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In my research before assembling song playlists, I found the recommended beats-per-minute (BPM) for beginning Swing dancers ranged from 135 - 155 BPM. Slower speeds indicate triple-step swing. Faster speeds give you trouble unless your balance, timing, and accuracy are much better. To practice, I start on song six in the first playlist. Enjoy.
The following playlists include the same songs as the beats-per-minute sorted lists—excepting the 200+ songs—separated by musical style.
After starting swing dance lessons after a long period off, I decided to organize practice CDs where the songs are organized in increasing beats per minute (BPM). I use Apple's iTunes application on my Mac—also available for Windows—to organize and create playlists of music. Occasionally, I burn a playlist to CD. While iTunes has a data field for BPM, it doesn't have a utility to extract or find the value. On VersionTracker.com, I found a freeware Mac-only utility, ltjBPM, a tap-to-beat tool to determine BPM. I also found a modest cost shareware utility, Audio Tools Pro, that is available for both Windows and Mac and it includes a tap-to-beat tool.
Using either tool, start the song in iTunes. Switch to the audio utility and tap along with the beat using the appropriate key and the BPM value will appear. Then, manually add the value to the song Info window's BPM field. I then used the View: Options menu to check the boxes to view only song title, artist, album, time and BPM. I then sorted the playlist by BPM and burned the CD.
I imported a number of my CDs, selected appropriate songs, found the BPM, and added them to the playlists. I also purchased individual songs on the iTunes music store at $.99 each. Here are a couple of my CDs with links to Amazon. You can listen to a short clip to preview the songs on Amazon. I have a number of Louis Jordan tunes in the playlists. I have the Bear Family Records version of the the Louis Jordan box set, "Let the Good Times Roll". So, I'm also including another alternative.