Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University, a senior consultant/writer for Dance Magazine and performer with her husband, choreographer Hellmut Gottschild, has written a number of books about Black American dance. I found these descriptions of the Black Bottom and The Funky Butt in the Google Books presentation of Gottschild's 2003 book The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

...[the Boomps-a-Daisy was] "a party dance among young people and adults", to waltz tempo "partners bumped hips sedately as the special lyrics indicated…"this dance, like all twentieth-century fad dances, is rooted in black traditions. The decorous Boomps-a-Daisy is clearly a white dance. Although bumping body parts wasn't one of its steps, the ur-buttocks dance of the early twentieth century is the Black Bottoms. According to Stearns and Stearns this dance was performed in Southern African American communities before 1910. African American dance songwriter Perry Bradford revamped his 1907 version of Jackson Rounders' Dance because people did not appreciate the connotation in the title. (Rounder was slang for pimp). He revised the lyrics and renamed the song and the concomitant dance The Black Bottom. The sheet music was published in 1919. It did not reach the white community as a fad dance until it introduced on Broadway in George White's Scandals of 1926. By then it was a watered down version of what was probably a bawdy original" The chief gesture that survived on the ballroom floor was a genteel slapping on the backside along with a few hops forward and back" . But the original, black Black Bottom required the dancer to "get down" in posture and attitude, rotate the hips and articulate them in movements known as the Mooche and Mess Around both of which involve full rotation of pelvis in a flexible, unbound manner that is commonly called a Grind. The behind wasn't gently tapped, but grabbed and held to accentuate the rotation. Even earlier than the Black Bottom was the dance the Fanny Bump, practiced in the turn of the century in grass roots black communities, the name of the dance an indicator of its principal movement. Da Butt had a similar bawdy precedent in a dance known as The Funky Butt, as described by one of the Stearn's informants and dating back to 1901. "Well, you know the women sometimes pulled up their dresses to show their pretty petticoats …and that's what happened in the Funky Butt" …[Then, recalling a particular woman who was a specialist in this dance] When Sue arrived…people would yell 'Here comes Big Sue!. Do the Funky Butt, Baby!' As soon as she got high and happy, that's what she'd do, pulling up her skirts and grinding her rear end like an alligator crawling up the bank." As outrageous as Da Butt seems in the music videos of the early 1990s, it is simply a recycled Africanist with a new spin put on it for a new era-and that is the story of the all the popular social dances of the twentieth century and will probably be the same story for the twenty first. The movements come from Africa with Africans and were transformed first into plantation dances, then into minstrel dances, then social dances on the ballroom floor. By the time they reach mainstream venues, they've been laundered in the appropriation-approximation-assimilation white-wash cycle and are distilled/finessed to a white approved version. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the approximation part of this equation is occasionally, if not frequently, omitted, and black dances are wholly appropriated and directly included in the white culture-and indication of the blackening of white America".

http://books.google.com/books?id=1mC9vO5z77QC&dq=the+black+dance+body++gottschild&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=HJQlStr


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[transcribed without the numbers for the footnotes]

My guess is that the Sterns are Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, authors of Jazz Dance: The Story Of American Vernacular Dance