It's not always easy to decide which "category" to list a song under. "Cold, Cold Heart" was written by Hank Williams (Sr.) and performed by many country artists. However, it was also a "crossover" hit as performed by Tony Bennett. So I've listed the song under both Country and Big Band Era.

In fact, many of Hank Williams' songs were performed by "popular" artists of the day. Kris Kristofferson enjoyed similar success with many of his songs a couple of decades later, as did Elvis Presley and Ray Charles with their diversified singing styles.

As for dancing, the "fox trot" and "jitterbug" were the most popular types when I was young. I'm not sure why the dance we did to slow ballads was called a fox trot, since we never trotted nor made any fox-like moves (although some of our dance partners seemed pretty foxy at the time).

Historians tend to think the original fox trot was based on a specialty dance done by vaudevillian Harry Fox in the early 1900s, and that the name hung on as ballroom music and dances evolved over the following decades.

The term "jitterbug" is thought to have originated with a radio announcer cover-covering a Harvest Moon Ball in the mid-1930s, when he said some "swing" dancers looked like "jitterbugs."

"Swing" was (and still is) the generic word covering the wide variety of mostly fast and mostly syncopated popular dance music of the 1930s through 1950s. Variations of the "jitterbug" were known as "East Coast Swing," "West Coast Swing," and the "New Yorker," along with the "Lindy Hop" (named for Charles Lindbergh's solo "hop" across the Atlantic).

There was also a "Jitterbug" dance filmed for the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz," but ended up on the cutting room floor. However, it's been restored for recent DVD versions of the movie.

My interest in ballroom dancing began when I met Norma Jean Salina in 1945. I was 16 and she was 14. She loved the jitterbug and offered to teach me how to do it. Well, doing anything that involved putting my arm around Norma Jean's waist I was definitely in favor of.

In fact, I was the first guy her mom would allow to date—and I fell madly in love with her. However, I was slow at learning the jitterbug—so when she was invited to a party by a guy who was really good at it, she accepted—and fixed me up with a blind date so I wouldn't feel so bad. I felt terrible! Here's what happened...