On his own at age fifteen, the talented young man joined a circus for a brief tour, played professional baseball and sang and acted on Vaudeville stages.

A music publisher liked his voice so much he hired him to sing songs from the boxes of vaudeville theaters in San Francisco. However, after the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, Harry Fox decided to give New York a try.

Appearing in various vaudeville shows in the New York area, he met and married Yansci Dolly of the famous "Dolly Sisters." When the New York Theatre (one of the largest theaters in the World) was being converted into a movie house, they decided to try vaudeville acts between the shows and selected Harry Fox and his company to put on the dancing acts.

Compared with today's standards, the original Foxtrot was moderately fast, simple and unrefined. It was the rise to fame of Vernon and Irene Castle's exhibition dances that led the elite of the dance world to try to capture the fox-trot's unusual style of movement, and it wasn't until the early 30's that Foxtrot began to take on the smoother and more flowing quality we recognize in today's dance.

It was also necessary to evolve a form of the dance that could express the slow syncopated 4/4 rhythm yet remain "on the spot." This did not mean that the "traveling" fox-trot was dropped, but the "on the spot" dance could by done in both small spaces and larger ones where throngs of dancers crowd the dance floor. Various bands and individual musicians were experimenting with, and perfecting, the new sounds and beats and the "on the spot" dancing became known (appropriately) as "Crush," then as "rhythm dancing."

The Foxtrot is now one of the most common of the social dances and is easily the most significant development in all of ballroom dancing.

The first combination of Ballroom's now familiar Quick and Slow steps permits more flexibility, and gives greater dancing pleasure, than the one-step and two-step dances it replaced.

While at the outset one of the simplest of dances, the Foxtrot's flexibility ultimately makes it one of the most challenging and rewarding.