all their own. They introduced moves, etiquette, chants, and traditions that passed from girl to girl and generation to generation. 

In the 1970s, a couple of New York police officers, Ulysses “Mike the Cop” Williams and David Walker, sought to use this love of Double Dutch as a tactic to promote positive choices for teen girls. Walker created the American Double Dutch League (ADDL), and for a while, McDonald’s restaurants sponsored local and national Double Dutch tournaments.

The competition could be intense. Teen girls were pushing what was possible between the ropes. They introduced back flips, handstands, and other acrobatic moves that were shared back and forth between them; they also incorporated breaking, the dance style of Hip Hop (and not by accident). Hip Hop and Double Dutch of the 1970s were developing side-by-side in the neighborhoods of New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and other U.S. cities, and the two gladly sampled from each other.

Today, Double Dutch has diverged onto two distinct paths. For the more competitive, it is an intense competition featuring uniforms and judges, becoming a sport that has spread worldwide. For others, “street Double Dutch” continues as a neighborhood tradition that binds together girls and women—especially African American girls and women—in a powerful, joyful tradition that brings together rhythm, song, dance, teamwork, and friendship. 

Playful, funny, creative—Double Dutch chants make their own music. Try them out with your friends!

“Rollercoaster”

“Cinderella”

“Miss Susie”

Read the Double Dutch chants above, paying attention to their rhythm, rhyme, and humor. Write your own and try it out with your own rope-jumping or step routine.  

Professor Kyra Gaunt, PhD (interviewed below), talks about “memories in objects.” For her, holding the ends of the ropes triggers memories of jumping Double Dutch as a girl. She says such objects can be things like favorite toys or jewelry, but also books, songs, sounds, or anything that helps us remember significant moments in life.  

Interview…an older person about a “memory object” in her or his life. What is it? Where did it come from? What is its story? 

Write about…a “memory object” in your life. What memories does it bring up? What does it mean to you? What feelings does it trigger? 

Write…a piece of fiction. Imagine finding an important personal “memory object” 50 years in the future. Describe it and the memories it triggers for you, and how it connects your fictional future with your present. Or considering writing the story from the object’s point of view. 

“Double Dutch’s Forgotten Hip-Hop Origins.”
By Lauren Schwartzberg.
Vice. March 31, 2015.

Professor Kyra Gaunt, PhD, is an ethnomusicologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Ethnomusicology is the study of music as it relates to the social and cultural aspects of the people who make it. She is also the award-winning author of The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop.

Kennedy Center: What’s your personal history with Double Dutch? 

Professor Kyra Gaunt: I grew up in the Washington, D.C., area in Rockville, Maryland, and my mother was a Double-Dutcher. She was great at it. I was an only child and an introvert. And honestly, I was not very good at Double Dutch, in part because I thought I was too fat. But the music-making involved in it became something that serendipitously got my attention while in graduate school at the University of Michigan studying ethnomusicology. I was at a reception for an ethnomusicology conference around 1994, and I heard the sound of girls down the hallway. They were twin seven-year-old sisters, Black girls, playing a popular hand-clapping game sung in a pentatonic blues scale: “Mary Mack (clap) / Dressed in black (clap) / Diamonds all down her ba - aa – ack (clap).” It was an epiphany to me. I was familiar with this game but not the song. But the beats and rhymes reminded me of rap. It sounded just like Hip-Hop.  

It was after that that I began to explore and study Black girls’ game-songs, cheers, and the chants and rhymes that accompany Double Dutch. As part of my research, I interviewed 15 African American women and a handful of girls from different parts of the country about their game-songs, and saw that as girls they considered them central to their lives. Also as part of my research, I learned to jump with the Double Dutch Divas in New York City. These were grown women [35 and up] and they let me join the group and taught me how to jump and dance in the ropes to recorded music. It was really a powerful experience—to be doing Double Dutch again, but this time as an adult surrounded by the support of Black women. Each member was given a nickname. One Diva named “Joy” started calling me “Twinkle Toes.” But they ended up calling me “Dr. Diva.” Why? Because I had a PhD. We respect people who have earned a doctoral degree and since I was learning from them so I could write my book about Double Dutch and hip hop, “Dr. Diva” stuck.  

KC: When and why did Double Dutch take root among girls in African American communities, particularly in urban areas? 

KG: Street Double Dutch has probably been popular for at least 70 or 80 years, and it was dominant in Black neighborhoods like Harlem in the 1950s. It wasn’t all that familiar or popular in the South, though, or in suburban and rural communities. 

The 1970s was when Double Dutch became bigger than street play and grabbed national attention. Starting in 1973, two New York City police officers, David Walker and “Mike” (born Ulysses) Williams, organized Double Dutch into competitions and tournaments for girls. The Fantastic Four were a ground-breaking group in the late ’70s, and these four teen girls were a very innovative, self-taught team. It’s important to me to say these Black girls’ names: Dolores Brown, De’Shone Adams, Nikki Adams, and Robin Oakes. Their picture appears in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. They won the American Double Dutch League Championship in 1980, then appeared in two McDonald’s commercials, and the 1981 video documentary, “Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show,” which won an Emmy®.  

All this was going on at the same time Hip Hop was being born in New York City. The Fantastic Four were part of the very first international European rap tour in 1982 with Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, the Rock Steady Crew, and others who all became legends in Hip Hop. But on the tour they were called the Double Dutch Girls, not the Fantastic Four, and they are largely erased from the history of the birth of Hip Hop as it was becoming commercialized from 1979 to 1982. They essentially were made invisible. That has so often been the case—African American girls and women and their contributions get left out of our picture of the past. Still, there is a dynamic relationship between Hip Hop and Double Dutch and the two practices have often sampled from each other. All you have to do is compare the lyrics of Nelly's “Country Grammar” with the popular Double-Dutch chant called “Down, down baby” or “Rollercoaster” and you'll see how girls’ games influenced the music of an emerging Hip Hop artist back in 2000. He went on to win a Grammy® with that song. “Down, down baby” is basically the entire hook. 

KC: Double Dutch is athletically and creatively intense, but it’s so much more than that. What is its meaning and power, especially for young Black women and girls? 

KG: Over time, Double Dutch became synonymous with “Black girl” community and identity in many urban cities. Boys had their usual sports, but as a rule, space wasn’t made for Black girls to participate or express themselves, especially their embodied music-making and dance, which was too often viewed as hyper-sexual given the rhetoric about teenage moms or welfare queens in the Reagan era. Double Dutch was one realm where Black girls ruled the game and called the shots. They were defining Black culture in a public space doing something where Black boys and white girls couldn’t keep up or were not interested in being included. 

It’s an important reason why Double Dutch has mattered so much for many women of color. It actually created boundaries, carved out a safe space, where Black girls could be all they wanted to be devoid of the gender stereotyping and anti-Black sexism elsewhere. Black girls have so often been demeaned and denigrated, or punished for talking too loud or showing attitude, or made fun of because of their “different” names or their hair or their body shape or skin color. Their bodies don’t necessarily conform to the white normative ideals of beauty. But when you’re turning those twirling ropes or stepping inside what looks like an eggbeater that others find impossible to jump through, none of that matters. 

Double Dutch has been a powerful symbol of identity and sisterhood for Black girls and women. Decades ago when doing my research, I interviewed a sister and fellow musician who grew up in North Carolina. The only Double Dutch she knew was from television. She told me without a second thought, “I’ll never be a Black girl until I learn Double Dutch. And that’s me. That’s us. It’s not like anything else. Double Dutch is Black girls’ jazz. And that’s the root of our Black Girl Magic.” 

KC: You sometimes discuss the concept of “kinetic orality” related to Double Dutch. What do you mean by that? 

KG: Part of being human is the need to pass along our own stories. We usually think of stories in terms of writing or storytelling, but there are also stories in how we move, how we dance, the sounds and songs we make, how we carry ourselves. These are examples of “kinetic orality” – telling stories and learning lessons of style and identity through word of mouth and body. I call the game-songs “oral-kinetic etudes.” Such self as well as social expressions are passed from person to person, generation to generation, place to place, especially within the African American community where so often attempts have been made to erase our history, especially the lived memories and history of Black girls. Kinetic orality is an important element in our story, and it is very present in Double Dutch, game songs, and other embodied musical expressions of what we know and who we are. 

KC: You’ve also talked about “memories in objects.” How do we experience and use such objects in our lives? 

KG: What I mean by that is that we attach memories to objects and they carry that memory, so to speak, for us. The women I interviewed about their childhood might say, “I don’t remember how the songs to Double Dutch go, it was so long ago.” But as soon as they heard the recording of the twins I first interviewed or when they pick up the handles, they’re right back there. Embodied memory takes you there. If you grew up baking bread, as soon as you put your hands in the dough it connects you to the timeline of your tactile experience. The toys from childhood, they carry memories. An “object” can also be a song or vinyl record cover from the past. These objects trigger social memories—the chants can [do that] when it comes to Double Dutch.  Just the feel of your feet scuffling on asphalt can remind you of the playground, a sidewalk, or the tick-tat sound the rope makes as it skips across the pavement. 

Black girls were musical griots in our neighborhoods and communities across generations. We were the librarians of musical traditions, and the caretakers of those sonic objects that held our collective memories. We helped keep them intact for us and for the world. 

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Director, Digital Learning

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Manager, Digital Education Resources

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Manager, Operations and Audience Engagement

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