George "Shorty" Snowden (July 4, 1904 – May 1982) was an African American dancer in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s.
Snowden and Purnell's invention was based on the breakaway pattern which they practically rediscovered via an accident in the dance marathon.
[2] Snowden is sometimes inaccurately credited with coining the name 'Lindy Hop' for a popular partner jazz dance of the day.
[3] After the dance marathon, Snowden became a popular dancer at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, New York, and around the United States when he with his dance group were the first Savoy Lindy Hoppers who took the Lindy Hop to competitions, ballrooms, night clubs, and Broadway plays like Blackbirds (1930) and Singing the Blues (1931) after his groundbreaking invention, and appears in the film After Seben (1929).
Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire paid tribute to Snowden in their epic "Shorty George" number (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Johnny Mercer), intermittently squatting down as they danced to look shorter, in the 1942 film You Were Never Lovelier.