Todd Decker is the Paul Tietjens Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published four books and many articles and book chapters on popular music and media in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. Decker has lectured on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London's Victoria and Albert Museum and was featured in a 2019 BBC World Service documentary on the song "Ol' Man River."

• Introduction One: Numbers Two: Shots Three: Days, Hours, Minutes Midpoint: "I just / Won't / [don't?] Dance" Four: Frames, Sets, Cuts Five: Partners Six: Noisy Masculinity Conclusion Appendix One: Astaire films corpus Appendix Two: Astaire dancing corpus by number Appendix Three: Astaire dancing corpus by shot Acknowledgements Notes

In wonderfully engaging prose, Decker demonstrates how and why both musical and computational numbers count in Astaire's films, and he is also enviably good at describing the qualitative dimension of those numbers. This book will be a delight for Astaire enthusiasts and a must-read for devotees and students of dance on film, while also providing a sobering account of the systemic racism and careful, career-long self-regulation that sustained his successful dancing performance of straight white masculinity.

Todd Decker is the Paul Tietjens Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published four books and many articles and book chapters on popular music and media in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. Decker has lectured on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London's Victoria and Albert Museum and was featured in a 2019 BBC World Service documentary on the song "Ol' Man River."

• Introduction One: Numbers Two: Shots Three: Days, Hours, Minutes Midpoint: "I just / Won't / [don't?] Dance" Four: Frames, Sets, Cuts Five: Partners Six: Noisy Masculinity Conclusion Appendix One: Astaire films corpus Appendix Two: Astaire dancing corpus by number Appendix Three: Astaire dancing corpus by shot Acknowledgements Notes

In wonderfully engaging prose, Decker demonstrates how and why both musical and computational numbers count in Astaire's films, and he is also enviably good at describing the qualitative dimension of those numbers. This book will be a delight for Astaire enthusiasts and a must-read for devotees and students of dance on film, while also providing a sobering account of the systemic racism and careful, career-long self-regulation that sustained his successful dancing performance of straight white masculinity.

Todd Decker is the Paul Tietjens Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published four books and many articles and book chapters on popular music and media in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. Decker has lectured on the stage and screen musical at the Library of Congress and London's Victoria and Albert Museum and was featured in a 2019 BBC World Service documentary on the song "Ol' Man River."

• Introduction One: Numbers Two: Shots Three: Days, Hours, Minutes Midpoint: "I just / Won't / [don't?] Dance" Four: Frames, Sets, Cuts Five: Partners Six: Noisy Masculinity Conclusion Appendix One: Astaire films corpus Appendix Two: Astaire dancing corpus by number Appendix Three: Astaire dancing corpus by shot Acknowledgements Notes

In wonderfully engaging prose, Decker demonstrates how and why both musical and computational numbers count in Astaire's films, and he is also enviably good at describing the qualitative dimension of those numbers. This book will be a delight for Astaire enthusiasts and a must-read for devotees and students of dance on film, while also providing a sobering account of the systemic racism and careful, career-long self-regulation that sustained his successful dancing performance of straight white masculinity.