Beyoncé's Single Ladies Routine Came from a 1969 Ed Sullivan Number
The leotard, the wrist flick, the trio walking sideways — Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon did all of it on TV nearly forty years earlier.
In June 1969, The Ed Sullivan Show aired a three-minute dance number called "Mexican Breakfast." Bob Fosse choreographed it. His wife, Gwen Verdon, danced the lead, flanked by two other women in fitted black leotards. The piece flopped quietly into the Sullivan archive and stayed there for decades.
It resurfaced in the mid-2000s, when someone dubbed Unk's hip-hop track "Walk It Out" over the original footage on YouTube. The clip went viral as a joke about how cleanly the 1969 movement matched a 2007 beat. Beyoncé saw it. "I saw a video on YouTube," she told Entertainment Weekly. "It was 360 degrees. We kept a lot of the Fosse choreography and added the down-south thing."
The down-south thing was J-setting, an Atlanta gay-club style of lead-and-follow that her co-choreographer JaQuel Knight grew up around. He and Frank Gatson Jr. layered it over Fosse's vocabulary: the same hip rotations, the same shoulder isolations, the same trio facing camera. Tina Knowles designed the high-cut leotards as an explicit nod to A Chorus Line and All That Jazz. The video was shot in black-and-white in twelve hours by director Jake Nava in October 2008, edited from multiple full performances to look like a single unbroken take.
The surprise isn't that pop borrows from theater. It's how literal the borrowing was, and how openly Beyoncé named the source. "Single Ladies" became the most-imitated routine of its decade by being a competent cover of a forty-year-old TV dance — staged and lit so cleanly that almost no one watching recognized the reference.
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