Tap dancing America: a cultural history 9780199745890, 9780190225384, 9780195390827

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Foreword by Dianne Walker (page xi)
Preface (page xiii)
1 TRICKSTER GODS AND RAPPAREES (1650-1900) (page 1)
2 BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) (page 20)
3 OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) (page 44)
4 SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) (page 68)
5 SWING TIME (THIRTIES) (page 97)
6 JUMPIN' JIVE (FORTIES) (page 132)
7 BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) (page 164)
8 TAP HAPPENINGS (SIXTIES) (page 198)
9 NOSTALGIA, AND ALL THAT TAP (SEVENTIES) (page 215)
10 BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTEES) (page 245)
11 NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) (page 291)
12 HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENIUM) (page 322)
Notes (page 363)
Glossary (page 387)
Select Bibliography (page 391)
Index (page 409)

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“Tim Flaherty,” which narrated one Irishman’s migration to America and was sung in 6/8 jig time: I’m a nate Irish Paddy, a true Irish laddie, And I came to this country, great wonders to see; I sailed from swate Cork, for the port of New York, and was eighteen long days sure crossing the sea.4’

Jerry and Nellie’s first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1877, followed by their only son, George Michael Cohan, born on July 3, 1878, in the Irish-populated Fox Hill-Corkie Hill section of Providence, Rhode Island. By the time he was eight years old, George and Josephine Cohan became working members of the family act. By 1889, the Cohan Mirth Makers were appearing in a program that included Jerry in “The Dancing Philosopher” as the Irish Dancing Master Larry O’Leary, who teaches his pupil how to dance the waltz, polka, and Irish jig; and George danced as the Lively Bootblack in “Master Cohan’s Own Conception of Buck and Wing Dancing.” They played this musical sketch over the next two years in six hundred one-night stands throughout the country.

GEORGE M. COHAN In his New York debut performance of “The Lively Bootblack” at Keith’s Union Square Theater in 1893, George M. Cohan threw himself into a vigorous, board-pounding Irish reel at the end of the first verse that concluded with a double heel slap, an unabashed signal for applause. But no applause came. Unruffled, he continued into the second verse of the song and fell into a spirited waltz clog, with another applause-begging finish. The audience, unimpressed, read their newspapers. Cohan strode to downstage center and recited the pathos-soaked poem, “The Bootblack’s Dream,” and then announced, “I will now offer for your approval my own conception of the most difficult terpsichorean art, commonly known as buck and wing dancing,” calling to attention the fact that the steps were of his own invention and that no other living dancer had ever been able to master the same routine. He then leapt into a dexterous buck-and-wing topped by a finish that became his trademark—a run up the side of the proscenium arch and a kick over, back to center stage for a breathless bow. The audience applauded vigorously for an encore. Cohan had

found in his flash finale a signature move that he would use throughout his dancing career.”

BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) 31 Cohan claims that when he was seventeen, while the Four Cohans were playing a one-week engagement at the Court Theatre in Buffalo, New York, he created a new rhythmic style of tap dancing. Intending to dance an essence (an early form of the soft-shoe) to something other than the usual tune of “Coming thru the Rye,” which was played in flowing 6/8 time, Cohan found himself on stage while the pianist played an unusually slowed-down tune in 2/4 time. So Cohan, in the midst of the performance, was forced to switch from the whispered shuffling of the softshoe to the harder and noisier buck-and-wing, which he dragged out (in order to accommodate the slower tempo) by leaping from one side of the stage to the other. “I did a jump with my scissors grinder step and threw my head back at the same time. It got a scream of laughter,” Cohan recalled. “I repeated this a moment later and got a second big laugh. .. . I finished with an eccentric walking step, throwing my head back with the hair flying all over my face and made an exit with the end of the strain instead of ending with the old-fashioned break.”” By the time the full-length version of The Governor’s Son opened at the Savoy in February 1901, Cohan was garnering praise for his technique, with one critic lauding him for his “clever

capable legs that prance uniquely with apparent disregard of other members.”” For Little Johnny Jones, which opened at the Liberty Theatre in November 1904, Cohan played a cheeky Englishman affianced to an American girl. As he sang “I’m a Yankee Doodle Boy,” his jingly, exuberant, braggadocio song-and-dance style embodied the spirit of Ireland that thrived in the large Irish American communities of New York, Boston, and his native Providence. To be Irish in America was for Cohan to be an American with a proud ancestral heritage. Cohan brought the Irish American music-hall tradition from early vaudeville to the respectable precincts of Broadway. There, every night, and twice on Sundays, he regaled his audiences with messages of enthusiastic, nonhyphenated, red-blooded Americanism. Just as the Irish American Stephen (Collins) Foster had found many of his songs decidedly unloved in critical circles because of their racial content, Cohan was referred to as a vulgar, cheap, ill-mannered, flashily dressed, and insolent smart aleck. He seemed to please nobody except the audiences that flocked to his shows. The crowds loved him. In the early years of the twentieth century, Cohan was Broadway. Playing characters with hearts-on-their-sleeves patriotism and singing such songs as “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Over There,” and “Grand Old Flag,” Cohan celebrated his transatlantic heritage, playing characters that were decidedly nonthreatening and genial.

Cohan’s lightweight portrayal of Irish America was as much a reflection on the playwright’s times as on his own overly sunny view of American life in general and the Irish experience in particular. There was no brooding about the famine or the heartbreak of separation or the trials of widows with children whose husbands had died in mining and railroad accidents. Nor was Cohan’s audience much interested in dark, brooding dramas about a minority sroup’s tribulations (such as in some plays by Eugene O’Neill). They preferred such happy-golucky creations as Ned Harrigan and Hap Farrell, affable characters who dispelled fear and won a measure of affection with their songs, quick wit, and dances. Although Cohan’s buck-and-wing dancing represented the long tradition of Irish blackface stage dancing, he wore no such makeup. He is regarded as one of the first to change the definition of a Broadway leading man. Tap dancing with a lightness that seemed to resist gravity yet looking manly all the while, he broke out of the invisible box that had long restricted male dancers in the theater. While some proudly claim that Cohan’s hard-shoe essence revolutionized American buck dancing and “set hoofers to doing without jug sand,”*' it was his signature style of strutting, or “cock-eyed prancing” across the stage with such jauntiness that it drove him up the proscenium wall, that actually set the pace and cadence for Broadway musical stepping.

32 TAP DANCING AMERICA

Tap and Step After The Governor’s Son closed in New York, it found great success as a restaged production

sent on tour in places where the Cohans were well known. A twenty-five-year-old dance director, Ned Wayburn, was one of five directors hired to restage the show; he received the staging credit when the production played the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn in January 1902. Wayburn counted his work on The Governor’s Son among the earliest of the 150 feature acts, musical comedies, revues, and prologs that he would stage between 1899 and 1932 as a dance director and choreographer who developed the tap dance routine structure for solo, team, and chorus performance.

Born Edward Claudius Weyburn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on March 30, 1874, he srew up in Chicago, where he studied mathematics, mechanical drawing, and piano, and claimed to have spent much of his adolescence running away from home to work as a call boy for Chicago’s Bijou Opera Company. He also worked at the Chicago Museum and Olympia

Theatre. He became “Rossiter” in the Hurricane Dutch and Irish team of Johnson and Rossiter at Middleton’s West Side Museum in Chicago. There, he became fascinated with minstrel shows and ballet spectacles. At age twenty-one, he took a job as an accompanist and teacher at the Hart Conway School, which offered classes in acting, fencing, gymnastics, and physical culture. With Mrs. Ida Simpson-Serven as his teacher, he studied Delsarte’s ideas about the meaning of gestures and their ability to communicate emotion. His choreography would later draw directly from Delsartian laws of inflection, velocity, attitude, precision, and opposition, which he applied to “aural” dances, especially tap dance work, where the speed and density of sound were vitally important. In practical terms, it meant that the number of separate taps heard by an audience was proportional to the number of performers executing them. Efficient force demanded exactitude of movement and gesture: this was Wayburn’s theory of articulate tap dancing.” By 1896, after leaving the Conway school, Wayburn was engaged by the Keith circuit vaudeville theaters as a blackface “ragtime pianist and mono-

loguist.” Billed as the man who invented ragtime, he built his act on the syncopating of familiar classical music pieces, such as Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On reaching New York City, Wayburn auditioned for and received a part as “Gregory, the rag-time Butler” in The Swell Miss Fizwell. In 1899, he was hired to perform in, write the music for, and stage By the Sad Sea Waves, which gave him his first experience with a professional chorus line. His emergence as stage director followed quickly.

By the 1901-1902 season in New York, he had settled into a schedule of staging a minimum of ten shows a year. Ned Wayburn’s Minstrel Misses (July 27, 1903), a feature act conceived as one single scene, had a chorus of seventeen “young and comely girls” march on stage wear-

ing long coats of fantastic design and military caps and play brass instruments. The dancers, in full view of the audience, retired to little tables at the rear of the stage and proceeded to “make up” as “darkies.” A minstrel show followed, as “the grinning colored minstrels” sat in a semicircle playing tambourines and bones, then performing with songs and dances until the finale song, called “My Dixieland Daisy.”*? The style of “minstrel” stepping for this act and probably for Ned Wayburn’s Girls of 1904 (June 13, 1904), in which the white female chorus girls transform themselves through the application of dark-face makeup into “Dinges” and dance to Theodore F. Morse’s “Dixie Overture,” drew heavily from the jig and clog dancing that Wayburn had seen in minstrel shows as a young man. Photographs of the dancers in Minstrel Misses show the ladies wearing “built shoes”—hard-soled shoes built up in the heel—although some speculate that these were light clogs with split wooden soles.”

BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) 33 To describe this newly simplified hybrid form of step dancing, which had its roots in solo and duo clog dancing in vaudeville acts, Wayburn coined the phrase “tap and stepping.” It is not true, however (as Gerald Bordman contends in American Musical Theatre), that Wayburn, “tiring of heavy-footed clog dances, put small metal plates on the bottom of dancers’ shoes for a lighter, steelier sound” with a result that “tap-dancing was born.”” Nor is it certain, as Aubrey Haines speculates, that this was the first time that the term “tap dancing” was “publicly and professionally used.”*° Certainly Wayburn was experimenting with different sounds from different shoes in that period; he was involved with the proscenium stage and used different ways of shaping different sizes of choruses. During that time of discovery, he devised a technical vocabulary and style of tap and stepping for the chorus, which stressed aural precision and exactness in execution.” Wayburn assumed that until the mid-191os, tapping and stepping was a solo or duo specialty, derived from clog dancing in vaudeville acts, which aided in the transition from individual specialties to chorus techniques of tap dancing; these would especially begin to take form during the “soldier” numbers that appeared in revues during World War I (1914-1918). He recognized the advantage of integrating tap and stepping sounds into the actual marching of the dancers, instead of just adding it conventionally through the percussion section of the band or orchestra. He recognized that the particular drawback to en masse stepping was the limited number of dancers who could tap before the sounds became muffled. He set about to devise a technique in which the footwork in tap dance would be further articulated, eventually spelling out six different ways the shoe made contact with the floor. Wayburn also incorporated “tap” steps into other dance idioms, such as modern Americanized ballet, character dance, eccentric dance, ballroom dance, and legomania, thus codifying tap dance and staging chorus movement for as many as eighty dancers. Thereby, he earned a reputation as one of the premier dance directors of show dance routines.

Cakewalk and Strut The cakewalk was the graceful fraternal twin of buck-and-wing. Both dance forms evolved on the plantation—one in the big house, where house servants observed and copied the highfalutin’ manners of their white masters; the other in the relative seclusion of the slave quarters where, deep into the night, field slaves could pray in their native tongues through the shuffling steps of the Ring Shout. Yet the cakewalk would have a tremendous impact on theatrical performances at the turn of the century, when the duple-meter rhythms of ragtime set it free. Transsressing the racial divide, the cakewalk would become the first black dance form to be accepted onstage by white society, thereby paving the way for the acceptance of the buck-and-wing. Cakewalking emerged during the pre—Civil War era as a celebratory dance with links to West African festive dances. As it became rooted in the vernacular of American dance, it became common as a festival dance: “The slaves would assemble en masse dressed in their Sunday best.... Masters and mistresses would be there, one of whom would award the prize for the best ‘cuttin’ of the figgers.’ Sometimes the mistress of the house would donate the prize cake.”** Although the cakewalk was a retention of African festival dances, so, too, could it be a parody of white mannerisms. “Us slaves watched white folks’ parties where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen doing different ways and then meeting up again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together,” reported an ex-slave from Beaufort, South Carolina. “Then we'd do it too, but we used to mock ’em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn’t dance any better.” By flattering the master’s vanity through imitation, these North

34 TAP DANCING AMERICA American slaves were also enjoying a parody of their master’s customs within the safe confines of the song and dance. Decoding the cakewalk, then, depended entirely on the audienceperformer relationship: who was dancing, who was observing, and in what historic juncture the dance was being assessed. Adding to this hybridization was white desire to enjoy and even expropriate black culture as portrayed in the cakewalk.” During the post—Civil War era, cakewalking became an integral part of minstrel performance. Also called the “walkabout” or “strut,” it was one of the most celebrated of competitive dances primarily because it made its way into blackface minstrel shows. Like the buck-andwing, the circular structure and the steps of the cakewalk were performed in the “Walk Around,” the grand finale of the minstrel show, in which couples danced, promenaded, and pranced in a circle, improvising fancy steps in competition." In 1887, the Irish minstrel team Harrigan and Hart presented “Walking for Dat Cake” in their act. But it was in 1889, when Sam T. Jack’s The Creole Show broke with the minstrel show

format—by discarding blackface and offering a sixteen-girl chorus and Dora Dean dancing cakewalk—that the dance catapulted into national popularity. In 1892, the first Annual Cakewalk Jubilee was held at Madison Square Garden, a gigantic arena that extended from Fourth to Madison Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-seventh Streets. A three-night competition featured buck-and-wing dancing and variety acts, culminating in a national cakewalk competition for dancers who had won small-town contests. It was within these competitive formats that the cakewalk became so flexible a form that one could add anything, from buck to Russian steps, so long as the male grabbed his partner at the finish and they pranced off. For the most part, however, buck-and-wing was distinct from cakewalk. In 1895 at the Madison Square Garden Cakewalk Jubilee, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported six thousand in attendance (and a gathering that was “a very mixed one and contained a large proportion of colored persons”), the program began with four men in a buck dancing competition (9:15 pM), followed by four women in a wing dancing competition (10 pm), and culminating in a Grand Cakewalk (11 pm). Almost every number was encored, and “when the buck-and-wing dancing began the audience went wild with delight.” But it was the Cakewalk Grand Finale that was the crowning culmination of the evening.” Describing the September 6, 1897, Gala Jubilee and Cake Walk at Madison Square Garden, Tom Fletcher remembered that “the curtain parted and 50 to Go couples came from behind the stage on to the floor, prancing and dancing to the tempo of the music. It was very reminiscent of the grand entry at a circus. The girls’ dresses were of all colors. The men wore full dress, clown clothes or comedy costumes with big checks. When all the walkers were on the floor, then the 50 or Go couples could be seen doing different prances and dance steps ranging from buck-and-wing to toe dancing.”® In 1897, the Black Patti Troubadours advertised its cake prize made by a prominent caterer, and cakewalk competitions could be seen in Coney Island on Saturday nights. Though Sam T. Jack played a huge role in catapulting the cakewalk into this kind of popularity, no one had more fun with it than the comedy duo of Williams and Walker, who, through a spectacular performance and outrageous audacity, became known by many among New York’s white elite as the inventors of the cakewalk.

WILLIAMS AND WALKER Egbert “Bert” Williams, who was born in the West Indies in 1874, met George Walker, a Kansas native his own age, in San Francisco in 1893. After a brief stint with the Mastodon Minstrels, they worked in such free-and-easy cafes as the Café Royale where, nearby, hucksters, freaks, and medicine men performed under canvas tents illuminated by flaring torches. By 1895, they

BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) 35 had worked their way to Chicago, finding work with Isham’s Octoroons, in which variety songs and dances were performed on the small stage at the back of a wagon. They billed themselves as “Williams and Walker, Two Real Coons,” with an emphasis on the “real” and not the “coons.” They were in a conscious rebellion against minstrel stereotypes but still performed in blackface. The easy manner in which they worked, wrote Tom Fletcher, “made it obvious to audi-

ences that theirs was a natural talent.” In this early organization of their act, they built their performance around their contrasting physical types. Williams, who was tall and lumbering, played the role of the fool. Wearing blackface makeup and shoes that extended farther than his already large feet, he shuffled along in a hopeless way, always the butt of fortune. “My bad luck started when I was born,” he’d say. “They named me after my papa and that same day my papa died.” He bemoaned this in “I’m

a Jonah Man” in The Sons of Ham (1900), while interspersing a series of grotesque slides between choruses and making an already slouched body look pathetic. His combination of a lazy grind, or mooche, with swiveling hips was an early elaboration of the buck-and-wing that was comic as well as rhythmically expressive. In dramatic contrast, George Walker played the role of the high-strutting dandy. He was the “spick and span Negro, the last word in tailoring, the highest stepper in the smart coon world” who turned his cocky strut into a high-prancing cakewalk. After varying the walk more than a dozen times, he repeated all the variations to the shrieking applause of the audience.” Williams and Walker’s performance of the cakewalk combined the parodic with the spectacular, forcing into full display the comedic contrast of one’s shuffling fool and the other’s strutting dandy. Walker strutted onstage with a high step and arching toe and whirled through the dance; Williams stumbled in behind him, waving the sole of his shoe and flicking away a cigarette, to launch into the dance that combined the worst features of the stage shuffle and the buck-and-wing.” In 1897, after performing their cakewalk as a dance specialty in the musical farce The Gold Bug, they scored their vaudeville debut at New York’s Koster and Bial’s Music Hall—then the leading variety theater in America—with a version of the cakewalk that was the high point of their act. They first came on together, sang coon songs, then left the stage. A drum major jiggling a baton soon marched onstage, leading Walker as the master of ceremonies, who then introduced seven fancy-dressed couples, each competing in a cakewalk for the prize cake. After the presentations, Williams and Walker strutted onstage, each with a pretty “coffee-colored” woman dressed in a bright yellow fancy dress. As each proceeded with a ludicrous burlesque of the other’s eccentric steps, everything was set for them to win the cake, which they accepted by leading the entire company into a jubilee cakewalk finale.°’ Some months later, Williams and Walker learned that Tom Fletcher had been hired to teach the cakewalk to William Kissam Vanderbilt, whose grandfather Cornelius had built the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. Soon Williams and Walker made a formal call to the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansion to hand-deliver a letter. In it, the entertainers, emboldened by their cake win at America’s leading variety hall, challenged Vanderbilt to a contest to determine the best cakewalker in New York City. To Mr. William K. Vanderbilt

Corner of 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue New York, New York

Dear Sir:

In view of the fact that you have made a success as a cake-walker, having appeared in a semi-public exhibition and having posed as an authority in that

36 TAP DANCING AMERICA capacity, we, the undersigned, the world-renowned cakewalkers, believing that the attention of the world has been distracted from us on account of the tremendous hit which you have made, hereby challenge you to compete with us in a cakewalk match, which will decide which of us deserve the title of champion cakewalker of the world. As a guarantee of good faith we have this day deposited at the office of the New York World the sum of $50. If you propose proving to the public that you really are an expert cake-walker we shall be pleased to have you cover that amount and name the day on which it will be convenient for you to try odds against us. Yours very truly, Williams & Walker®

Although the cakewalk challenge never came off—Vanderbilt apparently never sent a reply— many of Vanderbilt’s peers (and others who wished they were) came to think of Williams and Walker as the upstart entertainers who had invented the cakewalk.

ADA (AIDA) OVERTON WALKER The girl in the yellow dress, one of “the two girls with the café au lait complexions” that George Walker partnered with in the cakewalk finale at Koster and Bials, was the extraordinary young dancer Ada Overton. Seventeen when she partnered with Walker, nineteen when she married him and joined the Williams and Walker company, Overton would come to be known as cakewalking’s greatest choreographer—and, arguably, the first modern American choreographer of the twentieth century. She was born Ada Wilmon Overton on Valentine’s Day in 1880 in Greenwich Village, the second child of Pauline Whitfield, a seamstress, and Moses Overton, a waiter. She was a child who seemed to have danced before she walked. Legend had it that she was fond of dancing in

the streets with a hurdy-gurdy, and when one of her street shows caused a traffic jam, her mother forbade her to dance outside and saw to it that she would receive dance instruction froma Mrs. Thorp in midtown Manhattan. Around 1897, after graduating from Thorp’s dance school, she toured briefly with Black Patti’s Troubadours. A new opportunity came when a girlfriend invited her to model for an advertisement with Bert Williams and George Walker, who had just scored a hit in their vaudeville debut at Koster and Bial’s. She agreed to model for

the ad and subsequently joined the men in the cakewalk finale. She then joined the cast of Octoroons, in which one critic declared of her performance, “I had just observed the greatest girl dancer.”®

In 1898, Overton rejoined Williams and Walker at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in the second production of In Gotham with a cast of forty, in a program of songs and dances. With Grace Halliday she then formed the sister dance act of Overton and Halliday; a critic later reflected that “their turn was the biggest of any sister acts. It equaled any of the white acts.””° Overton and Halliday performed as the pair of Honolulu Belles in the Williams and Walker production of The Policy Players in October 1899 at the Star Theatre, and from there Overton began to develop as a soloist with more substantial roles. In The Sons of Ham, which premiered in October 1900 at the Star, she sang and danced “Miss Hannah from Savannah” and “Leading Lady”; and when the musical comedy went into its second edition, two more numbers were added, “Society” and “Sparkling Ruby” which brought her jubilant acclaim. James Weldon

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’ . a = 7 Ne ine ‘ . et , eee > : : Pe a eae at, i a as ; aSh — Heat? : - _* . eer = “ ,

iy Ada Overton Walker, 1911. (Frank Driggs — 'y.: bes Collection) Nee SOP ay “< ‘vs

; ——r ; » . "i : ¥. we theater managers to post “Standing Room ee ad a a! Si ee Only” signs for patrons. The Boston Globe, 5 v4 Me eT oat BK’ bs i complimenting her for substituting artist_ 2S .. yaad eee EAL 6 a g : =. ry for immodesty, found this “very properly Bs «Mag ane eae ~ draped Salome” to be “interesting.”®

eaee 43 Ae ae eel . ene oe ol i: pe ed. te ht : hi @ Sh : Bandanna Land, George Walker, playing ee See BN Bit : . One evening in 1908 while onstage in

eA nf fh \ SeaD t stn, , the role of Bud Jenkins, became ill. He was IG.e ei * | OT Sipe ee later diagnosed as having syphilis. He left ee Le | the show in 1909, and his role was rewritSe Salen & ayhas ‘ ae ; ten for Overton Walker, who donned his

i o _ Bs _ flashy male clothes and sang his numbers,

oo = Sy * [. a 4 including his major song, “Bon Bon Bud-

: me rg 7 - » die,” while retaining her own roles. With

A .,and her husband’s condition slowly deterioratom” a\ .f hr ee~ying decisions about future, | MAfacing Ae she chose not to renew herher contract with Williams and Walker. She considered a booking with six girls in Venice, Italy, but instead joined the cast of Bob Cole and J. Rosamonde Johnson’s The Red Moon in May of that year. This “American Musical Comedy in Red and Black” about Native Americans and African Americans featured her in two musical numbers:

“Phoebe Brown” and “Pickaninny Days,” in which she danced buck-and-wing with the chorus. She also had a solo, “Flaming Arrow,” performing what the program described as an adaptation of an aboriginal dance titled “Wildfire.” The decision to join the cast of Red Moon was fateful. Had she gone to Europe she might have benefited from the avant-garde environment that nurtured her female contemporaries Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan. She opted instead for a creative career in modern dance that would be forged on the vaudeville stage, with a full embracing—unlike Fuller, Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis—of jazz music and dance.* Overton Walker next opened at the American Theatre in New York in 1909, with a vaudeville dance act featuring a new dance, the “Kara Kara,” or dance |’Afrique, described in Variety as having “a wild, weird aspect and immense amount of action to it. Eight colored girls are concerned in the act, a splendid octet and active dancers. They have a special act showing a Jungle theme behind them, and Miss Walker leads several numbers.”*’ In 1910, she joined the Smart Set, a black theatrical company, and starred in His Honor the Barber the next year. She sang “Golly, Ain’t I Wicked?” and “Porto Rico,” and in male impersonation performed “That’s Why They Call Me Shine.” In the first two numbers, the New York Age declared, “Miss Walker’s dancing is the best she has ever done”; and with “Shine,” it said, “she surpassed all former efforts as an artist.”** By July ro11, six months after her husband died, Overton Walker had formed a new vaudeville act with one male and eight female dancers, in which she sang “Shine” as a male, impersonating her late husband, and she performed the new dance craze “The Barbary Coast” in close embrace with her new male partner. Variety regretted that much of the act focused upon the ensemble choreography—“That Miss Walker doesn’t dance more is a bit disappointing for she is a great dancer with very few equals.”* Yet from 1912 until her death in 1914, she continued to choreograph for two black female dance groups, the Happy Girls and Porto Rico Girls,

BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) 41 whose dancers included Lottie Gee, who would later star in the musical revue Shuffle Along, and Elida Webb, who would star at the Cotton Club in the twenties. In 1912, Overton Walker danced “Salome” again in a spectacular vaudeville performance at Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre in New York. She also rejoined Bert Williams for the annual Frog’s Frolic (the Frogs was an African American theatrical club in New York founded by George Walker). Appearing onstage with Bill Robinson and minstrel showman Sam Lucas, she wowed the crowd by showing up in a provocative dress, dancing to the ragtime tune “International Rag.” In 1913, Overton Walker’s dream to produce her own show was realized with a company of twelve at the Pekin Theatre in Chicago. She appeared three times on the program, first with Lou Salsbury in “La Rumba,” next in “Aida Valse,” a solo, and last in a closing medley of songs; the production was praised by the press as the “most successful engagement of her career.””°

In 1914, she switched from African-style dance to ballroom dance in her vaudeville act. With her new partner, Lackaye Grant, Aida presented several ballroom dances whose roots, she made clear in performance, were in the black vernacular: “Maxixe,” “Southern drag,” “jiggeree,” and “tango.” She participated in the tango fad by giving a “tango picnic” in July at New York’s Manhattan Casino, where she and Grant performed their ballroom dance act. The tango picnic was Overton Walker’s last public appearance. She died October 11, 1914, from kidney disease.”! Mourned as the foremost African American female stage artist, Overton Walker’s interest in both African and African American indigenous material and her translation of these to the modern stage anticipated the choreographic work of modern dance pioneers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus. Both in her solo work for women and in the unison and precision choreographies for the female chorus, she claimed a female presence on the American theatrical stage. She also gave presence to black rhythm dancing, thus opening prime-time, public professional space for tap performance, which had been previously restricted to post-showtime, late-night buck-and-wing contests. By negotiating the narrow white definitions of appropriate black performance with her own version of black specialization and innovation, Overton Walker established a black cultural integrity onstage that established a model by which African American musical artists could gain acceptance on the professional concert stage. In 1905 she wrote the following: As individuals we must strive all we can to show that we are as capable as white people. ... We must produce good and great actors and actresses to

demonstrate that our people move along with progress of the times and improve as they move. Our people are capable and with advantages they will succeed.”

Class Act At the turn of the century, concurrent with the musical comedy dance teams that were working in the blackface tradition, Aida Overton Walker became the aesthetic conscience for an elite sroup of black performers. They rejected the minstrel-show stereotypes of the grinning and dancing clowns, the fool and the dandy. Clean-faced and well-dressed, these performers insisted on absolute perfection in sound, step, and manner. Though they eschewed the stereotype of the lazy, ignorant, incompetent fool and instead imitated and embellished the formal elegance and sophistication of certain white acts, they ran headlong into the stereotype of the high-strutting dandy who, as Robert Toll says in his history of show business, “thought only of flashy clothes, flirtatious courting, new dances, and good looks.”’’ These performers nevertheless aspired to a

er:

‘ _ : “ Charles Johnson and Dora Dean, of Johnson and gy * ‘a Dean, “King and Queen of Colored Aristocracy,”

a . & a ca. 1900. (Frank Driggs Collection)

Z a A a a ( ; : ys 3 Ce x purely artistic expression that was driven by

te nee |g *4pe their desire for respectability and equality on ARE Sa3—~ I\% =the American concert stage. They were the

a Oe \ ~= | | / forerunners of what in tap dance is called the

peers ae , “class act.”

) | ” ie XX Sa When Bob Cole and John Rosamond

> }* ‘ Nie - 3 \ é : Johnson began their partnership at the | Sea were the rage on the musical stage. Minstrel

- b~ AL TY - ire. turn of the century, the so-called coon songs

* » Z ie “A parodies had also reinforced what whites

=rote ( iLas? ’ wanted to believe northern Negroes, “gt ae and became about permanent stereotypes of the

, oe rs urban black they illustrated. Cole and Johnan ? son decided not to write and perform songs

"Se ; bf /; A \ that presented repellent portraits of black Lew : eo\ OM ¢ , >ailife. wouldNegro be nodialect, shuffling, no songs &P Re ~ wm oa e There in syncopated no condescen-

7 : sion to black folk traditions. Instead, they presented themselves in a quiet and finished manner that was artistic to the minutest detail. Handsomely dressed in evening clothes, the two entered and talked about the party they were about to attend; they played Ignacy Jan Pederewski’s “Minuet in G,” they sang classical songs in German, as well as songs of their own composition, and they fast became a success with white theatergoers.”* A far cry from the minstrel-show dandy character that informed white perceptions of the northern Negro newly arrived in the big city, Cole and Johnson illustrated— to whites and blacks alike—how ludicrous Negroes could be when they tried to live like “white gemmen.” By donning the attire of (and as their performance proved they were) gentlemen, they touched on the role of the dandy ever so gracefully while ridiculing those Americans who aped European manners and cultivation. At the turn of the century, Charles Johnson and Dora Babbige Dean billed themselves as “Johnson and Dean, The King and Queen of Colored Aristocracy,” thus announcing and establishing the roles of the genteel Negro couple on the American stage. Dean was not a singer; she “talked” her songs and she “posed” in fancy dresses. Johnson was not a tap dancer; he “strutted” in the cakewalk tradition which he claimed to have introduced on Broadway. Together they appealed to audiences through well-dressed elegance and impressive personalities. Johnson always presented himself in full evening dress—top hat, tailcoat, monocle, gloves, and a cane— and he attributed his stage success to the inspiring stories of his mother, a former slave, who told him to always be “a real gentleman.” After touring Europe with Johnson and Dean, Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton returned to New York and, in 1914, formed an act that matched formal dress with an elegant style of dancing that combined strutting, ballroom dance, and cakewalking with percussive stepping. In 1923, at the height of their career, Greenlee and Drayton opened at the Cotton Club. Their graceful act was described as “picture dancing” because every move made a beautiful picture. Strolling onstage, they sang “You Great Big Beautiful Doll,” doffing their hats and

BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) 43 making sweeping bows. In “Virginia Essence,” a soft-shoe danced to stop-time, they filled in the breaks of the music with conversation in various foreign languages. “With the partial exception of Charles Johnson,” writes Marshall Stearns, “this was probably the first occasion

that any pair of Negroes, not clad in overalls, performed the Soft Shoe on the American Stage.” By the early 1920s, following in the performance aesthetic that was defined by Aida Overton and George Walker and Johnson and Dean, and chiefly in reference to Greenlee and Dray-

ton, the phrase “class act” came into general use among stage dancers. Graceful and impeccably dressed, moving together across the stage, making every move a beautiful picture, these dancers aspired to perfection in everything they performed. From these pioneers would emerge the cream of tap dancing, onstage and on film.

3 (TEENS) OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES

CHALLENGE! Darktown Follies of 1914 vs. Ziegfeld Follies of 1914

If You Can’t Steal It, Buy It

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. sat admiringly in a box at the Lafayette Theatre soaking up the delightfully abandoned tunes and rhythm-rocked dancing of J. Leubrie Hill’s Darktown Follies. What had been booked as a one-week performance in late 1913 had turned into a season-long run. Word spread that the musical comedy—which Hill produced, acted in, and wrote (book, music, and lyrics)—was a surefire hit.

The plot put to shame the most vaunted of musical successes. It was the story of Jim Jackson Lee, a moral weakling who, led by his home-wrecking boyhood friend Bill Simmons, mortgages half of his father-in-law’s plantation, then flees to Washington, D.C., in search of high society, the presidency of the Colored Men’s Business League, and freedom from the iron hand of Mandy Lee, his six-foot-tall wife (played by Hill). Lee’s freedom is short-lived; his indignant wife and her father, warned of his defection by the village lawyer, give chase and catch him on the point of entering into matrimonial relations with Miss Lucinda Langtree of the black elite. Having been exposed, Lee, kicking feebly, is returned to Mandy and the old homestead. The plot was perfect for bringing to life characters who could sing and dance and do pantomime, romance, and comedy. Though Hill thought it necessary to give in occasionally to the conventions of white theater—to add a dash of tenor and a sprinkling of girls in long

satin gowns singing conventional hymns to the moon—the greater part of the show was staged in ebony, ivory, and rose, in which the players portrayed entered into a spirit of pure black joy.

The first act opened on Lee’s old home in Kentucky. While there was plenty of old-time plantation-style dancing and cavorting, Hill presented blacks as they really were, not as they had always been required to appear onstage. When a Negro tenor sang an impassioned “Rock Me

44 in the Cradle of Love” to a bronze-toned soubrette, it kicked the lovemaking taboo between a

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 45 black man and woman out of the Negro theater. It was the singing, and especially the dancing,

that carried the three-and-one-half-hour show with some two dozen numbers. The songs “Good Time while | Can,” “Warmest Baby in Town,” “Night Time,” “Lou, My Lou,” and “The Gay

Manhattan Rag” were slightly ragged and danced by a chorus that included tap dancers Eddie Rector and Toots Davis, ballroom dancers Ethel Williams and Johnnie Peters, and the pianist Luckey Roberts, who also specialized in acrobatics. As the performers rollicked onstage, the spectators of Darktown Follies indulged in the participatory spirit of a good camp meeting. It was reported that they rocked back and forth with low croons, screamed with delight, giggled intermittently, waved their hands, shrieked, and pounded their palms vigorously together in an effort to make the entertainers work hard. And work they did. Every night, all of these diversely hued “Ethiopians” danced and sang out their lives. The ballroom number at the end of the second act featured the Texas Tommy, a whirling couple dance with a momentum that nearly catapulted the female partner across the orchestra pit; then the entire company went into a spiraling circle dance that became a recoiling serpent. The staging of that number, “At the Ball, That’s All,” was one of those miracles of originality. As the company turned round and round, passing before the footlights and behind the scenes, the dancers did a sliding syncopated walk with their hands on the hips of the person in front of them. At the tail end was Ethel Williams, “tagging the line” with her own ballin’ the jack moves; she twisted, hugged, and swayed her knees every which way until the curtain came down, then teasingly stuck her hand out from behind the curtain to “ball the jack” with her fingers. The rhythm was inexorable, spreading from one side of the stage to the other. The separate figures became part of it; the scenery and the stage boards took it up, the footlights flickered to it. The rhythm was so dominating that for days afterward, viewers might subconsciously adapt whatever they were doing to its demands. By the grand finale of Darktown Follies, as the entire cast paraded before the audience—bowing, prancing, strutting, and high-kicking with arched backs and pointed toes, in a grand cakewalk—the viewer might have sworn to have seen the Congo.

Ziegfeld, too, must have sensed the Congo. He was so taken with the tantalizing musical numbers that he “bought” several of them, together with their accompanying action, for his Follies of 1914. Knowing it would not be easy to instill the Congo in his Ziegfeld Girls, who were trained to walk demurely, one foot in front of the other, he brought in Ethel Williams to coach the cast. “At the Ball” became the greatest hit that Ziegfeld ever had. But neither Williams nor anyone else from the cast of Darktown Follies performed it on Broadway. Nor did J. Leubrie Hill’s

name appear on the program. Moreover, when Oscar Hammerstein announced that in his efforts to introduce “colored musical comedy to Broadway,” he would open his Roof Garden atop his Victoria Theatre (a music hall on Forty-second Street and Broadway) with Hill’s Darktown Follies, Ziegfeld threatened a lawsuit: Ziegfeld maintained that no one but Ziegfeld was to use the title of “Follies,” with or without the “Darktown” prefix. But no lawsuit ensued. Darktown Follies of 1914, its name intact, opened at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden on June 1, 1914. That same day, the Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 opened across Forty-second Street at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Perhaps there was no real contest. Despite the publicity and the

combined vocal strength of the cast that could be heard for blocks, Darktown Follies on Hammerstein’s Roof, presented in a condensed thirty-eight-minute version during the second part of the evening’s program, had patrons walking out at intermission. Ticket sales for the Ziegfeld Follies soared after opening night.

There was one major comeuppance. Whatever the price Ziegfeld paid for the numbers in Darktown Follies, and however little credit Hill and his musical artists received, the effect was not

_ re

.gett: .‘ y\° xsian A J i \ r , a _ f : 3 i Soe ¥ Le 4 l 4 Be ur Sf % S. . hth Be? alt) & i

on ‘cai +' “Jeoonws4 >hh ie sie OOKER T. WASHINGTON 3 % isi , aii ble husband and father, returns to

B is said to consider Bert Wil- i el nie | his Mandy and the old homestead. liams one of the greatest | eSprs3 el BBE: It is aallconscientiousness worked out and that played assets of the negro race. Without \ \ ) :| with dewishing to filch anyone jewels Mr. .;i| oe i m |serves unstinted honors. Williams’ crown, mayfrom venture ai)\ ni} of course, mustpraise. go to First Mr. Hill for to nominate, as another such asset, ]. §@ Ley \\f his acting (as the outraged Mandy) Leubrie Hill, author, composer and + - 4) 4 154\ =. and for the conception and produc-

producer of “My Friend Ken: at f\\ tion of thesufficiently piece. His dialogue 1s tucky,” presented this from season at the .Seclean and witty. His Lafayette Theatre on upper Seventh J. Leubrie Hill — Author and Composer musical numbers of which there are

Avenue. For when the 1913-14 some two dozen, are pleasantly tunetheatrical books are made up, “My ful, although for the most part they Friend from Kentucky” ought as- ° lack that insidious but rather necessuredly to be entered upon the credit The Darktown Follies sary quality of being readily whis-

side of the ledger. tled. Even so, “Night Time,” “Lou, Apart from the intrinsic value of their medium, the Darktown My Lou,” “Rock Me in the Cradle of Love,” and a couple of Follies, as Mr. Hill’s players are called, owe their success to others, have themes that linger in the memory. enthusiasm. It is stimulating to find a company whose members, Compared with songs from current productions, their tempo especially in the chorus, show an intelligent interest in their strikes one as being a bit ragged, and a rather too generous supwork; and in “My Friend from Kentucky” there is a pleasant ply of encores further retards the action. But the colored patrons absence of that narrow-lidded, sophisticated languor so common do not complain, They like their money's worth—who shall in your average chorus. A refreshing spontaneity pervades the blame them ?—and they get it. Doubtless when “My Friend from entire performance, These people are young. When they sing Kentucky” reaches Broadway, as it is scheduled to do, it will be and dance they do it whole-heartedly. When they laugh, they in an accelerated form. really laugh, and their spirit is quickly transmitted to the audi- It is not possible to mention every one in the large cast. Mr. ence—which, by the way, is probably the most appreciative in Hill, by his tone and manner rather than by his actual lines,

New York. makes a properly terrifying Mandy. Julius Glenn, as the mis-

“My Friend from Kentucky” is built around a plot which could creant Jim Jackson Lee, using to advantage an extremely mobile put to shame not a few much-vaunted musical successes. Jim mouth, is consistently funny, especially in his front-of-the-curtain Jackson Lee, a moral weakling, led by a boyhood friend, Bill scenes. Bill Brown, portraying Bill Simmons, the playful home-

Simmons, mortgages half the plantation of Jasper Green, his wrecker, acts with poise and naturalness a part that calls for venerable father-in-law, and flees to Washington in search of considerable restraint. Sam Gaines is quite an ideal colored high society, the presidency of the Colored Men's Business planter of the old school. Anna Pankey, a well-known Williams

League and freedom and Walker _Evon star; from the iron hand Jennie Schepar, of Mandy Lee, his - *% Robinson, Alice Ram-

six-foot freedom, wife. Jim and Grace Jackson's |& |esnea Se asey, | | son handle theirJohnroles however, isjustly short|i :\edee; oe, Z | gvery. satisfactorily; lived, as his | nal . the last two having indignant wife and |i Rt ; — mr 4 8 particularly her father, warned of == songs. good

his defection by the : Dancing, always a village lawver, give a, A feature of negro per-

chase, and catch him a , < : | a ! formances, plays an

on the point of enter- b ” — » gt? « e, Fs e * important part in this ing into matrimonial Ae. | BL: “- oe WN f ¥, one. Certainly there relations with a cerx ae 0 wo Sid4 ;, -traction is no Broadway attain Lucinda Lang| eee |i ae Y j Fa a CO that can boast

tree, ofbeen the élite. | . ' ¢- 6wy| any planned or Having ruthless| -£ better executed ensemble

ly exposed by the ' kK : : dances—or any less

avengers, Jim Jackson "oe Bats: ; —— | . :f favored with suggesLee, a sadder and we © a. a ae i i ae oo) S \ ie eon et _ _ tiveness. hope more responsi- . SE SE ES —— J. CHapMAN HILpeEr. Photo Unity OPENING CHORUS OF “MY FRIEND FROM KENTUCKY”

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 47 the same. The cast of Ziegfeld Follies could not “ball the jack” convincingly. The tunes remained pretty, the Follies Girls were undoubtedly pretty, but the rhythm was gone, the thrill was lacking, and the boom was inaudible. The Congo had disappeared.

Resisting Imitation The interest of whites in borrowing song-and-dance material from black culture goes as far back as the decades preceding the Civil War and was well established in the decades after Emancipation—when, ironically, blacks in the theater were forced to assimilate and adapt white American theatrical conventions. As one researcher on New York musical theater commented, by the turn of the century, there was “no style of genre in popular song that could be isolated... . The amount of borrowing and imitation was considerable.”* Thus was continued a long tradition in American popular theater of “stealthing,” with performers constantly working to perfect formulas that had long histories, striving to imitate or surpass the most successful entertainers. Hill, billing himself as “The Colored George M. Cohan,” was not exempt from aspirations to white Broadway models of success.’ What is most provocative about Darktown Follies is that the “refreshing spontaneity” that “pervaded the entire performance”* could not be duplicated. It was a distinctly African Ametican product that by its very nature resisted importation and integration into white musical theater. Thomas Riis writes in Just before Jazz, “Hill realized that the novel impact of black performers lay in the special way they could use their bodies and their voices, making the trappings of the nineteenth-century extravaganza or European operettas seem irrelevant.”° One critic was surprised to see blacks performing without burnt-cork makeup: “If you went to see this attraction of Darktown by colored players, colored actors, with colored audiences and a colored orchestra under the impression that if the lights went down you would feel alone in the house, you would soon discover the truth .. . that the rouge-pot had invaded Africa and the prevailing complexion of colored players is pink.”® Dodging the theatrical conventions of the day that restricted black musical-theater artists from having, literally and metaphorically, to play blackface slapstick comedy, Hill ensured that the singing and dancing, especially the dancing, carried the show.’ Darktown Follies was a landmark production for its transplantation of African American dance forms onto the musical stage—these included the circle dance in “At the Ball” (a snaking, sliding walk in rhythm based on the African Ring Shout), the strut and cakewalk, the tango, mooche, and ballin’ the jack, as well as traditional time steps and soft-shoe dances, plus a swinging blend of tap, acrobatics, and such Russian steps as kazotsky kicks, a lateral splaying of kicks from a squatting position. The Texas Tommy, a kick-and-hopping dance (a forerunner of the Lindy Hop) that was introduced in Hill’s production, had all the qualities of being a precisely executed rhythm dance. Although it had two basic steps, a kick and hop three times on each foot, dancers added whatever they wanted—turns, pulls, slides—which challenged

Opposite page: Author and composer J. Leubrie Hill and the cast of The Darktown Follies appearing in the March 1914 issue of Theatre. (Author’s collection)

48 TAP DANCING AMERICA them to keep their partners from flying off the stage. Within an environment of improvisation and competitive camaraderie in nightly performances, many steps were embellished and many more invented. Toots Davis, a member of the chorus when the show opened who, by 1916, had moved to solo specialties, popularized two air steps, which became the traditional finale of tap dancers: (1) “in-the-trenches,” which turned the (back-arching) cakewalk and tilted it 130 degrees forward, into a stationary running step, consisting of long backward slides, alternating one foot with the other, with the body bent forward at the waist and arms swinging 180 degrees; and (2) a floor-hovering air-defying step called “over-the-top,” which consisted of bending forward, springing up, and bringing each leg in turn around from the back and across to the front of the other leg. These two air steps would become staple finishing steps for tap routines for decades, used in the finale of the performance to excite the audience. Eddie Rector also worked his way up from the chorus of Darktown Follies to a specialty spot in which he performed a smooth military routine. By leaning sideways into the diagonal, and with the ensuing momentum of the lean, he traveled across the stage with a superb grace and elegance that made every move “a beautiful picture.” The widespread use of these forwardtilting, side-leaning steps reflected an evolving aesthetic of aerality in tap dancing that moved the dancer from the vertical (performing piston-like buck steps) to the diagonal and horizontal (which allowed for more fluttering wing steps). That change altered the image of the tap dancer from one of a hoofing horse to that of a hummingbird hovering over the ground with steps light and quixotic. Even the dancing of the choruses became lighter, faster, more syncopated, and more rhythmically precise. Dancing had always been a feature of African American performance, but in Darktown Follies, it was hailed as surpassing anything on Broadway: “Certainly there is no Broadway attraction that can boast any better planned or executed ensemble dances—or any less flavored with suggestiveness.”* As a stage form, musical comedy, with its line of chorus girls and bits of plot and characterization, had appeared earlier than 1914, but Broadway had yet to host a production that had music or dance with a swinging or propulsive rhythm.?

Integration and Segregation Darktown Follies of 1914 must be noted for integrating audiences. It drew whites to uptown (Harlem) theaters in which white patrons were in the minority, and it led blacks to downtown (Broadway) theaters to mix with whites. Hill’s show, first organized in Washington, D.C., around 1911 as My Friend from Kentucky, opened at the Lafayette on November 3, 1913. Harlem, an uptown neighborhood of Manhattan, was settled by whites; when the colonial-era farmland

was exhausted, nineteenth-century tenements and apartment houses were built to lure the expanding white middle classes away from Lower Manhattan. In the 1880s and 1890s, blacks began moving into this multicultural (Irish, German, Jewish) neighborhood, and by the 1920s they had become the dominant community. Darktown Follies of 1914 was predominantly meant for a black audience: “This company is drawing a light sprinkling of whites, and that seems likely to be increased, though the colored people of the city will doubtlessly hold the company in for some time yet,” reported Variety.’ When the Lafayette first opened in November 1912, blacks were allowed in the balcony only;

in August 1913, blacks were allowed in the orchestra but had to pay double the white price; by November 1913, after the smashing success of My Friend from Kentucky’s opening at the Lafayette, 90 percent of the audience was reportedly black.”

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 49 Two weeks after Darktown Follies of 1914 played Hammerstein’s Roof Garden on Broadway on June 1, 1914, the full-length production moved intact to the Bijou Theatre, a playhouse that became devoted to the new moving pictures but was reopened on Broadway as the first house for black patrons from which whites were not excluded. “There were almost as many [whites] in the theatre as there were Negroes,” the New York Times reported.'* From the Bijou Theatre, Darktown Follies moved to the Grand Opera House (November 9-15), south of Broadway, where it continued to play to mixed audiences. Though Darktown Follies integrated audiences, it also created its own distinctly African

American style of musical theater. As James Weldon Johnson, in Black Manhattan (1930) wrote, “During the term of exile of the Negro from the downtown theatres of New York, which began in 1910 and lasted for seven lean years, there grew up in Harlem a real Negro theatre, something New York had never seen before. That is, a theatre in which Negro performers played to audiences made up almost wholly of people of their own race.”'’’ The professional experience of Negro performers had always been to play before paying audiences that were predominantly white. The rise of a Negro theater in Harlem was, therefore, a new thing: suddenly a business might be based on a black audience with enough money to pay for leisuretime entertainments. The black performer in New York who had always played to white or predominantly white audiences “found himself in an entirely different psychological atmosphere ... freed from a great many restraints and taboos that had cramped him for forty years.” With the establishment of the Negro theatre in Harlem, therefore, “colored performers in New York experienced for the first time release from the restraining fears of what a white audience would stand for.” In the early decades of the 1900s, the newly derived sense of freedom that the African American musical artist found to draw on materials from the black vernacular thus led to their preservation. Like the African cultural elements preserved in the Sea Islands off the Carolina coast and like the sean-nos step dancing preserved in the westernmost portions of Ireland, black musical-theater dance, through its eight-year exile from the downtown theaters of New York, was sustained in Darktown Follies. As that style of theater continued to develop separately from white theater, it remained relatively uncompromised. Yet although that separation eroded black theater’s interest in borrowing white stage methods and materials, whites continued to borrow older and new black materials. As Theophilus Lewis, theatrical editor of Messenger Magazine, charged:

The tendency to borrow from the colored stage openly [began] when J. Leubrie Hill produced his “Darktown Follies.” . . . Hill’s production marked the turning point in the relations existing between the white stage and the colored stage. Before that time the Negro theatre borrowed its materials and methods from the white stage. Our comedians had accepted the minstrel tradition without questioning its merit or authenticity. ... He [J. Leubrie Hill] turned aside from Indian themes and South Seas motifs when he wrote the music and arranged the dances for the show, and it was the singing and dancing that carried it over."* It was in the teens, then, with Darktown Follies, that two streams of musical-theater dancing evolved—one based in black vernacular dance and black rhythmic sensibilities, the other in the jig and clog tradition of white Broadway. While the amount of borrowing and imitation was considerable between the two, that distinction (not along racial lines but on rhythmic sensibilities) would pervade the twentieth century.

50 TAP DANCING AMERICA

The Girls: Amazons to Ponies “Our women are supreme in the furious beauty of their dancing, and in their ability to insinuate riotous humor in their dancing and singing without sacrificing a mite of their feminine charm.” So Lewis wrote in a critical retrospective of the Negro theater called “Magic Hours in the Theatre,” in which he addressed the female chorus of Darktown Follies of 1914.” In Ziegfeld’s production of Follies of 1914, he envisioned quite another ideal of feminine beauty. Ziegfeld was the son of a dignified, old-school German American musician who had become president of the Chicago Musical College. Ziegfeld Jr.’s entry into theatrical production had been provoked by his fascination with Anna Held, whom he met in London in the late 1890s, placed under contract, and featured in a series of musical comedies; her daintiness, delicate accent, and flashing come-hither eyes became Ziegfeld’s model for the rich display of feminine beauty that became the mark of every Ziegfeld production. Knowing he should not appropriate the lascivious features of the French Folies Bergeres girls for the more puritanical

American stage, he worked instead on making his girls look more beautiful. His plan took shape when he presented the musical revue Follies of 1907 atop the New York and Criterion Theatres. In a striking “motion-picture effect” scene, the girls seemed to be splashing in the waves. In the finale, twenty-four drummer girls paraded out into the theater and back. Follies of 1905 was presented on a more elaborate scale; casting new luminaries Nora Bayes and Mae Murray, the revue was designed as a glance at the entire history of society, politics, and the stage, from the Garden of Eden to New York in the present time—and with girls who were more pulchritudinous than ever, even when parading across the stage as taxicabs. Ziegfeld interviewed as many as ten thousand girls a year to find those who met his personal standards of perfection: their race, Caucasian; their height, five feet five; their build,

petite. Using the Venus de Milo and other classical artworks as guides for proportion and form, he divided standards of female beauty into categories of face, hair type, body type, hands, legs, and profile, with the sum of the parts becoming his formula for the perfect American girl. His system was a curious racism of beauty in which one man had the power to decide who was beautiful and who was not. Because “ethnic types” were excluded from his beauty formula (and Ziegfeld forbade a suntan on any of his girls), the Follies Girls registered not simply the exclusion of color but also the promotion of whiteness.'® As early as the 1860s, there was established a tradition in precision chorus dancing, beginning with the Gaiety Girls in England, who were legendary for their beauty and perpetuated an appreciation of the feminine form on the legitimate stage by appearing in sophisticated revue shows. Not classically trained dancers, they were required only to move with poise in their elaborate costumes. Similar American groups included the Flora Dora Girls, originally a 1900 British musical brought to New York, and the Yama-Yama Girls in 1905. Precision chorus line

dancing reached its height around 1910 in England when the wealthy manufacturer John Tiller presented the Tiller Girls in the music halls of London. Tiller opened a dance school and developed a “Tiller system” of intensive training for his precision troupes, admired for the exactitude and precise uniformity of the dancing line, with plenty of high leg kicks. Although several of such troupes were imported to the United States by well-known producers (Ziegfeld included), Ziegfeld’s desire was to set new standards for the American revue chorus dancer. He began with the way she walked—a slow promenade down a staircase at an oblique angle to the audience, with footwork that was simple: a step forward with the outside foot, followed by a closing step with the inside foot; the step forward took place on the first beat of a four-count measure, and the closing step on the third. This “Ziegfeld Walk”—performed with chins held high and with blank eyes, to create a psychological distance between the girls

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 51 and male patrons, was one of several inventions by dance director Ned Wayburn. He wanted to move the chorus, to shape them into various geometric formations, to divide them into subgroups of varying heights and bodily proportions, based upon their ability to perform a number of his standard techniques—“tap and stepping” among them—and to use them as framing devices for the star soloists. This he did in the “Will O’ The Wisp” number in the January 1916 edition of Ziegfeld Frolics, which used two choruses to frame a male soloist, one group ranging five feet two to five feet six in height, called “chickens,” and a shorter group ranging five feet to five feet five in height, called “ponies,” whose specialties were tap work and modern Americanized ballet.’’

Ziegfeld produced shows that starred many superb tap dancers. One was Miss Ann Pennington, who was only four feet eleven in heels and weighed a hundred pounds (nicknamed “Tiny”), who arrived on the scene in Follies of 1913, “happily at a time when it was permissible for her to reveal her dimpled knees.”'® She introduced her tap dance specialties to delighted audiences, which established her as one of America’s most loved and sought-after dancers. In Follies of 1914, she was “the real hit of the evening” wrote the New York Times, “a real slip of a girl in a striking costume considerably shorter than the young woman herself. Little Miss Pennington appeared in the Tango Palace scene, but her dance was of the ‘buck and wing’ variety, quite a novelty in this age of the maxixe and other modern efforts.” The Ziegfeld Girls were presented not as a tap dancing chorus but as a ranked corps of dancers—from tall and slender show girls to shorter teams of ponies—who made a spectacular display of tap and stepping as one of many dance specialties, to provide a visual and aural contrast in the orchestration of choreography. Broadway wanted show girls, not chorus girls who could dance. Nevertheless, Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 was praised for its dancing and for its girls. “There are girls and girls and girls and plenty of real comedians and many more real dancers, and when the show begins to lag somebody dances or tells a story, or the Ziegfeld chorus comes skipping on, and all is forgiven,” wrote the New York Times.”° The first act’s characteristic finale, “The Ragtime Regiment,” presented an elaborate military routine, with Ann Pennington as Lieutenant Turkey, Johnny Dove (a minstrel dancer and buck-and-wing champion) as Captain Ragtime, sixteen Ziegfeld Girls, and the entire Company with a marching drum corps. It brought the audience to its feet, especially the precision military tap routine that would populate musical stages throughout World War I. Yet the stepping of the chorus was

most often described as heavy and loud, “Amazonian marches and drills,’ and no wonder, since the tap and step technique Wayburn was applying had, after all, been drawn from clog dancing.

The Shubert Brothers’ Passing Shows of 1912, 1913, and 1914 The image of the Ziegfeld Girl was to remain one of demure elegance—the ranked corps of dancers distinguished his tall and slender show girls from the shorter teams of dancing ponies. Wayburn’s device, to establish the primacy of the soloist and differentiate the chorus, was revealed with exceptional clarity in all the shows he staged for Ziegfeld, as well as those for the Shubert brothers. The Shuberts’ Passing Show of 1912 had “eighty artfully chosen girls” (“The Sumurun runway was again fully tested to its limit,” wrote Variety, who exhibited the three specialized classifications: the “show girls” [tall and statuesque posers], the “mediums,” the “ponies.”) So, too, the act 1 finale, “Capital Steps,” in Passing Show of 1913 (Winter Garden The-

atre) as staged by Wayburn featured specialty and chorus dancers performing ballet and tap

52 TAP DANCING AMERICA steps up, down, and across flights of stairs. The scene’s final specialty number, “Tangle-Footed Monkey Wrench,” was performed by the soft-shoe tap tandem team of Carter de Haven and Fred Nice Jr. in “rube” outfits. The finale, “Inauguration Day,” involved the scene’s entire cast of seven soloists and forty-eight female dancers tapping in rows, down the staircase, in lines and V-formations, stretching from the stage floor to the level of the balustrades and cover-

ing the entire staircase. All were framed by the male chorus, which lined the edge of the staircase. If anything was changing in the chorus dancing of white revues in the mid-teens, it was not the sound or expertise but the look of the dancer. By The Passing Show of 1914, the moment of final triumph for the slender, modern chorus girl had gone down in history. “Gone forever now were the gigantic chorus ladies with their Amazonian marches and drills,”*” wrote Cecil

Smith, explaining that in the earlier days a chorus girl was not considered much of a charmer unless she possessed limbs like barrels and, with a spear in hand, waddled about the stage. The production, staged by J]. C. Huffman with dance numbers arranged by Jack Mason, featured Marilyn Miller, whose combined expertise in ballet and tap made her an immediate star soloist; there was also a twenty-five-member female chorus. While “the choral Amazon” had been on the way out for some years, the Passing Show of 1914 made the metamorphosis complete. It signaled the edging out of “the baldheads from the front row,” and the usurpation of their places by “unwhipped cubs,” whose interest was in legs that had been emerging from their tights inch by inch for several seasons and were “now presented unadorned and au naturel, underneath torsos screened by glittering spangles.” When they took the stage, they also revealed “unwonted energy and talent by engaging in thoroughly professional tap dancing.”

Ragtime Syncopated Stepping On May 23, 1914, one week before the premieres of Darktown Follies and Ziegfeld Follies, the renowned white husband-and-wife ballroom dance team Vernon and Irene Castle dedicated

the opening of the new “Danseland” in Madison Square Garden with a tournament in which amateurs from across America competed for the title of Castle Champion rag dancers of the United States. Forty couples competed in the one-step and waltz event as James Reese Europe’s Orchestra switched tempos and tunes quickly from a fast rag into a slow one or a waltz. The ease and precision with which the dancers followed the music were the biggest points in deciding the cup winners. Seventeen couples also competed in the maxixe event, and seven couples danced in the tango competition.” Americans went “dance mad” in the teens with the one-step, two-step, and foxtrot— syncopated ragtime dances that bounced embracing couples along the floor with hops, kicks, and capers. Syncopated music had been popular in the “raggy motion” of songs and piano music since before the beginning of the century, but by the early teens dance bands in downtown New York clubs were “jassing up” (adding speed and syncopation) such dances as the Grizzly Bear and the Kangaroo Dip for their white clientele. Uptown, Harlem instrumentalists and those under James Reese Europe’s Clef Club, upon hearing the new enthusiasm for ‘Jass,” were infusing dozens of black-based “animal” dances— the Turkey Trot, Monkey Glide,

Chicken Scratch, Bunny Hug, and Bull Frog Hop, as well as slow drags with ragtime “jass” rhythms. James Reese Europe, an African American musician, composer, and bandleader, was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1881 and grew up in Washington, D.C. He studied violin under Enrico Hurlei, an assistant director of the U.S. Marine Band, and in 1904 moved to New York and

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 53

settled on the West Side. In 1910, Europe founded the Clef Club, an organization of black New York musicians, in an effort to provide a central hiring place for them. His concerts sometimes used as many as 150 musicians. They “played a lively kind of music—none of this onetwo-three stuff, with no in-between steps,” wrote Jervis Anderson. “The Clef Club would start off by playing [a piece] in ragtime. All of a sudden, people commenced getting up and trying to dance it. And this was the beginning of the Negro taking over New York’s music and establishing our rhythms.”” In 1914, Europe organized a smaller orchestra called the Tempo Club and quit the Clef Club to play for white ballroom dancers Vernon and Irene Castle. His star rose with the Castles and reached a peak when his band played all along Broadway in 1915. His own Tempo Club was a mainstay of the social dance craze before World War I (1914-1918). Whites, to a degree, were more accepting of the happy-go-lucky black dance music but reluctant to accept black culture’s serious music; they ignored, for example, the contemporary complex rag compositions of pianist Scott Joplin. The Castles, with Europe’s music moving them along, helped infuse black syncopation into their staged social dances. The enormously popular stage act thereby brought black vernacular rhythms to white elite ballrooms.

Ragtime dancing was not tap dancing per se, but it was an excitedly rhythmic form of social dancing. The simplicity of the shuffle walk (borrowed from the most basic step in tap dance—brushing as the foot moves in one direction) and the finely accented rhythms of the music encouraged couples to interpret the beat in a wider variety of ways. Such social dance styles as the tango and the one-step contained innumerable variations from which a couple could choose. The new styles freed the dancers from the rigid postures and step sequences that had served to prescribe “proper” behavior in the past. Dancers began to add more body expressions—more arm pumping, shaking, jiggling—to their movements on the floor. Thus, bodily interpretation of the beat was achieving a place, however slight, in the modern social dance. Along with the more natural shuffle walk-steps of black dancing and their Afro-American and Tin Pan Alley ragtime accompaniment, dancers enjoyed the heightened bodily expressions and intimacy with their partners. Black popular music “ignored any division of time that follows the natural pulse of regular metrical beat” and anticipated or held over accents beyond their expected time.”? This more complex music encouraged spontaneous movement and undercut the formal conventions about moving the body that had prevailed in social dancing. As Vernon Castle remarked, “When a good orchestra plays a ‘rag’ one has simply got to move.””°

Dancing, then, became rhythmically pleasurable: men and women moving their bodies in response to the rhythm. In addition, it signaled an adaptation to a more “youthful” set of social values, as ragtime social dancing became a way of affirming one’s identity as a youthful and vibrant individual, vital to and in society.”’ The Castles were ambivalent and hesitant about acknowledging the African American sources of their new dances. Noble Sissle says that it is more than likely that Europe taught the Castles the foxtrot to slow down the faster one-step.** However, Europe and his band remained subordinate to the Castles, who were unquestionably the super-stars of that era. Writing about the shimmy, Irene Castle described the role she had established for herself in the transmission of black dance forms: “We got our new dances from the Barbary coast. Of course, they reach New York in a very primitive condition, and have to be considerably toned down before they

can be used in the drawing-room. There is one that just arrived now—it is still very, very crude—and it is called ‘Shaking the Shimmy.’ It’s a nigger dance, of course, and it appears to be a slow walk with a frequent twitching of the shoulders.”” To be graceful in dancing, Vernon

Castle explained, presupposed a certain stateliness, a dignity of movement that had charm rather than gymnastic skill. Even the simple action of walking needed to be smoothed of any shuffling of the feet: “When I say walk, that is all it is. Do not shuffle, do not bob up and down

54 TAP DANCING AMERICA or trot. Simply walk as softly and smooth as possible, taking a step to every count of the

music." While whites in the ballroom, following Castle’s prescription, removed the shuffle and bounce of the foxtrot into smooth dancing, black dancers, buoyed by the craze in rhythm danc-

ing, performed the “animal” dances that were less restrained. White moralists were much more concerned by the new bodily freedoms taken by social dancers, and a battle of words raged between them. Such dances as the fish tail, eagle rock, and buzzard lope involved a grinding of the hips; and the fanny bump, funky butt, squat, itch, grind, and mooche became emphatically erotic and rhythm-driven, while the slow drag slid silkily through the beat.

Vaudeville in Black and White Although buck-and-wing/tap dancing was slow to gain prominence on the white Broadway stage (it was more to be enjoyed as a syncopated-stepping social dance on moonlit Broadway rooftop gardens), it had been developing as a performance art since the turn of the century in traveling medicine shows, carnivals, tent shows, and circuses. In the teens, tap dance moved forward with great vigor on the vaudeville stage, despite its evolution in two separate arenas as black and white entertainers were kept apart. Heading down dual paths of development that rarely intersected in performance, black and white vaudeville formed a twin chain of dancers and comprised a sort of double helix that wound around the core of tap without joining into a single strand. Antonio (“Tony”) Pastor was born in New York City in 1834 and as a child sang and played

tambourine in blackface. From 1865 to 1875, he staged and starred in variety shows at the Bowery Opera House in New York City. In December 1878, Pastor presented a mixed bill of fifteen variety acts at his theater on lower Broadway, which included Irish comedians Fergeson and Mack; the French twin sisters, who performed jig, clog, and reel dancing; and Kitty O’Neil (c. 1852-1916), the champion lady jig dancer” who was considered to be one of the best jig and clog dancers of the day.” Kitty O’Neil made her debut in New York on St. Patrick’s Day in 1862, and she continued to perform through the turn of the century at Tony Pastor’s theater, where she was acknowledged by the press and public to be “the Only Female Jig Dancer Extant,” with all others mere imitators. Without ever having to engage in a jig competition, O’Neil was hailed as a “champion”; there was even a jig tune named for her (“Kitty O’Neil’s Champion Jig,” an elaborate seven-part fiddler’s showpiece). In 1876, on Pastor’s stage, O’Neil was the first female to perform the Sand Jig, a specialty introduced that same year by Jimmy Bradley.*” Variety theater, with its separate acts following one another to make a complete bill, catered to carousing men in concert saloons and music halls. Variety was given a new context in Tony Pastor’s theaters. To attract wives and families and thus create a wider and more lucrative audi-

ence, Pastor banned liquor and censored some of the bawdiness in the acts, thus jettisoning the old name “variety,” with its stigma of vice and alcohol, for the more refined-sounding “vaudeville.” The result was a significantly broader audience of both men and women, working class and middle class, native-born and immigrant. Even the upper class found their way to it. In 1881, Pastor opened a season at the Tammany Hall building (which was on Fourteenth Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue in the Union Square district of New York) with a mixed bill of entertainments appealing to his middle- and working-class audience of men, women, and children. Having established himself as New York’s premier vaudeville showman, he began a tradition of presenting (mostly Irish) buck-and-wing dancers on the vaudeville stage. A newspaper discussing the earliest variety acts noted that “from the poorer and

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 55 uneducated classes .. . there was a sort of mania among young working lads to play banjo or bones, or do a jig. .. . These were the kind who supplied the variety ranks.”** After Tony Pastor died in 1908, B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albie, two entrepreneurs from the world of dime museums and circuses carried vaudeville beyond its origins. By creating theater circuits and booking offices for them, they expanded vaudeville into a mass entertainment industry of national scope. Although vaudeville continued to draw vitality from urban street life and from African American performers, vaudeville began to acquire a polish that made the old roughhouse Irish comics seem dated. Before the second decade of the century was over, there was an established roster of veteran Irish American vaudevillians—Pat Rooney,

Eddie Horan, Will Mahoney, James Barton, and the team of (James) Doyle and (Harland) Dixon. These song-and-dance men were a few newcomers who were breaking the established “two-man rule,” to work as dance soloists. George Murphy in his seven-minute routine at the New York Theatre was praised as being “one of the few steppers working alone” who did not pose as a songster: “He features and announces his own conception of triple-toe dancing and shows the difference between buck and wing dancing, which makes his ‘single’ look all the harder. Murphy’s a hard worker and that’s in his favor.”**

JACK DONAHUE By his own admission, Jack Donahue was a “just a hoofer,” not only because he danced in wooden shoes (made to order with a strip of leather on the inside and outside of each of the shoes because of his weak ankles) but because of the flat-footed buck-and-wing tap he grew up on. Born in Charleston, Massachusetts, in 1892, he says that in Boston in those days, “the boys didn’t worry about what they were going to do when they grew up—you were going to be either a dancer or a fighter.”*» He decided on the former. As a youngster he recalled climbing the stairs of the Howard Anthenaeum (home of the Mutual Wheel shows, the theater that specialized in burlesque entertainments) to sit on the hard benches at the very top of the auditorium. Caring little for the dancing women or the warbling singers and only tolerating the comedians, he saved his love for the hoofers, if they were good. The big moment arrived when George Primrose stepped onto the stage, the orchestra struck up “Swanee River,” and the old master went into one of his beautiful soft-shoe routines. Primrose belonged to the old school of tap dancers. He covered the whole stage with his graceful stepping, done to 4/4 time; Barney Fagan and the team of Delahunty and Hengler, who also played the Anthenaeum, were others of the same school of jig and clog. Donahue’s school of tap was the street, where learning was a hit-and-miss proposition of putting steps together into routines that, when mastered, were brought to the corner outside the old Rexford Hotel on Bullfinch Street, the clearing house for new steps. “Our conversations during these sessions,” he remembered, were “filled with such mysterious phrases as ‘Let’s see you cut a wing’; ‘Do Croppy-lie-down’ (you could hear the rhythm just saying the name); or ‘Here, watch these back-slip rolls’; or, ‘Can you do cover-the-buckle?’ Then there were the more familiar expressions, such as ‘Off-to-Buffalo’ and ‘Falling off a log.’”** If an unfriendly cop moved the boys off the corner, they would all go down to the Boston and Albany freight yards to jam. Endowed with long legs and arms and increasingly skilled at improvising new steps, Donahue went into eccentric dancing. His soft-shoe was sped up, as the 4/4 dancer was being

replaced by the 2/4 buck dancer—“the buck dancers got in more taps and they didn’t use so much stage.” Donahue’s first partner was Eddie Stone from South Boston; they doubled up and went busking around the local saloons, doing a dance as newsboys and passing the hat. His next partner was Benny Martin (Dan McGatchie); they succeeded in getting a vaudeville routine

56 TAP DANCING AMERICA together, which was booked at the King Edward Vaudeville Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His

third partner, Alice Stewart, he married; their act, called Donahue and Stewart, was a mix of dance and comedy. Donahue was the straight man and his wife appeared as an eccentric male dancer. When she retired, he worked as a single, appearing at the Palace Theatre in New York, the top of the vaudeville circuit, alternating dance numbers with light comedy. Donahue’s first experience with musical comedy was in New York in 1912, when he was engaged for a bit-and-specialty dance in The Woman Haters (at the Astor Theatre); playing the part of the orderly Spitsky, he performed a tap dance with a whisk broom. He toured with the show in Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts, where he received notices for his specialty, which was sand dancing. His first prominent dancing role on Broadway was in Hitchy-Koo (1917), followed by Angel Face (1919). Though he became a star on Broadway in the 1920s, he continued to play the vaudeville stage and was regarded as one of vaudeville’s greatest hoofing men. “Once a hoofer, always a hoofer,” he said.*’

Pickaninnies In dance, “pickaninnies” were talented black male juveniles who danced and sang to provide a backup and a socko finish to a vaudeville act. From the early 1900s, there were a number of white female vaudeville stars—Lucy Daly, Mayme Remington, Phina, Ethel Whiteside, Josephine Saxon, Emma Kraus, Louise Dresser, Canta Day, Carrie Schott, Laura Comstock, Nora Bayes, Blossom Seeley, Grace LaRue, Sophie Tucker, and Eva Tanguay—who carried a troupe of “picks” in their acts. There were as well a number of black female musical artists who traveled with picks, such as Mabel Whitman. Some acts, such as Josephine Gasman and Her Pickaninnies, included girls (Eva Taylor was one of three female picks for Gasman), but the custom of using young black males as backup “insurance” to an act was so common that when Canta Day and Her White Picks appeared, the act was considered a novelty. Dancers who worked as picks for Mayme Remington at one time or another included Luckey Roberts, Archie Ware, Eddie Rector, Lou Keane, Toots Davis, and Bill Robinson.

Cootie Grant worked for Remington in r9o1 as one of fifteen picks, dancing in various “Hawaiian, “Indian,” and “African” numbers, but the steps actually were variations of the strut, grind, and shuffle. In 1916, Dewey Weinglass, after working for the white singer Gertie LeClair and touring with Georgette Hamilton and Her Picks, was hired by Remington for a show at the Bushwick Theatre in Brooklyn. Opening on the same bill as the Marx Brothers, the boys wore Dutch wigs and clog-danced, while Miss Remington sang her songs and did her little dance. In the finale, Weinglass performed Russian steps and became the hit of the show.

For the most part, picks were assigned to the chorus as cute, black “miniature dancing men,” whose sole function was to enhance, and very rarely interplay with, the white female star. The dancer Tiny Ray, who would lead an early class-and-flash act, The Three Eddies, with Jimmy Walsh, Pop Bennett, and Clarence Wesley, worked for the white actress Gussie Frances in what was considered one of the best pick acts on stage. While Miss Frances sat in her swing and swung or sang “Won’t You Come Down, Rainbow Queen,” the youngsters, wearing opera hats, tuxedo jackets, short pants, and black silk stockings, danced a soft-shoe, or sat on the stage and watched her admiringly. Frances was not a dancer, so the choreography was left to the boys, who, said Ray, worked out all their own routines.** The tenure of work as a pick, because of size and age requirements, was limited. After a job as a pick with a famous star, a youngster had the difficult adjustment to make when he grew too large and was no longer “cute” enough for the job.

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 57 The experience that working in the pick chorus provided was the first major professional opportunity for young black men to collaborate, improvise, and perform in an ensemble. It led the way for an exceptionally talented dancer to develop his own act. In addition to Tiny Ray, former picks Henry “Rubberleg” Williams and Charles “Cookie” Cook went on to successful performance careers. Williams, a member of Naomi Thomas’s Brazilian Nuts, introduced the Charleston in the 1923 show Runnin’ Wild on black Broadway. Cook, a member of Lucy Venable and Her Picks, formed the comedy dance team of Cook and Brown and performed at the Cotton Club.

Tough on Black Asses (TOBA) Performance opportunities for black musical artists increased with the organization of the Theatre Owner’s Booking Association (TOBA), established around 1907 by F. A. Barrasso, a white Memphis businessman. It was similar to the Keith and Albie circuit founded in 1908. TOBA offered an organized option to the traveling carnivals, circuses, medicine and tent shows, with venues along an established route or network of theaters, thereby increasing engagements. Most of the circuit’s theaters were owned by whites until 1913, when Sherman Dudley, a black comedian and former minstrel, retired to Washington, D.C., and began to lease and buy theaters there. Combining with various white and black theater owners in the South, Dudley established his own chain of theaters within TOBA. By the late 1920s, Toby shows— tabloid editions of musical comedies, with three shows a night, each about forty-five minutes long—were playing in most of the South, the Southwest, and several northern cities. For young and unproven black dancers, many of whom had begun as picks, TOBA and the black vaudeville circuit provided one of the few opportunities for moving from the streets and

grassroots tent shows to the stage. But touring on the black TOBA circuit was arduous for entertainers of any age. Most agencies did not pay for traveling expenses after the first booking; lodging and meals were provided only for top entertainers, so most of the performers were left to their own devices. Traveling in the South was an enormous problem for black entertainers. Towns had curfews that banned Negroes from the streets after dark unless they had an official pass. Traveling America’s back roads became treacherous as U.S. racial violence peaked from the mid-teens to the early 1920s—among the most severe the nation had witnessed since the Civil War, with lynchings, bombings, and burnings. Willie Covan was a former pick who launched his career as a dancer on the black vaudeville circuit. Born in Savannah, Georgia, around 1900, he grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where there were no dancing schools. He learned to buck-and-wing by mimicking street dancers and listening to street cars in Chicago, earning pennies by tapping to street rhythms. By the age of ten, he was working as a pick and touring with George Webster through the Dakotas. After winning an amateur dance contest, he met Leonard Ruffin and formed the team of Covan and Ruffan to tour the TOBA circuit. Ruffin had the reputation of being the better soft-shoe dancer, but Covan could do a soft-shoe and just about anything else, including a variety of acrobatic steps, with and without taps. Their act was subtitled “Every Move a Picture,” and they performed a soft-shoe together, multiplying syncopated accents, which gave the dance flow and propulsion. That number would earn them billing at the Palace Theatre in New York, where they were continually shifted to different places on the program because no one wanted to follow them. In 1915 in Chicago, Covan decided it was time to ascend the tap dancing ladder of success

by entering the Monday night buck-and-wing Dancing Contest, sponsored by the touring company of In Old Kentucky—just as Bill Robinson had done in 1900 in New York City. The long-running show, which played every major city in the country, was then playing in

58 TAP DANCING AMERICA Chicago, and Kid “Mose” Checkers—a cornet player in the band who he had taken up dancing overnight and was defeating all comers—was the reigning buck-and-wing king. This contest was going to be a real challenge, since dancers from all over the country had traveled to Chicago to compete, to get in the “horse line” and be judged by eight dancers sitting on one the side of the stage, eight dancers on the other side, and eight sitting below the stage. A contestant had one minute, tops, to compete. Covan drew the number 8 and sat looking at his competitors. He noticed that each and every one began his routine with a time step. Sitting there and listening, he realized that all the

routines were beginning to sound like too much of the same. When Willie’s number was called, he made the rash decision to scrap the opening of the dance that he had been rehearsing for months—his time-step introduction. Instead, he says, “I came jumping out with a Wing, a Grab Off, and a Roll, and managed to get in a lot of new stuff before my time ran out.” After the judges awarded Covan the first prize silver medal, members of the audience came backstage and carried him out on their shoulders. “From then on,” Willie recalled proudly, “everybody in Negro show business knew about Covan.”

Bert and Baby Alice “Bert and Alice Whitman . . . [and] a chorus of honest-to-goodness beautiful girls.” (Philadelphia Tribune, January 10, 1929)

“Famous Whitman Sisters .. . featuring Alice and Bert Whitman, Princess Pee Wee, ‘Pops,’ Cut-Out and Leonard ... speed, comedy, song, novelty, entertainment.” (Philadelphia Tribune, November 14, 1929)

“These beautiful and versatile young women were capable of enacting individually or in group formation acts and exhibitions ranging from complete shows to revues . . . the charming ingenue and the lady of quality to the dainty and piquant soubrette and comedienne.” (Baltimore Afro-American, June 27, 1936)

Fleeting citations (like these above) in small black newspapers are one of the only resources available for constructing the histories of extraordinary early-twentieth-century black women. Among these are mere bits of information about Alice Whitman, the youngest of the Whitman Sisters (Essie, Mabel, Alberta, and “Baby” Alice)—a family of African American women that managed, booked, directed, and toured a large company that played on both black and white stages to become the longest-running and most highly paid act in Negro vaudeville. In her time, Alice Whitman was thought of by her peers as the “Queen of Taps.” Pete Nugent admired her fabulous figure and clear, clean taps,*° and Buster Brown said she was a tremendous dancer. Jeni LeGon claims: “She was the best there was. She was tops. She was better than Ann Miller and Eleanor Powell and me, and anybody else you wanted to put her to. She was just an excellent dancer. I mean, she did it all. She could do all the ballet-style stuff like Eleanor. And then she could hoof!”*! She was neither a blues singer nor a cakewalker, the only performance options open to African American female soloists in her day. She did not enter buck-and-wing contests or incorporate staged challenge dances in her act. Despite the cute-asa-button baby-doll dresses that became her signature look, she was a formative challenger to prevailing norms and expectations of black female artists, and she devised alternative strategies for female solo tap performance during the second and third decades of the century. Born in Atlanta in 1900, Alice Whitman was the fourth daughter born to Caddie Whitman and the Reverend Albert Allson Whitman, bishop of the Methodist Church in Lawrence,

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 59 Kansas, and dean of Morris Brown College in Atlanta. When Alice’s older sisters Mabel, Essie, and Alberta were young, their father gave them singing and dancing lessons. While living in Missouri, Kansas, and Georgia he taught them, for exercise only, to dance the double shuffle; he also taught them religious songs, with the intent that they would accompany him on evangelical tours and church benefits. The girls sang, danced, and played guitar while he preached. They became regarded as such talents that in 1899 they formed the Whitman Sisters’ Comedy Company and toured all the leading southern houses, playing to both black and white audiences. With the establishment of the Whitman Sisters’ New Orleans Troubadours in 1904, Mabel became one of the first black women to manage and continuously book her own company in leading southern houses. By the time Baby Alice joined the company at the age of ten, the Whitman Sisters had become a family-run business that played most of the major vaudeville circuits in the South, East, and Northeast. Mabel handled all the bookings, Essie designed and made costumes, Alberta composed music, and Baby Alice was billed the star dancer. The Whitman Sisters’ fast-paced shows were based on a variety format of songs, dances, and comedy skits; it included a cast of up to thirty performers, with a chorus of twelve to fourteen girls, and a five or six-piece jazz band. The first scene was sometimes a plantation number, with “Little Georgia Blossom” Willy Robinson, who was “as big as a couple of bunches of toothpicks” but had a sense of humor that would “make a cow smile,” returning home with a rooster for supper, prompting his Mammy to praise the Lord by singing psalms. Then came the specialty numbers, comic skits alternating with big production numbers, in which a chorus of girls in shimmering orange blouses with big green sleeves, green-satin pants, and sashes around their waists, did a Tiller dance—kicking to the left, to the right, and straight up and down. Next on was Butterbeans (Henry “Rubberlegs” Williams) who sang “Heebie Jeebies,” patting and scratching himself to the beat; and Susie (Jodie Edwards) who sang a blues; Willie Toosweet, “Sparkplug” George, and the three-foot-tall Princess Pee Wee did their comedy acts; and Mabel Whitman sang some old favorites and turned the show over to her chorus of male picks, who belted out songs, clapped out Charleston rhythms, and tapped like there was no tomorrow, turning flips, running up walls, and seemingly defying gravity and most other laws of physics.” The handsome and debonair “Bert” Whitman, dressed in top hat and tails, strutted onstage to introduce the “Queen of Taps,” Alice Whitman. Cute as a button in her baby-doll costume,

she sang with the sultry voice of a Helen Kane, flirted when she balled the jack, and then cleared the stage for the audience to focus on her solo routine of pullbacks, wings, and time steps; she finished with a shim sham shimmy, which she danced mostly from the waist down, wearing a shawl and a little flimsy thing around her middle with a fringe and a bow on the back. Beneath her floppy bows, she produced very clear taps. There was no scraping or shuffling, just the sharp distinct sound of a hoofer, weighted and fluent. Her high-energy, fastpaced tapping rivaled that of Willie Robinson or any of the picks in the chorus. Bert then rejoined Alice onstage, and somewhere in the middle of their duet, the audience realized that Bert Whitman—whom they had been admiring as a strutter rivaling the great George Walker—was actually Alberta Whitman. Surprised, but not shocked, the audience found itself not only enjoying the performance but also accepting the broader spectrum of gender identities that Alberta’s cross-dressing implied. There were other segments of the show in which the audience was similarly challenged, such as when the sisters performed as minstrels in blackface, wearing black wigs. After the finale of the skit and before the curtain bow, they took off the corked makeup and the wigs, let their bleached-blonde hair down, and came back onstage. “The audiences were always puzzled,” Essie Whitman wrote, “and someone was sure to ask, ‘What are those white women doing up there?’ Then they would recognize us as the performers and laugh in amazement.” Disrupting the norms, the sisters called attention to the (gendered and racial)

ee gle , _ ee 3 ; AB aie bats ae Program cover of Baby Alice and Alberta Bert Whitman ; - ‘ire (right) dressed in a man’s suit, for the vaudeville musical

ee 7 , prs ¥ : 5 comedy High Speed, starring the Whitman Sisters, which

ne f x ‘ ’ eis played at the Orpheum Theatre, Newark, New Jersey,

rin =:.se ? ) , 3 tae S84 power relations that were at work. “They took agency over

. Ee SD ; : 4 December 1925. (Frank Driggs Collection)

i 3 Pat their images and experimented with constantly shifting sieaniplidi buat = tn A i aS) ee portrayals of identity,” Nadine George Graves wrote about 7 the Whitmans. “They refused to accept the standard sin-

od f ; cular definition of what black women were supposed to ; do, how they were supposed to look, and where they were

| 4 p =a es supposed to work.”

4 fi AEM T And so, too, it was with Baby Alice Whitman, high5 ME kicking, snake-hipping in her baby-doll dresses, doing a

2 tg “ 7 shimmy while delivering a fierce and hard-hitting style ) ie of tap dancing. By simultaneously pleasing the audience

aS - with her cute self while capitalizing on the power of the

. y Na . ¥ erotic, Alice claimed power over her own self-represenhb: = es a [eee § tation as a star-soloist female rhythm dancer. “There he Sats weren't too many girl tap acts around,” Jeni LeGon

_ 1 Nass ' reminds us. “You had to tap to be in the house line and

. ; et there were excellent girl tap dancers all over the place. I

' SS just don’t know why there weren’t many soloists. Most : of them danced in the chorus line or did soubrette out in front of the chorus. But not too many of them went in for doing solo.”** That Alice Whitman was able to do this was in a very large part attributable to the fact that for most of her career she remained within the safe and protective confines of the Whitman Sisters organization. She was able to bypass having to contend with, as Ethel Waters described it, the serious legacy of black women from earlier times, in shows and carnivals, who “were considered not much better than cattle by respectable Negroes.”” “She could hoof,” said Jeni LeGon. “But she never went out on her own, you know, she stayed with the Sisters.””°

The Whitman Sisters not only succeeded in featuring the single most talented female rhythm tap dancer of the teens but were also the greatest incubator of dancing talent in black vaudeville. The sisters trained and gave a start to the hundreds of young dancers who apprenticed with them. Despite the company’s constant touring, they created a homelike atmosphere by cultivating a family company, with themselves as motherly figures. They also cultivated a stream of talent that passed through the show. Said Leonard Reed, “You sang one week, danced the next, sold peanuts the next, and if you got caught breaking any of the rules, they shipped you home in a hurry.”*’ At one time or another, Catherine Basie, Bunny Briggs, Willie Bryant, Joe Jones, Jeni LeGon, Maxie McCree, Aaron Palmer, Leonard Reed, Billy Mitchell, Samuel Reed, Julius Foxworth, Tommy Hawkins, Clarence Taylor, Earl “Groundhog” Basie, Willie Robinson, and Alice’s son, “Pops,” all apprenticed as picks or chorus dancers with the Whitman Sisters before forging their own careers as dancers on the black and the white vaudeville stages.

Vaudeville 1918 “Vaudeville is a mighty fast-moving entertainment,” claimed Variety in its 1918 year-end review

that singled out the Palace Theatre for “the best hard and soft shoe dancers in vaudeville.”

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 61 Vaudeville business in the East, West, North, and South had been uniformly good throughout that year: “It has been the favorite amusement of the soldier and sailor, has been constantly patronized by the President at Washington and has at last come into its own—as the recognized popular amusement in the regard of the general public.” In that final year of World War I, singing and dancing continued to sway the variety programs. It was also vaudeville’s biggest year for what was known as the “single act”—the man or woman appearing alone upon the stage who was considered a “single,” although accompanied by a pianist.

GEORGE PRIMROSE AND THE IRISH MINSTREL MEN In 1918, the vaudeville stages of New York headlined the most prestigious tap dancers in the business. Most prominent was the legendary George Primrose, who was announced in his act at the Fifth Avenue Theatre as “the greatest softshoe dancer in the world.”” Two major styles, or schools, of tap dancing had evolved from the grand tradition of turnof-the-century Irish step dancing. One was the jaunty and eccentric jig-and-clog of George M. Cohan on Broadway. The other was Primrose’s song-and-dance soft-shoe dance style. An Irishman whose real name was George Delaney Primrose, he was born in London, Canada, in 1852. He began his stage career at age fifteen when he joined McFarland’s Minstrels in Detroit, Michigan, dancing a solo that was billed as “Master Georgie the Infant Clog Dancer.” He later

joined the New Orleans Minstrels, O’Brien’s Circus, Skiff and Gaylord’s Minstrels, and Haverly’s Mastodon Minstrels, and he was presented as the “Ne Plus Utltra of Song and Dance.” Of all the Irish tap dancers to have lighted upon the stage in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Primrose was far and away the best. “Prim was the greatest stylist of them all—not necessarily the greatest technician—with the finest Soft Shoe I ever saw in my life,” said Harland Dixon, who first worked with the Primrose Minstrels in 1906 and at once adopted Primrose as his lifetime model. “He was of medium height, weighed a little over a hundred and ten, and could wear clothes like Fred Astaire; he smoked cigars but he didn’t drink; I never heard him raise his voice or swear; I never saw him practice a step and yet I never saw him perspire—even during the minstrel parades on the hottest summer days. He wore a high, stiff collar and looked up over the audience as he danced; he had a flat stomach, beautiful legs, and fine hips and shoulders—and just the way he walked was poetry.”°° Primrose was a perfectionist; he rehearsed all his dances and kept fit between seasons in his Mount Vernon barn. The whole of his face was lined from the black cork makeup he had worn over the years, and this gave him the grin of a leprechaun. While he used blackface, it was said, Primrose “talked white out of black”—that is, he used blackface but made no attempt to fake a black dialect, relying more on his sense of humor and dry Irish wit to carry his act. Performing at New York’s Palace Theatre in 1918 at the age of sixty-six, Primrose presented a minstrel act with a company of seven men in blackface and him in whiteface, dancing a soft-shoe to “Morning Glories Grew,” which drew the most admiring of reviews. Wrote Variety: “He appears in whiteface, closing the act with his soft shoe dancing, announced by the interlocutor as ‘the greatest soft shoe dancer in the world.’ If anyone has ever disputed that just

title, applied to Mr. Primrose, his protest has never been heard around these parts. He still dances, that veteran .. . he’s been at it a long while, so long he is beyond criticism. .. . ‘Primrose’ is a great name wherever there is cork, and George Primrose in white face, despite his years, can still soft shoe any of ’em to a finish.”*' This would be one of the last accolades for the great soft-shoe dancer; Primrose died in 1919 at the age of sixty-seven. Other vaudevillians who headlined at the Palace in 1918 included “Jack Donahue and his Six Virginia Steppers”; “Eddie Foy and his Seven Younger Foys” in the nineteen-minute act, “Slumwhere in New York”; and McIntyre and Heath.’ There was also Eddie Leonard and his

62 TAP DANCING AMERICA “Eleven Spades” in “Dandy Dan’s Return,” which recalled his old numbers and stopped the show at the first intermission, “the public refusing to leave its seat until Leonard took a final bow.” Eddie Leonard (1883-1941) was considered one of the greatest minstrel men in vaudeville, having been a star of Haverly’s Mastodon Minstrel troupe since the turn of the century. He was billed throughout his long career as the “Minstrel of the Hour” in a song-and-dance act in which his “appealing voice did not hide a slight Irish brogue” and his “graceful stepping equals any of the former masters of the art.”°?

Black (Dancers) in White (Vaudeville) It was an extraordinarily rare feat for a black dancer of any reputation or skill to make it in white vaudeville. If he did, he had to be experienced; he had to have proved his ground as a seasoned performer on the medicine wagon, in the sideshow, circus, Tom show, or minstrel olio, and he had to have done so with material that was original because vaudeville demanded freshness.

ULYSSES S. THOMPSON Ulysses “Slow Kid” Thompson was that rare and talented exception. An acrobatic dancer, singer, comedian, and tap dancer, his career included medicine shows, sideshows, circuses, minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, and Broadway performances. He is a brilliant example of the black musical artist who made the transition from grass-roots shows to the vaudeville circuit and Broadway. Born in 1888 in Prescott, Arizona, he ran away from home at age fourteen to work with a “doctor” show on a medicine wagon, dancing on a small platform in front of a tent to the accompaniment

of clapping and patting juba. In 1904, at age sixteen, he worked in Louisiana with the Mighty Hagg Circus in its winter quarters. His employment history is staggering: he worked at Patterson’s World Carnival, Heger and Hopper stock shows, other street medicine shows, stock shows in Kansas City, the Sells-Floto Circus, the Gentry Brothers’ Dog and Pony Show, the Hagenback and Wallace Circus, and Ringling Brothers Circus. At the end of Ringling Brothers’ 1915 season, he joined Ralph Dunbar’s Tennessee Ten on the Keith Proctor vaudeville circuit. After spending 1918 in France with an army band, he returned to the Tennessee Ten on the Keith Proctor circuit for five more seasons, during which he would become known, for the entirety of his career, for his swinging blend of tap, acrobatics, and the Russian dancing/eccentric style of legomania that combined somersaults, cartwheels, and tap dancing with knee-drops and Russian kicks.”

ROBINSON AND COOPER Like “Slow Kid” Thompson, Bill Robinson had been steadily dancing his way up the planks of the white vaudeville stage. By the summer of t901, Robinson’s partner, Theodore Miller, quit

the team. And Robinson—wanting to work with J. M. Moore’s New Orleans Minstrels at Hubert’s Museum in New York but relegated to the “two colored” rule, which restricted men of color to performing in pairs—showed up with a girl named Lula Brown, who was a marvelous dancer but made too many mistakes to meet Robinson’s standards. They parted, and Bill headed to Boston by himself to play one of the Drum Majors in an act headed by Tricky Sam and Charles Randall.’ Around 1902, Robinson teamed up with the dancer Johnny Juniper for another short-lived partnership. He was then called back to New York to work with George W. Cooper, a well-known black vaudevillian who, with his former partner, was one of the black acts on the classy white vaudeville Keith circuit. On January 10, 1903, they officially became the team of Cooper and Robinson.

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 63 Playing the role of the fool to Cooper’s straight man, Robinson’s stage getup consisted of a clown outfit with a tutu worn over long pants and a derby perched atop his head. Their new act took advantage of Robinson’s comic skills at impersonating an automobile having a fit, a mosquito, or a ttombone—using his lips. Their popularity grew, as did their income. They played all the leading vaudeville houses and went to London, where they were a tremendous hit with English audiences. Each year they put on a new act. In 1905-1906 it was called “Looking for Hannah”; in 1907-1908, “A Friend of Mine”; in 1909, “The Elephant Hunt.” All their shows followed the standard formula of jokes and skits, with Robinson’s dancing restricted because the act was primarily comedy. By 1914, Cooper and Robinson had established a sterling reputation on both the Keith and the Orpheum circuits. Crisscrossing the northern half of the United States, they were celebrated as “real Ethiopians”; “two colored gentlemen”; and the genuine article, whose “chuckling guffaws, pigeon wing steps and cachinnating songs” were “real vaudeville entertainment.” Around 1915, as the team of Cooper and Robinson was dissolving, Robinson was ready to move on as a solo dancer, despite the “two colored” rule. Marty Forkins, a Chicago Irishman who was considered the top independent theatrical manager in the Midwest at the time, took Robinson on as the first black solo act in white vaudeville. In July 1915, Robinson was featured at Henderson’s in Coney Island, New York, not only dancing but singing and imitating various musical instruments. “Bill dances, and it be a hard audience that will not take kindly to his work along this line,” wrote Variety, noting him “a clever entertainer who can hold down an early spot on a big-time program.” When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Robinson was among the dozens of variety artists who performed for the troops as a volunteer. By December of that year, he was touring the Orpheum Circuit, both as a soloist and in an act with Cooper called “A Friend of Mine on the Wrong Street” that played the Palace Theatre in Chicago on a tour that was “booked solid to July 1918.”°* In Variety’s year-end celebrity tributes, Robinson wrote “Success and Good Luck. I am having mine. If you don’t believe it, ask Harry Spingold [the Orpheum circuit's Western representative]. I’m not funny, just an entertainer, but—‘Oh, My.’””?

Stair Dance Bill Robinson was indeed still feeling his success and good luck in December 1918 when, after working sixteen years on the vaudeville circuit, he had arrived at the right time and place. He had performed as a soloist that year at the Palace Theatre in New York, the showplace of the Keith-Orpheum circuit and undisputed crown jewel of vaudeville theaters.’ There, he introduced into his solo act his “Stair Dance,” a routine that would set him apart from every other hard- or soft-shoe dancer on the vaudeville stage and allow him to lay claim to the title of the “World’s Greatest Dancer.”

Bill Robinson claims he first discovered the idea of dancing on stairs during a matinee performance when he saw some friends in the audience; on impulse, he danced down the four steps that flanked the stage to greet them, and then back up, all while continuing to dance. The audience applauded his deft moves, and he decided to work them into his routine. Since all theater stages did not have stairs, Robinson had his own portable staircase built, the first a three-step pyramid placed in the middle of the stage; later, he used a triangular structure— four-feet high by ten feet wide at the base—at the apex of which was a level platform flanked on each side by a flight of five steps, each one layered with a different thickness of wood. By the spring of 1921 the “Stair Dance” routine was a standard part of Robinson’s act, one that was challenged by many. King Rastus Brown insisted that Robinson had “outright stolen” his staircase dance from him, and challenged Robinson to a cutting contest on any stage,

S&S > Bill Robinson (left) and George Cooper of the - [ comedy team of Cooper and Robinson, ca. 1914.

| i ie , i 2 (Frank Driggs Collection)

a >i S anywhere, and at any time; it was a chalae ; lenge never taken by Robinson. The Four ~ Gams < Mortons also claimed that the stair act was f , | N “ ; theirs, and they tried to take it away from

& 2| 4a Robinson.” vaudeville legends abound with Though “firsts,” no one person could > officially lay claim to the stair dance or

s claim to have originated the idea. Some people credit Al Leach (and His Rosebuds) with originating it in the 1890s. Others say the Whitney Brothers introduced a musical

stair dance for the first time at Hyde and Behman’s Theatre in 1899. Eddie Mack— of Mack, Goldie, and Burns—also used the

. stairs in his routines, but so did clog dancer " Dane Burke and Mack Williams in their | A separate acts.” pK ps - Although Bill Robinson may not have

ee originated the stair-dance routine, he had

the opportunity and showmanship to make it famous. What distinguished his from all others was its perfection in sound and movement. Tapping a different rhythm for each step, each one reverberating a different pitch, he transformed an awkward gimmick-driven prop into a rhythmically symphonic drum dance. In the early 1930s, after bringing his stair dance to the peak of fame when he performed it in the musical revue Blackbirds of 1928, Robinson filmed it. Although it was shot documentary-style, with a stationary camera that was largely focused on the five-step stair construction placed unceremoniously on a blank stage, we see and hear the masterwork he had been perfecting for nearly a decade—one that would have dozens of iterations throughout Robinson’s career.

In the film, on the four-bar introduction to the “Stair Dance,” performed to Stephen Foster’s tunes “Swanee River” and “Old Kentucky Home” (played in 4/4 stop-time on piano, arranged in standard thirty-bar length and divided into four units each of eight bars, then further subdivided into six bars of a rhythm, or time step, and a two-bar break, or solo improvisation), we see Robinson in profile, dapper in a three-piece suit and trademark bowler hat, at the foot of the stairs. Dancing upright on the balls of his feet in split-soled clog shoes (leather shoes with wooden “taps”), he is tapping out his signature time step—a back-cycling treadmill riff, off the right foot and repeated on the left, consisting of a “shuffle HOP, flap, fl-AP step” which sounds like “and I THANK you for the BUG gy). This basic time step, combined in endless variation with rippling cramp rolls, comprises the core lexicon for five choruses of dancing the stairs. Robinson taps on the ground level through the first chorus. Focusing his attention on the mountain of planks before him, he kicks and knocks on the risers with his hands and feet, recapping his sonic discoveries with a neat two bars of time steps. In the second chorus, he meticulously cramp-rolls his way up each of the steps, reaches the top to claim the summit, and skips back down. By the third chorus, he bounds up one flight, claims the landing with a

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 65 flurry of wings, and trips down the other side, the stop-time rhythm of the accompaniment providing an open forum for his unexpected syncopations and accents. The fourth chorus sees him speeding to the top and hovering over the landing with suspended one-legged wing steps. Then he brushes lightly down, with a refrain of time steps that are by now so familiar to the ear that he can add triple-brushings which sweep him into the last chorus up and over and down, up and over and down the stairs, in whispering hops and brushes that sweep him into a tip-toeing jog, off the stairs and into the wings.

Afro-lrish Fusions It is said that Robinson’s light and exacting footwork brought tap dance “up on its toes” from an earlier, earthier, more flat-footed shuffling style. But what influenced him to move from the flatfooted buck-and-wing style of a King Rastus Brown onto his toes? Perhaps it was the influence of the cakewalk and other turn-of-the-century black exhibition dances that lifted the torso and arched the back, releasing the legs into scissorlike struts. Yet it is more the influence of English and Irish jig and clog techniques—which brought the dancer up onto the balls of the feet, with a style of stepping that valued aerality, clarity, precision, and musicality—that shaped and sounded Robinson’s dancing. Robinson was no stranger to Irish step dancing, having grown up and performed on the street with his friend Sammy “Eggie” Eggleston, later Eddie Leonard, who was regarded as one of the best Irish American soft-shoe dancers in vaudeville. Robinson had been to England and seen the English music hall performances of clog dances done in six bars and a two-bar break. “He always did things in eight bars and he loved those breaks,” recalled Al Minns, who worked with Robinson in Hot Mikado (1939).° When Robinson was a boy, the big minstrel shows that came through Richmond, Virginia, were Primrose and Dockstader and Primrose and West;

and Robinson idolized and attributed his earliest influences to the great George Primrose. Robinson, moreover, danced in split-soled clog shoes, an American adaptation of the solid wooden clogs from the Lancashire and Lakeland regions of England. Robinson’s clogs had a wooden half-sole attached from the toe to the ball of the foot and was left loose, allowing for greater flexibility and tonality— and that facilitated going up on the balls of the feet and forward onto the balls of the feet.

Some would claim that Bill Robinson, as has been said about the African-American jig dancer William Henry Lane,® was an “Irish” dancer: he had been fully engaged and even competed against Irish dancers in contests, such as those held in the old Tammany Hall, which staged buck-and-wing competitions. Robinson abided by the Irish step-dancing rules of competition and standard of performance, in which its judges sat beside, beneath, and before the

stage, to evaluate the precision, form, clarity, and speed of the dancing, the dancers being judged solely on tempo and execution as registered on the platform. Robinson’s time step, with its lilting hops, was typically performed on both sides of the body; one after the other— this kind of symmetry was the rule in Irish dancing. “In our dancing, there are very specific rules,” the Irish dance historian John Cullinane explains. “If you take a step on your right foot, you must reciprocate on your left foot.”“ Robinson’s signature scoot step, or cross-over tap, done with hands on hips tapping as he went, while one foot kicked up and over the other, as well as his “heel and heel and toe cross” step, looked like a jig. He did not make much use of his hands, nor did he employ body motion to any great extent—most of his action was from the waist down. There was a fastidious clarity and precision in his footwork, with steps that were quick and light. He danced “upright,” counter to African-style dancing, which bent the

knees, and he made little use of the arms. Finally, like Irish step dancers, Robinson was a

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4 2 James Barton who competed with Robinson ‘am ae while six judges, two in front, two in the ) . awings, two beneath the stage, ,y verdictand in favor of Robinson. Thatrendered was just = the beginning. Robinson then wagered that | the judges beneath the stage could not tell = when he shifted from one foot to the other doing the same step—a classically Irish

practice of dancing on the right then the left foot. He won again. He then asked the musicians

in the pit for an eight-bar intro, synchronized to a metronome and followed by silence; without hearing the metronome, he danced for three-and-a-half minutes all by himself. When the band started up again, as cued by the metronome, he came out exactly on the beat.“ Irish influences notwithstanding, the swinging syncopations that Robinson achieved in his tap dancing—and which made his style of dance unique and superior to all his peers— really derived from African and African American rhythms and rhythmic sensibilities. The aesthetic principles of his dancing, the formal properties that allow us to recognize excellence in the form, follow Robert Farris Thompson’s “canons” of fine Africanist form—Correct Entrance and Exit, Cutting the Line, Percussive Attack, Multiple Meter, Apart Playing, Call and Response, Aesthetic of the Cool.® That Robinson, then, was both upright and swinging, fusing ragtime syncopations with a light-footed and vertical style of jigging, makes his tap dancing the embodiment of Afro-Irish fusions in American tap dance.

A metaphorical rationale for the “uprightness” in Robinson’s tap dancing had much to do with his aspirations as an African American musical artist. He once explained to a contemporary how he happened on the idea for a stair dance: “I dreamed I was getting to be a knight, and I danced up the stairs to the throne, got my badge, and danced right down again.””° Like the class act dancers at the turn of the century who countered the derisive stereotypes of blacks as strutting dandies and shuffling fools by insisting on the perfection of sound, step, manner in their dancing, Robinson’s dreams of racial uplift were realized by dancing up a real flight of stairs to knighthood. While the stairs on which he climbs “go nowhere and exist only on stage,”’' they represent Robinson’s aspirations for ascendance; they function both as a metaphor for “rising to the top” and as the material vehicle through which he can prove his technical perfection as a dance artist.

OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 67 It is no small irony that shortly before he died, Robinson and the Irish American dancer James Barton planned to do a play called Two Gentlemen from the South. According to the script,

Barton was to play the master and Robinson the role of the servant, until the middle of the show—when they swapped roles, donned each other’s masks, and in Barton’s words, “do each other’s steps and wind up doing a dance together.” The goal for which Robinson as an African American musical artist always fought—complete equality—was to be made ironic by a switching of roles in which he ends up on equal footing with an Irishman, someone who, too, had had to fight for upward mobility. Robinson’s “Stair Dance” is the first tap masterwork of the twentieth century, one of the earliest tap choreographies to attune the listener to the precision, clarity, and rhythmic logic of

a tap composition. This was the first time, as Marshall Stearns noted, that critics, in their enthusiasm, began to examine exactly what Robinson was doing with his feet.’”? The “stair dance” established a rhythmic literacy for an audience that was just beginning to learn how to listen to what was being played in the feet and that wanted to know how to follow the dance through its rhythmic progressions. By using the stairs as a prop, Robinson broke with the convention of dancing along the narrow horizontal line of the stage to utilize the verticality of the stage space, thus elevating the dancer to occupy the center of the proscenium frame. Although Robinson’s Irish-inflected “upright and swinging” style of tap dancing would remain his signature style throughout his career (into the 1940s; he died in 1949), by the end of the teens, “tap dancing was evolving away from the original concept of the Irish Jig—that is, movement from the waist down only—toward a more flexible style,” Stearns said.’? Specifically, tap was assimilating body movements from vernacular dance, putting them together in new combinations, and inventing steps of its own, including air steps, which employed the upper half of the body. Building upon but moving beyond Robinson‘s style, tap dancing began to utilize the entire body with new moves, which opened up more possibilities for expressiveness. Combined with the new rhythms of jazz, in the 1920s, tap dancing would become ever more complex and swinging.

| (TWENTIES)

SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ

CHALLENGE! Flournoy Miller versus Aubrey Lyles in Shuffle Along (1921)

IN THE ACT 1 “JIMTOWN FISTICUFFS” SCENE of the 1921 black musical comedy Shuffle Along, there is a facing off on the corner of Possum Lane in the Dixieland South town of Jimtown. It’s Election Day, and Steve Jenkins (played by Flournoy E. Miller) has just won a crooked race for mayor, but Sam Peck (played by Aubrey Lyles) has decided it’s payback time. They are ready to duke it out. Jenkins: What do you mean runnin’ up and down the street like dat? Ain’t you got no sense? Peck: I’m trainin’ for the Chief of Police. Jenkins: Who? Peck: The Chief of Police. Here! In Jimtown! Don’t you remember? You said if you was elected Mayor, you was gwine appoint me Chief of Police. Jenkins: | said dat BEFORE | was elected. And if you got no better sense then to pay attention to dem election promises, you ain’t got no sense enough to be no Chief of Police. Peck: Is | fit? [shouting to the crowd] Crowd: Yes, you |S! You bet you’re fit! Peck: Can | whip anybody here? Crowd: You can whip anybody that’s over THERE. [Someone in the crowd throws Jenkins a pair of boxing gloves] Jenkins: YOU is gwine to fight ME for the job. Is that it? Peck: Well, if the job is worth having, it’s worth fighting for. Jenkins: Well, if you gwine whip me, den I’m gwine make YOU the Chief of Police. Peck: “You don’t have to worry about dat. If | whips you, I’m gwine BE the Chief of Police!

They come in swinging, throwing punches and swiping blows, ducking and weaving as their feet

68 shuffle and drag. Jenkins knocks Peck down to the floor, and the crowd boos Jenkins and cheers

SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) 69 Peck back up on his feet. Since the little guy’s arms are too short to box with the tall and lanky mayor, Peck runs circles around him and dizzies him to the ground. The crowd cheers. Thrilled at his momentary victory, Peck jumps over Jenkins’s back and pumps the crowd with jibes and bucks. Jenkins recovers and thrusts his foot into Peck’s stomach. They continue to deflect and duck, parry and punch, buck and wing for twenty minutes—Peck fussing, Jenkins knocking him down; Peck jumping over Jenkins’s back, Jenkins popping up, and each round of victories pronounced with buck-and-wings that set their feet in a flurry over the ground. In the final round, the exhausted mayor of Jimtown—standing firm, his arm extended and hand placed on the forehead of the little man who refuses to quit swinging, and buck-and-winging—proclaims Peck Jimtown’s new chief of police."

Thousands of Raggy Dances SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ Shuffle Along would change Broadway forever. It was the first musical produced, created, and performed by blacks to truly succeed commercially on Broadway. Written by Miller and Lyles with music by Eubie Blake and lyrics by Noble Sissle, Shuffle Along was full of “firsts.” It integrated audiences, and it introduced the most exciting form of jazz music and dancing that had ever been seen on Broadway, firmly establishing jazz dance on the American musical stage. From twisting shimmies, boogie-woogies, buck-and-wings and syncopated time steps to unison precision dances, synchronized chorus lines, and stylish social dances that were stepped and kicked with punch, the dances in Shuffle Along were pronounced as being “simply full of jazz.” Just what that jazz looked like when the show opened at New York’s Sixty-third Street Theatre on May 21, 1921, can only in part be gleaned from a lexicon of applauding superlatives. These were repeated, over and over, by the popular press, distinguishing the dancing for its speed, precision, swinging propulsions, raucous noisiness, wild eccentricity, and an unfailingly “natural” sense of rhythm: Dusky Band in a Riot of Swift Jazz;’

The Speediest, Peppiest, Breeziest, Funniest Musical Comedy Chicago Has Seen in Years; If that hard to spell word rhythm had not been invented, it would spring into distinction ... Rhythm is the life of the show;'

Every chorister dances like a demon and together they move with precision and lightness;° A snappy show, a snappy cast—snap, snap!°

Reviews of Shuffle Along were a study in admiring confusion. “Most of them agreed that the show pioneered something having something to do—here they disagreed on what—with jazz,”

wrote Marshall Stearns. “While a rather mild kind of jazz had been around for some time,

7o TAP DANCING AMERICA reviewers found the music in Shuffle Along remarkable, particularly in combination with the dancing.”’ It was the aural and corporeal synergy of black rhythm, more swift, subtle, and propulsive than what had previously been heard, that distinguished the new jazz: The Boston Post wrote:

Jass is probably the answer here. .. . You discover that the Negroid technique of jazz is more delicate and subtle than that of his non-Hamitic imitators. The black hand is lighter, swifter and more dainty in syncopation than the white. ... Tin Pan Alley [has] corrupted and sensualized the Ethiopian song and dance rhythms, and transformed an ecstasy into a delirium.® The new “jass” that Shuffle Along introduced to Broadway audiences gave a scintillating sendoff to that black literary and cultural movement in Manhattan that would be called the Harlem Renaissance. It heralded, for the first time in the cultural history of America, a learned, chic, and sophisticated style of black social enterprise. “For nearly two years, the theatre was always packed,” poet Langston Hughes wrote of the New York performances of Shuffle Along. “It gave the proper push—a pre-Charleston kick to the vogue that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing.”? James Weldon Johnson wrote that Shuffle Along had “the most exhilarating dancing to be found on any stage in the city” and that it provided new material for hundreds of dancers.'° Jazz tap dancing was the driving engine of Shuffle Along, the source of visual, visceral, and aural excitement that propelled the musical forward. The many dance scenes—the plantation strutting and strolling in the number “Bandanna Days,” the eccentric dancing in the vamping number “Oriental Blues,” the time-step rhythms in “Syncopation Stenos,” the boogie-woogie inflections in “If You Haven’t Been Vamped by a Brown-skin, You Haven’t Been Vamped at All,” the foxtrot two-steps in “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and the rhythmic social dance-move

instructions in “Baltimore Buzz’—all had audiences not only cheering and shouting to see more jazz dancing but wanting to do more jazz dancing. Shuffle Along made people want to get up and dance. “At times it seemed as though nothing would stop the chorus from singing and dancing except bringing down the curtain,” wrote the critic from the New York American. He went on to say:

They reveled in their work; they simply pulsed with it, and there was no let-up at all. And gradually any tired feeling that you might have been nursing vanished in the sun of their good humor and you didn’t mind how long they “shuffled along.” You even felt like shuffling a bit with them."

“Shuffle Along calls for more foot tapping from the customers than anything else has ever done,” offered the Chicago Journal. “Bronze figures sway and syncopate, bronze throats let flow sweet harmony. And dance! Generations of good nature, of take-things are aback of the buoyancy of the Shufflers’ dancing. A whole chorus moving together . . . pure zest.” To move, or to aspire to move, with the invigorating speed and regenerative energy that the “flappers” in Shuffle Along moved, signified chic modernity in the Jazz Age, the hustle and bustle of bodies shimmying, twisting, and strutting in 1920s time. “It’s the song that makes a fellow want to get right up, no matter where he is, and begin whistling and dancing all over the place, that makes a hit these days,” Eubie Blake told a New York newspaper in 1921, explaining that in making the “modern song,” he had to invariably set a part of the audience,

“particularly the younger members, to beating with their feet and swinging their shoulders

SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) 71 rhythmically.” The goal, said Blake, was “to produce in the audience the desire to dance, and whistle these songs as they are coming out of the theatre.” Blake accomplished just that by infusing the score with about every popular dance rhythm he could set to his own music, drawn from a number of musical traditions—from ragtime, blues, jazz, and European operetta to sophisticated ballads. Thereby, he simultaneously referenced traditional music while delighting audiences with his modern tempos. So, too, with the dancing. Some of the steps—shuffles, slides, marches, struts, shimmies, strolls, and slow-drags; tangos, hesitations, and dips; one-steps, two-steps, and foxtrots (to name but a few of the steps specified in Blake’s musical score and described in Sissle’s lyrics)—reference dance forms from the nineteenth-century minstrel stage, turn-of-the-century

black vaudeville, white Broadway, and black and white social and ballroom dance. But in Shuffle Along, these so-called traditional steps were made stylishly “modern” by being performed to speeded-up tempos, offbeat rhythms, and swinging rhythmic propulsions of early jazz—a musical form that essentially combined syncopated rhythms with a steady, rhythmic bass. It was similar to ragtime, but it slurred the rhythms even more than ragtime syncopation did. Dancing, in its most basic form of rhythmic stepping, is in almost every scene of Shuffle Along. In act 1, scene 1, a political rally on the front lawn of the Jimtown Hotel has the entire cast of fifty grouped around the candidates for mayor and marching in rhythm while singing, “If we keep step with the hep-hep and the rattle of the drum, Honor is our motto, bright and grand, Justice is the platform on which we stand.” In act 1, scene 3, a grocery store sets the stage for a wild-moving chase scene that recalls the Keystone Cops routines from Charlie Chaplin’s movies, complete with dashing exits and entrances by Jenkins and Peck who move in, out, and around the cash register, the key prop that each guy can’t help slipping his hands into. The mayor’s office, with its staff of syncopating stenographers, becomes a sound box for dictation that is recorded with tap dancing feet. At the ballroom of the Jimtown Hotel (act 2, scene 5), couples dance the “Baltimore Buzz,” which instructs them on how to glide, slide, and hesitate in the newest social dance of the day. Calico Corners, the site for act 2, scene 1, features a rush-hour traffic jam in which crisscrossing pedestrians are directed by a tap dancing traffic cop who performs buck-and-wing, and all are singing, “Shuffle Along, Shuffle Along / Doctors, bakers, and undertakers, do a step / That’s full of pep and syncopation.” For all the tap dancing in Shuffle Along, “tap dance” is rarely referred to as such in the script, the score, or in descriptions of the dancing by critics—even though the steps in the choreography were derived from early tap dance. The first and most obvious is the “shuffle” in the title, a rapid forward-and-back brushing of the foot that is the most basic step in tap dancing. It can be made in any direction with either foot. In the musical, dancers also per-

form buck-and-wings, over-the-tops, in-the-trenches, stomps, slides, hops, and flaps, all belonging to the family of rhythmic stepping that is the sonic embodiment of black jazz rhythms. “Shuffle” also refers to the southern stereotype of the shuffling old black plantation slave, who, accused of being lazy and venal, then consciously dragged and scraped his feet noisily along the ground. This trait was greatly exploited by white, and then black, min-

strel dancers, who, in exaggeration of the stereotype, shuffled and slid across the stage. Though Shuffle Along’s book purveyed the old caricature of the black shuffling fool, the musical part of the show embodied a new image, that of the “the black dancer as a rhythmically

propulsive source of energy.”'* “Jazz dance” therefore became an aggregate term in the 1920s for a number of black vernacular stepping and social dance forms. They had been evolving on the American musical stage for at least two decades, inflected with the new rhythmic propulsions of jazz.

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The San Francisco Beauties, the first female group to perform tap dancing on the West Coast; from left: Alice Sullivan, Zeta Harrison, Reva Howitt, Marge Hacker, Alice Haas, Idis Hacker, and Pat Mason. (Photo by Harry Wenger, courtesy of Mimi Melnick)

In her diary entry dated September 17, 1928, Howitt specifically mentions metal taps: “Unlike ballet ... a sensational routine can be done in one spot... . Even without the usual metal taps, one can slap out a routine with leather shoes. Taps require looseness, the flexing of the knees provides any necessary bounce, and the above-mentioned floppy ankles generate the

battery of taps that are the purpose of the dance. There is no arm technique, no set of arm movements except those which come naturally to the performer and are needed for balance or buoyancy.”

Billy Pierce Dance Studio While white chorus dancers were learning simple steps in square rhythms and complicated formations at the Ned Wayburn Studios of Stage Dancing, the most elite of white Broadway stars flocked to the Billy Pierce Dance Studios. Described as the “colored man who has perhaps most influenced the dancing of the musical-comedy stage of recent years,””’ Pierce had been a lieutenant in James Reese Europe’s all-black famous 369th Infantry Band during World War I, where he played trombone. After the war, he played with a ragged black minstrel troupe in Union Hill, New Jersey, for a while, then spent one of his last nickels for a ferry ride to New York, where, he hoped, he would set himself up as an instructor in stage dancing. He succeeded in talking the owner of the building at 223 West Forty-sixth Street into giving him, rent free for a month, a small room he could use as a studio. When Greenwich Village Follies star

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7 er ao (1924). (Frank Driggs Collection) :he \\ ‘ a / a Bue ee = m4 ) TT Irene Delroy heard about him from Piste a Ss ~oi po pe a ae star tcn oA, her maid, she dropped by to ask OT aeatee ochsohtla A Mois AT ae Lage rp Fon. a, about instruction. After that, busi-

OO ——————— ™ ness picked up, and Pierce began to hire the most expert dance instructors available, including Leonard Harper. He placed the following advertisement for instruction:

If It's Dancing You Want, We Have it: Leonard Harper System. Stage Dancing Taught. Latest New York Craze. Special. Charlestons and Black Bottom, Buck and Wing, Eccentric, Tap, Knee Drops, Struts, Soft Shoe, and

Waltz Clog; Chorus Work. Acts Staged—Producer of Revues. Staged Hollywood Follies, now playing at Columbia Theatre. Fastest Dancing Chorus in New York.*

Around 1928, Clarence “Buddy” Bradley joined Pierce’s staff of instructors and found himself tailoring routines—for gangsters’ molls and Broadway stars—for $250 a routine. His dance formula was radically new: he simplified rhythms in the feet while sculpting the body into shapes from African American social dance, blending easy tap dance and jazz dance into routines that rose to climax and finished gracefully. Well paid but known only in show-business circles, Bradley created dozens of dance routines for white stars of Broadway musicals, including Adele Astaire, Ruby Keeler, and Eleanor Powell. His name never appeared on any program: it was the custom that as long as the “dance director” who grouped scenes and coached the stars got his pay, there was no need for program credit. Bradley coached Tom Patricola, Ann Pennington, and Francis Williams in the Black Bottom musical numbers of George White’s Scandals (1926). In 1928, he re-choreographed the entire production of Greenwich Village Follies of 1928, even though Busby Berkeley’s name remained as choreographer on the program. He also created routines, and sometimes staged complete scenes, for Mae West, Gilda Grey, Irene Delroy, Jack Donahue, and Paul Draper. The “High Yeller” routine from the “Moanin’ Low” number in The Little Show (1929), which had established Clifton Webb (who later became famous as an actor) as one of the hottest white dancers since Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker, had been choreographed by Bradley. Ann Pennington and Marilyn Miller, two of the foremost while female tap dancers of the 1920s who “tapped as ably as any men,””’ both studied with Buddy Bradley.

Harlem Studios and Hoofers Club While the majority of white professional dancers in New York City learned to tap dance in the studios of a Ned Wayburn or Billy Pierce, black males learned to tap dance on their own, in the

SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) 87 dance hall or on the street, where dancing was hotly contested. Black females received instruction in Harlem dancing schools.

Born in New York City in 1916, Ludie Jones began to dance at the age of three, after becoming aware of the Charleston by a family friend from Norfolk, Virginia. “She came up with the tap Charleston and that intrigued me. So she taught me how to do the Time Step. And from then on it was just dancing. I never had a formal teacher in tap.” Jones’s mother enrolled her in dance lessons that were taught at the Elks Hall on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue. Jones traveled on the el (elevated transportation) to the class from her home on Sixty-Fourth Street to get to the dance studios, which were fast becoming popular in 1920s Harlem. Her teachers included Alice Garrett, Phil Simmons, Grace Charles, Ella Gordon, Mary Bruce, and Ruth Williams. Emma Kemp, who taught ballet, asked Jones, then eleven years old, to teach tap dance in her studio. Jones says she never engaged in street dancing, which was performed by boys.®°

Male dancers wanting to learn to tap went to the Hoofers Club, a small back room to an old pool hall in a basement two doors down from the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. At the Hoofers Club, rookie and veteran, mostly black male tap dancers assembled to share with, steal from, and challenge each other; there, new standards were set for competition. These were nothing like the formalized buck-dancing competitions of Tammany Hall, where judges sat beside, before, and beneath the stage to evaluate the clarity, speed, and presentation. The Hoofers Club comprised a more informal panel of peers, whose judgments could be cruel and mocking and were driven by an insistence on innovation. “Survive or die” was the credo. In an eccentric fusion of imitation and innovation, young dancers were forced to find their style and rhythmic voice. It was said that on the wall of the Hoofers Club was written: “Thou shall not copy each other’s steps—Exactly.” Novices sat still, their eyes glued to the kings who challenged each other with their five-step wings and triple over-the- tops in jam sessions that sometimes lasted all night. According to legend, a tap challenge might last for weeks in traveling matches from New York to Chicago. Bill Robinson, Honi Coles, Eddie Rector, Dewey Washington, Raymond Winfield, Roland Holder, Harold Mablin, “Slappy” Wallace, Warren Berry, James Barton and Baby Laurence all frequented the Hoofers Club. “King” Rastus Brown danced his “Buck Dancer’s Lament” there with an improvised two-bar break, thus challenging dancers to pick up and one-up his rhythmic ideas.

BUBBLES SUBLETT Around 1920, a cocky eighteen-year-old by the name of John Sublett (his nickname at the time was “Bubber”) walked into the Hoofers Club. Born on February 19, 1902, in Louisville, his voice was changing and he saw no reason why he should not be a dancer. Waiting impatiently and needing no urging to perform, he stepped out onto the floor of the club and performed a

strut and a turn before the watchful eyes of club veterans Eddie Rector and Dickie Wells. Amused but deadly serious, they told him he was hurting the floor and booed him out of the club. He left for California on the next train. After a year working as a singer on the Orpheum circuit in the West, he was back in New York at the Hoofers Club, with legs that were like double-barreled shotguns and a routine consisting of double over-the-tops and triple back slides, which multiplied time and changed steps so quickly that no one could copy him. His success was immediate: a new king was crowned. And Bubbles (as his name had become) fought hard to keep his reign. He had a reputation for being cagey, and his technique for extracting a step from a competitor was notorious. At one cutting session at the Hoofers Club, Detroit Red was scaring everybody doing variations of over-the-top. Then Bubbles showed and started working the step,

83 TAP DANCING AMERICA first from a single-leg jump over one leg, into a double on alternating legs, traveling backward and forward, and from side to side, with a climax of backward trenches that looked like a cakewalk slide, leaving nothing undone. “I invented that step,” Toots Davis remarked to a bystander. “But I never knew there were so many way to do it.” Born in 1902 in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Indianapolis, Bubbles’ initiation to tap dancing was seeing dancers who tapped a little; they then went into wings, splits, and Russian kicks—anything to be flashy. Given the nightly improvisations he worked out from battling steps at the Hoofers’ Club, he began to move away from a style of tapping up on the toes, with moves that extended upward and outward with Russian kicks, splits, and wings. He developed a new style of dancing that cut the tempo and complicated the rhythm, leaving himself twice as much time to add new inventions. “I wanted to make it complicated so I put more taps in and changed the rhythm.” Cutting the tempo in half, he changed it from a two-to-a-bar to a four-to-a-bar, with twice as many beats within the bar. “Working with twos, you can’t add much because the tempo is too fast,” explained Honi Coles, who became a leading exponent of Bubble’s rhythm tap style. “With fours, a good dancer works just as fast... even though the tempo is slower, but he has to fill in with his own ideas as well as with his balance. In fact, he has to learn to handle his entire body more gracefully.”®

Dancing four-to-a-bar was not new. The tempo of soft-shoe dancing from traditional Lancashire clog hornpipe was traditionally four-to-a-bar, and in the earliest decades of the century, it continued to be danced by Harland Dixon of the team Dixon and Doyle. They danced Lancashire clog using heels and toes and putting together combinations that were complicated but that did not swing. An unsyncopated “diddely, diddely, diddeley, diddeley” was the simplest form of the old Virginia essence that Dixon performed, switching wood clogs for split-soled clogs, as had the great soft-shoe dancer George Primrose. Bubbles’ contribution was unusual accenting with a dropping of the heels into accenting thuds—impossible in clogs and difficult in split clogs—in a variety of cramp rolls, which made for greater dynamics. He also did new

things with his toes, adding taps behind and bringing them together in front, for an extra accent. Most important, he worked out turns and combinations, or rhythmic patterns, that extended beyond the prescribed four bars of something plus the two-bar break of traditional Lancashire dancers. In doing so he anticipated the prolonged melodic line of “cool” jazz. Though John Bubbles was far from being solely responsible for the rhythm-tap idiom,

he was its chief embodiment and the main source for those dancers who took part in its early growth and establishment. Arguably, his “down in the heels” style of rhythm tap dancing (Bubbles has been called the “Father of Rhythm Tap”) was more long-lasting than the “up

on the toes” style of Bill Robinson, who was fourteen years older than Bubbles and more established in his career in the 1920s. Bubbles’s dropped-heel style of rhythm tap dancing over elongated phrases, which afforded room for offbeat accents that were highly syncopated and swinging, had a profound influence on jazz tap dancers throughout the twentieth century.

Black Modernity By the late 1920s, with Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1928, jazz tap dancing began to be distinsuished as the most rhythmically complex “cream” of jazz dancing. Blackbirds of 1928 starred Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a veteran dancer in vaudeville and the most beloved dancer of the black community who, at the age of fifty, was “discovered” by Broadway audiences and pronounced “King of Tap Dancers.” The musical revue in two acts and prologue, nineteen scenes staged and conceived by Lew Leslie, featured, in addition to Bill Robinson, Adelaide Hall, Aida Ward, and Tim Moore, a chorus of sixteen female and three male dancers, and the Hall

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f y fe a y Johnson Blackbird Choir. Several of the =, amusical scenes werewas devoted tap danccs ing: the prologue “ShuffletoYour Feet,” KR : if with Ruth Johnson and Marjorie Hubbard; 9: a | the “Scene in Jungleland: Diga Diga Do” A | starred Adelaide Hall and Her Blackbird Chorus. “But the most accomplished tapdancing of the evening,” wrote Brooks

| ip Atkinson in the New York Times, “is exhibit-

Fa ed by Bill Robinson on his pair of stairs. There is a touch of the old-time cake-walk in

his manner. But he varies it. In one fairly

% long number he touches his dancing with

; drama.”

“dh + bits of pantomime and then, using the steps | : asgeprotagonist, he turns it skillfully into Robinson had introduced his stair dance in vaudeville ten years earlier (see chap. 3). As he danced up and down a flight of stairs, each stair tuned to a different pitch, Robinson’s taps were delicate, articulate, and intelligible. The poet Langston Hughes, describing these tap rhythms as “human percussion,” believed that no dancer had ever developed the art of tap dancing to a more delicate perfection than Robinson had. He could create “little running trills of rippling softness or terrific syncopated rolls of mounting sound, rollicking little nuances of tap-tap-toe, or staccato runs like a series of gun-shots.”® Reviewing Blackbirds of 1928, Mary Austin observed in the Nation that the postures of Robinson’s lithe body and the motions of his slender cane punctuated his rhythmic patter and restored for his audience “a primal freshness of rhythmic coordination” that was fundamental of art.°° Broadway had not only discovered Robinson, but

had become newly enamored of a rhythm dance that transformed Negro folk rhythms into sleekly modern black artistic expression. “A Bojangles performance is excellent vaudeville,” wrote Alain Locke. “But listen with closed eyes, and it becomes an almost symphonic composition of sounds. What the eye sees is the tawdry American convention; what the ear hears is the priceless African heritage.”® Alone among the forms of African American expressive production in the 1920s, which

included the visual, the literary, and the performance arts, jazz was treated with grudging respect by the self-assertive and socially conscious cultural leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, a group of black intellectuals led by James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois, who

strategized that the “rediscovery” and adaptation of black folk materials into a “high art” would be used to secure economic, social, and cultural equality with white American citizens. Nathan Huggins comments that except for Langston Hughes, none of the Harlem intellectuals took jazz seriously. And John Graziano acknowledges that in the 1920s, black musical theater never rose to the “high art” expectations that spokesmen envisioned and was not truly accepted by them.” Jazz was popular in design and commercial in intent; it therefore was never intended to serve as “high art” or to develop into a “serious” art form like the other renaissance arts. Nor

go TAP DANCING AMERICA for the Harlem group did jazz project the appropriate intellectual image of the “New Negro.” For those black intellectuals, who went to the South to redefine the Negro within America’s

cultural mainstream, jazz seemed to be the very antithesis of high culture. The historian Lawrence Levine writes that jazz was the product of a new age, whereas “culture” was the prod-

uct of tradition, the creation of centuries; jazz was raucous and discordant, whereas culture was harmonious, embodying order and reason; jazz was accessible and spontaneous, whereas culture was exclusive and complex, available only through hard study and training; jazz was interactive, a participatory music, frequently played in the midst of noisy, hand-clapping and foot-stomping audiences, whereas those who came to witness culture did so in art museums, symphony halls, and opera houses.” Despite its relegation to a “low” art form, jazz permeated Harlem in the 1920s and was at the very center of the renaissance movement. Jazz was the background and the setting for the renaissance novels; it was the dance music heard in cabarets, in the blues and ragtime speakeasies. As the theme of novels, poems, photography, and paintings, jazz performance and its vernacular became evocative of both the modern sensibility in general and the black experience in particular. Jazz provided a general ethos and style for the intellectual climate of the renaissance in Harlem. As a metaphor for the fierce independence that defined the New Negro, jazz was, in Langston Hughes’s words, the “tom-tom of the revolt”: Let the Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. ... We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful.” Jazz was the quintessential modernist expression of the twenties, and jazz tap dance was a form of expressive production that led to a specifically African American modernism. The speedy, swinging, rhythmic propulsion of this modern drum dancing—dissonant in the clatter of its taps, yet exciting in its offbeat, rhythms—defined the new Jazz Age twenties and sounded out a new breed of artists who would finally “shed the costume of the shuffling darky” for the more formal elements of rhythmic expression: its essential abstractness, form (angularity and asymmetry), succession and repetition (visual and aural), and the play of weightedness against weightlessness. As Amiri Baraka writes in “Return of the Native,” Harlem is vicious

Modernism. BangClash Vicious the way it’s made. Can you stand such Beauty? So violent and transforming?

Jazz Ellington If there was one jazz artist who realized the dreams of the Harlem Renaissance theoreticians, it was Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, born in 1899 in Washington, D.C. In the 1920s, when Harlem Renaissance authors were publishing their first volumes of poetry, Ellington was honing his skills as a bandleader and gaining a reputation as a gifted young pianist, composer, and orchestra leader. Whether playing “jungle music,” in which he used blue notes and expressive growls and animal sounds from muted horns, or creating for his orchestra soaring

SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) 91 harmonies transcribed from the most poignant of Negro spirituals, Ellington stretched his musicianship to new limits. At the same time, he remained rooted in the fertile artistic soil of his people: “The music of my race is .. . the result of our transplantation to American soil, and was our reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny we endured,” Ellington wrote in 1931 in explaining the deepest significance of jazz music and its relationship to dance. “Jazz is something more than just dance music. We dance it not as a mere diversion or social accomplishment. It expresses our personality, our souls react to the elemental but eternal rhythm. ... The dance is timeless and unhampered by lineal form.”” The most important event in Ellington’s early career as a musician, orchestra leader, and composer was the opening of the newly enlarged Ellington orchestra at the Cotton Club. Ellington established at the Cotton Club a rich style of jazz musicianship, one distinguished by harmony and a “beautiful, jumping, swinging sound.”” The Ellington orchestra had a sonic texture of instrumental sounds, whose expressive powers had been derived from the polyphonic ensemble playing of New Orleans jazz musicians. Drummer Sonny Greer was a showman who conjured up the wildly “primitive” sounds of tribal warriors, man-eating tigers, and war

dances on his tom-toms, snares, and kettle drums. He was an adept rhythm man and tonal colorist who responded buoyantly and creatively to fellow musicians. Otto Hardwich and Johnny Hodges played saxophone; Sam Nanton and Juan Tizol played trombone; and Arthur Whetsol, Freddie Jenkins, and Cootie Williams played trumpet as an aggregation of swinging, dissonant

harmonies. But these great musicians, alone or together, could do far more than create the notorious “jungle sounds” they were famous for at the Cotton Club. The entire brass section could suddenly rise and play an intricately beautiful chorus in unison. They were as adept at playing smooth dance tempos as the most sophisticated of modern New York swing orchestras. Ellington made his Cotton Club debut on December 4, 1927, in a revue produced by Dan Healy that comprised some fifteen acts with a number of encores. Ellington’s band usually led off with a show piece, then played two or three numbers during the revue. The big numbers were “Dancemania” and “Jazzmania,” in which the white songwriter Jimmy McHugh captured the essence of the attitude toward jazz of that day, with Ellington and the band. The featured Cotton Club singers and dancers completed the exotica, with Earl “Snakehips” Tucker twisting his haunches and thigh joints as if he were a human boa constrictor; Edith Wilson in an abbreviated costume singing “adult songs”; and the dance team of Mildred and Henri regaling the audience with their intricate steps. Then came the sensational flash tap and acrobatics team of Ananias and Jimmy Berry, of the Berry Brothers, performing in top hats and tails. The Berrys combined strutting with acrobatics in an act that was practiced to perfection and remained intact over the span of their career. It began with Ananias doing an elegant strut with a cane under his arm, high-kicking across the stage and ending with a double turn. Jimmy entered singing, while Ananias posed, then both men strutted together, stopping and starting in sudden contrasts of tempo. They ended with an explosion of acrobatics, precisely timed splits, jumps, and somersaults, all the while passing the cane which stayed airborne. Although the Berrys never wore taps, their precision timing and rhythmic stepping alternated posed immobility and flashing action, called “freeze and melt.” The duo (and later trio, when their youngest brother, Warren, joined the team) performed on Broadway in Blackbirds of 1928 and Blackbirds of 1930, toured abroad in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1929, and played the opening of Radio City Music Hall on December 2:7, 1932. Still, the Cotton Club remained their home base. Ellington worked steadily at the Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931 and sporadically from 1931 to 1938. During Ellington’s tenure there, he was blessed with having a number of talented

| a sg The Berry Brothers—Ananias, Warren, and si James—performed Club in the 1920s and 1930s. (Frank Driggs Ya. (s regularly at the Cotton

Aa\ A Collection)

” we. stage directors who would produce spec4 tacular stagings of his music. The Cotton Club’s Hot Chocolates Revue in 1928 was

directed by Leonardthe Harper, who isform crediti{ed with inventing nightclub of

zz fl r entertainment. Harper produced some \ =) two thousand shows7 from 1920 to 1943 and sometimes had eight shows going at different clubs at the same time. He was known for his impeccable taste and superb, jet-propelled theatricality; his original signature on these musical revues was a cho-

i rus of fast steppers and a show of colorful [. Wy, Gy acts. He helped to establish the Cotton

Pit =A V iP | Se Club as the most prestigious showcase for black musical talent in New York.

Cora LaRedd The Blackberries Revue of 1929 with the Duke Ellington orchestra was choreographed by Clarence Robinson, another of the black dance directors who would stage chorus tap routines. It featured the Three Ebony Steppers, with “lightning-like leg work,” and the class-act team of Wells, Mordecai, and Taylor, announced as the “Hot Feet Boys” who “just burn the board up!” Ninth on that program was Cora LaRedd, a much-admired Cotton Club dancer known for a hard-hitting rhythm-tap style that was announced as “Terpsichorean riot.” The rhythmic brilliance, athleticism, and open sexuality of LaRedd’s dancing made her not only the most noted female soloist at the Cotton Club in the 1920s and 1930s, but also the most extraordinary jazz tap dancer in those decades. LaRedd was first recognized as a brilliant Harlem singer and dancer when she became the lead dancer for arranger and bandleader Charlie Dixon (of the Fletcher Henderson band). She received her first Broadway notices in the musical comedy Say When, which premiered in June 1928 at the Morosco Theatre, in which she was singled out by the press as “a sepia-tinted Zora O’Neal who combined limber-legged dancing with wah-wah singing.” One reviewer reported that the one and only highlight of the “intimate musical” was when “a young colored girl called Cora La Redd became galvanized with electricity in full view of the audience, and to the barely concealed chagrin of white actors and actresses who were forced to grin while the Negress bowed.”” Broadway saw much of LaRedd in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The “all-colored musical novelty” Messin’ Around, which opened in April 1929 with music by James P. Johnson, lyrics by Perry Bradford, and dances by Eddie Rector, featured LaRedd in “Tapcopation,” “Put Your Mind Right On It,” and a waltz clog specialty with Charles Johnson. In the all-black musical comedy Change Your Luck (June 1930), with music and lyrics by J.C. Johnson and dances by Lawrence Deas and Speedy Smith, LaRedd excelled in “Can’t Be Bothered Now,” “My Regular Man,” and “Percolatin.” Audiences were also dazzled by LaRedd at the Cotton Club, where she

SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) 93 was regularly featured as the leading song-and-dance diva. In the fall 1930 Cotton Club revue “Brown Sugar (Sweet but Unrefined)” LaRedd was a featured soloist on the bill with Wells, Mordecai, and Taylor in “Hittin’ the Bottle”; with the Ebony Steppers and with Jimmy Mordecai; and in the final scene, set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, with Mordecai playing “a tap dancing gentleman playing the Easiest trade.” The best example of LaRedd’s dancing may be seen in the twelve-minute black-and-white musical short That’s the Spirit (1933), regarded as one of the greatest all-black jazz shorts ever made. In it, Mantan Moreland and Flournoy Miller play two watchmen who hear songs performed in a haunted pawn shop. A miniature jazz band comes to life. Led by Noble Sissle and featuring clarinetist Buster Bailey, the band plays red-hot versions of “Tiger Rag” and the “St. Louis Blues.” And as it plays, LaRedd sings and dances with a fiery vitality. Wearing a white satin blouse with full-blown sleeves and black shorts that draw attention to her strong, gleaming legs and feet, she dances at shimmering speed; dancing in low-heeled Mary-Janes, her triple-time steps and treble-roll steps, which resemble Bill Robinson’s steps and style, were never made more up-tempo and swinging. Tap dancer Bunny Briggs remembered LaRedd vividly, dancing at the Cotton Club: She’d walk out with a red jacket and white pants and sing, “Look what the sun, has done, to me,” and she was really black—when I say that, I say that in a lovable way, because she was blacker than me—that kind of black. And when she walked out on the stage and smiled, her teeth were like pearls. And she sang this song, “You Can’t Tell the Difference after Dark.” And then she would tap dance. She would do a time step, that kind of stuff, she was a good one. She could really dance.”

The Early Jazz (Tap) Musical Films The success in 1927 of The Jazz Singer as a film with synchronized musical accompaniment proved to be the catalyst for Hollywood studios to make musical films. Joan Crawford, whose acting career began after she won a hometown Charleston contest, would perform the first tap dance to music on film in MGM’s Hollywood Revue (1929). By 1929, more than thirteen hundred movie theaters in the United States were equipped to show sound films. The first two films to make genuine use of jazz music, jazz tap dance, and jazz artists for both narrative and performance were the all-black films produced and directed by Dudley Murphy.

ST. LOUIS BLUES (1929) For St. Louis Blues, Murphy collaborated with the renowned blues composer W. C. Handy in developing a story around the “mood” of Handy’s 1914 composition, a song that used a folk blues three-line stanza to create a twelve-measure strain that combined ragtime syncopation with the melody, in the spiritual tradition. Bessie Smith, perhaps the greatest of 1920s “classical blues” singers—who brought emotional intensity and personal expression to blues singing—was cast in the starring role, her only film appearance. The tap dancer Jimmy Mordecai, a dancer of renown who was a member of the class act of Wells, Mordecai, and Taylor, played

her two-timing lover. James P. Johnson was the leader of the band, made up principally of Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. Members of the James P. Rosamonde Choir played the Harlem nightclubbers who witness and respond to—instrumentally and vocally—Smith’s lament, a song centered on the wail of a love-struck woman for her lost man.

94 TAP DANCING AMERICA In the first scene, Smith arrives at her own Harlem flat to catch Mordecai dancing with another woman (Isabel Washington); she bodily throws the girlfriend out only to be thrown to the ground by her man, who haughtily walks out the door. In the second scene, set in a local barroom—the setting for the singing of “St. Louis Blues’>—Mordecai struts into the room like a dandy. Showing off a fast-stepping soft-shoe for the crowd, he dances mooche with Bessie, and the slow-grinding dance is her last glimmer of hope that he has returned to her. When the dance is over, and Jimmy has felt her up and taken more of her money, he tosses Bessie away and struts out of the bar as cocky as when he entered. Though Mordecai’s role in the film is not as a tap dancer per se, Mordecai uses tap dancing to physicalize the character of Jimmy as a cool-and-cocky, strutting dandy who can shuffle and stomp his way over Bessie’s heart.

BLACK AND TAN (1929) Tap dancing played a substantially greater role in Murphy’s second film, Black and Tan. The two-reel sound film starred Duke Ellington and the singer-dancer-actress Fredi Washington, and it featured Ellington’s Cotton Club Orchestra, the Hall Johnson Choir, the Cotton Club Girls, and the Five Blazers, an all-male precision tap team. The narrative, structured along the score of Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, unfolds as a jazz love story. Ellington, in his film debut, plays a struggling young bandleader-pianist-composer who, behind on his rent and on the verge of losing his instrument, is saved by Washington, a young dancer and Duke’s love. She arrives at his Harlem flat with the good news that she has found a nightclub willing to hire Ellington and band on condition that she herself dance there—which she insists on doing despite her grave heart condition. The first scene opens in Harlem (to “Black and Tan Fantasy”) in the cold-water flat where Ellington (on piano) and Arthur Whetsol (on trumpet) are rehearsing Duke’s new music. After Washington arrives with the news of a gig for the band, the camera comes to rest on Ellington’s hands, then pulls back to reveal, in the second scene (to “Black Beauty” and “The Duke Steps Out”), the Ellington band, with Ellington at a grand piano, ona stage that has been raised to a platform. Five male tap dancers in ascending heights, wearing black tuxedoes and patent-leather shoes, make their entrance onto the stage floor to perform a “one-man” precision tap dance (all five performing the same steps in synchrony, as if they were in “one” body). The all-male quintet was uncredited in the film but was known for its concerted stepping at the Cotton Club, where it was billed alternately as the “Five Hot Shots” (who performed in the “Springboards” Cotton Club revue of mid-1929), and the “Five Dancing Blazers” (number 1 in the lineup is Andrew Jackson; number 2 is John Thomas; numbers 3 and 5 are unidentified; and number 4 is Henry “Phace” Roberts).” The five men do a stunning tap dance; they dance along the edge of a black-glass floor, in hard-soled shoes, on a stage reminiscent of the Cotton Club. The strict formations that are reflected in the glass floor give the meticulous stepping, the syncopated breaks, and the diagonal lines a lucidity and gleaming clarity. As Washington watches the precise formations of this dance from the wings, her faintness causes her to see double images, and we are made to see film art—the dance through her eyes— as the number is repeated precisely, but our visual bearings are confused by the splitting of musicians and already duplicated mirror-image dancers into a revolving myriad mosaic which intertwines rhythmic stepping with images of the instruments. When Washington makes her entrance (to “Cotton Club Stomp”), and despite her condition, she goes into a wild shimmying dance in which her erratic steppings and gyrations personify an enveloping demonic force: she collapses to the floor. Urged on by the club’s manager, who orders the collapsed Washington to

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be removed from the stage, the orchestra continues to play (to “Flaming Youth”), as the Cotton Club Girls (Amy Spencer, Hyacinth Curtis, Evelyn Shepard, Dora White, Minnie McDowell, and one unidentified dancer) rush onstage, swishing and shimmying. Ellington stops the band in the middle of the number so that he and his men can join Washington. To the sounds of the “Black and Tan Fantasy,” the scene shifts to Washington’s chamber,

where, in chiaroscuro lighting, the Ellington band and mourners (the Hall Johnson Choir) crowd around the deathbed. Ellington is at the piano; Freddie Guy, Wellman Braud, and Juan Tizol are in the foreground, and the shadows of Arthur Whetsol’s, Barney Bigard’s, and Joe Nanton’s instruments are on the far wall. At Washington’s dying request, the assemblage goes into a full instrumentation of the title tune, complete with solos by trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. Assuming once again Washington’s viewpoint, the camera focuses on Ellington’s face. In an image that gradually blurs as she dies, a lone tear runs down Ellington’s cheek. Then the aperture of the lens of the camera closes. Black and Tan is the first film to bypass the stereotype of the tap dancing minstrel. It is a love story—one of the most poignant and veritable—and the earliest between black actors

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the rhythm breaks in chorus lines of that period. The synchrony of their tap dancing is the dance climax of the film. From the old Negro of the South to the New Negro of the North—in New York, that most urban and urbane northern industrial city—Black and Tan helped to shed tap dancing of “the

costume of the shuffling darky, the uncle or aunty, the subservient and docile retainer, the clown,” to become the “intelligent, articulate, self-assured” rhythmic expression of the Jazz Age twenties.”°

5 (THIRTIES)

SWING TIME

CHALLENGE! Baby Laurence versus Freddie James 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, Harlem, New York (1938)

ON THE CORNER OF 126TH STREET AND LENOX AVENUE in Harlem in 1938, Baby Laurence was egged into a battle of the taps with Freddie James. “Fans would start arguments. Then the dancer would come along and have to prove himself,” said John Bubbles, the father of rhythm tap, about the all-night tap challenge between James, the star member of the Four Step Brothers and one of the best dancers in town, and Baby Laurence, a seventeen-year-old upstart. James was considered a genius by his peers. “He was sensational,” said Maceo Anderson of the Four Step Brothers. “He was so talented,” said Al Williams, a member of the Four Step Brothers, “that the discipline of working with us, and taking his turn, made him perform even better.” James could do everything—acrobatics, spins, knee-drops, flips, splits—even play the trumpet. He was so nimble a dancer that people said he could spin rings around Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, if he wanted to. Pete Nugent remembered stopping by the nightspot called Chicken Charlie’s, on his way to perform at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., and seeing James dancing—only to return forty-five minutes later, to find him still dancing, and not repeating any of his steps. Baby Laurence was a freshman just coming into his own, after having hung around New York and seeing the latest bouts of feet at the Hoofers Club. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1921, he started performing at the age of twelve as a boy soprano. With his brother and friends, he formed a vocal group called the Four Buds; they accompanied themselves on the ukulele and did some dancing. It was not until Baby came to New York and worked for Dickie Wells, who owned a celebrated room in Harlem, that he became involved with tap dancing. He picked up advice at the Hoofers Club from Harold Mablin, who taught him steps (and gave him the devil because Baby turned all the steps around). While he absorbed ideas from tap greats Eddie Rector, Pete Nugent, Honi Coles, Toots Davis, and Teddy Hale, who became his chief rival, several

years would pass before he actually worked as a single, just tap dancing. 97

98 TAP DANCING AMERICA Baby Laurence must have thought himself a big shot to stand up against James on that Harlem street corner that night in 1938. He was still, though not for long, a small fish in a big pond, and James was about to remind him of that. After the police broke up the crowd that had surrounded the challengers in their first few rounds on the street, the contest adjourned to a nearby Harlem nightclub. With Bill Bailey at the piano, James and Jackson fired steps at each other from 11 pm through the wee hours of the morning. At 4 am in the Harlem club, with Bailey still at the piano, both were still firing away. James decided it was time to finish Baby off with one of his favorite moves. He took a flying headlong leap across the floor into a handstand, and with his feet dangling in the air, started slapping and tapping the floor with his hands. Jaws dropped, feet stomped, and it was over. So who won? Baby was asked some years later. “| think we were even,” said Baby, though some claimed Baby had won, and others called it a draw.’

Harlem “In the thirties, tap dance was everywhere,” said Cholly Atkins.’ In truth, though, not all tap dancers worked, nor were they seen “everywhere.” The decade that saw more tap dancers and more tap dance acts than any other in the twentieth century was also the most segregated and the most segregating of white and black dance artists. Thirty years after the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had ruled for “separate but equal” status for black Americans in public transportation and which set in motion a number of related legislation that spilled over into housing and education, segregation of the white and colored races had thereby become an institutionalized and codified practice, especially in the South. The socalled Jim Crow laws, state and local laws that were enacted in the Southern and border states, enumerated regulations requiring whites and nonwhites to use separate public facilities (e.g., water fountains, public schools, public bath houses, restaurants, public libraries, buses, rail cars). Jim Crow segregation—the name taken from Thomas Dartmouth Rice’s blackface songand-dance routine “Jump Jim Crow” (1828), caricaturing a shabbily dressed, rural black jig dancer (and in 1837 had become the term for racial segregation in Vermont), became ever

more insidious during the Depression-era thirties, when the rise of the “talkies” and the motion picture industry introduced yet another medium for demeaning stereotypes of blacks. The social-realist painter Reginald Marsh’s “Twenty Cent Picture” (1936), a colorful painting of Forty-second Street’s Lyric Theatre, with its huge poster portraits of the dashing actor Frederic March with the sultry Anna Step, in the upbeat musical comedy film Moonlight and Pretzels,

encapsulates the overpowering magic of the movie palace. During the depths of the Great Depression, for the price of pennies, people weary and in the doldrums from unemployment and ravishing hunger might sit comfortably and dissolve into an effervescent cinematic space filled with adventure, elegant songs and dances, and romance. In the 1930s, white actors often played characters who were wealthy, ambitious, and entrepreneurial. The roles offered to blacks in Hollywood were those of servants and domestics, and these were often played as demeaning black stereotypes. Blacks were represented by the loyal, kind-hearted, and ever-faithful Uncle Tom; the amusing, simple-minded dancing Coon; the big-boned, fat, and bossy Mammy; the brutal black Buck—not as a buck-and-wing dancer, but,

SWING TIME (THIRTIES) 99 as Donald Bogle says in his book on blacks in movies, “big, baadddd niggers, over-sexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.”° The black dancers cast in films often played roles as domestics, such as Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), who played a much-maligned handyman, flamboyantly shuffling and stammering, in Hearts in Dixie (1929). A tap dancer before becoming an actor, Perry used his shuffling buck-and-wing steps to create his character of “The World’s Laziest Man.”* Black dancers often had only “specialty” spots in the films in which to perform dance routines. A specialty spot was offered to many fine black performers because it could be neatly excised from the film (without harming the continuity of the plot) when it was played in southern theaters to satisfy the audiences offended by seeing black entertainers or musicians on the silver screen.

If there were two traditions of tap dancing that had flourished since the turn of the century—one being the jig and clog, the other black rhythm tap—then by the 1930s, these two

rhythmic dance traditions were becoming ever more different. Yet in the 1930s, more and more people saw it performed, and tap dancing thrived—it was everywhere, on big stages and small ones and at the movies. Cholly Atkins and Jaqui Malone write in Class Act: “There were millions of little nightclubs throughout the country in almost every neighborhood, and they all had little chorus lines with four to eight dancers. The numbers were choreographed by people who later became popular as producers and choreographers, simply because they were given the opportunity to exercise their creativity. And most of these black dancers learned on the

street, in nightclubs and ballrooms, and at parties, wherever people were getting together socially to have a good time.”° But it was in Harlem, that thriving black metropolis in which an artistic and cultural renaissance had been flowering for more than a decade, that the largest number of jazz tap dancers gathered—to perform, to watch one another, and to compete on the street, in social clubs, and in theaters.

THE LAFAYETTE The Lafayette Theatre, on Seventh Avenue and 132nd Street, was one of Harlem’s biggest theaters, and it prided itself on being “America’s Leading Colored Theatre Presenting the Finest Stage and Screen Shows.” All the best bands and jazz orchestras in New York played there, including those led by Sam Wooding, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway. For black dance artists just arriving in New York, the Lafayette was the first and most important stepping-stone to a successful career. “You had to work your way up from the TOBA circuit ... to Washington. Then you’d go to Philadelphia,” said tap star Leonard Reed, “and when you got to New York you passed through the Hoofers Club on the way to the Lafayette.” When Reed and partner Willie Bryant first played the Lafayette, one of the Four Step Brothers was a candy boy, and Fats Waller played the organ.° Honi Coles. When Charles “Honi” Coles made his New York debut at the Lafayette in 1931, it was as one of the Three Millers, a dance group that performed over-the-tops, barrel turns, and wings atop six-foot-high pedestals. Born on April 2, 1911, in Philadelphia, Coles remembered that the shows were “typically well-rounded.”

You had a band number for the opening, and then you would have strictly vaudeville . . . seven or eight acts on the bill. There were no openings, no finales and mostly there would be six white acts and one black. Believe me, the black acts had to be great, otherwise, they wouldn’t have been on the same bill.’

100 TAP DANCING AMERICA After hearing that his partners had hired another dancer to replace him, Coles left the Three Millers and retreated back to his hometown, determined to perfect his technique. “I went into a room and locked the door and rehearsed for one year solid, ten to twelve hours a day. I did nothing else. From one bar of music to another bar, I wanted to cram as many taps as possible. When I came out of that room at the end of the year, I had the fastest feet in show business— bar nobody.”* Coles returned to New York in 1933 to do a solo act at the Harlem Opera House. He then headed to the Hoofers Club, confident in his ability to cram several steps into a bar of music; he did double and triple time over other dancers whose tempos were down, and so he was hailed by his peers as the fastest and most graceful of tap dancers. From 1936 to 1939, Coles performed with the Lucky Seven Trio, a group that tapped on large cubes that looked like dice. Known to be among the neatest and best-dressed performers in the business, they went through ten costume changes in the course of their act; their tuxedoes and tails were all made to order. “I worked with them two years before I caught up with paying for my costumes,” Coles said, as he remembered the days when he would do five and six shows a day at the Lafayette, then every night get a dime—-s5 cents for the subway ride home, and 5 cents for the subway ride back the next day. To close his budget gap, Coles took up pool. He got pretty good. There was a poolroom attached to the Hoofers Club. “You could learn anything there,” said Coles, “starting with how to survive. The older guys came with blood in their eyes, always looking to cut you up. But that’s how tap is.”°

The Brothers Nicholas. The Nicholas Kids—eleven-year-old Harold and his seventeen-year-old brother, Fayard—made their New York debut in Harlem at the Lafayette Theatre in March 1932 with Eubie Blake “And His Great Band,” earning $500 a week in a “Glorious Musical Comedy Revue.” Fayard Antonio Nicholas was born on October 28, 1914, in Mobile, Alabama; Harold Lloyd Nicholas was born on March 17, 1921, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Their parents, Ulysses and Viola Nicholas, were professional jazz musicians, he a drummer and she a pianist. From a young age, at the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, where his parents conducted a pit band orchestra, Fayard was introduced to the best tap acts in black vaudeville. He then proceeded to teach young Harold basic tap steps. As the “Nicholas Kids” (later the Nicholas Brothers), they made their professional debut in Philadelphia in 1930, but in 1932 the family moved to New York, expressly because of a booking at the Lafayette Theatre. Their act was modeled after a three-part routine that they had performed in Philadelphia at the Standard, the Pearl, and the Earl Theatres. It opened with a soft-shoe in medium tempo, a series of solos that took the form of a challenge dance, and an up-tempo tap dance to “Bugle Call Rag,” in which they showed off with flips, splits, and an assortment of acrobatic moves. The brothers were such a hit in March that by the end of the first week, the Lafayette management booked them for another engagement in April. A producer from the Warner Brothers film studios, who had seen them at the Lafayette, signed them for the all-black musical short Pie, Pie, Blackbird (1932), with Eubie Blake and his band. It was being filmed at the Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn. In the “China Boy” number of the film, the brothers performed a streamlined style of tap dancing, distinguished by lightness, speed, angularity, and swinging rhythms. That became one of the earliest representations of jazz tap dancing on film. Buck and Bubbles. When the song-and-dance team of Ford Lee “Buck” Washington and John “Bubbles” Sublett played the Lafayette Theatre, they were already established stars. Bubbles, in the role of Sportin’ Life in the Broadway production of George Gershwin’s folk opera, Porgy and Bess (October 10, 1935), was praised by the composer for changing the character of Sportin’ Life from a sinister dope peddler into a humorous dancing-villain, who is “likeable and believable,

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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in the “Cheek to Cheek” number in Top Hat, RKO, 1935. (Photofest)

SWING TIME (THIRTIES) 115 goes into a diminuendo reprise, the number keeps climbing as Astaire sprinkles sand on the floor and, as her official sandman, dances the sand with caressing little strokes that snuggle her back to sleep. Astaire’s tap dancing feet are the leitmotif in Top Hat. They hoof on the box of the hansom cab, to let Dale Tremont know that she is his prisoner. They tap on the ceiling of the Lido Hotel room, to remind her that he has followed her to Paris. They are a mating call that leads her to join him in the rhythmically bewitching duet “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?” in which Rogers is held hostage in a gazebo in the middle of a rainstorm. The duet takes the form of a challenge dance—he does a step, she copies it, he does another, she tops it. Nothing they do is meant in the driving sense of the challenge dance, and the freshness in their dancing has nothing to do with driving forward tap technique. “The point isn’t tap-dancing, it’s romance,” wrote Arlene Croce. Those spurting little phrases that end in a mutual freeze, as if to say “try and catch me,” and the ecstatic embrace when they pivot together around the stage, whipping into a froth, is never intended to be a straight exhibition of tap dance expertise. Instead, Astaire makes stories out of the dynamic variety of tap dancing. “With him, a dance impulse and a dramatic motive seem to be indivisible and spontaneous, so that we get a little kick or imaginative sympathy every time he changes the rhythm or the speed or the pressure of a step.”” This is grandly demonstrated in “Cheek to Cheek,” the romantic climax of the film, in which Astaire and Rogers (wearing a satin dress with feathers galore) dance a sustained, tap-inflected foxtrot across the expansive dance floor of the Lido restaurant, seen as a huge gleaming fairground, with dance floors, balconies, and restaurants on terraces. In these feathery and frivolous adagios with Astaire, it is easy to underrate Rogers’s dancing because, as Croce comments, “she never appears to be working hard, and seems to dance in the beauty of an illusion.”

CHALLENGE! Astaire and Rogers at the Paradise Club, Follow the Fleet (1936)

There are some numbers in which Rogers’s skills as a tap dancer are nicely articulated, such as in the swinging “Let Yourself Go” number in Follow the Fleet (1936), in which she wears pants, not flowing gowns, which show off her legs and focus on her footwork. Circling the dance floor at the Paradise

Club during a Saturday night dance contest, she and Astaire discreetly eyeball the competition— gageles of couples strutting out their specialty steps for pockets of onlookers. They decide to show off with their own tasty steps—sassy, sliding cross-back steps, a slinky shim-sham with slaps on the thighs that make the knees rise. Spying one couple’s moves, they mimic the step and add a slouchy waddle to their spin. With eyes glued on another couple, they tip-toe delicate crossover steps in direct imitation. Glancing at another couple’s flashy combination of sideways sashays with full-bodied pecking steps, they steal that move, adding to it alternating turns on the offbeat. Astaire breaks into a finish of underarm spins, in which he lifts Rogers to balance her on his knee, popping her back into an upward stance; and with Rogers leaning a hand on her partner’s shoulder, they coolly flash a “top that!” signal to the challengers. The couple then launch into brilliant-galloping kicks in place that are

116 TAP DANCING AMERICA punctuated by sudden midmeasure pauses. Alternating frisky jumps with earthy heel-grinds, they now face each other and dance only for each other. Their victory dance is all rhythm—legs wiggling, arms circling around like windmills, they propel each other into a stutter of hopping turns that stagger them into giddy dizziness. As a crowd of sailors cheer their victory, the partners dance a brilliant pattern of circling steps, finally pulling themselves upright, into an arm-raising salute of triumph.

Commenting on Rogers’s superb performance in Follow the Fleet, Arlene Croce writes, “How

outrageous that the liquid hips and the strong knees should be more interesting than the tapping feet, which were overdubbed and choreographed by Hermes Pan.”** This raises a most serious question: Was Ginger Rogers a tap dancer, if Hermes Pan choreographed all her routines with Astaire, rehearsed them for her, and dubbed the taps in postproduction? Clearly in a class of her own, Ginger Rogers was a superb dance partner to Fred Astaire, and as for neither choreographing nor dubbing her taps, she had no choice. Astaire’s standard practice was to prepare for, and if possible film, all but the most complicated of the dances before the main production of the musical got under way. For Follow the Fleet, he had four major numbers to prepare, and although the shooting of the film was not scheduled to begin until November 1, 1935, Astaire was at the studio rehearsing eight weeks earlier. By a special agreement with RKO, he always worked in seclusion. No one was allowed in at his rehearsals except the pianist, Hal Borne, and Astaire’s collaborator and the film’s choreographer, Hermes Pan.

.-- AND HERMES PAN Born Hermes Panagiotopulos in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1909, of Greek and Irish parentage, he claims to have first learned to dance from blacks in Nashville by imitating their steps. At age fourteen, he went to New York and began dancing in amateur theatricals. He eventually danced on Broadway in My Maryland (1927), in the Marx Brothers’ Broadway production of Animal Crackers (1928), and in Top Speed (1929), in which he assisted LeRoy Prinz and first met Ginger Rogers. After relocating to Hollywood in 1930 in a dance act with his sister Vasso Meade, he assisted LeRoy Prinz on the film Lucky Day (1933) and tried out as Dave Gould’s assistant for Flying Down to Rio (1933). Gould assigned him to the Astaire-Rogers portion of that film, “The Carioca” number, and he pleased Astaire. He soon became his assistant, and was eventually responsible for the ensemble dances in most of Astaire’s films. Pan looked a bit like Astaire, and he also danced like him; as mirror image, he illuminated Astaire’s conceptions and contributed ideas. When there was a duet with Rogers to be choreographed, Pan assumed her role in rehearsal with Astaire; he would then teach it to her and rehearse with her, before she rehearsed it with Astaire. “With Fred I’d be Ginger, and

with Ginger I’d be Fred,” he said.* Astaire also partnered with Eleanor Powell, Paulette Goddard, Rita Hayworth, Virginia Dale, Joan Leslie, Lucille Bremer, Olga San Juan, Ann Miller, Vera-Ellen, Jane Powell, Leslie Caron, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson, and Cyd Charisse. From the 1930s to 1960s, Hermes Pan would collaborate with Astaire on fifteen Hollywood films and numerous musical specials on stage and on television. Their last film together was Finian’s Rainbow (1968).

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Si ifa h.&Ay\“Come FORTY-SECOND STREET f ae and meet those dancing feet / On i AS J : : the Avenue I’m taking you to, Forty-sec-

: a7” : Vy ond Street,” Ruby Keeler sings in the

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icy e yy. y musical film Forty-second Street. The 1933 4 . Ler 4, ~=©Warner Brothers film about an unknown atw’ Ss : y chorus dancer who steps out of the line to a P y, % . save a Broadway show—who goes out a a ali) : a =e) youngster and comes back a star—made ¢ Of 4 ‘ gs the twenty-four year-old Keeler “the first . 7 -___ tap dancing star of the screen.”*° Bi qj aaa —- ——— Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on

Oe nia“with August 1909, Keeler immigrated e =, > —— her 25, family to the United States at ae ae : : the age of three, settling in the Upper

mae me or — oe — East Side Yorkville section of New York City, then a mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood with some Italian laborers and Jewish and German immigrants. The teacher of Keeler’s gymnasium class at St. Catherine of Sienna grammar school noticed her natural grace during “rhythmic exercises” and suggested formal dance training at Joe Prince and Jack Blue’s School of Rhythm and Tap. At age thirteen, Keeler joined the chorus of George M. Cohan’s 1922 stage musical The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly. She added two years to her age and

signed with him for a wage of $45 a week, which pleased her struggling family. A fan magazine, reporting an amateur-night dance contest conducted by Broadway impresario Nils Thor Granlund, which Keeler had won, wrote of her: She was skinny and poorly dressed and looked underfed. She handed in her music, a lead-sheet of a fast tap. She had no orchestrations and had to work

with the pianist alone. She had no costume and came on in her shabby street attire, with clumsy, cheap, muddy shoes. She “went into her dance.” And she stopped the show. The crowd wouldn’t let her off. She knew only a few steps, but these she had to repeat again and again.” She was promptly hired by the Strand Roof, a second-class cabaret, to do her “fast rhythm tap” on its dime-sized dance floor for $50 a week. In that period, when customers made thirsty by Prohibition jammed dozens of nightspots up and down Broadway, Keeler worked steadily.

From the Strand Roof she went to the El Fey Club, and then to the Silver Slipper. There, she was spotted and offered a chorus job in the Broadway musical Bye Bye Bonnie (1927, Ritz Theatre), and featured in three of its numbers: “Tap Dance,” “Tampico Tap,” and “Specialty.” She reportedly stopped the show. In 1933, Daryl E. Zanuck, head of production at Warner Brothers, cast Keeler in the backstage musical Forty-second Street, by Lloyd Bacon, with dance direction by Busby Berkeley. The original 1929 MGM backstage musical—a genre of musical film whose plot evolves as a show within in show, allowing the audience to see the backstage workings of a musical, but actually a device for the performance of musical numbers—was

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> | | | | a we _ | for the production. “They didn’t want to have r , $e 4 : ‘aa . my two [ female solo] dancers,” said LeGon, “and

| _ | - ie oP because I was the brown one, they just let i. - me go.” The studio then informed LeGon a 7 rs |2: ithat they had assigned her to the London

Pil Se » hy = ~s : stage production of At Home Abroad, peraj wr ——— forming the dances of Eleanor Powell and

= wy Wa) ™, the songs of Ethel Waters, who had both ; ~ a Lie ay fis ; pir “ appeared in the Broadway stage production.

ee x l+ :a \(}| APN oe LeGon did perform on the London “es stage in C. B. Cochran’s At Home Abroad —_ —_—- j —_———— ~ and was hailed as “one of the brightest spir-

| Be wee l\ if = ¥ its,” the new Florence Mills, “the sepia Cin-

a ~ Xe — derella girl who set London agog with her

clever dancing.” Back in the United States and in Hollywood, however, LeGon faced the cruelest indignity of being cast to play every kind of servant imaginable. One of the cruelest was having to play the role of Ann Miller’s maid Effie in Easter Parade (1948), starring Miller and Fred Astaire, who never spoke to her on the set. “The stars did not socialize. There was complete separation, that’s the way you lived.” The tragedy was that LeGon’s burgeoning career as a female soloist in Hollywood films became a dream deferred. Had she emerged in another era, she might have surpassed the success of, say, Ruby Keeler, who in the 1930s was regarded as the “queen of taps.” In a conscious and misleading redirection of LeGon’s contract, MGM avoided having to consider how to represent her as a virtuosic black female soloist. If they paired her with a white leading man, how could they face possible financial losses caused by bad publicity? The nearest retrieval of LeGon’s enormous talents was to keep her behind the scenes at MGM, working as a dance consultant and dance director, having her stage such numbers as “Sping” for Lena Horne in her first movie, Panama Hattie (MGM 1942). The word sping was a cross between “Spanish” and “Swing.” The song-and-dance “sping” was LeGon’s conception; she wrote the lyrics and staged the number, but she received no onscreen credit. LeGon said that it was only when she was an actress, in such all-black films as Double Deal (1939), Take My Life (1942), and Hi-Di-Ho

(1944) with black jazzman Cab Calloway, that she got the chance “to be the heroine, to get kissed.” The lovely Lena Horne had the same experience in Hollywood, not coincidentally. The troubling question that remains is why Bill Robinson, after working with LeGon in Hooray for Love, did not choose to work with her again. In 1937, the New York Amsterdam News

published a damning article on Robinson, accusing him of being captious in character for interceding with studio officials in behalf of “a white girl” whom Robinson had chosen as his first choice to dance with him in the new Twentieth Century-Fox movie Cafe Metropole (1937). The “white girl” Robinson promoted was Geneva Sawyer, a dancer on the Fox lot who was tap teacher to Shirley Temple and who was, the Amsterdam News wrote, “reported to have profited

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through Bojangles’ free hearted teaching of his dancing steps to her as well as to many other white persons in the studios including Shirley Temple, Eleanor Whitney, Eleanor Powell, Tiny Gamberelli, and Adolph Menjou.”* In proposing Sawyer to be his dance partner in Cafe Metropole, Robinson, who was said to have been delighted with Miss Sawyer’s ability to mimic his steps, proposed that she appear in blackface in the film. Robinson’s vogue and his insistence apparently encouraged studio officials to overlook the fact that a white woman would be dancing with a Negro actor, her wearing blackface a mitigating factor. “The white girl will blacken her face to dance as Bojangles’ partner in the production,” wrote the Amsterdam News, “and speculation is rife regarding Robinson’s failure to choose a colored girl for the favored spot since there are so many capable dancers eager to share the favored spot.” Sawyer indeed shot the movie with Robinson, as he requested, in blackface.

The New Queen of Taps In Broadway Melody of 1936, Eleanor Powell, wearing a sequined top hat, bow-tie, and tails, makes a dazzling entrance in the “Broadway Rhythm” finale—leaping circles over twirling top hats on the tips of canes, spiraling into an infinity of turns, and spinning into a rhythm dance of slurring speed. “Gotta dance, dance on Broadway; Broadway rhythms make you want to dance,” sing the forty-eight all-male dancers of the chorus, twirling and tipping their top hats to her in salute. And dance she does. From the running struts, high kicks, and head-to-thefloor backbends to mercuric moves that take her into multiple spins, finishing with eighteen fouette turns, capped by dozen more chenee’ turns that spin her into a beautiful smiling salute at the camera, Powell leaves no doubt that she is in a class act of her own. In Hollywood, with its hundreds of female dancers working in the chorus, Eleanor Powell emerged triumphant and forged a career as a female tap soloist. A rhythm tap dancer who dressed in top hat and tails, with sequined tops and shorts or flowing pajama pants, she danced in two-inch Cuban-heeled shoes. With long legs shimmying, hips swerving, torso splayed across the diagonal and back arched, she moved with grace and speed, dribbling beats in her feet, while dipping into backbends that brought her head to the floor. The speed and aggression of her tapping was countered by her long, sleek, and shapely legs; though she was wearing pants and in military costume, she was clearly a beautiful female dancer. Her rhythmic phrasing did not conform to the standard eight- and two-bar break structure. Instead, she varied and complicated her rhythmic phrasings by moving over the bar and seemingly over the chorus. Powell combined ballet, rhythm tap, and acrobatics into routines that were entirely her own invention.

SWING TIME (THIRTIES) 127 Powell was born on November 21, 1916, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and was raised by her maternal grandparents while her mother worked as a chambermaid, waitress, and bank teller. At age seven, to help overcome her shyness, she was enrolled in dancing school, where she studied ballet and acrobatics with Ralph McKernan. In the summer of 1925, during a family visit to Atlantic City, New Jersey, she was turning cartwheels on the beach when discovered by the entrepreneur Gus Edwards, who offered her a job working three nights a week, earning a salary of $7 per show, in a dinner club at the Ambassador Grill. Wearing a burnt-orange velvet

pant outfit, she performed the acrobatic routine to “Japanese Sandman” from her dancing school recital.

In the summer of 1927, Powell returned to Atlantic City to work at the Silver Slipper and at Martins, a high-priced supper club. In a costume now of purple chiffon, with a cerise fan, her routine combined classical ballet and acrobatics. She looked down on the tap dancers who appeared with her at the club and considered their style to be awkward. Urged to try her luck on Broadway, Powell headed to New York in the fall of 1929. There, she worked for three months at Ben Bernie’s nightclub and danced at private parties, where she met and appeared on the same bill as Bill Robinson. With him, she devised a dance routine in which they challenged each other. Powell and Robinson performed at various private society parties organized by the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, and others, for which they were paid $500 a night. Robinson became her lifelong friend, and he later taught her his stair dance. It was the heel-dropping rhythm tap dancing of John Bubbles that most influenced Powell’s footwork and rhythmic style. Powell met Bubbles in 1928, on a twenty-week vaudeville tour that included New York’s Paramount Theatre. On the same bill as Buck and Bubbles, and doing five shows a day, Powell said they were each other’s most appreciative audience and remembered “lying on my stomach in the wings, watching Bubbles dance to me.”*? Between shows, dancers spent time backstage trying new steps. Wearing high-heeled tap shoes with a Cuban heel—one that is wider than the spiked or hourglass heel of a chorus dancer—she began to master the heel-drops that marked Bubbles’s style of rhythm tap dancing. “I often wondered if I had some colored blood in me,” she later said, “because the kind of off-beat tapping I came up with was

a colored sound.” Powell continued to audition for Broadway shows and met with rejection because she did not yet have enough tap dance expertise. She decided to take tap dance lessons and enrolled in Jack Donahue’s dance school, where she studied with Donahue and Johnny Boyle. Donahue, a famed Broadway hoofer and partner to Broadway star Marilyn Miller, was a masterful softshoe dancer in the style of the great George Primrose; Boyle, a vaudeville hoofer, was known for his terre a terre style of buck-and-wing. Powell signed up for ten classes for $35 and, somewhere between the first and fifth lessons, became frustrated with learning the steps; her training in ballet and acrobatics made her tap dancing too aerial. One of the first things Donahue did, in a private lesson, was to sit on the floor in front of her and hold her ankles, explaining that tapping was done with the feet and not the whole body. Donahue and Boyle then devised a belt, purchased from a war surplus store, with a large sandbag attached on either side. They made her wear it in practice, thereby training her to tap close the ground. By the eighth lesson, she caught on and was often called on in class to demonstrate.

Those ten tap lessons were all Powell needed to help launch her career on Broadway. She debuted in Follow Thru in January 1929 at the Forty-sixth Street Theatre, and it was a hit show that ran for one year. On matinee days, Powell used the time at the theater—following Donahue’s suggestion that she blend her ballet skills with tap—to hone her craft. She often practiced twelve hours a day, devising her own routines, dancing to phonograph records, particularly those of jazz pianist and composer Fats Waller. Between shows she appeared with jazz

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y High, and she returned to Broadway later that year with Fine and Dandy, which gave her the most exposure to date. She performed three

; numbers: “I'll Hit a New High,” “Jig Hop,” and “Waltz Ballet.” Variety called her “a clever \ rhythm dancing girl,” and the Washington Post wrote that she threatened to stop the show with “her broken rhythm tap dance and waltz ballet.”°! In March 1932 came the Florenz Zieg-

ese i —_—— feld—produced musical Hot-Cha! with Powell on , ej ____— dancing “There’s Nothing the Matter with Me” and Variety noting that she “tapped her way to a

hit.” In 1933 she performed two rhythm tap numbers in George White’s Music Hall, and the New York Times called her “an excellent tap dancer, who stands out markedly.”® The Powell that Broadway audiences knew was quite different from the glamorized version that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would promote in the next few years. In the early 1930s, she wore her hair in a short Dutch-boy style, and her costumes were often satin versions of men’s pajamas or tuxedos. “Her lanky body was graceful but hardly the kind of figure that had men lusting.”® Reviewing her vaudeville performance in Yasha Bunchuk’s Third Birthday Revue (June 1932, Capital Theatre), Variety wrote, “Miss Powell . . . is a homey looking girl with a curiously relaxed, lazy dancing style. She was an applause item at this show and took a legitimate encore, used for a fast, energetic bit of buck and winging to prove that she could do the fast stuff too.”®

In the early thirties, with the Depression at its worst, most Broadway producers were cutting costs. Powell, who had never intended to go into the movies, was cast by Louis B. Mayer for a small role in Broadway Melody of 1936—that of a struggling dancer who comes to the big city to become a star. Her routine combined elements of ballet and acrobatic dancing, doing pivot turns and arabesques, and letting male dancers toss her in the air. She still worked her rhythm tap close to the ground, tapping with slurring speed. The New York Times wrote that she had “the most eloquent feet in show business” and likened her to Fred Astaire; with Time claiming that the film “confirms her status as the world’s greatest female tap dancer?”

BORN TO DANCE Eleanor Powell was immediately offered a long-term contract at MGM, which she began with Born to Dance in 1936. It was a lavish musical, with songs by Cole Porter, in which she played a dancing understudy in love with a sailor, played by James Stewart. While the Porter songs included “Easy to Love” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the highlight was the finale,

SWING TIME (THIRTIES) 129 “Swingin’ the Jinx Away.” Set on a battleship, Powell slides down a metal fire pole and taps on

the deck. The Cincinnati Enquirer called her rhythm “flawless,” adding that the “apparent effortlessness with which she does the most intricate maneuvers marks her genius.” She was treated to an MGM beauty makeover, complete with ultraviolet light freckleremoving treatment, capped teeth, and a curly, more feminine hairstyle. MGM made no secret of the fact that her voice was dubbed. As virtuosic as her dancing was, she was never considered glamorous. In a review of Rosalie in which Powell danced on drums, Time called it “the best dance in the show,” calling her legs “sexless, superhuman and morbidly adept, as if animated by a baleful intelligence of their own.”® At MGM, Powell had full control of her choreography; was given a studio in which to rehearse; and dubbed her own tap steps. Allowed

to control her onscreen image as a rhythm tap dancer, she made an effort to learn all the behind-the-scenes workings and choreographed all her own routines. A perfectionist and a workaholic, she was known to rehearse up to twelve hours a day on the empty sound stages.

After her routines were choreographed and rehearsed, she then performed for the studio orchestra silently, on a mattress in the sound room, so that it could record the music with the proper tempo. When the number was shot, the background recording was played, but the filming was silent, with cameras gliding on noisy tracks. Powell had to act as her own stand-in during camera set-ups since she was the only one who knew her choreography. Finally, she performed the routine again in a sound studio, wearing earphones and watching a film of her number, while she dubbed the taps on a maple mat, ensuring the best sound quality. Dubbing the taps in later also allowed her to wear dress shoes on screen. “There’s no such thing as a pretty girl’s tap shoe,” she insisted. If in Broadway Melody of 1938 Powell got a chance to tap dance with George Murphy and Buddy Ebsen, in Honolulu she got her only chance to personally acknowledge the virtuosity of

her friend Bill Robinson—albeit in an athletic tap number in a blackface impersonation. Though the sight of it today may be offensive, the routine was intended to be tastefully done, appearing in a segment at a costume ball at which guests were dressed up as their favorite entertainers. Bound by the strict rules of segregated Hollywood, impersonating Robinson was Powell’s way of honoring her longtime friend and mentor on the screen (similar to what Fred Astaire, in blackface, tried to do with the “Bojangles of Harlem” number in the 1936 film Swing Time). Powell had performed with Robinson only at private parties, but Hollywood studios, overly concerned with censorship, morality, and public opinion, would not allow an adult couple of different races to perform together in the 1930s. While the young Shirley Temple could dance innocently with Robinson, Powell was reduced to having to impersonate him.

BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940 The publicity that ensued was enormous when Powell was paired with Fred Astaire for his first post—Ginger Rogers film, Broadway Melody of 1940. It featured Astaire and George Murphy as a dance team, who compete for a role in a Broadway show, with Powell as their leading lady and romantic interest. There were many hesitations in teaming Powell with Astaire, as MGM executives feared the she was not glamorous enough (and would be unfavorably compared to Rog-

ers), too tall as a partner to Astaire (which would diminish his dancing line), and too independent. Unlike Rogers, Powell was accustomed to creating all her own choreography, dubbing her own taps. MGM’s fears materialized. Powell recalled that during her first rehearsals with Astaire, each was intimidated with the other’s talent and was afraid to take charge. Finally they worked independently in opposite corners of the room while improvising to Cole Porter’s music. They agreed to stop each other if they heard something they thought could be used. The film portentously opened with

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i. 2 ee 4 3 ee ~~’ pas de deux, with Astaire costumed as Harlequin and Powell as Pulchinella; he in tap shoes, she in ballet slippers. He moved quickly around her and framed—a facile partnering that built to an ecstatic climax with a tap-and-toe dance up a spiral staircase, in which he bent her over a balcony. Then in “Begin the Beguine,” a competitive tap-off in the dazzling finale, Astaire met his match—not in the romantic-partnership sense that he always sought with Rogers, but in the vivacious and energizing rhythmic sense. The very ferocity of Powell’s dancing created a forward-moving atmosphere of propulsion.

CHALLENGE! “Begin the Beguine” (Broadway Melody of 1940)

The number is divided into two distinct parts. It begins with a brown-skinned female squiggling in a strapless dress singing Cole Porter’s lyrics, “When you begin the beguine / it brings back the sound of musical splendor / it brings back a night of tropical pleasure.” As a sepia-tinted female chorus sways breezily beneath a starry set, Powell whirls across the mirrored floor in a long-flowing gown with bare midriff: Astaire appears as if materializing from one of the mirrored panels, and they proceed to dance their beguine as a tap rumba (in 2/4 time). Twirling around each other, backing each other in this traditional Afro-Cuban mating dance, he spins her, and they dance in synchrony with hesitating turns and chenee turns, joining hands and circling, until he finally holds her in a number of closed-partnering positions, and then spins her away.

SWING TIME (THIRTIES) 131 In the second part, as a female quartet sings a swing arrangement of “Begin the Beguine,” Powell and Astaire appear in all-white casual dress (she in a short white flared dress, he in slacks and jacket), dancing in unison, step for step. But as they dance the routine with more swinging and casually interloping steps, there is an exchange of glances, as if surprised to be keeping up with each other, yet pleased with their own performance. Powell begins to move out of the tandem choreography—charging forward with chugging steps that make Astaire move backward, as if being cornered. Then she is backcircling, making him follow her path of direction—and into her own individuated steps—stating the first two measures of the bar, which Astaire repeats. Soon they are back into unison dancing, with Astaire politely offering a rhythm, and Powell tapping out her own two-bar phrase, until he is starting with his phrase, and she is finishing with hers. All the time, they are each increasing the stakes of the tempo, which continues to accelerate until they are ultimately stammering over each other’s steps in an a-cappella tap-off. In a race to the finish, they do a stuttering one-upping of steps that simulates the forward-moving propulsion of swing—it is the most swinging tap dance number Powell and Astaire achieved on film. Next, at top speed, they call it a draw by figure-eighting around each other in acknowledgment of their equality. If there is one-up that Powell could claim in this tap challenge, it is that she matched Astaire step for step, and she made him dance faster than he has ever danced on film.

After Broadway Melody of 1940, there was talk of reteaming Powell and Astaire in a film version of the Broadway musical Girl Crazy, but Astaire was less than enthusiastic about the project, and so it was shelved. Plans for pairing Powell and Astaire in a film about the life backstage at the Ziegfeld Follies were also dissolved, as Powell learned that Astaire had been “unhappy with their teaming” in Broadway Melody of 1940. Powell had begun on the stage as an independent, and she remained so for the rest of her career. In the spectacular finale of the “Fascinating Rhythm” number in Lady Be Good (1941), Powell reinstated her independence as a star soloist. Dressed in top hat and tails, she danced with a legion of men, who frame and flip her into dizzying aerial forward rolls into the camera’s eye. Their group partnering with her is not so much to display her as an object of gazing desire, but a device in which she uses them to display her phenomenal expertise as the virtuoso female dancer of the Hollywood thirties.

6 (FORTIES) y

JUMPIN’ JIVE

CHALLENGE! Fayard Nicholas versus Harold Nicholas Down Argentine Way (1940)

FAYARD AND HAROLD NICHOLAS, dressed handsomely in tailcoats, stride smoothly onto the dance floor of the swanky Club Rendevous in Buenos Aires, passing their top hats and canes to a pair of doormen as the Latin orchestra plays the eight-bar introduction to “Argentina.” Harold opens by singing the song in Spanish, enunciating the words percussively in the style of a scat song, translating the 2/4 rhythmic bounce of the lyrics into eye winks and shoulder shrugs, as Fayard shakes out the rhythm on a pair of maracas. The Latin-flavored arrangement of the

song featured the 2/4 rhythmic ostinato of the samba played by the band’s rhythm section. While Harold and the band hold the Latin beat in the AA sections of the first chorus, they shift into a 4/4 swing arrangement of the song in the bridge. And in a surprising introduction to the second chorus, Harold scats the rhythm that was a classic swing anthem: “va VA va VI-VI-VAVA VI vi VAH VAH—the clarion call for the orchestra to break into a swinging four-beat arrangement of the song. In the dance that follows, the brothers play their tap rhythms over and against

the competing 2/4 and 4/4 time feels of the orchestra, in a competition of beat and feet. They begin the second chorus dancing side by side with smooth slipping and sliding steps. Harold solos with cramp rolls and back-slipping chugs and variations on the slide, in which he rubs the whole of the foot along the floor. Fayard adds skidding steps and a break in double-time break, passes the dance to Harold, and then tries to take it back by waving his hand toward Harold, who mimes being stretched and released like a rubber band. Harold snaps free and dives into six rounds of in-the-trenches, which he repeats with a surprise ending, a split propelled by a front flip. When he struts away, waving the dance to Fayard, it is clear that he has challenged his brother to come up with a better split than his. The challenge begins. Fayard jumps into the air with legs splayed and drops right down to the floor into a full split. From that position, he makes eight half-turns on the ground, pulling himself up to a stand. Harold answers by diving into a forward flip into a full split; on the recovery, he does a one-arm

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Fayard a cocky “Top that!” salute. And Fayard does just that: holding the ends of a white handkerchief he has gallantly unfurled from his breast pocket, Fayard jumps over the handkerchief to land in a split; he then pulls himself back up to jump back over the handkerchief again to land in a split. Standing proud with legs outspread, Fayard replaces the handkerchief in his pocket as

Harold, who has been standing behind him, takes a running slide through Fayard’s legs. He pulls himself up just in the nick of time to finish the last four bars of music. After a slip and a slide and a fast rhythm break, they call it even, bowing and strutting off the stage in a one-man exit.

Swinging Taps Swing was at its peak when the film Down Argentine Way was released in 1940 and completely enraptured the American public. In three-and-a-half minutes, the Nicholas Brothers captured the spirit and tempo of the music and transferred its wildly infectious energy to the movies. When the scene played in segregated theaters in the South, audiences black and white shouted to the cameraman to stop the film, rewind it, and show it again. Soon the Nicholas Brothers had a five-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. Swing, as in the verb “to swing,” was not really new in jazz. The forward-driving propulsion of swing, produced from the conflict between a fixed pulse and wide variety of duration and accents played against that pulse, was a quality attributed to all styles of jazz performance,

134 TAP DANCING AMERICA from ragtime (1890-1900) and “sweet” music (I900-1915) to “hot” early jazz (1917-1925) and semi-symphonic sweet (1925-1932) jazz. Swing was also the name given to the jazz style and related popular music that began to emerge in the early 1930s. It was characterized by arrangements with solo improvisations and a repertory based largely on AABA structure of Tin Pan Alley songs, with equal weight given to four beats of a bar. As dance music, swing had a flowing, streamlined 4/4 beat, which made for a smooth sound. For jazz tap dancers, the steady four-beat was the base upon which one could multiply time and syncopate smooth propulsions, which gave the impression of the beat speeding ahead. Jazz music through the first half of the twentieth century always had its social dance counterpart. Ragtime had the cakewalk; “sweet” jazz in the teens was danced with the foxtrot; “hot jazz” in the twenties was embodied by the Charleston. For swing in the 1930s and 4os, it was the Lindy Hop—a kicking-and-hopping, open-partnered jazz dance with pre-swing roots in the Texas Tommy, the Hop, and the Charleston, and whose basic step consisted of a syncopated two-step, or box step, that accented the offbeat. In contrast to the bouncy vertical steps of earlier jazz dances, swing flowed horizontally, with a smooth rhythmic continuity. The Lindy Hop incorporated the “swing” characteristic from the Charleston’s basic step—a syncopated twostep with the accent on the offbeat—with a smooth rhythmic continuity that gave the impres-

sion of the beat moving forward. The fundamental innovation of the Lindy Hop was the “breakaway,” often performed during an instrumental solo, when dancers spun away from each other to improvise a dance break. By the late 1930s, Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy Ballroom (located between 140th and 141st Streets on Lenox Avenue in Harlem) incorporated “air steps,” which had men flipping their partners over their backs, thrusting them upward, and balancing them from hip to hip.

SUN VALLEY SERENADE Though jazz tap dancers did not dance the Lindy Hop, their moves and their sense of timing recalled its air steps and breakaway steps, as so deftly demonstrated by the Four Step Brothers in the 1943 musical film It Ain’t Hay. The “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” number in the film Sun Valley Serenade (1941) shows the Nicholas Brothers with Dorothy Dandridge stretching the social dance form of the Lindy Hop into a staged form, reshaping their tap dance into a rhythmic personification of swing. The musical drama, starring Sonja Henie and John Payne, was set in a ski resort in Sun Valley, California. The plot centered around a big swing band’s attempt to get a recording contract, and it featured Glenn Miller and his orchestra—known for its full,

ultrasmooth, and readily accessible four-beat rhythm, the distinctive woodwind and brass sound, and the rich harmonies. In the film’s “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” number, the first chorus of the tune is played by Miller and his orchestra; the second chorus is sung by one male vocalist (Tex Beneke) and four female vocalists (the Modernaires). The orchestra continues to segue into the third chorus as the camera pans to another part of the lodge, with a cardboard set of the back of a train, attached to which is a platform and railing. The ensuing standalone scene, with the lovely black songstress Dorothy Dandridge and acrobatic jazz-tapping Nicholas Brothers, served no other purpose than the performance of that one complex musical number. It is an example of a scene that could be neatly cut without harming the continuity of the plot when the film played to audiences that might be offended by seeing black entertainers on the same screen as white performers. Standing beside the “train,” wearing a black satin dress and holding a parasol, is Dandridge, trailed by the brothers, sportily dressed in matching plaid suits, snazzy bow ties, and straw hats. Against the strolling tempo and a steady four-beat of the music, the trio begins the

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third chorus by sharing, trading on, and adding on to one another’s lines. The fourth chorus doubles the tempo, and the three perform a tap dance that begins with successive stomps and slides that sound out the locomotion rhythm of a train. When the tempo picks up further, Dandridge steps back onto the train platform, leaving the Nicholases to trade steps on each succeeding two beats of music. By the sixth chorus, the orchestra is playing at top speed and the brothers take more daring air steps—like high and side-swinging “bells,” in which the legs are raised to ninety degrees off the floor—and descending backward slides. Tossing their hats, Harold performs back flips, and Fayard a one-armed cartwheel that catapults him into a midair split. Turn-and-sliding together, Harold steps back, runs and places his foot on Fayard’s bent knee, and back-flips high into the air off that knee, landing in a split; his recovery timed to coincide with Fayard’s splitand-recover. Sliding backward, and with a one-handed jump over the railing and onto the train platform, they land in a deep knee-bend, which springs them up, legs splayed, into a midair split to end the number. The tap choreography in “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” as performed by the brothers in their duet, was beautifully shaped and styled after the Lindy Hop. Unlike earlier dances, in which they dance side by side, facing the camera, they took the “open facing position” of Latin American social dancing, which bears a strong resemblance to the Lindy Hop’s breakaway move; there, couples move from closed to open position by releasing one hand, allowing for freedom of movement. Harold’s back flip off Fayard’s knee resembled an air move in the Lindy Hop, in which the male flips his partner over and around his back. More important, all the moves in the choreography—from the forward and back swinging of the legs, and the back flips to springs from second-position plié into slides in all directions—had a certain momentum that responded to the buoyancy of the swing beat. In the early forties, while the Nicholas Brothers were absorbing and using the dance rhythms of the big bands, they were also broadening their dance vocabulary by working with choreographer Nick Castle at Twentieth-Century Fox. He was the one who embellished their tap routines with balletic and acrobatic moves, plus a blazing assortment of slides and wings, splits and jumps they had never before imagined being able to perform. Nick Castle, born Nicholas John Cassaccio in Brooklyn, New York, in 1910, began his career in Hollywood in 1935 as Dixie Dunbar’s tap teacher, but he was not a rhythm tap dancer per se. His strength as a choreographer to and collaborator with the Nicholas Brothers was not so much his invention of rhythmically complex combinations but his imaginative extension of their tap choreographies; they became musically and visually succinct extravaganzas to music

136 TAP DANCING AMERICA that was always played by a big swing band. In Down Argentine Way, Castle added the jumps that Fayard performed over his handkerchief during his challenge dance, as well as the back-

sliding splits. In one scene in the film Tin Pan Alley (1940), in which the brothers are two marble figures who come to life in a harem—bare-chested and bare-legged, and swathed in gold-brocaded briefs and turbans—Castle added slides and wings, splits, and jumps to their routine. In The Great American Broadcast (1941), Castle’s idea was to have the brothers dancing on suitcases and jumping through the window of a moving train into midair, doing 180-degree splits. For Orchestra Wives (1942), Castle had them running up the proscenium walls and had Harold running up and pushing off the wall into a backward flip and split.

STORMY WEATHER The most tantalizing of Nicholas Castle collaborations was for Stormy Weather (1943), the Nicholas Brothers’ last film for Twentieth Century-Fox. That all-black musical extravaganza, directed by Andrew Stone, was choreographed by Clarence Robinson and Nick Castle, with songs by Ted Koehler, Andy Razaff, Fats Waller, Dorothy Fields, Jimmy McHugh, Harold Arlen,

James P. Johnson, and Irving Mills; and it featured Cab Calloway’s swinging big band. The story about a backstage romance between two entertainers, one a rising star, the other a mature dancer—played by the twenty-six-year-old Lena Horne and the sixty-five-year-old Bill Robinson—who fall in and out of love, was loosely based on the careers of James Reese Europe, Noble Sissle, and Adelaide Hall. In the film, Robinson taps a lively riverboat dance and sings “My, My, Ain’t That Somethin’,” as introduction to one of Clarence Robinson’s quintessential Lindy Hop choreographies for a chorus of fifty dancers; Lena Horne sings “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and then “Stormy Weather,” which is then danced by Katherine Dunham and her dancers; Fats Waller appears briefly playing his own “Ain’t Misbehavin’”; Ada Brown belts out a heart-wrenching blues; and Flournoy Miller and Johnny Lee do a classic black comedy skit of “indefinite talk,” in which the two men speak to one another, each one never letting the other complete a sentence yet understanding each other perfectly well. But it is Cab Calloway’s “Jumpin’ Jive,” in the last and only scene in which the Nicholas Brothers appear, that swept the film to the most swinging peak of excitement. Set on a stage in a ballroom, the scene for “Jumpin’ Jive” opened with a drum roll and the orchestra playing a brassy upbeat introduction, as Cab Calloway, in a shimmering white tuxedo, bounces up and down with baton in hand to the swinging four-beat rhythm. Turning to the camera, he calls out: “Oh boy!” And the musicians stand up and answer, “Whatcha gonna play, that game?” “Oh boy!” Cab repeats. “Whatcha gonna play, that game?” they answer back and sit down. “Boogally boogally boogally BOY!” Cab rhymes and scats, as he moves to a corner of the stage, near a cluster of tables where the guests are seated. And the Nicholas Brothers, who are seated at one of the tables, jump on top of their table to answer. Dressed in tailcoats, they jump from table to table, then over the railing and onto the stage floor. Stepping and sliding across the floor, they follow Calloway to center stage and begin their tap dance (the A section). Spins, cramp rolls, turns, and crossover steps are woven into an intricate pattern of sound and movement, as the brothers spin out backsliding rhythms that slip them smoothly from place to place on the stage. In the second A section, they repeat and vary their step patterns in alternating solos and duets. Then, with a back-slide split that springs up into a jump-split, they land on the platform where a row of musicians are seated. In the bridge (the B section) the brothers jump onto round pedestals that look like the tops of large drums. Drumming the rhythms with their feet, they spring from one pedestal to another, moving higher and higher, up past the rows of musicians, drum-dancing their way to the highest pedestal. Then the brothers jump over the heads of the musicians, skipping lightly from drum to drum until they land once again on the stage floor.

JUMPIN’ JIVE (FORTIES) 137 The second dancing chorus ends with the brothers jumping three steps at a time up a flight of stairs onto a long and narrow platform crowning the rows of musicians. Dancing along the platform, the brothers alternate turns with slides, splits with pull-ups, then spring onto the top of a grand piano to trade fours with the pianist. From the piano, they leap over the heads of the musicians onto the stage floor, their split-and-recover a visual counterpart to the

sliding sound on the trombone. Jump-turning and figure-eighting around each other, they dance their way across the floor, and then up a curved flight of stairs, leaping three stairs at a time. Slipping around each other in figure-eights at the top is the prelude to the breathtaking series of descents down the stairs: first Fayard jumps down one step and lands in a split, then Harold leapfrogs over Fayard to land on the next step into another split; Fayard recovers and jumps over Harold’s head to land in yet another split—and they alternately recover, jump over each other and onto the next step into another split, until they reach the bottom of the stairs. Skidding victoriously across the floor, they are suddenly halted by the piercing wail of a trumpet, which spins them around and catapults them back up the flight of stairs—Harold on one side, Fayard on the other. Jumping three steps at a time, up the stairs, they turn around at the top and slide, in full split, down each of the curving ramps, pulling up just in time for Calloway to shout out, “Everybody dance!” Fred Astaire told the brothers that the “Jumpin’ Jive” number in Stormy Weather was the

greatest number he had ever seen on film. He would have been more impressed had he known that the choreography was filmed all in one take. Despite the unanimous critical praise the Nicholas Brothers received, their five-year contract with Twentieth Century-Fox was not renewed. By 1945, the reasons had as much to do with the brothers’ maturation as jazz dance artists as with the shifting racial politics in Hollywood during the postwar years.

War Time The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, unleashed a terror of the Japanese that shook America. Within weeks, wartime mobilization set in motion social, political, and economic developments that were to transform American society for generations to come. Among those were changes that aided black Americans in their long struggle for civil rights. In 1940, about 70 percent of African Americans were living in the rural South; during the 1940s, more than 2 million moved to northern and western industrial areas for jobs created by the war effort. Although the accelerated migration to northern urban centers created new urban ghettos, resulting in overcrowded housing and hard-pressed social programs, blacks gained independence from the overwhelming social constraints they had endured in the South, among them the sharp limits on their expression of civil rights. In 1941, black determination to fight racism became obvious when the March on Washington Movement, led by A. Philip Randolph, insisted that black Americans challenge the employment policies of the federal government and demand equal treatment in the workforce. This led to the establishment, in June 1941, of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee for Employment, and very soon black employment increased dramatically. Nevertheless, wartime jobs failed to address the promise of equal opportunity because most were at low levels, with blacks usually hired as unskilled laborers, janitors, or scrubwomen rather than as technicians, skilled craftsmen, or secretaries. Even after the war, the Jim Crow laws still maintained “separate but equal” segregation in the South (and in Washington, D.C.) in housing, transportation, education, and public accommodation. Jim Crow laws prevailed, as well, in some states of the Midwest. De facto segregation continued just about everywhere else. The country’s simultaneous postwar optimism, prosperity, and ongoing oppression spawned anger and

138 TAP DANCING AMERICA frustration in black Americans; a new spirit of assertiveness became part of the postwar protest movement, extending into the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.’ Produced during the war years, Stormy Weather was considered as “wearing its black patriotism on its sleeve,” as one film historian puts it.’ The story recounting the life of Robinson’s veteran hoofer was told through a series of flashbacks, from the Jazz Age through the swing era. It simultaneously drew on the lives of jazz musicians James Reese Europe, Noble Sissle, and Eubie Blake, their images intercut with newsreel footage of the victorious 15th National Guard deployment, marching up New York’s Fifth Avenue, with its Croix de Guerre ribbons flying on its guidons—and with footage of Harlem, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Pekin Theatre in Chicago, and other sites of African American performance culture. The film addressed the srowing ideological tensions between integration and cultural uniqueness, and it produced in the minds of many black activists an anxiety over the implied retreat from integration in Hollywood films. Further complicating a growing debate, Stormy Weather was released during the summer of 1943 as “race riots” broke out in Harlem and Detroit, and “zoot suit” riots hit Los Angeles. The riots drew attention to the persistence of racism in the United States. The movie industry, which had added to the pressures surrounding an enhanced status of blacks in films, was seen to be a factor. Twentieth Century-Fox considered pulling Stormy Weather from distribution; yet the decision to release it earned praise from blacks in all political sectors. Like most wartime movies, Stormy Weather made a profit, with long runs in key cities and southern towns. More important, the film spoke to the conscience of liberals, while signaling a general retreat from the production of all-black Hollywood musicals.

These factors were, perhaps, reason enough for Twentieth Century-Fox to allow the Nicholas Brothers’ contract to lapse: the studio saw no commercial advantage in retaining a pair of African American specialty dancers. The more pressing reality confronting Fox executives in considering their contract renewal was that when Stormy Weather was released, Harold was twenty-two years old, and Fayard twenty-eight. The brothers were no longer the cute youngsters who charmed and disarmed audiences at the Cotton Club with their dimpled smiles and jubilant rhythm dancing. Precocious sophistication had given way to mature sexuality.

Historically, the black man’s dancing body aroused in a white audience some deeply entrenched fears of black power and sexual potency. The concert stage became the legitimate arena for controlling and subduing that threat. Minstrelsy, James Weldon Johnson wrote, had “fixed the tradition of the Negro as only an irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, shuffling, banjo-playing, singing, dancing sort of being.”* Black Broadway musicals in the teens and twenties only hardened the stereotype of black male dancers as easygoing innocents, whose dancing abilities could be fully appreciated in the simple delight they provided.* As long as the Nicholas Brothers projected the image of bright-faced innocents, devoid of any sexuality, they presented no challenge to the white world at large. In their films, they appeared in few scenes with women, unless with an all-female chorus with whom they never exchanged a line of dialogue. The only exception was the “Chattanooga ChooChoo” number in 1941’s Sun Valley Serenade with the black songstress Dorothy Dandridge, whom Harold Nicholas later married. What was Fox to do with the Nicholas Brothers in 1945? They were now too old to be cast as a pair of carefree teenagers; too talented and too proud to accept roles as tap dancing shoeshine boys; too young and sexually potent to play the role of veteran hoofers past their prime (as had Bill Robinson in Stormy Weather). It was only a

matter of time before the brothers would be doomed to experience the same restrictions and taboos as any other African American man living in the generally segregated American society of the 1940s.

JUMPIN’ JIVE (FORTIES) 139

Million-Dollar Legs and the Fastest Feet in Town While black musical artists continued to suffer notorious and systematic stereotyping, segregation, and the denial of substantial roles in Hollywood, white musical artists were becoming stars with the onset of the golden age of movie musicals. Feeding off the tragedy of World War II and the public’s need for escapism, Hollywood churned out a multitude of revue-type musicals—many of them low-budget formulaic “B” movies, classified as home-front-morale-

booster films, filled as they were with patriotic fervor and camp—whose characters best expressed themselves through song and dance, most often tap dance, as this was the period in which tap became almost synonymous with movie-musical dancing. It was the era in which children grew up “believing the greatest goal in life was to simply feel so good that you could twirl on a shiny floor like Fred Astaire or breeze down a sidewalk like Gene Kelly,” Larry Billman

writes in his book on film choreographers.’ The movies also had them believing that they should look as good as the platinum-blonde Betty Grable or the raven-haired Ann Miller, who wowed audiences with their beauty, brilliant smiles, and legs so uniquely talented that their respective movie studios insured them for $1 million.

BETTY GRABLE Elizabeth Ruth Grable was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 18, 1916. She was propelled into acting by her mother, who, after the family vacationed in California, announced that she was returning to Los Angeles with Betty to launch her daughter’s film career. Grable was enrolled in Hollywood’s Professional High School and in Ernest Bletcher’s Academy of Dance. She made her film debut at age thirteen in the chorus of the musical Let’s Go Places (1930), her youth concealed by blackface makeup for her featured number. Her mother then gave her a makeover, which included bleaching her hair platinum blonde, and got her a contract under a false identification of her age. When the deception was discovered, she was fired, but soon

after that she was chosen by Busby Berkeley to perform in the chorus numbers in the film Whoopee! (1930); in it, she led the opening number, “Cowboys.” Her first featured solo was the “Let’s K-nock K-neez” number in The Gay Divorcee (1934), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In 1937, Paramount signed her to a contract and gave her leads in minor movies, but she soon realized that nothing much was happening in her movie career and accepted an offer to appear on Broadway in the Cole Porter musical Du Barry Was a Lady (1939). It drew rave notices, Grable got plenty of attention for her dancing, and Hollywood could not wait to get her back. Twentieth Century-Fox signed her to a long-term contract and starred her in the spirited Technicolor romp Down Argentine Way (where she was featured in many more numbers than

the two and a half minutes allotted to the Nicholas Brothers), thus launching a spectacular movie career and a comparatively long reign as “queen” of Hollywood musicals. In fact, Betty Grable displaced the young Shirley Temple as the top box-office draw during the 1940s. Moon over Miami. In the splashy 1941 Technicolor girl’s-dream-come-true Moon over Miami, Grable plays Kay Latimer, a woman weary of her waitress job at a Texas drive-in who gambles on a plot to land a rich husband. Latimer heads to Miami with her look-alike sister, their aunt posing as their maid. In very short time she finds a millionaire, and becomes affianced, thanks to her good looks and singing-dancing charms. Grable shines in two musical numbers in Moon over Miami, her third film for TwentiethCentury Fox. The first is at a hotel party where she sings “You Started Something” and arouses the desires of a young and handsome millionaire (played by Robert Cummings) and two young

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smooth slides and rippling tap steps in unison while staying glued to their loveseat, Grable sits

right down and joins them in a little challenge dance. When she rises to her feet to dance between the men, she holds her own, slip-sliding and tap-turning steps; in the finale of the routine, she performs in-the-trenches, military cramp rolls, and boogie-woogie steps. Grable was a petite, compact, shapely dancer whose talents are best seen in “The Kindergarten Congo,” a duet with the film’s choreographer Hermes Pan (his first onscreen appearance) that combines tap with jazz and Latin ballroom dance. Wearing a silver-sequined halter top, with midriff, and a shimmering white gown, which she makes sure to swoosh on every turn, it is easy to feast the eyes on her radiant face and to enjoy the flowing movements of her renverse turns; but she also knows when to draw attention to her feet and the glittering rhythms tapped in two-inch high heels. She takes a feminine approach to rhythm dancing, in which shoulders, arms, legs, and hips are in curvaceous display. Grable’s dancing with Pan, who collaborated with Fred Astaire in creating dances for Ginger Rogers, invites comparison between the women. Both are blonde and petite, and Rogers had, as Arlene Croce said of her, “one of the most elegant dancer’s bodies imaginable.”° But on film, and perhaps because she is not eclipsed by a starring male partner, the clarity of Grable’s technique, her musicality, and her rhythmic sensibilities, rival those of Rogers.

Pin-up Girl. Grable was enjoying her reign as box-office champion when she posed in 1943 for her iconic pin-up photo which, along with her movies, became escapist fare among Gls fighting overseas in World War II. Studio photographer Frank Powolny’s photo—Grable in a onepiece white bathing suit, smiling over her shoulder as she stands with her back to the camera, which captures her curvaceous bosom, bottom, and legs—celebrated her body and its highvoltage feminine energy. The pose also authorized her body as a force she was entitled to use; her status with Gls helped lead to the 1944 musical comedy Pin-up Girl and to salaries that made Grable the highest paid female worker of any sort in the country. Fox insured her legs for $1 million through Lloyd’s of London. That Technicolor musical comedy, directed by Bruce Humberstone, with dances staged by Hermes Pan, cast Grable as Lorrie Lorraine, a famed World War II pin-up girl and the most popular girl in the USO in her small midwestern town. In the film, her popularity does not come by way of her dancing but her golden looks. Wearing a spotless white apron dress, her blonde hair tied back in soft curls, she swoons the men when singing “You’re My Little Pin-up Girl,” but turns the tap dancing over to the Condos Brothers. Stuffed into a hot-pink, skin-tight

JUMPIN’ JIVE (FORTIES) 141 dress, with a split clear up her leg, she performs the apache dance in “Once Too Often” with famed ballroom dancer Fanchon, which was built on long-strutting steps and deep lunges, with only a flurry of taps thrown in for dramatic accent. The final military number had Grable in uniform, as a femme drill sergeant, calling out marching orders to a battalion of women stepping in precision unison. That number, choreographed by Alice Sullivan, recalled the precision military tap routines that populated musical stages through World War I, when tap and stepping was utilized as a means of demonstrating wartime patriotism.

ANN MILLER Betty Grable may have been wartime’s most ravishing pin-up girl, the girl who finds her mil-

lionaire and marries. Yet the reigning queen of wartime movie musicals, who never got married and rarely got kissed, was Ann Miller—the raven-haired, long-legged, sexy dancer with the machine-gun taps. Miller was born Johnnie Lucille Collier in Chireno, Texas, on April 12, 1923. Her father was a criminal lawyer; her mother, Clara Birdwell, was a homemaker who was half Cherokee. When Johnnie Lucille was three, the Colliers moved to Houston, Texas, and her mother enrolled her in dancing school, partly to build up her legs, which had been affected by rickets. But ballet was not her forte, and after seeing Bill Robinson in a personal appearance in Houston when she was eight, she set her sights on tap dance. Robinson, she claims, gave her her first tap lesson, and she soon was performing in clubs and local theaters. At age nine, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles, where she enrolled in the Fanchon and Marco dance school. Calling herself Annie and adopting the stage name of Ann Miller, she performed dance routines at

meetings of local civic organizations, earning $5 a night plus tips. After watching Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1936 she turned her attention to sharpening her tap dance skills. Appearances in vaudeville theaters led to nightclub bookings and a sixteen-week engagement at the Bal Tabarin in San Francisco, where she was spotted by an RKO talent scout. He arranged a movie audition, which led to her first film, a nonspeaking part in New Faces of 1937. With her vibrant personality, great legs, and dazzling style of tap dancing, RKO awarded her a sevenyear contract when she was only thirteen (she claimed to be eighteen)—and would later insure her legs for one million dollars. Miller was a remarkable, self-propelled young talent. At age fourteen, she played Ginger Rogers’s dancing partner in the film Stage Door (1937), which also featured Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Eve Arden. A year later, she was borrowed by Columbia Pictures to appear as Essie Carmichael, the fudge-making ballet-dancing daughter in the Academy Award— winning You Can't Take It With You, directed by Frank Capra. Back at RKO, she played Hilda in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service (1938). In 1939, she made a smashing Broadway debut in George White’s Scandals, creating a sensation dancing “The Mexiconga.” She then signed a new seven-year contract with Columbia and was starred in a succession of wartime B-rated musicals, such as True to the Army (1944), in which her solo routines were the high point. Her personal rat-a-tat, mile-a-minute tap style warranted that she choreograph all her own solo routines. Her notoriety as “Queen of the B’s” came from her musical adaptability in working with a number of big band, swing, and Latin orchestras. They included Rudy Vallee and Edwardo Durant in Time Out for Rhythm (1941); Freddie Martin and Orchestra in What’s Buzzin’ Cousin? (1943); the orchestras of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Alvin Rey, Charlie Barnet, Glen Gray, and Teddy Powell in Jam Session (1944); and the Kay Kaiser Orchestra in Carolina Blues (1944). Tagged “The HOTTEST rhythm in pictures,” Reveille with Beverly starred Miller as Beverly Ross, the moderator of a 5:30 Am radio show with swing music dedicated to local servicemen. The music was played by the orchestras of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bob Crosby, and

142 TAP DANCING AMERICA Freddie Stack, with singing by Frank Sinatra and the Mills Brothers. This revue-type musical was made under a formula by which B movies were produced in immense numbers. Viewed today, many of these films are perfectly awful, especially those classified as Word War II homefront morale-booster films, filled as they were with patriotic fervor and camp. Reveille was remarkable within its category insofar as it was the first Hollywood picture to take full advantage of the fact that the average movie audience was then almost identical with the audience for dance bands. The orchestras in the film simply played the music that had made them so popular with their fans, just as they had recorded it or played it in public and radio performances, and they were filmed as they appeared on ballroom or theater stages (with the exception of Ellington and band, who were filmed at the studio). Easter Parade. In 1948, Miller left Columbia and was signed by MGM to star in Easter Parade, playing the role of Nadine Hale, who loves Don Hewes, played by Fred Astaire, who loves Judy Garland, who loves Peter Lawford, who loves Judy Garland. The film was directed by Charles Walters, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, and musical numbers staged by Robert Alton. “To be in a picture with Fred Astaire is every girl’s dream,” Miller said. Indeed, she danced with a dreamlike grace with him in “It Only Happens When I Dance with You,” despite the fact that Miller, five foot seven in her stocking feet, had to wear ballet slippers. But it was as a soloist in one scene—in the film, starring Nadine Hale in the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1912” number—that she sang “Shaking the Blues Away” and with it delivered the snazziest song-and-dance in 1940s musical film. “There’s an old superstition, way down South / Everybody believes that trouble won’t stay, if you shake it away,” she began. In the opening long shot of the number, she was posed on a chiffon-draped stage, wearing a long, bright yellow skirt, elbow-length gloves, and a blacksequin bustier that squeezed her body into hourglass form. As she continued, the camera zoomed in on a close-up of her face and full red lips. Then it zoomed out to a medium shot and she ripped off the front panel of her skirt to reveal a pair of long and shapely sheer-blackstockinged legs with flowered garters. She sang, “Shaking the blues away; unhappy news away / If you were blue, it’s easy to, shake off your cares and troubles,” strutting like a runway model directly into the eye of camera while swiveling hips, shaking shoulders, and slicing the air with her long-gloved arms, all as a wake-the-senses preface to her tap dance. It began with a tittering ripple of heels on the bridge of the first chorus and built with a neat and speedy style of paddle-and-rolling, in high heels, in which the standing leg keeps the beat with heel-drops

as the working leg paddles. She danced the second chorus tacit, spewing out moves and rhythms made more tantalizing by hits on the bass drum, as if she were doing a strip burlesque. She brought it all to a climax on the last chorus, circling the stage with sassy kicks, cross-backs, and ball-chain steps that whiplash her into long-lined and languorous back arches, and ending with a dizzying set of twenty-four single-preparation single and double turns—and a flashing smile. Miller’s lexicon of tap steps was similar to Eleanor Powell’s hip-strutting, head-to-the-floor

back-bending, multiple-turning mercuric moves, but Miller preferred a vigorous approach that was athletic and speedy. She claimed to be able to dance at five hundred taps per minute, which no one disputed. Remembered in the popular imagination as an athletic, long-legged tap dancer with lacquered raven hair and Nefertiti eye makeup, in the tap world she is renowned

for her dazzling and gutsy style of dancing, one that was as brassy and goodhearted as the showgirl roles she played in her films. Blending glamour and razzmatazz with speedy precision, Miller came as close to hoofing in high-heels as any female dancer in the golden age of movie musicals.

\ a’ Ann Miller, who claimed to be able to < oy NI | tap dance five hundred taps per minute, ae en N ? Vy) challenging the speed of her taps with a io oa. ~ a i Ry A aPraia “re le See ‘a ry hy, Ht /re\/ eg bi nn a a Wa ._ — aes ies A 4 ty SG XN

a| ~~ | : ms 1 : \ *\ / | . ’ : a || >|f.’gy 7 | it ¢ Tt) y=“") ‘iy number ever show business, alta"Sih fi) a. ~ La said Coles, “all neat and composed a i Naa Wy exe \ J I

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Waters gave us, “Taking a Chance . ay ei \ / on Love.’”””? The in Vernon Duke tune7h ‘ | 5ir“Wy; vy \ | that Waters sang the Broadway

production Cabin in Ww the| Sky (1940) and in theof 1943 Vincente ‘ Es | “i I | Minnelli—directed film version (to te a

Bill Bailey’s whisking soft-shoe) Va eI tt was in and medium up-tempo. It was Cole’s Atkins’s choice to slow| ~| éPs>2 a

down “Taking a Chance on Love,” i oa aa, x as a way to turn their soft-shoe into| MS = = PP aa Jigen a study in suspended animation. wt ms me 5 4 2 : ee “Floatingabout across the if ‘ a"breath Pao” vstae pat. . ; a blown byfloor the asmere of softly-clicking taps, balancing at the edge of andante swings, sliding down into amused and delicate riffs,”*? Coles and Atkins managed to trump all others. Said Coles, “Our soft-shoe became so big, we never successfully followed it.”*?

Although Coles and Atkins soft-shoe was a masterpiece in adagio dancing, their most significant achievement was their assemblage of tap dances formed into a suite of rhythm dances in a continuous flow that climaxed musically. The class act also had a set musical arrangement, which ensured that any band worked with would play their music as rehearsed. Coles and Atkins had their music arranged by Chappy Willett, who, said Coles, “was the greatest arranger, as far as the dance act was concerned.” With a musical arrangement, instead of being episodic, there was a continuous weave of sound and movement; the resulting tap work not only dovetailed with the melody but also included special accents that were reinforced by the accompaniment. While elegant dress, aural precision, a detached coolness in performance, and flawless execution were the requirements of the class act dancers, what further distinguished the Coles and Atkins class was their emphasis on “pure dance,” the elimination of any elements that would label it flash. As Coles, explained, “Cholly and I were two straight, stand-up dancers, clean-cut, did wings—the extent of any kind of acrobatic stuff were wings, and wings were very popular—and we did the slowest soft shoe ever in show business, and it was all neat and composed, and we had good music, and we had good costumes. We dressed well, we presented ourselves well, and we didn’t resort to any kind of trickery as far as our act was concerned.” As Coles and Atkins reached the pinnacle of perfection in their class act, audiences in the late 1940s were becoming less and less interested in “pure” tap. In a performance at the Lookout House, a gambling casino in Covington, Kentucky, audiences were not especially interested in tap dance, so they began to add comedy, with only partial success. In 1949, at New York’s

JUMPIN’ JIVE (FORTIES) 163 Ziegfeld Theatre, in the Broadway musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, they stopped the show with the Jule Styne number, “Mamie is Mimi,” to which choreographer Agnes DeMille had added a ballet dancer. By the time Gentlemen Prefer Blondes closed in 1952, Coles and Atkins found that jobs were scarce. The big band era was swiftly drawing to a close, vaudeville had vanished, television was in its infancy, a new style of balletic Broadway dance that integrated choreography into the musical plot became the popular stage form over tap dance, and night spots became small spaces with piano bars or small cool-jazz groups. They each took new jobs. Coles opened the short-lived Dance Craft studio on Fifty-second Street in New York City with tap dancer Pete Nugent. Atkins’s vocal coaching skills were solicited by the Shaw and the William Morris agencies—which led to his being named staff choreographer for Detroit’s up-and-coming Motown Records. Much as they sought out work for the act, they could not counter the steady decrease in the interest of tap dance in the 1950s. “No work, no money. Tap had dropped dead,” Coles remembered of that decade.*" And so the greatest of class acts that Coles and Atkins had taken a decade to bring to perfection retrograded into a ten-year-long demise. They would play their last gig together in 1959, dancing at the Palladium Theatre on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, between movie showings. “We followed some huge musical extravaganza, like The Sound of Music,” Coles recalled. “The audience couldn’t have cared less about two tappers doing a soft-shoe. The drummer in the pit must have been 180 years old, and when we gave him the tempo for “Taking a Chance on Love,’ he couldn’t believe it. So he played it his way. When we finished, I said, ‘That’s it.’ I threw in the towel.”*»

(FIFTIES)

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL

CHALLENGE! King of the One-Legged Dancers versus Hal LeRoy (The Ed Sullivan Show, March 13, 1955)

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” Ed Sullivan announces on his Sunday-evening variety show on CBS-TV, “next on this really good show, the sensational Peg Leg Bates.” The studio roars with audience applause, its orchestra’s horns play the first bars of “Shine,” and the king of onelegged dancers swaggers across the stage and catapults into a limb-swinging tap Charleston, his wooden peg leg slicing the air as a musketeer would his rapier. Through two speeding choruses, he translates the textbook of tap steps—from Susie-Q and shuffle-off-to-Buffalo to nerve-

tapping, tapping turns and one-legged wings—for his deep-toned wooden peg and his high-toned tap shoe, and finishes with in-the-trenches and a high-kicking cakewalk strut. On the nineteen-inch black-and-white television screen that sits, framed in a console, in the darkened living room, the animated figure of the one-legged dancer is starkly clear: he is the undisputed king of one-legged dancers, the fastest-dancing man in town. At the peak of the applause, Sullivan returns to the stage to announce that Hal LeRoy, the tall and gangly white man standing beside him, has come on the program to challenge the onelegged king. Born John LeRoy Schotte in Cheviot, Ohio, in 1913, and of Irish parentage, LeRoy had studied jig-and-clog with Ned Wayburn, which led to his Broadway debut at age sixteen in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931. An upright, nimble dancer known for an eccentric style of tap dancing, based on the Charleston, which he called “Tanglefoot Tap,” LeRoy was one of the few Caucasian dancers to be allowed into the Hoofers Club, where he learned to compete. “So you want a challenge,” says Bates, shaking hands with his opponent. “Okay, me and you. Show me what you got.” LeRoy proudly trots out a double-time step with the drumming speed and precision of the County Cork dancing master Cormack O’Keefe, embellishing the step with leg wriggles and slippery ankle rolls that would make John Barton proud. Keeping

ei within the tradition of the Irish step-feis competition, he states the phrase on the right foot and

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 165 reciprocates the whole of it on the left. Studio applause. “That’s all right,” says Peg Leg, who steps forward to repeat LeRoy’s double-time leg-twisting step; then he tops it with side-brushing wings, giving the move a lateral splay. “That’s very pretty,” says LeRoy, slapping a low-five to Bates who takes the five, and says, “Show me another one.” LeRoy politely obliges by hopping into a side-traveling step-shuffle-step, crisscrossing the legs front- and backward into a whirling propeller step, which he is sure the peg-legged dancer cannot do. “You're not making this too easy,” Bates politely chides. Cordially shifting the conversation into a high-speed chattering of paddle-and-rolls—in a nod to the musicality of Irish feet—Bates ends in a full-splay balancing onto the rubber-tipped peg, as if it were a ballet shoe. Applause. LeRoy answers with a whirligig of single, double, and treble-shuffles, which lift him up into the air and set him hovering over the floor like a hummingbird. Bates returns with his aerial specialty— graceful hitch-kicks that sprint him upward into an air-arresting pose that allows him to click his heel against the wooden peg. He uses the applause as a recursion to Afro-America, nose-diving into trenches—body leaning forward on the diagonal, legs slicing backward—to end with a peg-

thumping rhythm break, which resurrects the flatfooted buck-dancing of another king of the buck-and-wing—Rastus Brown. Applause. Then, suddenly, it all goes dead for LeRoy—perhaps because he refused to abandon the aerial battering of Irish stepping for the grounded ragging of the African-American jig, or perhaps because the artificiality of playing a tap challenge to a television camera. Recusing himself, then, from the proceedings, he says that he is getting “too hot from the television lights” and

“why don’t we do something together?” Bates accommodates. Shifting from contenders to compadres, Bates and LeRoy move side by side with the double-shuffling-crossovers of the shim sham shimmy; then, moving offstage in a one-man exit, they look like a pair of seasoned vaudevillians.

Just when you think the two have struck a note of conciliation on their two-man exit, Bates subtly reminds the television viewers about who has scored the most one-ups in this friendly fire match. At the very last moment, before moving off the stage and off the screen, he dives onto his wooden leg, with arms spread like an eagle, and the other leg extended in arabesque, to soar off the stage in a rubber-tipped pattering of hops.

Pavane for a Dead King On November 25, 1949, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the most beloved dancer of the first halfcentury, who proudly lifted tap dancing up onto the balls of its feet, died at the age of seventyone in the Harkness Pavilion of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. The man who danced for pennies as a boy and for as much as $6,600 a week in the movies, had estimated accumulated earnings of more than $2 million at the end of his career when, after suffering a heart attack and having cataracts removed from his eyes, he could not climb or see the steps in his famous Stair Dance routine. Yet, almost all of his earnings had been spent, gambled, or given away. At the time of Robinson’s death, a benefit performance was arranged by his friends, with his hospital expenses paid for by a group of funders that included Judge Jonah Goldstein, Msgr. James O’Reilly, and Noble Sissle. Not even failing health had kept Robinson from dancing. When he finally had to be admitted to the hospital, he received

166 TAP DANCING AMERICA more than five thousand letters from admirers, among them President Harry Truman and members of his cabinet, congressmen, and state officials, as well as vaudeville, stage, and movie fans.

“His death takes from not only a great performer who entertained us but a great human being who made our lives richer and happier,” wrote the editorial board of the New York Times.

“His generosity was fabulous. ... His whole life consisted of doing the thing that he loved to do for the enjoyment of others. ... How many multiplied thousands of persons there must be who have experienced that ‘lift’ that they got from just watching ‘Bojangles’ in action. All of them will feel that in his passing they have lost a personal friend, and he would have wanted them to feel just that.”? After hours of waiting in the snow and cold, hushed throngs of an estimated 31,942 people filed past the body of Robinson as it lay in state at the 369th Anti-Aircraft Armory at Fifth Avenue and 142nd Street the day before the funeral. On the day of the funeral (November 28, 1949), Harlem schools were ordered to close at noon. Singers, actors, dancers, politicians, and other leading public figures filed into the Abyssinian Baptist Church on Seventh Avenue and 138th Street; there were 150 honorary pallbearers. Mayor William O’Dwyer joined the funeral cortege from the armory to the church and delivered the eulogy, which was conducted by the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell and assisted by the Reverend John Johnson, chaplain of the Negro Actors Guild. “Bill was a legend,” Powell said, “because he was ageless and raceless. Bill was a credit, not just to the Negro race, but to the human race. .. . And who is to say that making people happy isn’t the finest thing in the world?” Participating in the church service were Marian Anderson and Robert Merrill, the contralto singing the Schubert “Ave Maria” and the Metropolitan Opera baritone singing “The Lord’s Prayer.” Hazel Scott played Chopin’s “Funeral March.”

After the two-hour church service, there began a procession of more than four miles, with crowds that the police estimated at half a million lining at least eight miles of streets, as the flag-draped hearse carrying Robinson’s body rolled slowly from Harlem to Times Square via Lenox Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Central Park West to Columbus Circle, and then down

Broadway to the Palace Theatre, where “Bojangles” had scored many triumphs. At Father Duffy’s statue, a band joined the procession of choirs, three cars of flowers, and dozens of limousines before leaving for the cemetery. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, few people wept. Most impressive were the deep silences. When the procession moved along Lenox Avenue, for example, cars came to a complete halt; and “the shuffle of honorary pallbearers was as distinct as though in an empty room.” For the hundreds of tap dancers who paid their last respects to the “King of the Dancers,” Robinson’s passing foreshadowed an almost two-decade-long period of decline, during which tap dance, as a performance vehicle, slid into a deep sleep.’ On December 5, 1949, seven days after Bill Robinson was buried, the Copasetics, “a social, friendly benevolent club” of musical artists dedicated to preserving the memory of Robinson, was organized. Its members pledged, as stated in the preamble of the organization, “to do all in their power to promote the fellowship and to strengthen the character within their ranks”:

With these thoughts ever foremost in our minds, it should be our every desire to create only impressions that will establish us in all walks of life as a group of decent, respectable men. Bearing in mind that these achievements can only become a reality by first seeking the aid of God.’ The club colors were black, brown, and beige; the club flower, the yellow rose; and the club motto, “Everything’s copasetic’—the Bojangles expression for fine, okay, grand. The original

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The Copasetics (counterclockwise from top right): Billy Strayhorn, Phace Roberts, Milton Larkin, Francis Goldberg, Billy Eckstine, John E. Thomas, Charles Cook, Honi Coles, Pete Nugent, Ernest Brown, Lewis Brown, Peg Leg Bates, Frank Goldberg, Eddie West, Cholly Atkins, Emory Evans, Elmer Waters, Roy Branker, Paul Black, Chink Collins, LeRoy Myers, and (bottom right) Luther Preston (d. 1950), as it appeared in the souvenir journal of the 1960 annual ball. Billy Eckstine and Lewis Brown took the place vacated by two founding members, Preston and James Walker. (Copasetics Connection)

168 TAP DANCING AMERICA twenty-one members of this largely tap fraternity were Cholly Atkins, Peg Leg Bates, Paul Black, pianist Paul Branker, Ernest Brown, Honi Coles, Chink Collins, Charles Cook, Emery Evans, Francis and Frank Goldberg, trumpeter Milton Larkin, LeRoy Myers (who became the organization’s first president), Pete Nugent, Luther Preston, Henry Phace Roberts, John E. Thomas, James Walker, Elmer Waters, Eddie West, and composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn was president from the early 1950s until his death in 1967, at which time the club abolished the presidency in his honor.* While the Copasetics remained a vital social force in the Harlem community, with boat cruises, annual balls, and charitable performances, in large

part, they remained in isolation from a world that had turned its back on tap dancing and turned its attention to ballet and modern dance on the Broadway stage.

Tap’s So-called Decline There have been, through the years, a multitude of explanations, in the form of bitter accusations and logical rationale, for what was commonly referred to in the 1950s as “tap dance’s decline,” or, what Honi Coles called “the lull’—when tap dance waned in popularity as the sheer number of live performances diminished; tap dancers found themselves out of jobs; and venues for tap performances shifted from the live stage to the television screen. Some say it was the shift in aesthetic preference from tap dance to a new style of choreography in Broadway musicals, which integrated ballet into the musical plot—such as Oklahoma (1943), choreographed by Agnes DeMille—that sounded the death knell for tap. The situation became worse for tap on Broadway after the blazing success of West Side Story (1957) when a new style of jazz dance—with bits of ballet, exotic, acrobatic, and abstract modern movement— became popular. Writing in Dance Magazine, Marshall Stearns bemoaned the alleged use of “Jazz” in this so-called modern jazz dance, in which the arms, legs, and pelvis flew out in different directions, with seemingly no regard to the rhythm in the musical accompaniment. Stearns conceded that West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and dances by Jerome Robbins, was a milestone in the theater and that the choreography was hailed for “its splendid use of jazz dance.” Yet, Bernstein’s music was not jazz, and the dances employed by Robbins had only one “ancient” jazz move—“the finger-poppin’ hipster’s hunch, arms swaying, shoulders down, and knees up”’—a movement known as the pimp’s walk, derived from the cakewalking strut. Robbins’s mambo-styled dances, moreover, lacked “the rhythmic fire” of those that were being danced just around the corner from the theater, at the Palladium Ballroom.° Drummer Max Roach ascribed the waning popularity of tap dance to the postwar tax on dance floors: “It was the 20 per cent war tax levied just after the Second World War. It was levied on all places where they had entertainment. It was levied in case they had public dancing, singing, storytelling, humor, or jokes on stage. This tax is the real story behind why dancing, not just tap dancing .. . was just out.”°® As Jimmy Payne, a Chicago-based tap dancer and teacher, explained, “The cost of musicians and stage hands rose greatly in the fifties because they became unionized. People couldn’t afford to put on the shows anymore.”’ The slow demise of live vaudeville and the onstage variety act, and with them, the big bands that suddenly began dying out, caused a chain reaction. Every club that had a line of girls, a band, a lead male singer, a lead female singer, or a dancing act had to reduce the size of its big band—thus causing the chorus lines to be eliminated. As a result, many featured dancers found themselves out of dancing jobs. Honi Coles took a job as the production stage manager at the Apollo Theatre. Others found work as bellhops, elevator operators, bartenders, even carpenters. More pressingly, the music was also changing. Rock ’n’ roll was coming in, and with it, wrote film historian Arthur Knight about the musical film Let’s Rock (1958), “big screen

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 169 audiences were bombarded with the talents of a paralyzing assortment of rock ’n’ roll combos— trios, quartets, and sextets of shoulder-shrugging, finger-snapping, glass-eyed youngsters who mouth the inane lyrics with utter incomprehension.”* As the steady and danceable rhythms of 1940s swing gave way to the dissonant harmonics

and frenzied rhythmic shifts of bebop, the big bands downsized into small jazz combos, in which musicians could play in a smaller, more intimate format. “But where are you gonna go?” drummer Buddy Rich asked about the tap dancers. “You’re gonna dance up four flights of stairs, dance down four flights of stairs, do a couple of splits, a couple of six-tap wings, and then where are you going? You're going to be an opening act all your life? It wasn’t that dancing was limited. There was no call. When vaudeville died out, and nightclubs started putting in thirty girls, and Radio City put in sixty Rockettes, where was the tap dancer? It was a dying art.” A dying art? How could a three-century-long percussive dance tradition have died out? Granted, Bill Robinson was dead, after having danced nearly all of his seventy-one years, but tap dance did not go to the grave with him. As tap dancer Sandman Sims pronounced, “Tap dance did not die, it only went underground.” Perhaps a more holistic evolutionary explanation for the radical transformation that tap dance inevitably had to undergo is that in the ensuing period of mourning, after Robinson’s death and during which tap dance went “underground,” it lay to rest the half-century jigging tradition in order to be regenerated and transfigured by the restless attack, asymmetrical phrasings, and sharp angularities of bebop, thus to be resurrected into a modern jazz expression. Of course, tap’s musical transformation did not come without pain, loss, and personal insult to some of its elder practitioners. Bop was led by the new breed of young, angry, hip jazz musicians, many of whom felt that tap dancing was a form of Uncle Tomming—nothing more than a minstrel show of grinning-and-shuffling darkies. Here, the deep aesthetic differences were bared between a Fayard Nicholas, whose ethos of performing was to please and entertain audiences, and the new breed of dancers who, having been schooled in the musical philosophy of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, with its aesthetic of the “cool,” had no desire to entertain audiences. In fact, they could disregard them entirely. Nevertheless, time— literally and metaphorically—moved tap dance forward.

The Nifty Fifties The decade of the fifties is remembered for its postwar prosperity, the Cold War, McCarthy witch hunts, Korean War, atomic threats, Montgomery bus boycotts, the Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional and had to be phased out “with all deliberate speed,” and the ensuing struggle against the National Guard in desegregating the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was a decade of suffocating social conformity and political intolerance—a decade in which the civil rights movement escalated while the status quo and de facto segregation continued—and the highest priority was “to keep the peace and balance the budget.”"! In a decade in which (unlike the sixties) artistic expression could provoke suspicion and outright repression—in which dissent was made to seem illegitimate, subversive, or un-American, and the more patriotic temperament was a self-satisfied complacence—both popular music and social dancing, as well as jazz music and jazz dancing were undergoing a radical schism, for the first time since their naissance at the turn of the century. As jazz musicians formed small combos, jazz tap dancers in the prime of their careers found themselves out of work. It seemed to them a cruel, inexplicable punishment. In times of tumultuous and fractious schisms, artists may be our most vulnerable, absorbing the subterranean tensions and responding in kind with personal crises of their own,

170 TAP DANCING AMERICA suffering physical and mental breakdowns. In 1951, the Harlem multimedia artist, writer, and art historian Romare Beardon had an emotional and mental breakdown, as did the novelist Ralph Ellison in the early fifties. The saxophonist Charlie Parker, at the time of his January 17, 1951, recording session for Verve (in which he recorded “Au Provave,” “She Rote,” “K.C. Blues,”

and “Star Eyes” with Miles Davis on trumpet and Max Roach on drums), had only recently been discharged from New York Medical Arts Hospital.” In 1944, tap dancer Chuck Green (of Chuck and Chuckles) was committed to a mental institution because of the strain and the wear of performing. When Green was released in 1959, some fifteen years later, he was changed— extremely introverted and seemingly in a world of his own; his friends thought it a miracle he could still dance. By experimenting with the new harmonies, rhythmic patterns, and melodic approaches of bebop musicians, Green created his own bop-influenced style of rhythm tapping that was ad-libbed and ultracool. Beset by drugs, alcohol, and financial troubles, Baby Laurence stopped performing in the late 1950s; after a prolonged illness, he returned to Harlem in the early sixties to work again in small jazz clubs. Still, for the vast majority of dancers who found themselves out of work, the decade offered only bitter, enforced retreat. From the mid-1950s right on through the 1960s, as Cholly Atkins said, most of the buck dancers and many of the musicians who had played with big bands were struggling to make ends meet. Most of them wound up getting day jobs. A few were able to travel with a few of the big bands that were left, but that was a mere drop in the bucket. The tap teams were the ones that really suffered.’ Several black dancers left the country: Ralph Brown went to Canada; Harold Nicholas (separated for a short time from his brother Fayard) and Jimmy Slyde went to France, where black Americans were accepted and celebrated. The story of Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins tells it all. In 1949, the team of Coles and Atkins joined the Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “They said they wanted us,” said Coles, “but ballet dancers looked down on tap then, and they had no idea what to do with us.” They were asked by the playwright, Anita Loos, to speak in Negro dialect, and they flatly refused, so the dialogue was cut. They sat for weeks in their dressing room until, one day, musical director Jule Styne came by and asked how it was going. “And we said, ‘How’s what going? We aren’t dancing anything,” said Coles. So Styne played a song he had written, which they called “Mamie Is Mimi,” and the duo worked up a dance. Choreographer Agnes DeMille added a ballerina, Anita Alvarez—and they stopped the show. But that didn’t mean much. For months after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes closed in mid-September 1951, Coles and Atkins could not find a job. Eventually, they played summer stock, appeared in revivals of musical comedies in Dallas, Kansas City, and St. Louis, and appeared occasionally on television shows. In 1955, they went to work with singer Tony Martin’s act in Las Vegas. They enjoyed it, but for some unknown reason they were dropped from the show. In a sense, they were classed out of the market for audiences wanting comedy, acrobatics, and flash. In order to stay with tap dancing, they broke up the team in 1959: Atkins went to work as a coach and choreographer for Katherine Dunham’s School of Dance, and Coles opened a dance studio, Dance Craft, with Pete Nugent. The studio was short lived: “Tap had dropped dead,” said Coles.“

Not Quite Dead: Tap Dancers and Big Bands In the early 1950s, Duke Ellington and his orchestra toured with a number of tap soloists and sroups. These included Tip, Tap, and Toe in Boston; Baby Laurence, Bunny Briggs, Buster Brown, and Teddy Hale in Chicago; and Peg Leg Bates in New York City. In the summer and fall of 1951, Stump and Stumpy, Patterson and Jackson, Marie Bryant, and Peg Leg Bates all appeared with the Ellington orchestra in the Biggest Show of 1951, an all-black show (with the

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 171

exception of drummer Louie Bellson) that opened at the Boston Garden Theatre, played the Memorial Auditorium in Worchester, Massachusetts, to forty-two hundred people, and played the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence to a crowd of sixty-one hundred. They also played the Armory Theatre in Troy, New York, to forty-four hundred people and Carnegie Hall to a sellout crowd of twenty-eight hundred (at $4.80 a ticket) plus a hundred people standing by permission of the New York City Fire Department.” In 1955, even Duke Ellington—despite a series of nonstop engagements of his orchestra and the constant employment of tap soloists and teams, and the Silver Jubilee celebration of his twenty-five-year career at Carnegie Hall in November 1952—settled in New York for the entire summer and disappeared from the pages of the trade papers. He seemed to be at a low point in his career, the reasons manifold. Young people, even at the colleges where Ellington had been a frequent performer, were clamoring for the sounds of small modern jazz groups, such as those of Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, and Stan Getz. With so few nightspots and dance locations left for black big bands to play, Ellington found himself in competition with Count Basie, who was enjoying immense popularity with his new jazz band, and with Dizzy Gillespie’s modern jazz orchestra. It was Gillespie who did the first government-sponsored foreign tour of a jazz orchestra in the State Department’s cultural-exchange program; and it was the Basie band that in 1955 would be voted the winner (in the big band category) in the Pittsburgh Courier’s roth Annual Theatrical Poll.!° For economic reasons, Ellington signed a contract that kept him and his orchestra steadily employed throughout the summer by providing orchestral background at Elliot Murphy’s Aquashow in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York—a show for the family with water ballets, diving exhibitions, ballroom dance exhibi-

tions, and swimming/diving comedians, but no tap dancers.”

Still Not the Whole Story: Retirees and Survivors In the so-called nifty-fifties, the decade once described as “the happiest, most stable, most rational period the Western world had known since 1914,”"* a number of female dancers decided to retire briefly from the stage to pursue the domestic side of life. Hollywood tap star Eleanor Powell retired to raise her son, as did the Apollo Theatre’s chorus line dancer Marion Coles.

Some women who chose not to retire found themselves in competition with the men.

HARRIET BROWNE, TINA PRATT, AND BILLIE MAHONEY Tap dancer Harriet Browne said that in the 1950s and 1960s, there weren’t many tap dance jobs for black female soloists. Born on the South Side of Chicago on August 7, 1932, Browne came from a musical family: her mother played piano, her grandfather standup bass, her uncle played the saxophone, and her older sister, Marquita, had a voice “that could quiet any room.” Through the Depression years, the family entertained each other by singing, dancing, making music at home. Browne’s father was the first to give her tap lessons: “He could tap, and the rhythm fascinated me.”” She took every opportunity to watch the tap dance acts that played the Regal Theatre, a black vaudeville house in Chicago. She took her first formal dance lessons at age ten from the Bruce Sisters (Mary, Sadie, and Evelyn), from whom she learned jazz dance and rhythm time steps. At age fifteen, she began performing as a soloist and an ensemble chorus dancer, appearing in clubs in around Chicago; and her tap choreography landed her in the center of variety shows and clubs where she toured with the Cab Calloway band. But in the 1950s, when jobs for female tap soloists became scarce, she moved to New York, where she found a job working in the chorus line in a Greenwich Village club: “I remember

dancing in the Savannah Club, and there was a tap dancer named Derby Wilson, who was

172 TAP DANCING AMERICA good, but there were no women doing it. And there were no groups doing it. It was just like an act. When they put the show together, ‘we’re going to have a singer, we’re going to have a comic, we’re going to have a tap dancer, we’re going to have Joe Chisholm twirling his canes’— and that was the show. The tap dancer was always a male, although there were females out there who could do it, but they weren’t. They were doing chorus work. And the fellows were tap dancing. Then they stopped, and then there was no tap dancing, so you had to do other

things. Some of them got out of show business altogether and started tending bar, waiting tables, getting welfare, whatever they had to do to survive. Taps went away. In fact, I forgot I could even do it.””°

Tina Pratt fell in love with tap when her father took her to the Nixon Theatre to see the Whitman Sisters, Ralph Brown, Bill Robinson, and the Edwards Sisters. Born in Pittsburgh on January 15, 1935, she was the only child in her family to receive formal training in ballet, tap, and acrobatics when, at age six, she became the first black student to attend Mamie Barth Dance Academy in Pittsburgh. She danced professionally at age fifteen in nightclubs and show bars in Detroit and Cleveland, and at age eighteen she joined the act of the four McCoy sisters as a chorus, jazz, and tap dancer. After touring Europe and working in Montreal, she returned to the states in the 1950s to discover that tap dancing was no longer popular. “That is when tap dancers became comedians or MCs, singers, going into something else besides tap-dancing. It wasn’t popular... and the young people felt that tap dancing was more like Uncle Tom dancing, and so they away from that.” Pratt turned to exotic dancing, working strictly as a soloist in small black clubs in Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and Baltimore. “We had a chitlin circuit for black people, and we had black and white musicians’ unions. And when the musicians’ union merged, we went under the rules and regulations of the white unions. But at clubs in the black communities, we worked like $25 a night. White clubs you got more money. Black clubs couldn’t afford that. So they went from big bands to small bands... to small groups. And then they lost the chorus lines. And they just started doing two acts, a singer and a dancer.”” For the white tap dancer Billie Mahoney, who grew up in Kansas City dance schools in the 1930s and 1940s, “tap dance never died.” Instead—because it was not marketable in the 1950s—it was worked into such other forms of dance as military tap, Spanish tap, Hawaiian tap, acrobatic tap, ballet tap, toe tap, and jump-rope tap.” Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 23, 1927, she was enrolled at age four in the Kelly Mack dance school, taking fifteen minutes each of ballet, tap, acrobatics, and expression (singing). She began her professional career at age fourteen, performing at conventions, Army camps, and Midwest fairs. Her specialty was a six-minute tap routine that began with double-wing time steps and included the Cincinnati, leading into a backbend, and then splits, during which she twirled two batons. Sometimes booked on the same bill in Kansas City was a “colored” tap dancer, like the teen-age Little Buck (Conrad Buckner) who, she remembers, “could really lay down fast rhythms,” at which time Billy would be asked to perform other dances from her repertory, such as an American Indian acrobatic number with feather headdresses, a toe rumba, boogie-woogie on toe, or a Hawaiian-style hula tap. Mahoney, who earned a B.A. in dance at the University of Kansas City in 1949, went to New York by way of a summer of modern dance study at Connecticut College in 1950. Arriving

in New York that fall, she made the rounds of agents in the phone book on a Monday—and opened at the club Bal Tabarin (on Forty-fifth Street off Broadway) on Tuesday, tapping and twirling batons. Thus began a steady stream of jobs in and around the city. A good many of the shows for which she was booked in small clubs on weekends had a “colored” tap team, generally a comedy or flash act with acrobatic tricks, such as Stump and Stumpy, the Chocolateers, Moke and Poke, and Tip, Tap, and Toe. Not much attention was given to footwork in Mahoney’s

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 173 repertoire, since tap was merely the vehicle for getting there—tap dance brought Mahoney on with her batons. Similarly, for many comedy dance acts, tap dance carried them in and out of their routines and acrobatic tricks. One week, Mahoney answered a call in Show Business for a baton twirler, and she was hired to lead the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on the Arthur Godfrey and Friends television show. She used the $250 that the parade stint paid to hire Harry King (of the renowned class act of King, King, and King) to stage a class act for her. King immediately separated the baton twirling from the tap dancing, structuring a routine that began with a blues strut with top hat and cane and integrated high kicks, splits, and a walkover; it was followed with a “battle of the tempos,” in which she danced to a metronome that was placed on a pedestal in front of the microphone. As an encore, she returned with the baton-twirling portion of her former act, for a sure flashfinish. Although King staged the act with metal taps on her shoes, it was difficult to hear the taps. Mahoney found a way of moving her feet as if she was doing tap steps, but with no sound. Variety later described it as an “uneducated shuffle”; it was, said Mahoney, “a forerunner to jazz dance, with a lot of leg-o-mania and fancy footwork.” In the fall of 1951, the act Mahoney had been working on for a year was finally ready, but the New York theaters for which it had been prepared were closing down. In a short time, there would only be the stage shows at the Roxy Theatre, with its ice shows; the Palace Theatre, with “two-a-day” vaudeville; and Radio City Music Hall, with its Rockettes—a ballet corps and tap dancing, high-kicking chorus. When Mahoney performed at Loew’s Eighty-fifth Street and at the Jefferson Theatre on Fourteenth Street, two of last theaters to produce her act, she remembers “only one colored tap team on

ihe bill. Mahoney insisted that there was a general taboo against single girl dancers. “Too sexy for the Palace” was the comment from her agent. With few exceptions, she said, “Tap dance in the 1950s was a white man’s game.” George Tapps, Hal LeRoy, and Johnny Coy were in the presentation houses, and Paul Draper was in the concert hall. Ray Bolger occasionally appeared on television, doing his eccentric style of dancing. For white male dancers in the fifties, ballet-tap was the form of dance needed—and in an ironic prioritizing of skills, it was said that a tap dancer had first to be able to dance (meaning dance ballet)—tap was an added means of expression, seldom a source in itself. In 1953, in Buffalo, New York, Mahoney saw a dance act staged by Jon Gregory that was neither ballet nor modern, nor tap, nor ballroom, but seemed to use the elements of all these dance forms. When she visited Gregory in his Roseland Building in New York City, she saw a studio filled with dancers executing movements to the recorded music of the big bands. “It was like the modern dance I loved, but to the jazz beat that I knew so well through tap dance,” she said. “This was one the first modern jazz dance classes in New York.” Trading in her flat-

heeled black pumps for two-inch Cuban heels, and then three-inch heels—it was the look, not the sound, of the act that mattered—she worked her way up to being assistant in Gregory’s

modern jazz classes, knowingly confident that “those with tap in their background were better at the fast footwork and casual down to earth style required for the new jazz dance, than those with ballet only.” By 1960, there would be three main “modern jazz” dance teachers in New York: Billie Mahoney, Matt Mattox, and Luigi. Each had come from a tap dancing background.”4

Arbiters of Change: The Bop Revolution The music of bebop was a texture of fragments, repetitive, nervous, not fully formed. Its melodic lines underground, secret and taunting; its riffs jeering—“Salt peanuts! Salt

174 TAP DANCING AMERICA peanuts!” Its timbres flat or shrill with a minimum of thrilling vibrato. It rhythms were out of stride and seemingly arbitrary, its drummer a frozen-faced introvert dedicated to chaos. —Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

Tap’s transition from an exhibition form to an expressive form—from the buck-and-wing to rhythm tap—can be mapped according to the changes in the musical forms of African-American jazz. As Swing gave way to Bebop in the late 1940s, tap inspired its first inward-looking artists. They were willing to explore their own pioneering rhythmic inventions, to create percussive accents that were implied, but not bound to, the underlying beat, confirming an important observation made by tap dancer and theoretician Thomas DeFrantz about bebop’s radical displacement of the beat. On one level, bebop replaced the primacy of the beat that had been so evident in swing music, with its virtuosic renderings of harmonic and melodic structure. Bop assumed the presence of the beat, whether it was barely implied or clearly defined, expressing “an expanded experience of blackness, in which rhythmic structures, even when submerged, are presumed to be eternal. The bebop taught dancers that we don’t have to hear the beat to know it is there.”” The best jazz had always been music for dancing, but bebop, because of its complexity, was insistent on being music for listening. At first, few rhythm dancers listened hard to the new music or abandoned themselves into the dynamics and complexities of bop’s rhythmic maze. Those who were willing found an empowering musical freedom and expressivity—even for those acts with only spots of improvisation, because much of the material was already set when they went onstage. Bop opened the spaces for improvising explorations for dancers like Honi Coles, a great improviser who sought new interplay with drummers. “That’s what they did, especially the bebop dancers,” said James Buster Brown. “They were like drummers. Tap dancing and drumming are twins. They just don’t look alike.””° Although the emergence of bebop and the simultaneous decline of swing are often cited as reasons for tap’s demise in the late forties and early fifties, it was also the case that traditional dancers who were not inspired by bop’s intricate rhythms and unpredictable harmonic changes were reluctant to change their style to move forward with the new music. Those tap dancers who were willing became the arbiters of change—among them Earl Groundhog Basie, Bunny Briggs, Walter Green, Will Gaines, Lon Chaney (a paddle-and-roller with the rhythmic sense of a bop drummer), and Jimmy Slyde. Baby Laurence was the king of that style; some say he was the first bebop tap dancer, and others called it a draw between Baby Laurence and Teddy Hale.

LITTLE TEDDY HALE “Teddy Hale was everyone’s idol,” said tap star Gregory Hines, who with his brother Maurice was on the same bill with Hale at the Apollo Theater in the 1950s. “Everybody was doing routines, and I loved routines, but he [Hale] would come out for the first show and do ‘Begin the Beguine,’ dada da diddley dee bop shoo op, you know, it was like jazz. And for the second show he’d come out a little tired, and go into a slower tempo, java didee da java di dee, slower, stuff

like that. And the third show, maybe he scored, ’cause he went into this chaotic speed that blew my mind. And I said, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna try and come up with

stun

Born in Philadelphia in 1926, by the 1930s “Little Hale” was getting rave reviews in vaudeville. He danced the role of “the shadow” with the white vaudevillian, bandleader, and singer Ted Lewis (1892-1971), known for saying to audiences, “Is everybody happy?” His signature tune was “Me and My Shadow.” Tap dancer Pete Nugent, who saw Hale perform

“Little Teddy Hale,” 1937. (Private collection) : .

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his solo act at New York’s Paramount Theatre A ‘ ge in 1947, said he opened with three terrific S | choruses of a waltz before anybody realized what Y Uh. \

was happening, followed by a routine to “Begin v > the “he transitional threw in fivesteps light-that ; : °! ningBeguine,” choruses in ofwhich tap using only another dancer could appreciate.” In the » finale, Hale sat down in a chair and danced to an aor

up-tempo, two-to-a-bar (a very difficult feat), then ail Se

closed with a breathtaking assortment of spins,= é / flips, and splits. In the early 1950s, Hale and = / Babyother. Laurence were Ray sometimes pitted against each Trumpeter Nance recalled a battle f4, of the taps at the Club Harlem during one of the \ hottest nights of the year, as Laurence and Hale, ~ the sweat pouring off them, fought to a draw. oN Even Nance, a former dancer, could not decide who won. It was rumored that Laurence and Hale . met again in 1954, at the Harlem jazz club Mie. \eorus Minton’s Playhouse, with the same verdict. Gaol ’ ,

“There was never no clearer taps than Teddy

Hale,” Bill Bailey said about Hale, whose style he described as “easy and beautiful.”” Unfortunately, there are no intact tap routines by Teddy Hale in the visual record. One clip of his dancing on television in the 1950s has him in the middle of a routine, doing time steps that are so close to the floor that he appears to be skimming.” Wearing high-waist pants and a jacket with big lapels, he was free and easygoing, his arms moving gracefully, yet extremely

precise as he tapped a long phrase on his heels, clicking his toes. Hale got applause not only for the endless variations—for his time steps and rubberlegging rhythm steps—but also for his wide-legged straddling in which he continued to tap out a rush of fluent rhythmic phrases. Moving into his signature chair dance, he sat with folded arms as his black patent-leather shoes flashed out over-the-tops and lightning-fast rhythm breaks. Out of the chair, he went into swift tapping turns, not so much to fill in the sound with the taps but to enjoy the rush of the pivots, finishing with slides, turns, half splits, moon walks, and two front somersaults into a split and recover. With this dazzling routine, which was in large part improvised, it is easy to understand how Hale’s nonstop rush of notes, so like the flickering melodic lines and flyaway riffs of alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker—inspired and influenced a new young generation of rhythm dancers. There is one more clip of Teddy Hale dancing on the Milton Berle Show in the early 1950s.*°

It shows him, again wearing high-waist pants with a white cut-out shirt on his lanky and supple torso, performing a step pattern based on military cramp rolls. This second viewing of his dancing drew attention to him being a straight up-and-down dancer; he does not lean but hovers over the floor in fluent phrasings that go over the bar and, with no discernible rhythm breaks, make his rhythmic patterns of differing lengths. Because he stays buoyed on the balls of the feet, he is positioned to drop his heels in offbeat accents and go to slides from a wide second position to first positions. Traversing the stage, he pulls out a chair from behind the

176 TAP DANCING AMERICA curtain, slips down into it, and with arms folded proceeds into his chair dance, as in the earlier routine, this time finishing with a flip-into-a-split and recover. These two clips, however truncated, confirm that Teddy Hale was a virtuoso rhythm tap dancer in the bop tradition. We can only imagine how Hale might have continued to push the beat into “a texture of fragments, repetitive, nervous, not fully formed.”*' Hale died in 1959, some say of a brain hemorrhage, others say an overdose of narcotics. He was in his early thir-

ties. He had been dancing on and off at a seedy nightclub in Washington, D.C., where he had also been employed on and off as a janitor. When, in 1960, Whitney Balliett asked Baby Laurence who had taught him the most, Baby answered, “I’ve learned from everybody [but especially]... Teddy Hale. Hale got a sound, Lord, what a sound! He died last year.”*

LEON COLLINS: BOP CLASSICIST Leon Collins, born Leandre Kollins in Chicago on February 7, 1922, wanted to be a prizefighter as a boy, but in a short time he became a popular dancer in clubs around town. By the age of seventeen, he left Chicago for Detroit, where he married blues singer Tina Dixon. The two moved to New York City when she was signed to perform with the Jimmie Lunceford Band. Collins’s big break came when the opening act called in sick one night; Dixon recommended that her husband perform with the band. Billed as “Gangs of Dancing,” Collins was offered a five-year contract by Lunceford. By the late 1930s, Collins had also worked with Count Basie’s orchestra in Chicago and New York, and with the bands of Erskine Hawkins, Earl “Father” Hines, and Tito Puente. Collins’s style in his early years embodied a clean, clear tapping with an emphasis on melodic line, which set him apart from other dancers. Whereas most hoofers would dance successive eight-bar rhythmic patterns broken up by moments of virtuosic flourishes or breaks, Collins did away with repetitive eight-bar/break patterns. His tapping flowed along with the melody and behaved more like a trumpet or saxophone than a snare drum or tom-tom. “He wasn’t dancing like the other guys,” Dixon said. “He was different, dancing tapfor-tap, note-for-note.” This preference followed the style of Baby Laurence, whom Collins always accorded much respect, and of Teddy Hale, a friend with whom Collins traded steps. All

three were intimately involved with the new developments taking place in jazz music and dance during the late 1940s and early 1950s. They tailored their fast and free-form tap improvisations to the bebop that was being created by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, with whom Collins jammed informally on numerous occasions. Collins experimented with expressing in his feet what the musicians played on their horns and developed a melodic style of tapping that grew from his own musicality. “Tap is music,” he said. “We use our feet to get the same sound as an instrument.”*?

Though Collins danced to bop standards, like Gillespie’s “Night in Tunesia,” he also danced with disarming ease and shimmering speed to such classical compositions as Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and J. 8. Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in C Minor.” Dressed immaculately in a white or black tuxedo and bow tie, his sounds were soft and delicate

at first, gracefully embellishing the pianist Joan Hill’s rendition of Bach’s “Prelude.” Then, little by little, his movements grew more intense, his feet splashing the stage floor like summer rain pelting a roof, moving nimbly while the upper body remained still. What Collins had discovered was that the high speed and packed tempos of bebop-style tap was quite well suited to Bach’s sixteenth notes. The cruel irony of Collins’s career is that while he was developing jazz tap along the rhythmic and harmonic styles of the new bebop, opportunities for tap dancers were drying up across the country. Collins managed as best he could during this cultural and musical transition. He formed partnerships with other dancers to increase his performing opportunities; he learned

a

ie

ye se. Leon Collins, “Gangs of Dancing,” ca. 1960.

, : i wt 4 (Dianne Walker Collection)

ff J

LG OK to play the guitar, and he attended the Berklee

vet. — ee School of Music in Boston. In the early 1960s, 4. " he was forced to give up dance entirely and, for

- | Gy ~~ ‘ the next fourteen years, worked a polisher

Ae | > | and reupholsterer of used cars. Collins’s return

Le... # ~~ 4 4 : JIMMY SLYDE: THE GODBOLT

et ; \."| to tap dancing, choreographing —— would not cometeaching, until the and 1970s tap revival.

Jimmy Slyde says, “Ia New was the X-factor. I was an |a .‘‘ |A~. 4 }. \|placing outsider. I was not York dancer,” when himself within the context of the

ae q , y swing-to-bop revolution in tap dance. As the

7 =, 7" = tap dancer Bunny Briggs reminded him, “You

if ) z= came in on the tail end but then kept it going.”** , Slyde was born James Titus Godbolt in Atlanta,

Georgia, on October 27, 1927. Around the age of three, his family moved to Boston, where he received his early musical training at the Boston Conservatory in playing the violin; though the training gave him a good conception of music,

standing in one place for a couple of hours and bowing was difficult. He needed to move. Impressed by the tap dancers he’d seen perform in Boston and encouraged by his mother—who wanted him to do something other than baseball, basketball, and football to contain all that physical energy—he decided on dance. He enrolled in Stanley Brown’s studio in Boston, where he began the study of tap dance and ballet. His instructor Eddie “Schoolboy” Ford taught Godbolt how to slide. “It’s pure magic, and I don’t know how he does it,” wrote dance critic Sally Sommer about the move that became his signature inscription over a bebop line—and which prompted the name change to Slyde. “He’s upstage left and sliding downstage right as fast and smooth as a skier; arms held out to the side, head tilted. He stops the cascade by banking backward, slips into a fast flurry of taps, working quick and low to the floor, then ends the phrase by pulling up high and flashing off a triple turn... . Slyde improvises with rhythms coming down the backside of the offbeat playing those edges the same way he plays with the edges of his feet, scraping his shoes against the floor to pull out ‘sha-a-ahush’ sound like the brushes of the snare drums.”* Slyde regards tap improvisation and the ability to swing as a spiritually enlightened conversation, in which he can experiment with rhythm and tonality; for him, the sound of sliding into a cascade of taps is as important as each step. That he is a bop-influenced rhythm tap dancer is obvious from the list of performers he says inspired him. At the RKO Theatre in Boston, Slyde saw the bands of Count Basie, Artie Shaw, and Duke Ellington; he saw the sreat tap dance acts of Stump and Stumpy, Patterson and Jackson, Coles and Atkins, the Berry Brothers, and Nicholas Brothers. It was the style of Bunny Briggs, however, when dancing to the tune “Skyline” with the Charlie Barnett Orchestra, that became his favorite. Teddy Hale was another of Slyde’s idols, especially Hale’s routine to “Begin the Beguine,” which was danced note-for-note with the music. Of course, Baby Laurence was tops: “I’ve never seen anybody do anything better or greater, or more meaningful to tap dance than Baby Laurence.”*°

—_

= . Petronio) a

Jimmy Slyde performing at the Z p ey Jazz: .Festival, 1966. (Courtesy ofBerlin Peter

~

* If the 1950s was tough on tap dancers, : it was tougher still on bebop dancers. Slyde got a bit role in the Hollywood film A Star is

4 » Born (1954), starring Judy Garland, which

; led choreographer Nick Castle to provide y / him with studio space in which to work and teach as a means of survival. In 1966 at the Berlin Jazz Festival, Slyde, Baby Laurence, James Buster Brown, and Chuck Green were

| a hailed as “Harlem’s All-Star Dancers” with a band comprising Roy Eldridge (trumpet), Illinois Jacquet (tenor sax), Jimmy Woody (bass), Milt Buckner (piano), and Papa Jo Jones (drums). Europe then seemed the only

5 ee =f ;sixties, d , slydetherefore, returned Slyd to Europe, remaining host for jazz artists. In the late

— and in the seventies, he moved to France— until the tap revival called him back.

Television Television sets of many makes and models exploded into the American marketplace after World War II. Many families had accumulated some savings during the war years and were eager to purchase homes, cars and other necessities and luxuries that had been denied to them by the Great Depression and the wartime shortages. In 1946, only forty-four thousand homes had sets, only a few television stations were on the air, and broadcasting hours were limited. In 1949, there were three million television sets in homes, and almost all major cities had at least one station. By 1953, 50 percent of American homes had televisions. In 1954, the first model color television sets were sold using a fifteen-inch screen; later that year, nineteen-inch sets were made, and by 1955 all color sets were made with a twenty-one-inch picture tube. Televisions were very expensive at first, priced from about $100 to $500, depending on the size and cabinet enclosure; color sets sold for $750 to $1,000. Buck and Bubbles made history in 1939 by becoming the first tap dancers to appear on television, in the Night Club Revue, the first cabaret show to be televised.” In 1948, tap dancer Tommy Farrell appeared on Toast of the Town, the first in a long series of successful variety programs presided over by Ed Sullivan. Also in 1948, Johnny Barnes performed a tap routine on the Philco Television Playhouse. In 1949, Baby Laurence was featured with drummer Buddy Rich, pianist/organist Milt Buckner, and tap dancer Teddy Hale, each taking a chorus and then swapping eight-bar, four-bar and two-bar breaks, in Eddie Condon’s Floor Show, one of the first network series devoted to jazz music.** In 1947, Steve Gibson and the Red Caps (Romaine Brown, Dave Patillo, Emmett Matthews, Jimmy Springs, Andre D’Orsay) made their television debut on Steve Gibson’s Talent Showcase on WPTZ in New York City.*? In 1949, Dottie Saulters and the Coles and Atkins duo were

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 179 among the first dancers to be featured on CBS’s Harlem Jubilee, later called Sugar Hill Times. In 1949, Sandman Sims “moved along in rapid style” on The Adams’ Alley.*® Hal LeRoy, “whose loose and easy tapping has long been a vaudeville standard,” did two ingratiating numbers on the American Minstrels of 1949 variety show (Pick and Pat Minstrel Show), hosted by actor Jack Carter.’ That same year, the “famous tap teacher” Willie Covan and Taps Harris were guest performers on From Central to Vine,” and Peg Leg Bates made his television debut on CBS performing his “White Suit Dance” on This Is Show Business, hosted by Clifton Fadiman and actress Arlene Francis.”

On May 2, 1949, it was announced that Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was to appear within the next two weeks on DuMont TV’s Harlem House, “a new weekly Negro variety show” presenting “top name Negro acts as well as notables from the sports world and other phases of Negro life.”“* Robinson’s last performance on television was actually his star appearance on Texaco Star Theatre hosted by comedian Milton Berle on NBC, September 27, 1949; Robinson died on November 25, 1949. In the early fifties, television was still considered a new medium, said jazz dancer Billie Mahoney. “New York was Television City, and variety was what TV was about. The shows were live! Video tape did not exist! And one of the most talked about TV commercials was a tapdancing cigarette pack—rumor had it that it was Dixie Dunbar, who had been quite well known as a tap dancer on Broadway.”* New, however, did not mean lucrative. Television gigs paid very little. The top salary was about $150 a show for Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins, who around 1950 were the first black dancers on NBC’s Ford Star Revue, performing their “Mamie Is Mimi” number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. While they also had small appearances on the Kate Smith, Morey Amsterdam, Gary Moore, and Milton Berle shows, producers never wanted more than three minutes of dancing. Atkins was of the opinion that although a few dancers succeeded on television—John Bubbles, Bunny Briggs, and Bill Bailey (as well as Arthur Duncan and, later, Jack Imel, who made regular appearances on The Lawrence Welk Show)— they were too few to keep tap going. “Television helped to kill tap. See, it was very difficult for good tap to catch on television-wise [since] it had more depth to it than TV could accommodate. Staging it was expensive—a lot of money for rehearsals and adequate floors, so it just got eliminated.”“°

Truth be told, early television was the worst medium for presenting tap dance. The studio orchestras were loud, and the music did not swing. The camerawork was crude, and it often captured only the top halves of dancing bodies. The studio’s acoustics were abysmally insensitive to the sophisticated sounds of rhythm tap. Tap dancers looked shrunken on television, and their rhythms seemed to lose their clean-cut edge; facial and bodily effervescence became lost in the black-and-white dots and lines of the television screen. With live performance, one felt the corporeal charisma of the dancer, and on film, the dancer loomed larger than life. On a nineteen-inch television screen, the dancing body was a pixilated composite of light that just glared in the viewer’s face.

FINN MACCOOLS AND RAPPAREES: IRISH VAUDEVILLIANS ON TV Just as the vaudeville stage at the turn of the twentieth century had been dominated by the Irish acts, performed either by Irish people or by people pretending to be Irish, the varietycomedy television stage in the fifties had a strong Irish presence, with such hosts as Donald O’Connor, Jackie Gleason, and Ed Sullivan following in the footsteps of the Irish minstrel song-and-dance men. These Irish Americans, who apprenticed in vaudeville or were touched by its aura, would carry the dynamic, urban, inclusive vaudeville style into twentieth-century show business and, in the process, maintain an Irish presence in the entertainment industry.

180 TAP DANCING AMERICA

ED SULLIVAN: PRESENTING AVERAGE JOE Ed Sullivan was one of a host of Irish newspaper columnists and sportswriters to emerge in the 1950s pledged to the celebration of the regular guy—the street savvy, gritty “average Joe,” who was against all pretension. It was a voice that was buoyed by the 1930s New Deal celebration of the “common man” and World War II’s heroes, the GIs. From 1948 to 1971, Sullivan hosted a very popular variety program on Sunday nights, The Ed Sullivan Show, that became the viewing habit of millions of Americans. By welcoming rock ’n’ roll stars such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles on his stage, he made them acceptable to a then-reluctant mainstream America. He also used the venue to introduce some Irish music and dance groups, like the Little Gaelic Singers of Ireland, the McDiff Dancers, and the folk-singing Clancy Brothers. Then, too, Sullivan’s show brought performers to a national audience, acting as a platform that reinforced the celebrity and talents of well-known entertainers like Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Gene Kelly, and Donald O’Connor, who happened to be Irish Americans.

DONALD O’CONNOR: SONG-AND-DANCE MAN Donald David Dixon Ronald O’Connor was born in Chicago on August 28, 1925, into an Irish theatrical family. His father, John Edward “Chuck” O’Connor, was an acrobat with the Ringling—Barnum and Bailey Circus; his mother, Effie, was a circus bareback rider and dancer.

When they graduated from circus into vaudeville, all their children were initiated into the O’Connor Family, billed as “The Royal Family of Vaudeville.” O’Connor made his first stage appearance when he was three days old, lying onstage across a piano bench beside his mother who, not yet ready to return to heavy dancing, played the piano. At age thirteen months, he began making $25 a week dancing the Black Bottom and faking acrobatic tricks. He made his

film debut at age eleven, dancing an uncredited “specialty routine” with brothers Jack and Billy in the Warner Brothers musical Melody for Two (1937). Like most child performers who grew up in show business, O’Connor learned to dance by watching the hundreds of musical acts on the stage and screen, making tap comedy dance and acrobatic tricks his specialty. He received no formal training in tap dance until he went to work for Universal Pictures and took tap dance classes with the studio’s choreographer Louis DaPron, who, after a few weeks of classes, exasperatedly pronounced him “unteachable.” Unabashed, O’Connor developed his own style of tap dancing drawn from experience in vaudeville. O’Connor is seen, briefly, dancing a vaudeville-style tap routine, as one of the three Dancing Dolans in the 1939 Warner Brother’s musical On Your Toes. In the 1940s, after failing attempts to perform in what was left of vaudeville, he returned to Hollywood and became a star in a number of Universal Pictures’ budget-minded youth musicals. He was often cast as a brash and energetic young man and paired with the equally energetic actress and tap dancer Peggy Ryan. In the 1950s, O’Connor reestablished himself as a comedic actor and tap dancer on film and television. As Cosmo Brown, the sidekick chum of Gene Kelly in MGM’s classic film musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952), his gravity-defying, largely improvised rendition of “Make ’Em Laugh” is considered one of the funniest in film history. That number, along with the cheerily strutted “Good Morning,” danced with Debbie Reynolds and Kelly, and the vaudeville-inspired “Fit as a Fiddle” danced with Kelly, rewarded O’Connor with a Golden Globe Award (over Kelly) for his performance. In the mid-1950s, Paramount Pictures cast O’Connor in the film adaptation of Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Anything Goes (1956), with crooner Bing Crosby and dancer Mitzi Gaynor. With the decline of the studio system at the end of the decade, O’Connor launched himself into the television industry. He became one of the rotating hosts of The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950-1954, NBC); he then starred in three incarnations of

——

= *y\*

: ey Donald O’Connor, the fleet-footed Irish ) re 44 ~ leak Pon vaudevillian. (Photofest) < LN 3 [i BO a eo The Donald O’Connor Show for NBC,” for . he Bek Ga which he was nominated for an Emmy “a eS ‘ Award (1952) and received the Emmy Award

{ — | for Outstanding Personality (1953). a Be, JACKIE GLEASON: THE POOR

Ye Sa SOUL Qe The 1952 fall premiere of The Jackie Gleason

% Se Show on CBS opened with the entire cast e y, \ bustling in a behind-the-scenes preparation;

Sy, from the chaos there emerged the zigzag F line of the June Taylor Dancers singing i “CBS welcomes you to a great new fall ) debut.” The chorus of sixteen girls in very

short skirts and with gorgeous curvaceous legs forms a kick-line that slashes a thick horizontal across the TV screen; then girl number eight and nine break the line by moving downstage, turning it into a V formation. The girls raise their shoulder-length white-gloved arms to hail the entrance of “The Fat Man”: Gleason, dark-haired and jolly, the man in the black suit, struts downstage to the television camera with a dimpled smile. He halts at the apex of the V to deliver his first line, “I love girls,” and the dancers shimmy and cutesy-pose themselves around the round-bodied man as he sings, “Any girl’s all right with me; as long as she’s a she.” Applause. He thanks the audience and promises that this new season he and the cast are working extra hard. “Can we start with a little soft-shoe music, please,” and he goes into his “Tea for Two” essence with the brushing grace of a ballet dancer, quipping, “Every move’s a picture.” Then he asks conductor Ray Bloch for “a little traveling music, please,” as his brushsteps elongate into grande jetes that gain in momentum when he twice circles the stage—and then, breaking his stride by lifting his thigh up into the air in preparation for a cartwheel, his legs get entangled, and, FLOP, he falls flat on his face. “There goes that suit!” he quips.* Born Herbert John Gleason in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn on February 26, 1916, Jackie Gleason was of Irish ancestry. His father, John Herbert Gleason, was an insurance clerk who abandoned the family; the young Gleason (whose brother died when he was a boy) was raised by his mother, Mae Kelly Gleason, a loving but troubled and overworked subway attendant who died when he was nineteen. Gleason’s first major role on Broadway was that of Goofy Gale in the 1944 musical comedy Follow the Girls. Though he made some B-rate movies in the 1940s and did not make a strong impression in Hollywood, he was at the same time developing a nightclub act that included music and comedy. His first big break arrived in 1949, when he landed the role of the blunt but softhearted aircraft worker Chester A. Riley in The Life of Riley for the first television version of the radio hit. With his nightclub act having already gained attention in New York, Gleason was hired to host DuMont Television Network’s Cavalcade of Stars in 1950, a variety hour balancing entertainment and his comic versatility. He framed the show with splashy tap dance numbers and developed his now-famous sketch characters, which he would refine throughout the next decade. He became enough of a presence—his show was one of DuMont’s only major hits—

182 TAP DANCING AMERICA that CBS executives wooed and won him over to their network in 1952, naming the program The Jackie Gleason Show; it would soon become the country’s second-highest-rated television show (after The Ed Sullivan Show). Gleason amplified his show with ever splashier opening tap dance numbers, with formations and overhead shots inspired by Busby Berkeley-style routines, performed by the June Taylor Dancers. From its premiere on September 20, 1952, to its last telecast on September 12, 1970, The Jackie Gleason Show showcased tap dancing; Gleason insisted on a tap-based routine opener by the June Taylor Dancers, claiming that it was the kind of dancing the majority of the country preferred. Tap dance was not only performed for the opening and closing numbers but also by guest dancers and, of course, by Gleason himself. At the 1952 premiere, the Irish American Mayo Brothers, in top hats and tails, did a synchronized tap dance to “Blue Skies,” sliding and turning on top of pedestals. They challenged each other to show their specialties: one did a Gene Krupa drum-styled tap solo, which had quick and exacting footwork; the other one-upped with half-splits and back flips off knees; both did a synchronized finish. Gleason next performed a solo pantomime to his character of “the Poor Soul” that was touching, with pathos and beautifully timed; the Ray Bloch Orchestra played the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” as accompaniment to the Soul who tried, with no success, to paint a

portrait of his dog in a park. Next, guest musical artist Louis Armstrong and his quintet (which included Cozy Cole on drums and the trombonist Trummy Young) played “Little Kiss to Dream On,” after which Gleason presented his sketch of “Reggie Van Gleason, the Third,” a shoe salesman (in tuxedo and top hat) who slips shoes on the feet of wealthy female customers as he dances a soft-shoe (sipping whiskey from a silver flask). At one point in the sketch, fellow shoe salesman Art Carney shows off the beauty of the shoe with a light-footed tap dance. Tap dancing became the leitmotif for The Jackie Gleason Show—accompanying the pantomimes, coming at unexpected times in response to the studio orchestra’s jazz riffs—with Gleason’s lumbering but oh-so-light-footed tap dancing combining into wistful pathetique perfection, the elegance of Fred Astaire and clumsiness of Ray Bolger.

JUNE TAYLOR: FIRST LADY OF TAP TELEVISION What Gleason also perpetuated through his nearly twenty-year tenure of The Jackie Gleason Show was June Taylor’s dance chorus. Born in Chicago in 1917, Taylor began dancing professionally when she was twelve, and she had a promising career as a nightclub dancer until she developed tuberculosis at age twenty; she then took up choreography and founded, in 1942, the June Taylor Dancers. She made her television debut in 1948 on The Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan, where her six original dancers appeared as the Toastettes, thus bringing the chorus line to television. Two years later, she joined Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars, then went along with him and her sixteen dancers to The Jackie Gleason Show. There, her signature camera shot became the overhead kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley—type view of the dancers making geometric patterns. If the high-kicking, smiling routines that formed the first three minutes of each broadcast were Broadway-based and reminiscent of the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, her dancers were multiply skilled, versatile, and rigorously trained precision line dancers. They did tap and high kicks as well as ballet. Taylor, in addition to choreographing all the routines, insisted on directing how they were shot in the studio. June Taylor dancer Mercedes Ellington remembered that Taylor battled with the cameramen on the set to make sure the camera angles showed the women’s legs to best advantage and enhanced the precision work that was rigorously drilled.”

1.

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j =aes 3 _— ;iD> .fee \ “’>. = as Bill Robinson and Fred Astaire. In 1949, | Bates sang and danced the role of the swash-

buckling pirate Long John Silver in the Ken

~ Murray musical revue, Blackouts. “Don’t give

oat up the ship, although you seem to lose the

fight; life means do the best with all you got, give it all your might,” he sang in the revue that played for three years at the Hollywood and Vine Theatre in Hollywood, California. Wearing a white suit and looking as debonair as Astaire, he made his first television

appearance in 1949 on This Is Broadway (later called This Is Show Business) performing high-speed paddle-and-roll tapping and balancing on his rubber-tipped peg as if it were a ballet pointe slipper. In 1950, he was the first black dancer to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, strutting his stuff in an extended solo. Bates made more than twenty appearances on the show; his last performance, on August 22, 1965, included a tap challenge dance with “Little Buck” (Conrad Buckner). “Blacks weren’t on The Ed Sullivan Show every week in those days,” said Gregory Hines. “It was tough for black people to feel good about themselves in those kinds of ways, to be able to see ourselves on TV like that. To know that Peg Leg was coming on The Ed Sullivan Show tomorrow night was a big thing, and there was no missing it.” Hines remembered seeing an advertisement of Bates standing tall, hands on his hips, and that image just loomed—“he was so important, so smart, he was a big deal.”*° Though television gave Bates greater exposure than any other medium, he continued to pursue a variety of performance venues. In 1951, he and his wife, Alice, purchased a large turkey farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains and converted it into a resort. The Peg Leg Country Club, in Kerhonkson, New York, flourished as the largest black-owned and -operated resort in the country, catering to black clientele and featuring hundreds of jazz musicians and tap dancers. The hoofer Lon Chaney came to Kerhonkson the summer of 1966: “I came here to go fishing, and I was deep into my dancing. And I turned around and he [Bates] was on the [golf] cart, watching me dance. A lot of dancers didn’t understand what I was doing. I said, ‘What do you think? You’ve been around a long time.’” Bates hired Chaney for two weeks— and told him not to change anything. “I was proud I was black and I owned the place,” said Bates, “but I was not seeking black clientele. Even before integration, I opened this place on an integrated basis. I did not accomplish that purpose.””

188 TAP DANCING AMERICA

Integrating Las Vegas The black tapster Bunny Briggs remembers that when he first went to Las Vegas in 1950 ona bill with black crooner Nat King Cole, “after we performed we had to get out. There was a car waiting outside for us to take us to the west side—Miss Shore’s, a motel, or little apartments— and [black jazz artists] Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and Sammy Davis Jr. and the Will Mastin Trio were over there. When I came, there was nothing. It was a desert—all I saw was sand. Often you had to walk to get to the terminal at the airport.”°* Through the fifties, in Las Vegas, and for the ensuing three decades, Briggs said, “I played all the places—the Thunderbird, the Frontier, the Copacabana.” He was required, as was the custom for all black performers in the 1950s, to accept accommodations in a rooming house on the west side of the city rather than reside with his white peers in the hotels, to do without a stage dressing room, and to wait outside by the swimming pool between acts. “You couldn’t even walk on the Strip,” Briggs added. “You had to be on the west side after hours.” The only place that let the whites and the blacks mingle was the Moulin Rouge on the west side. “I never worked there, but I lived a few blocks from it on the west side—Teddy Hale worked it sometime in the 1950s with the Les Brown Band and Dinah Washington, and he got into a lot of trouble, but I wouldn’t go there. And you could mingle, a black man with a white gal. And it got famous. But then people on the Strip started losing business. And I don’t know what happened, but it closed down.” Briggs said there was one man—Howard Hughes—who had all the money, and who helped to change the segregation policy in Las Vegas: “He was instrumental in stopping segregation. And there’s a story to that—he came into a nightclub, called the Sands, with sandals. And you had to be properly dressed. And a man stopped him at the door and said, ‘You can’t come in, you are not properly dressed.’ So he [Hughes] bought the place! Then he bought up all the nightclubs, and [black] people could come in, so long as they behaved themselves and paid the bill.” Briggs claims that while Howard Hughes helped to curb segregation in Las Vegas, and the Four Step Brothers broke the race barrier when working with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Sands, it was the famed and beloved tap dancer Sammy Davis Jr. who “stopped it—he just stopped it.”

SAMMY DAVIS JR. Davis was born in Harlem on December 8, 1925, to a show-business family; his mother was the Puerto Rican—born dancer Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, and his father was the star dancer of Will Mastin’s Holiday in Dixieland touring show. As an infant, he was raised by his paternal grandmother, in an apartment on r4oth Street and Eighth Avenue. When he was three years old, his parents separated, and his father, not wanting to lose custody of his son, took him on tour. As a child, “little Sammy” learned to dance from his father and his adopted “uncle” Will Mastin, who led the dance troupe. In 1929, at the age of four, Davis joined the act, which was renamed the Will Mastin Trio; he toured the vaudeville circuit, accompanying his elders with flash-tap dance routines. In 1933, he took time off from traveling with the Mastin troupe to make his motion picture debut in Rufus Jones for President, a black short-subject two-reeler, in which he played a little boy who falls asleep in the lap of his mother (Ethel Waters) and dreams of being elected president of the United States. Small and slightly built, he was dubbed “Silent Sam, the Dancing Midget” and became phenomenally popular with audiences. He was reportedly tutored by his idol Bill Robinson, from whom he took tap dance lessons. In short time, the act was renamed Will Mastin’s Gang, featuring Little Sammy; still later, the Will Mastin Trio, featuring Sammy Davis Jr.

,v* ey | . 2 ee acca ,

..\*’ a = =

| se ira Sammy Davis (right), Jr. with Sammy DavisMastin Sr. (left) a: SS ; qjie) ‘ and Will Mastin of the Will

| Sa i S&S % ay . Trio, singing a foe on the Steve "; was | , Allen television show in age the 1950s. (Photofest) dy Gy. In 1942, at the of eighteen, Davis ~oy —_— >}. = was drafted into the U.S. Army. There he Mires se aid j Ye encountered, he said for the first time, bla-

ive | “ tant racial prejudice, which he countered with his fists. “Overnight the world looked | | different,” he later wrote. “It wasn’t one color anymore. I could see the protection I’d gotten all my life from my father and Will. I appreciated their loving hope that I’d never

| need to know about prejudice and hate, but . 3 they were wrong.” He was subsequently

: transferred to Special Services, where he i r= performed in Army camps across the coun-

i try, “gorging” himself on “the joy of being liked,” as he wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can. He wrote that he combed every audience for “haters,” and when he spotted one he would give his performance an extra burst of strength and energy because he “had to get those guys,” to neutralize them and make them acknowledge him. “My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight,” he wrote. “It was the one way I might hope to affect a man’s thinking.”

In 1946, upon being discharged from the Army, he rejoined the Will Mastin Trio and perfected his performance by doing flash-style tap dancing and uncanny impressions of popular screen stars and singers; he also played trumpet and drums, and he sang to the accompaniment of Sammy Sr. and Uncle Will’s soft-shoe and tap as background. It was in this period that Davis met Frank Sinatra, who was then singing with Tommy Dorsey’s band, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; the popular “Mr. Bojangles” tune, written by Jerry Jeff Walker and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, later became a standard song in Davis’s act. In 1952, and at the invitation of Frank Sinatra, the Will Mastin Trio played the newly integrated Copacabana nightclub in New York. In 1954, Davis signed a recording contract with Decca Records, topping the charts with his debut LP Starring Sammy Davis, Jr., and another LP, Just for Lovers. After recovering from the loss of an eye in a car accident, he continued to score a series of hit singles. After several successful nightclub appearances, he made his Broadway debut in March 1956 with his father and Mastin in Mr. Wonderful. The Will Mastin Trio also sang and tap danced on television, Sammy Jr. often turning over the tap to Mastin and his dad. On The Milton Berle Show in November 1955, for instance, Sammy sang “That Ol’ Black Magic,” the trio sang “It’s Good to Be Home,” and Sammy Sr. and Mastin tap danced to “Liza.” Tapping upright, with vertical alignment and clean footwork, the elder Davis’s style resembled Bill Robinson’s, with the addition of aerial moves, such as beautiful circling over-the-tops. Meanwhile Uncle Will took the role of flash dancer, performing such acrobatic moves as in-the-trenches and Russian kazotsky kicks. Sammy Jr. offered impressions of Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, and Frank Sinatra, all while singing “Hey There,” but he did not tap.” With the exception of the 1964 Warner Brothers musical comedy Robin and the Seven

Hoods, which gave Sammy Jr. one of his rare chances to hoof on film—principally in the

190 TAP DANCING AMERICA “Bang-Bang” number, in which he tap dances on a bar while spraying machine-gun bullet taps—fans had to go to Las Vegas in the late 1950s and 1960s to see Sammy Jr. dance. It was there, as a headliner at the Frontier Casino in Las Vegas, that he was confronted with having to accept accommodations in a rooming house on the west side of the city, as did all black performers during those years in Vegas. During the civil rights years, Davis, who had achieved some professional success by then, declined to work at venues that upheld racial segregation; his demands expanded and, eventually, led to the integration of Las Vegas casinos (and night-

clubs in Miami Beach as well), where he continued to be a huge draw through the latter 1960s.

The (White) Concert Stage PAUL DRAPER: CLASSICAL TAP While tap dancing was most often seen in its shrunken form, on the televisions in the 1950s, Paul Draper was presenting it most elegantly on the concert stage. He was born on October 25, 1909, in Florence, Italy, where his mother, Murial Draper, was a patron of the music and art worlds of the time; his father was a singer of lieder in England. At the age of nine, Paul was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and then lived in New York City with his mother, who enrolled him in the progressive Lincoln School. He attended the Loom’s Institute in Windsor, Connecticut, and was enrolled as an engineering major at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In 1930, Paul, who had a natural flair for dancing, applied to the Arthur Murray dance studio school and was accepted as an instructor of ballroom dance. In the winter of that year, he began taking tap dance lessons with Tommy Nip. Both the tap dance lessons and the teaching of ballroom dance were short-lived, as Draper traveled to London, fortified with letters of introduction for his newfound career as a dancer. He was cast in and toured for twenty weeks in Sensations of 1932, in which he performed a “flash routine” on a marble pedestal. Upon returning to the States, he landed work at Cobina Wright’s Sutton Club in New York. Engagements followed at the Roxy, Paramount Theatre, and Radio City Music Hall. In 1935, he appeared in the musical Thumbs Up, dancing his pedestal routine. The next year, he partnered with film star Ruby Keeler in a tap dance in the movie musical Colleen. In 1942, he returned to Hollywood to make another movie with Keeler, Six Hits and a Miss. In the mid-1940s, after studying ballet at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, he began combining tap dance with the elegance of manner, precision of execution, arm movements, and turns and jumps of ballet. He soon embarked on a series of concerts, teaming with harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. Dance critic Edwin Denby was critical of Draper’s dancing in his review of a 1944 concert:

Paul Draper combines ballet steps and gestures, as well as suggestions of Spanish and “modern,” with tap dancing; the result is of course a mixture. ... 1 only wish it worked better. I find the “art dance” arm movement not free enough—the arms look put into position, accurately but not naturally. Tap technique requires relaxed knees, and so it blunts many of the lines that ballet technique tries to keep taut... . I wish Draper had more freedom in his neck and shoulders. And I wish he had more rhythmic freedom in

his tap rhythms. To my ears he seems to be embroidering the musical rhythm rather than to be creating an independently interesting parallel rhythm.”

\

» Paul Draper performing in the 1936 Warner G ; Brothers film musical Colleen. (Photofest)

yy > In 1948, Draper was blacklisted on alle-

d q gations of pro-Communist sympathies. Unable to secure bookings for concerts

E AS ~ during the McCarthy era, he lett the , % o land. Upon returning to the states in aela :ok 1955, he continued tosuch give perforFer .E=|FLath =| |mances ofcomposers, his dances to the of i classical assolo J.music S. Bach United States in 1951 to live in Switzer-

= —" « ‘ oe —S iia and Francois Couperin. In January > , he appeared on a program with his1955, aunt, . . = 5 the monologuist Ruth Draper, at New ; a York’s Bijou Theatre. New York Times 3 dance critic John Martin wrote of Draper, “He is dancing brilliantly these nights. ...

2 He has developed a fabulous speed and

le . delicacy in his feet, and the Bach ‘Gigue’ st SS an Iand the [Handel] ‘Alcina Suite’ and the charming new ‘Irish Jig’ flash and sparkle with a crisp and musical clarity and many subtleties of phrasing and dynamics.”*! In April of 1955, Draper appeared in a three-act triple bill at the Playhouse titled All In One, which included Leonard Bernstein’s brooding opera Trouble in Tahiti as act 1, then dances by Paul Draper as act 2, and the Tennessee Williams one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton as act 3. “Although Mr. Draper comes second on the program, let’s put him first as an artist,” wrote Brooks Atkinson. “He is a tap dancer. He can tap as jauntily as the next man in his humorous pieces, like the Youmans’ ‘Tea for Two’ and the Porter tunes for the sardonic, fantasticated, ‘In a Dance Hall.’ Even in these idiomatic sketches there is a lightness of style that is very much his own.”” In August 1956, Draper was again within the mix of a show. Three for All appeared at the

Carnegie Recital Hall with a program consisting of Draper’s dances, dramatic readings by David Allen, and ballads by singer Milt Ogun. Yet it was for his performance at the Ninetysecond Street YMCA in New York in April and May of 1958 that John Martin wrote, “Paul Draper has never danced better in his life”: Having chosen tap dancing as a medium for art rather than for hoofing, Mr. Draper early ran into the problem of what on earth to do with the body while his feet were indulging in all sorts of rhythmic and dynamic nuances. For guidance he turned to the academic ballet for its formal deportment. ...

While the result of the blend in the past had been less than completely satisfactory ... there was a fresh development in his style. The arms served a definite function in the guidance and propulsion of the body, there was a kind of vertical unity between the feet and the rest of the body, entailing a much freer back and torso, and for the first time the dancer appeared at least to have glimpsed the full potentialities of the highly specialized medium of

his choice.

192 TAP DANCING AMERICA Despite critical acclaim, an insidious form of censorship followed Draper and sometimes dissuaded him from appearing in public performances. In 1959, Draper was forced into a cancellation of a concert series in Freeport, Long Island, after protest letters from the local American Legion post were received by the Board of Education pointing out that he had been accused of pro-Communist sympathies.” Draper managed to continue performing on Broadway (in the 1957 revue All in One) on the concert stage. In 1958, he performed his famous Sonata for Tap Dancers without music, and in concerts across the country in the fall of 1959 he embarked on a forty-five-city concert tour with partner Ellen Martial under the auspices of Columbia Artist Management. He also became a writer for Dance Magazine, for which he wrote monthly features on the art and technique of tap dance performance.

DANNY DANIELS: CLASSICAL IRISH While Paul Draper was combining ballet and tap dance into a classical style of percussive dance for the concert stage, Danny Daniels was returning to the early Irish roots of tap dance to find its highest octave of expression as a percussive dance form. Born Daniel Giagni Jr. in Albany, New York, on October 25, 1924, he began dancing at the age of five and a half with Tommy Sternfeld after seeing Fred Astaire dance. He made his Broadway debut in October 1941 in Best Foot Forward, directed by George Abbott and choreographed by Gene Kelly, and continued to build his career as a musical theater dancer in the 1945 Billion Dollar Baby, directed by George Abbot and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with music by Morton Gould. Broadway productions of Street Scene (1947), Make Mine Manhattan (1948), and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) followed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Daniels expanded his career, teaching and choreographing such Broadway shows as All American (1962), starring Ray Bolger; High Spirits (1964); the revival of Annie Get Your Gun (1966); and Walking Happy (1966). The experience faced him with the challenge of choreographing rhythm tap dance. As he explained to Jane Goldberg in an interview in the 1980s:

Broadway tap can’t use that individual improvisational style, unless you have a jam session. When you have a lot of people dancing together, they have to dance in close coordination with each other. Some say you can’t count in tap dancing, but anything that’s done to any kind of rhythm can be counted ...and every beat of a tap dance can be put into a musical phrase, a musical notation... . It’s all mathematics.” Daniels was a strong believer that his Broadway rhythm-tap style of choreography had roots in clog dancing. “Hal LeRoy, Gene Kelly and myself—our roots are Lancashire Clog dance. The roots of what black people do are street dancing. They [blacks] took this Lancashire Clog dancing and transformed it into a kind of improvisational style . . . [yet] Honi Coles dances the way I dance: his feet work pretty much like mine. Somehow, he got his training . . . from a traditional tap dancer from Lancashire Clog.” Daniels continued to promote the theory that tap dance’s largest inheritance is from the Irish and Irish step dancing. When asked about his thoughts on the African contribution to tap dance, he replied: “Tap dancing came from the Irish step dancers from England and the Africans picked up their footwork and used their own rhythms to it. They changed a little of the rhythmic structure, but its origin is Ireland.” Even when Goldberg tried to present a compromise about the merging of the African and Irish musical and dance traditions that evolved tap

BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 193 dancing in America, Daniels clarified his belief: “Well, no, they were doing Irish step dancing in Ireland a long time ago; it’s really traditional Irish dancing.” When Goldberg asked if he disagreed with the statement that “tap is black,” Daniels answered: “Absolutely. It isn’t black;

les tisis -Asked in 1951 to do a concert at the Ninety-second Street YMCA, Daniels sought musical ideas from Morton Gould, with whom he had worked on Broadway in Billion Dollar Baby. Gould had begun to write a tap dance concerto for Paul Draper but proposed it to Daniels, and thus began their collaboration. “Morton would write sections, with the rhythms noted as part of the musical score, and then play it on the piano for me to see if the rhythms were tap-able. I would then take the manuscript score and a tape recording of his playing, and work on the

choreography in my basement studio.” The concerto, with four movements—toccata, pantomime, minuet, and rondo—and written for a forty-five-piece orchestra, premiered with the Rochester Symphony Orchestra in November 1952 with Daniels tap dancing and Gould conducting. “Gould has written a very sophisticated work that is a far cry from the hoofing and its music of the older era,” wrote music critic Raymond Ericson. “It is exactly what its name says it is, a four-movement, formal, jazz-influenced symphonic piece in which the tap dancer has a solo role as virtuosic and important as the piano in a Mozart concerto. The tap rhythms are written out, and the soloist has cadenzas where he can improvise on his own.”®’ Daniels regarded Morton Gould’s Concerto for Tap Dancer and Orchestra as the highlight of his career. “After the concerto I thought I had done it all and anything after that was gravy.” The last time Daniels performed the concerto

was at Lincoln Center in 1963 (now Alice Tully Hall), with Gould conducting.” In 1983, Daniels choreographed The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway.

Modern Jazz Tap in the Movies After the prolific output of musical films in the 1930s and 1940s, there was a shift in both the 1950s musical genre and in films. Both were challenged by two of the most influential innovations of the half-century: television and rock ’n’ roll. The collapse of the movie industry and its

studio system would prompt choreographers to look for work elsewhere as studio dance departments were eliminated. Although the quantity of 1950s film musicals diminished (when compared with their numbers in the previous two decades), the quality reached a level of perfection. After more than twenty years of experimentation, the dance inventors had become skilled in combining inventive choreography, camera technique, storytelling, music, design, and technically proficient dancers to create a prolific library of dance on film. Although new film processes such as 3-D, Cinerama, VistaVision, and CinemaScope were trumpeted to lure audiences away from their television screens, the widescreen processes made the solo dancer look lost on the wide ribbon of the screen; chorus dancers to the left and right of the soloist suddenly loomed thirty-feet high; and images had a tendency to shatter if a body moved too

quickly across the screen.’' There were some choreographers from that previous era of the 1930s musicals who tried to save the genre with inventive work.

ASTAIRE: MIDDLE-AGED AND MOCKING ROCK ’N’ ROLL Fred Astaire continued singing and dancing and creating through the 1950s, despite rumors of retirement, incorporating knee-slides, isolations, and even rock ’n’ roll into his work. In the musical film Royal Wedding (1951), written by Alan Jay Lerner, Astaire’s boogie-woogie “Piano Dance” solo included a number of falls to the floor and knee-drops (referencing Jack Cole’s skidding knee slides) and a tap dance atop a piano, in which he slapped his foot on the keys. The

% — 4 Pale | Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire in the

% B go | Py il ote “Girl Hunt Ballet” in The Band Wagon,

eS at ~~? &F eo Me : Ny ~ four dance duets in the film are

i i: SE a: . .\ 5 3 b/ 4 MGM, 1953. (Photofest)

Bo | oy : . A a se - ; all onstage routines, performed by

Be i | 5 *¢ | | { a \ pr ,

and Tilden Foundations) ! LN al ~

audience as he dug into the floor with close “iG — | cramp rolls, maxifords, running flaps, and eo. $ > 2

sliding wipes from the rim of the shoe. In 1 NSS ’ Hees

the second chorus, he sat down on a mar- he SRS iq agenees ble bench to tap, squinching face,‘efesses: smil- | :‘uth : Bea ith ba 7a bags a a ea ing with closed eyes, relishing thehis sounds 2 I coming from his feet; he demolished the mt i E z ee. 4 meses ry

performance facade and brought the audi- Ste eae aebasy

ence into his circle of rhythm. 3S 2 : | tes ae was immediately 7 ees on Success the Hines brothers in theirbestowed first big 2; gaeRY Wd| |=aei BEE Broadway show, but for them the -— Be ‘ _ fi eetite |

applause and the other rewards were | ae meee ld \aeee ae a only part of the joy. They were keen on | Reuaeeseaee ea ) co making clear that despite their youth— = lia rm o a a saved tee Maurice was thirty-five and Gregory thir- se ————_————_— — y

ty-two—their tap dancing was “the old a "Be a = technique,” inherited firsthand from the =

veteran masters they had watched perform since childhood. With the mid-1970s showings of the MGM musical film retrospectives That’s Entertainment! (1974) and That’s Entertainment, Part 2 (1976), the films’ discussions of the musical scenes and the clips of the tap dancing of the white stars Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, and Eleanor Powell had glossed over tap dance’s black roots. The Hines brothers therefore took full advantage of the publicity from Eubie! to make clear, as Maurice stated flatly, that “tap is a black art.” He felt the black presence

in the art form most deeply with weekend performances, when a newly rising number of blacks bought tickets to see the show. “On those Saturday and Sunday matinees those women out there, ooh! When we begin to rock in ‘Jordan Roll,’ we take them right on into church.”*’

Stepping Out No, No Nanette and the dozen or so tap-enhanced musicals that followed it in the 1970s had the net effect of sending hundreds of women into the tap dance studio. “Tap dancing is back,” declared the fifty-something-year-old housewife Betty Russell in a 1978 New York Times Metro feature about the slew of middle-aged women—in the article, all the women were white—who were helping to bring tap dance out of the wings. Patsy Healy, from Larchmont, New York, was teaching a Monday night adult tap class in a local elementary school auditorium to thirty-one women (and sometimes three teenage boys). The women left the dishes, television, children, and their bemused husbands to go out and tap at eight o’clock in the evening. Healy had to feed her five children before arriving at the class, and this after a long day of running a daytime dancing school for children. “I never taught an adult tap class before but some of the women asked me to have one. | thought I’d have 30 pairs of swollen feet, but they love it and I love it!”**

NOSTALGIA, AND ALL THAT TAP (SEVENTIES) 229

Not since the 1930s and ’4os, when little girls took up dancing, inspired by the Shirley Temple movies, had so many little girls and grown women turned out in droves to tap dance. Certainly, it was tap dancing—not (black) rhythm tap—that those women were crowding into classrooms to practice. The style of tap taught by Selma Rothstein of Mount Vernon, New York—a dance teacher of thirty years who at one time was a solo tap dancer at New York City clubs and summer resorts, and who was now teaching tap dance at the YMCA in White Plains—was that of the shuffle-and-hop tap school. Wearing a navy blue leotard and whiteheeled tap shoes affixed with jingle taps (which give off a loose sound like a heavy, jangling charm bracelet), she exhorted her students to put “umph” in their strut routine, reminding them that they were wearing long chiffon skirts and therefore had to use their arms. For Rothstein, tap dancing was fun and easy. “It only takes six lessons to learn the basic steps,” she said, and after having taught three generations in some families, she wished the older ones would return, because “tap can be done at any age.” At the first annual Macy’s Day Tap Parade (August 26, 1979, Herald Square, New York City), the leggy regiment of 420 tap dancers that clattered west on Thirty-fourth Street from the Empire State Building through Herald Square to the entrance of Macy’s department store proved that tap dancing could indeed be done at any age. The event, organized by Macy’s as a back-to-school promotional, inspired a mass of volunteer tap dancers (mostly women, and of all ages and description) in shorts and orange T-shirts. No matter that they lacked the precision of the June Taylor dancers. “They cheerfully faked such old-fashioned steps as the grapevine and traveling flaps, rat-a-tapping down 34th Street with a shuffle-shuffle-bam-bam to Macy’s,” the New York Times reported.*” The success of Macy’s Tap Parade turned it into an annual event with a new name, Macy’s Tap-o-mania. After the Tenth Annual Tap-o-mania set the record in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of tap dancers at a public event, the numbers continued to spike. The Eighteenth Annual Tap-o-mania, in August 1996, set a record at 6,654 participants.

MODERN WOMEN OF THE TAP RESURGENCE While hundreds of middle-aged women (and some males) were flocking nightly to the shuffle-and-hop schools of tap dancing that proliferated across the country, a smaller group of younger women were being drawn to the more elusive forms of (black) rhythm tap as presented in the smaller, less commercial venues of jazz clubs, university stages, artist lofts, and studios. In 1977, on an afternoon excursion in New Paltz, New York, Katherine Kramer says she “discovered” tap dance upon seeing a performance of the Copasetics at the state college (now SUNY-New Paltz). That led her to the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York City, where she saw hoofer Ralph Brown. Andrea Levine saw Baby Laurence at the Palace Theatre, six months before he died, in 1974. In 1975, Dorothy Anderson (Wasserman) was first introduced to the black tap dancers when she attended the Copasetics Ball. Also in the 1970s, Peggy Spina saw Baby Laurence at several of the tap jams (“challenges”) at the New York Jazz Museum. Babs Rifkin saw Jimmy Slyde and Chuck Green in their performance of The Hoofers at New York’s Orpheum Theatre. Camden Richman saw Honi Coles in the touring production of Bubbling Brown Sugar in San Francisco. And Linda Sohl-Donnell, a modern dancer at the University of California at Los Angeles, saw a tap performance at Royce Hall that included Foster Johnson, Honi Coles, Sandman Sims, and the Nicholas Brothers. These were just a few of the women—many of them white, college-educated modern

dancers—who sought out black male hoofers of the rhythm tap tradition as teachers and forged professional relationships with them. Thus they became the activators of the tap

230 TAP DANCING AMERICA resurgence. “We all came out of the civil rights and the sexual revolution and women’s movement, and so we had to save the art—we didn’t have a choice,” said Jane Goldberg.*® They were women who were born in the late 1940s and the 1950s, and they had been forever emboldened by the social and political movements of the 1960s to speak out against racism and segregation, war and violence, and the oppression of blacks and women—and to speak for saving the earth and the arts and the best of human expression. The civil rights movement had imbued

its energy and transforming dynamics into every progressive struggle in our country since that time. As tap dancer Katherine Kramer explained about the liberation eras of the 1960s and 1970s: “Times had changed and these rhythmic stirrings fell upon the ears and hearts of a

new generation of tap artists, primarily women. The timing was right. Tap dance had a unique appeal to this new generation of women who felt stronger, more liberated, freer in their thinking, and more independent. Some were dancers searching for a new form of artistic expression while others tripped over tap and were caught off-guard by its intensity. One fact is certain: they were not intimidated by it having been predominantly a black male form.””!

Many of those women had come from the tradition of modern dance, which had roots in being an early twentieth-century feminist art form that challenged Western classical ballet’s standards of beauty and deportment to champion the athleticism and form of the female body and its freedom to move. That attitude undoubtedly allowed them to exercise their own freedom of choice, to even engage in an interracial exploration of rhythm dancing that seemed exciting and somewhat dangerous. In the 1970s, “individualism” as well as “relevance” was in the air. Some Americans even created a counterculture and tried to live outside the social norms; some tried a “back to the earth” approach or shared life in communes; some turned to grassroots organizations and were critical of their governments and suspicious of their leaders. In the midst of political turmoil (the Watergate scandal, the messy end to the Vietnam War) and the economic decline (the new expenses caused by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, double-digit inflation), many grasped at personal solutions—everything from psychotherapies and consciousness-raising sessions to shamanism and religious fundamentalism. The 1970s then became a period of great individuality, resilience, and experimentation—a decade when women, gay people, and racial and ethnic minorities began to embrace identity politics, a time when disillusion fed a healthy skepticism of authority. White “liberated” females were not the only dancers freshly attracted to black rhythm tap dancing in the 1970s. “Even though we were revisiting an art form that was broad, we specifically looked at one aspect of that dance form and said, ‘That’s what I want, right there,” said Dianne Walker about the prevalent interest in black rhythm tap during that period. “No one went after Fred Astaire, and he was alive and well, and we knew where he was. And Gene Kelly—he was accessible to the point that one of my friends went up to his door and rang his doorbell and had him sign her tap shoe.”” Dianne Walker was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two, living in Boston and working as a staff psychologist at Boston University Hospital when, in 1978, she attended an affair at Prince Hall Masonic Temple where she met Willie Spencer. “He was doing some rhythmic pattering, and it tickled me to hear it. I eased down to him, he really got my attention,” Walker recalled. “He looked like he had stepped straight out of vaudeville—he had thick coke-bottle glasses, a plaid jacket on with a strange tie, white patent-leather shoes—my man was interesting, someone I had never seen before.” Spencer told her he was a tap dancer; Walker told him she used to tap dance as a kid (with the renowned school of Mildred Kennedy in Boston). Spencer sent her the very next day to the studio of Leon Collins where, she recalled, “I walked into

NOSTALGIA, AND ALL THAT TAP (SEVENTIES) 231 the studio, and I see this little man sitting at his desk with a screwdriver adjusting his taps... and he looks up at me, and he says, ‘Hi dumplin’, I’ve been waiting for you. Willie called me and told me you wanted to learn to tap dance.”* Walker, who is African American, would study with Leon Collins, become his protégé, and codify and teach his technique, becoming one of the major activists in the resurgence of rhythm tap. When asked why she had such an interest in studying with Collins, Honi Coles, and Bubba Gaines, Walker said, “I think it had to do with style—that style was more interest-

ing to those people, period. Black and white... and maybe it was more interesting because it had been less visible, less attainable. And dancers like myself, and those before me coming onto the scene, were trying to find those dancers who were more elusive.” For the white dancer Dorothy Anderson (Wasserman), “it was totally a gravity thing—something in your being was attracted to rhythm,” and the accessibility of the black rhythm tap dancers. “The suys were there, and they were human beings, and their rhythms were just to-die-for gorgseous. We were so lucky to have been there at that time. It was a fluke in nature.”™

For the women, white and black, who chose active engagement into “that style” of rhythm tap, the tap resurgence was less about forming alliances with black men and more about women finding new rhythmic expressivity in the old forms that were then refashioned in the feminist vein. “As the new generation of tap dancers, we began to make it our own,”

said Kramer. “We recognized that tap was not ours alone and that it was not without its traditions, but through artistic voices and our own unique set of influences, we carved out a place for ourselves. We began to produce, present, study, and then to teach and perform. We wrote about tap, proselytized, presented the work, and helped to create an audience for this generation of tap dancing men and their work, as well as for our own generation and future tap dancers.”*

BRENDA BUFALINO: STEELY, LOW-HEELED, AND RAPTUROUS When Brenda Bufalino first performed Singing, Swinging, and Winging (June 1-4, 1978) with her all-female company of three tap dancers, she filled every nook and cranny of the tiny Pilstim Theatre, on Bowery in New York City, with her gutsy vocals and full-bodied jazz tap danc-

ing. If the audience was impressed that the petite and pale-faced blonde belted out her body-and-soul blues so shamelessly, it was even more impressed with the new territory she was claiming for an emerging generation of female dancers, which licensed a steely and lowheeled yet rapturous style of rhythm dance. The performance had a unified flow. Instead of a program of short routines, Bufalino created suites of dances for herself and the company. It opened with a jazz trio playing a hauntingly slow arrangement of Billy Strayhorn’s “A-Train,” which was played rubato, with arpeggios

that brought a lush new life to the melody. The dancers mirrored the music with sustained open phrasings, wide-circling preparation steps, and flurries of taps. The band then laid out as the women—Dorothy Anderson, Patricia Giordano, and Bonnye MacLeod, all dressed in body-hugging black pants and striped tops and dancing in low-heeled shoes—tapped out an a cappella counterpoint-section that built in tempo. The bridge section, which was bowed on the bass, melted into a slow soft-shoe tempo; that was then contrasted with the crisp clarity of the taps in the last A section, in which the taps almost seemed to sing the melody. The ending, multiple spins with a piano arpeggio and drum roll, led the dancers into Dizzy Gillespie’s tune “Night in Tunisia,” played at a bright tempo. The dancers moved

about while hand-clapping and improvising Latin social dance-style body postures; they did walking riffs on the swing section of the music, and in the last section, tapped syncopated staccato phrases, finishing bluntly with a sharp flap step. Charlie Parker’s “Just Friends,” the

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myself.” Charles Cook and Ernest Brown (Cook and Brown) teach vernacular (jazz) dance to Duke Ellington’s tune “Take the A-Train” as a dance-instruction song (“pull, pull, de bop de bop/ crossover drag drag / ball chain and boogie slide and bump”) and perform their classic slapstick tap-and-cane routine, “Old Man Time” in which they trade quips and blows. Great Feats of Feet succeeds not only in capturing the personalities and individual styles of those rhythm-and-tap song-and-dance men but also their repertoire (Ernest Brownie Brown bumps and grinds as the men sing, “And everything will be .. . And everything will be... Copasetic”; James “Stump” Cross sings “I Ain’t Got Nobody” as a delighted Gaines, watching from upstage, hugs Gipson; Cook sings, “On a rain, on a plane, it’s a love thing, it’s all about the love”). The walkaround, or Coles’s stroll (an easy and steady medium-tempo circular walk that begins with the heel and ball of the foot and builds to a skip with scuffing and kicking steps), serves as the introduction. That is followed by each of the dancers doing his own time step, which in turn is followed by the “Copasetics chair dance,” an extended one-chorus routine of fancy crossover and time steps done while sitting in wooden chairs. Then “the B.S. chorus,” a thirty-two bar chorus routine of well-known and often overused figures is done at breakneck speed (time-step and break, crossovers, wing steps, and over-the-tops, in-the-trenches, and “shave and a haircut” in the last bar). The “Copasetics soft-shoe” (composed by Coles, Pete Nugent, and Cholly Atkins) follows, and the finish is a shim sham. Those dances, especially the shim sham, are so totally derivative that for anyone to lay claim to ownership of them is foolish. Bufalino says, “It’s a half-break, and everybody knows a half-break; ballroom dancers knew it as well as tap dancers.” All of the dances in the Copasetics’ repertoire are derivative, she says, insofar as they contain bits of steps and routines and comic patter that have been drawn, borrowed, and adapted from the classic tap dance acts from the 1930s and ’4os. That precisely is the value of the film: for the first time, a “body” of tap choreography—a fairly substantial representation of seven decades of tap dance performance—

236 TAP DANCING AMERICA had been captured for future generations who want to follow in the rhythm tap dance tradition. The filming also allowed the Copasetics, through their weeklong residency, to assemble their various individual and group dances into a full evening’s “concert-length” performance. As Bufalino points out: “They did their Copasetic dances, and they did these big shows around, but there was no ‘Copasetics Act’ until Great Feats of Feet.”°°

SINGING, SWINGING, AND WINGING Bufalino emerged from the making of Great Feats of Feet ever more focused on finding her own choreographic identity. Singing, Swinging, and Winging was the first major showing of her tap choreography in New York; it was performed June 1-4, 1978, at the Pilgrim Theatre by three

members of her Dancing Theatre Company with a jazz trio. Honi Coles, as guest artist, appeared midway through the second half of the program with the premiere of Hont’s Suite—a suite of songs composed by Coles and with dances choreographed and performed by Coles and Bufalino, which included “Let’s Dance,” “Get Yourself Another Guy,” “Doggonest Feeling Ever,” “Don’t Get Caught Short on Love,” and “Warm Feet”; the evening culminated with a rendition of the classic Coles and Atkins signature soft-shoe to “Taking A Chance On Love,” performed by Coles and Bufalino. Dance critic Jennifer Dunning’s four-paragraph review of the concert in the New York Times began with a physical description of Bufalino and her guest artist: “She is a performer of lithe, hyperactive extroversion, the possessor of an agreeably husky if weak singing voice and the choreographer of a number of energetic jazz and cooler, more inventive tap dance numbers. ... He is the venerable black tap dancer who once starred in the Coles and Atkins duo...a master tapper, a man with feather feet and apparently not a nerve or muscle in his thin, slightly stooped frame [who] tapped his way all too briefly through an homage to Bill (Bojangles) Rob-

inson and a dance of such complex rhythms and rapid dynamic changes that the audience began to cheer mid-number.”*! With no mention of Bufalino’s tap choreographies to the songs of Mingus, Strayhorn,

Parker, and Gillespie, a reader who had not attended the concert might have assumed that Hont’s Suite was the sole offering on the program. Dunning seemed to be more interested in Bufalino’s program notes (“She writes the sort of breathless copy that might grace the menu of some high-flying West Village vegetarian establishment”) and made a sarcastic jab at Bufalino’s statement that “Dancing with Honi Coles is like dancing with the wind. Listening to him dance, I know I’ve been somewhere refined and undefinable” (“Cardamom tea, anyone?” Dunning writes). Dunning’s only mention of the women in the concert came in the last line of the review: “Wiry little Patricia Giordano, feline Bonnye MacLeod, and a Liv Ullman look-alike named Dorothy Anderson sailed confidently through some demanding tap.”°’ In contrast to Dunning’s review, jazz critic Richard Sudhalter’s review of Singing, Swinging, and Winging for the New York Post considered the tap choreography in its relationship

to the music. Identifying the jazz musicians (pianist Peter Tomlinson, bassist Bill deNeergaard, and drummer Harvey Sorgen) and the dancers by name, Sudhalter detailed the program which, he wrote, “drew on a variety of styles, including soft-shoe and [the] more familiar modern ‘jazz’ dancing, along with an arsenal of tap techniques—all backed by a skilled responsive rhythm section.” He then described the works in musical terms, and the conjoining of the choreography and the music as “a collective tour de force”: In “Take the A-Train,” “Li’l Darlin’” and other standards, the musicians and dancers worked “as a tightly knit jazz ensemble, each soloing, then trading four- and two-bar phrases with all the inventiveness of master instrumentalists.” On “Just Friends,” they could have been “a kind of Dixieland front line—a clearly defined lead, an embellished counter-melody, and the equiva-

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ge | ae : =e QQ? ~~ lent of a ground bass.” Honi Coles’s entry, midway through the second half of the program, to join Bufalino in a duet, “took on a joy of inspiring proportions.” For Sudhalter, it was the collective experience of the program—which included the young dancers and the veterans (Charles Cook, Ernest Brown, and Bubba Gaines joined the cast for the traditional closing, a shim sham)—that gave him, as a jazz critic, “an irresistible urge to laugh and weep at the same time.”” Bufalino continued to work with Honi Coles. In 1979, they collaborated on the creation of tap choreography for The Morton Gould Tap Concerto, performed with the Brooklyn Academy Philharmonic Orchestra. That artistic success was followed by their collaboration on Sounds of Music, with original songs by Coles and dances by Coles and Bufalino. ”We kind of did it in tandem,” said Bufalino, “the white vaudevillian, the black vaudevillian. It was a wonderful show but it was hard to book because we were black and white.” Unlike Bill Robinson, who received charges in the black press for choosing to work with white women over black women, Coles was never directly challenged by his black peers. When asked why it was he taught his material to a white woman, he responded, “Because no blacks want it, and she does, and because nobody else can do it, and she can.”** Bufalino would continue to forge deeply creative

ties with Honi Coles for the next fifteen years, while continuing to build her own career as a tap soloist, performance artist, and choreographer.

JANE GOLDBERG: TAP GODDESS OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE Jane Goldberg was a twenty-five-year-old modern dancer living in Boston and writing about dance when she begged her way into a film retrospective of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. Bitten by 1930s nostalgia, she discovered what she had been yearning for and missing in her adult life: romance in dance. Born in Washington, D.C., on February 2, 1948, Goldberg was trained in dance from an early age. One of her earliest dance teachers was a Miss Maxine, who first dazzled four-year-old Jane with the intoned phrases of “slap, shuffle, ball-change.” The memories of those tap dance recitals in which she wore red-spangled capes and sparkling shoes were long gone by the 1960s,

238 TAP DANCING AMERICA when she enrolled as an undergraduate in Boston University with a major in political science; what came along with it was an active engagement in antiwar protests, antiestablishment attitudes, and muckraking journalism for the BU News. As she recalled, “I was a journalist coming off the anti-war movement writing about Cesar Chavez’s lettuce boycott, and women’s issues.” In that period, the most profound influence on her life was a professor, the renowned populist historian Howard Zinn, who told her: “If you can’t liberate the world, you must liberate the ground upon which you stand.” Goldberg literally embodied Zinn’s command. “I forever gave up my rollers, let my hair go naturally curly again, and looked up ‘tap’ in the Boston yellow pages,” figuring she could liberate the ground upon which she stood with her feet.** She found her way to the black dance studio of Stanley Brown and began to study tap dance. The year was 1973. One year later, Goldberg moved to New York City, where she studied dance with the Judson Dance Theatre experimentalist Simone Forti, who had her rolling on floors in her downtown studio. She also took workshops with postmodern performance artist Meredith Monk, all the while looking for Honi Coles, whose name Brown had given her when she left Boston. Walking past St. John the Apostle Church on Columbus Avenue one day, she heard some hoofers working out in the basement—Rhythm Red, L. D. Jackson, Chuck Green, and Sandman Sims, led by Leticia “Mama” Jay, who were rehearsing for a revival of Tap Happenings—and set out to learn their art. “They weren’t really teaching. They didn’t see the point of it. It’s really an individual art form. And I’m white and middle class. I think they just didn’t believe I was serious.”*° She was. A two-month telephone campaign to Honi Coles led to private classes with the master at Jerry LeRoy’s Dance Studio. In November 1976, she attended the Copasetics Ball, and she got the phone number for Sandman Sims, who taught her a great paddle-and-roll. Lessons with Charles Cook, Bert Gibson, Leon Collins (who gave her lessons in his dining room), and Bubba Gaines (who taught her his specialties from his act, the Aristocrats of Rhythm) followed. There were futile attempts to learn tap dancing from Chuck Green, and after about six months of studying with a number of men, including Henry LeTang, who, she said, “left me, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, my first unavailable tap guy,””’ she felt neither willing nor ready to woodshed, so she decided instead to write about tap dance. She traveled to Pittsburgh to interview Paul Draper and, in April 1974, published her first article, “It’s All in the Feet,” in Boston’s Patriot Ledger. Teaching the rhythm tap tradition also became part of Goldberg’s charge, as she well knew that for the form to survive, it needed to be passed on by the masters. She made arrangements for the veterans to teach workshops and small group classes. In the meantime, she continued to study with Charles Cook, and they began to get some dances together. In 1977, they applied for a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in choreography, convincing Rhoda Grauer, then the head of the NEA Dance Program, that “tap is art” by showing her the shim sham in her Upper West Side apartment. They were awarded $1,800 to produce a lecture-demonstration with veteran dancers and, by then, their students. The result was It’s About Time, presented February 24-26, 1978, in the fifth-floor walkup loft (which seated 125) of Judson Dance Theatre experimentalist Elaine Summers. Envisaged as a loose, informal downtown event, it turned out to be a packed-to-the-walls sold-out show that was attended by jazz critics, downtown dancers, musicians, visual and performance artists—even well-heeled people from Westchester who wandered up and down lower Broadway looking for a theater but finding a funky SoHo loft. It garnered a preview listing and dance review in the New York Times, which called it “one of the happiest of get-togethers of many a season.” The interracial and intergenerational mix of dancers included, along with Cook and Goldberg, rhythm-tap veterans Jazz Richardson and Bert Gibson, as well as Andrea Levine, who was Goldberg’s student. In this loft concert, it was reported that the men reminisced, clowned, and delivered some exhilarating dances, with a

NOSTALGIA, AND ALL THAT TAP (SEVENTIES) 239

“funny step” competition and time-step demonstrations. Goldberg presented evocations of great hoofers like Pete Nugent, Bill Robinson, and Baby Laurence; Cook contributed a delicate number he described as Creole “gumbo or something”; Cook and Goldberg performed to a touching Cole Porter tune, “Let’s Be Buddies” (from the 1942 movie Panama Hattie), that had in it a compendium of tap rhythms and sounds; and Levine contributed a split-second-timed tap-and-drum duet with Chris Braun. In the finale, “Shim Sham Shimmy,” the dancers were joined by Ernest Brown and a number of Goldberg’s students. “One of the great mysteries—and tragedies—of cultural life in this city is that there is no permanent home, or at least deserved acclaim and encouragement for these great exponents of one of our richest and most idiomatic forms,” wrote Jennifer Dunning in her New York Times review of It’s About Time, which was headlined “Jane Goldberg Taps with the Hoofers.”

She urged readers to attend the two remaining performances: “Break down the doors if you have to.”°8

With the critical success of It’s About Time, club owners and the producers of old established modern dance festivals were calling up for Cook and Goldberg. They were next invited, along with Bubba Gaines and Andrea Levine, to perform at the American Dance Festival at Duke University as part of its Archival Project. That show, performed June 22, 1978, led to an invitation to perform the next month at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival—a training and performing complex in Becket, Massachusetts, founded in the 1930s by modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn. The result was the first concert of tap dance there since Paul Draper’s in 1941. Goldberg and company, performing as a replacement for a previously scheduled dance group that had been unable to appear, shared the bill with ballet dancers Martine Van Hamel and Clark Tippet

in an oddly structured program that alternated ballet pas de deux with tap solos and duets. Though this landmark event helped to ease tap dance onto the (modern) concert stage, the next performance of tap dance at Jacob’s Pillow would not be for another five years, in 1983, with Leon Collins’s company.”

The Dance Theatre Workshop next presented Goldberg and company at its American Theatre Laboratory in New York City, in Shoot Me while I’m Happy (February 25, 1979) with Goldberg and Cook, Ernest Brown, LeRoy Myers, Phace Roberts, Honi Coles, Louis Simms, Bubba Gaines, and Marion Coles. Goldberg’s penchant for presentation quickly made

an impression on critics, who began to cement her into the role of mistress of ceremonies: “Informal, unpretentious, and often totally captivating, she introduces each dancer like a favorite aunt serving up treats,” wrote one critic. “Her own dances are celebrations of her wit. After explaining how her mentors had introduced her to the black roots of tap, she took it one step further, celebrating her Jewish roots in a tapping-singing rendition of ‘Adon-Olum.’”® In Shoot Me, Goldberg also tapped to the poem, “The Neighbor.” Written and recited by Stewart Alter as a rewrite of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven,” this original and quite humorous partnering of the cadence of rhythm tap and poetic scansion is what got Goldberg interested in “tapping and talking.” That concept came to full bloom in the 1980s with Tapping and Talking Dirty (1985), in which Goldberg and Sarah Safford dealt with issues of sexuality and safe sex. In Goldberg’s next production, Rhythm and Schmooze (1986), she again intertwined and juxtaposed solo tap and word. Previously, Goldberg’s 1979 production Shoot Me while I’m Happy had marked the formal founding of her company, the Changing Times Tap Dance Company, which was dedicated to preserving, promoting, and creating new tap performances—and also to the mixing of dancers who were young and old, black and white, male and female. Within the auspices of that company, Goldberg generated many more ideas that would help bring a more enthusiastic critical and public response to tap dance, thus fueling the flames of its renaissance. While many of the

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shows were based loosely on campy plots, they were but a thin veil masking the still serious issues surrounding tap dance in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, her 1983 tap show The Depression’s Back, and So Is Tap, with Goldberg, Cook, Leon Collins, Marion Coles, Sarah Safford, and Beverly Wasser, had a deliberately silly plot: the first tap dancers to land on the moon hit the ground by immediately looking for work (at the local Holiday Inn), thus setting off the “Big Bucks Tap Company,” crass venturers doing Depression-era songs and thriving on the commercialism of nostalgia (since bad times were always good for tap dancers). That theme was played against the more au courant “Transcendental Tapists,” led by guru Leon Collins (who tapped to a J. S. Bach prelude and fugue, the Franz von Suppé Poet and Peasant Overture, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera interlude “Flight of the Bumblebee”), who were intent on evolving the “art” of tap dance. In The Tapping Talk Show (1984), Goldberg and Safford played talk show hosts with guests that included Charles Cook, Beverly Wasser, Marion Coles, Buster Brown, and Chinky Grimes.

Observing Goldberg and Cook in rehearsal after that show, Paula Span of the Wall Street Journal wrote: The dancer on the left, in a rain hat and black patent leather shoes is Charles Cookie Cook, at 65 years old one of the senior hoofers who've revived the long dormancy between vaudeville’s dissipation and the current tap revival.

... The dancer on the right, in the red satin Capezios and purple harem pants is Jane Goldberg, nearly 30 years younger, both a disciple of the black

tap masters and a resuscitator of their careers. ... Rehearsing in a vacant storefront on a block of East Fourth Street... Mr. Cook and Miss Goldberg

NOSTALGIA, AND ALL THAT TAP (SEVENTIES) 241

whistle and hum a syncopated Humoresque, their steps echoing the tin ceiling. It is, she beams, “almost like hearing your heart beat.”®

By “liberating the ground” with her tap dancing, Jane Goldberg had gotten her wish for a tap partner, and very much more.

STEPS IN TIME In the last two days of 1979, the crowning performance of the decade for tap dance occurred with Steps in Time: A Tap Dance Festival, a nearly four-hour program at Brooklyn Academy of Music. The program included an hourlong musical section by Dizzy Gillespie and his band with scat singer Joe Carroll and performances by the Copasetics (Honi Coles, Leslie Gaines, Charles Cook, and Buster Brown), Leon Collins, Sandman Sims, the Nicholas Brothers, and guest surprise Chuck Green. In her review of the show, Susan Reiter in Dance News wrote: “It is fitting that Jane Goldberg, who has been a catalyst in what has developed into a tap dance revival in recent years, also put in a brief appearance, joining Cook and Coles in two original numbers.” Barry Laine, critic for the New York Times who was also impressed with Goldberg’s distinction of being the lone woman among the men, identified her as “the only white—and

only young—tapper invited to perform in BAM’s present festival.” Although this was not entirely ttue—Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times reported that Leon Collins “brought five young women who are among his students to perform in the concert, and they did him proud in an ensemble number, each showing an already developed individual style in a series of solo turns.”™ Laine was particularly aware, and complimentary, of Goldberg’s distinctive style of dancing: “Her own style respects and preserves the past, yet she makes use of her whole body, curling her arms and swaying her torso. Given her modern dance background, tap with her was bound to be different from what it was.” Laine added that this kind of difference seemed to be the future of tap: “While the hoofers are mostly older black males, today’s crop of new tappers seem to be mostly young, white women. Many are taking tap in new directions.”

Also Dancing in New York: Conrad, Kramer, Levine, and Hess Gail Conrad, the daughter of professional ballroom dancers, was then seeking to develop a visual and dramatic structure for tap; her work Travelers: A Tap Dance Epic, performed by her company in 1978, had put tap in a narrative travelogue. Conrad with her group Dancing in the Streets had won a lawsuit to allow public tap performances—and with five dancers, four musicians (and sixteen squares of Masonite flooring) was performing in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village and on the Staten Island Ferry. Also dancing in New York was Kathy (Katherine) Kramer, who in November 1979 presented a largely modern dance concert at Marymount Manhattan Theatre that included one tap dance work. That had begun as “Separate Times,” with Kramer and four friends tapping in unison to swing-style music by Hillel Dolgenas and Ross Levinson, and it continued as “Duet Tap” with Kramer and Lynn Jassem. That same month, Andrea Levine presented a concert of eleven tap works at American Theatre Laboratory with guest artists Sandra Gibson, Albert Gip Gibson, and James Buster Brown; her “tap fouettes and percussive duets with drums marked a crisp, abstract style,” Laine commented in the New York Times.” Also in November 1979, Carol Hess presented Tap Dances, Rhythm, and Rags at the Horace Mann Auditorium. Hess, known as a modern dancer, was praised both for her use of bal-

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entire troupe’s arms and legs sweeping away with in-the-trenches—in a grand, all-American celebration of this vernacular dance form.*?

Lynn Dally: The Lusciousness of Space and Time After she founded the Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble in 1979 with Fred Strickler and Camden Richman, Lynn Dally continued to pioneer the field of tap composition. Drawing from her modern dance background and driven by a gutsy willingness to investigate new creative turf, she moved tap dance from a solo form to ensemble choreography. Born Lynn Rawlins in Columbus, Ohio, on December 3, 1941, her father, Jimmy Rawlins, and mother, Hazel Capretta, were dancers who since 1933 had run the Rawlins Dance Studio in Columbus. “They were like my Fred and Ginger,” said Dally of her parents. “My first teacher in

tap dancing was my father.” Rawlins taught a graded curriculum of routines that prosressed in difficulty, and all the steps had names, but in class he would ask students to close their eyes, listen to the taps, and re-create what they had heard. “We were always dealing with rhythm .. . he played the piano in class. I was one of those kids where you could sit under the piano when someone was practicing for hours, and that was a pleasure.” After graduating from high school in 1959, Dally enrolled in Ohio State University, where she signed herself into the then-new modern dance department headed by Helen Alchire. She studied the modern dance techniques of Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Merce Cunningham; improvisation was taught by Judson dance group experimentalist Judith Dunn. “The psychology of Graham technique was sexy,” said Dally about the emotionally expressive deep-pelvic contractions of Graham technique, “but Merce was more freeing, in terms of somebody who wants to make things. And I really wanted to make dances.”* After graduating from Ohio State, Dally moved to Massachusetts to teach at Smith College, and then worked in Athens, Greece, with an international modern dance company. After that, Dally returned to Ohio State, where she taught modern dance and improvisation from 1966 to 1971. She moved to San Francisco in 1973 to study with the modern dancer Margie Jenkins, and there met Camden Richman. In 1974, she began her first efforts in choreography with her first all-woman company, Lynn Dally and Dancers. In 1979, Dally conjoined her company with Fred Strickler’s Open Eye, and Richman’s jazz quartet (pianist Paul Arslanian, bassist Ted Dannenberg, and percussionist Keith Terry) to form the Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble, later the Jazz Tap Ensemble.

266 TAP DANCING AMERICA In its first four years of existence, JTE grew from small studio performances to sold-out houses in such far-flung places as Honolulu and Paris winning enthusiastic responses to work that showed off Dally’s “gutsy, terrier-like tap attack,” Strickler’s “intricate, petite-like style,” and Richman’s “elegance and aplomb.”* They toured the country, were awarded grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in April 1982 were invited to perform in a tribute to Honi Coles at the Smithsonian. In a 1983 performance at Pepperdine University, Keith Terry opened with “Hey Rube,” a loose-limbed, genial performance of a slap-happy patty-cake rhythm routine. Camden Richman, whose dancing would later be praised in the Los Angeles Times as “deeply musical and strikingly thoughtful, so technically polished yet unassuming,”** found comic toughness and expressive shadings in “Play’n for Keeps,” a rock-accentuated collaboration with Tom Dannenberg on electric guitar. In “Jordu,” Richman and Fred Strickler “indulged in pure tapper-to-tapper interplay that mixed intricate unison combinations with responsive improvisation.”*’ In 1984, Richman gave notice, as did the group’s three jazz musicians; the intense touring schedule (which accounted for 75 percent of the company’s income) had become too wearying. Their defection left Dally and Strickler to re-form the ensemble (Linda Sohl-Donnell was hired to replace Richman; Sam Weber replaced Stricker, who left the company in 1987, leaving Dally as the company’s sole director and prime choreographer). Even with two-thirds of the original company gone, the Jazz Tap Ensemble stayed true to its original intent—a respect for the heritage of black rhythm tap, but with a style more eclectic than the early American prototype. It continued to hone the vocabulary of the vernacular, taking the lexicon of tap out of the stage tradition of unison dancing and flashy performance style and into a subtle, concert-style art form.** The new company was (jazz) improvisational in spirit, but it used space threedimensionally, with an accent on intricate configurations and ensemble work. “We have a contemporary look that reflects our modern training,” said Dally about the company in 1984, when Jeffrey Colella (piano), Eric Von Essen (bass), and Jerry Kalaf (drums) constituted the new rhythm section. “We use the musical ideas to create set pieces, but every program is spontaneous. We embroider the rhythms and movement just like jazz musicians do. We’re always innovating.”*°

From her earliest tap works, Dally’s penchant for full-bodied movement and a luscious exploration of space distinguished her choreographic style. “Bout a Mile (c. 1979), an a cappella duet, used pedestrian-like walking patterns that were repeated/riffed in varying abstract configurations. In the solo Sweet Blues, Dally meandered the stage with back-brushing shuffling steps and side-winging maxi-fords in various facings. The laid-back and casual walking duet After Hours had dancers spiraling around each like a spinning top. Circuit Breaker Switch flashed dancers through space, firing off phrases at one speed, then double the speed, in the overlapping cadences of a round. Writing about Dally’s “I Mean You,” part of a suite of dances choreographed to the music of jazz composer Thelonious Monk, Llewellyn Crain wrote, “The expression of the entire body is as important as the movement of the feet. Dally twists and arcs through space, gliding, turning, tapping, and scraping her metal taps on the floor. Unconcerned with virtuosity or besting the musicians with speed and intricacy, she dances about feelings, about style, about the myriad complexities of dance.”*° “When I am working on a piece .. . I try to really focus on the dancing itself and all the things that about dance, the qualities of the movement, the intention of the movement,” Dally explained. She continued: It’s become a very natural thing for me to move and tap at the same time, they’re blended in a sense, into what I do and what I’m interested in. Along

i

Lynn Dally, artistic director of the Jazz Tap Ensemble,

in a studio portrait. (Photo by Lois Greenfield)

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That’s something that I trained in, and that’s one of my great loves, space and turning. I’m in heaven. So in this work, as it’s become natural to make rhythms with my tap shoes on and move and makes gestures with my whole body doing things, I’m also always in three-dimensional space.*!

ALL BLUES A superb example of visual and aural dimensionality in Dally’s choreography is All Blues, set to the jazz music of Miles Davis. First performed at the Kennedy Center in 1986 as a

duet for Dally and Linda Sohl-Donnell, it evolved into a trio and was subsequently enlarged for the ensemble. (In its 1993 performance at the Joyce Theatre, Dally, Weber, Dormeshia Sumbry, Derick Grant, and Lainie Manning formed a semicircle in front of the musical ensemble, tip-toeing and brushing out counterrhythms to the melody. Then they traveled across the floor in two horizontal lines, weaving through each other and spacing out in a design that allowed the viewer to see the full-bodied movement of each dancer; they completed the phrase by moving in unison on a long diagonal line that cut across the space.) Visually and rhythmically engaging, the pleasure of All Blues was its movement and musical design. There was something very satisfyingly cool and chic in the way the patterns made by the dancers related to the musical structures. Though Dally had conceived of and choreographed the work, she allowed room for individual styling by her dancers, who used their arms (open into first, second, and third ballet port de bras positions, as well as more informal stylistic variations) and were featured in solos and duos. There was form, but there was no rigidity. Some very talented dancers joined the Jazz Tap Ensemble in the 1980s: Heather Cornell, who danced with insouciant musicality; happy-go-lucky Terry Brock, who danced with brio and effusiveness; Sam Weber, who wove ballet into his tapping with impressive ease, and whose tapping crescendos and diminuendos made him a perpetual-motion machine; and Mark Mendonca, who was coolly articulate in his footwork. All benefited from Dally’s choreography while adding the individuality of their solo voices to the Jazz Tap Ensemble.

Linda Sohl-Donnell: Rhapsody in Taps In 1979, Linda Sohl-Donnell was a twenty-six-year-old modern dance student in the graduate dance department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) when she attended a

268 TAP DANCING AMERICA performance of Tap II at UCLA’s Royce Hall. It included Foster Johnson, Honi Coles, Sand-

man Sims, and the Nicholas Brothers. Though she had studied tap dance from the age of six in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, where she was born on April 23, 1953, the unfamiliar rhythm-tapping style of those black tap veterans was intoxicating to her. She went backstage and met Johnson, who had been living and teaching in Los Angeles, and she soon began private lessons with him. Johnson would expose her to jazz-tap rhythms and techniques and to the culture of the music that was intertwined with that dance form. Sohl-Donnell’s first lessons with Foster Johnson began in December 1979, in the recreation room of the Oakwood Apartments where he lived. The very first combination he taught her—a fluttering shuffle step that rippled across the floor—had so many sounds in it that “my eyes popped out of my head,” she said. “He did not do time steps so much as melodic phrases that would continue with sixteenth notes and some punctuations.””* Describing Johnson’s flowing, oil-on-water style of tap dancing to the Duke Ellington tune “Satin Doll” in a 1980 performance, music critic Kirk Silsbee wrote:

Johnson slid gracefully around the stage, dropping accents with his heels

and clapping occasional after-beats for emphasis. Unlike the rhythm tappers of his generation, he didn’t stay in one small area with his head down, concentrating on his footwork . . . Foster tried to make it all look easy... . [He] used the stage space like Fred Astaire. He had a background in ballroom dance—unusual for tappers—that informed his concept of stage movement. As the applause died down after the number, Johnson

called for a repeat of the tune. Then he doubled the meter, springing forward, galloping sideways, and backpedaling like an elegant Sugar Ray Robinson, smiling all the while. It was a tour de force that had the crowd hollering and stomping.” “His dancing was gorgeous, like sand pouring from a bottle,” said Fred Strickler, who also studied with Johnson. “I was flabbergasted by his facility, and his feet were so close to the sround, not like the Irish tapping I knew, where the feet were so high [but] completely in line with what I understood as a modern dancer.”

FOSTER JOHNSON Born in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 1917, Foster Johnson saw his first minstrel show at the age of seven; he entered the show’s Charleston contest and won. In 1936, at age eighteen, he toured with Bennie Moten’s Orchestra (which featured a young Count Basie at the piano), tap dancing

and performing knee-drops and leg-splits to such tunes as “Lady Be Good,” “Dinah,” and “Sweet Sue.” From there, he had one club date after another as he (working as a soloist and with Bobby Johnson, Timmie Rodgers, Albert “Pops” Whitman, and Tip, Tap, and Toe) made appearances at New York’s Cotton Club with Duke Ellington (who coined the word “tapismatisamology” in Johnson’s honor), Chicago’s Chez Paree, Philadelphia’s Earle Theatre, Atlantic City’s Round-Up Club, and the new nightspots of Las Vegas with the bands of Ellington, Basie, Gene Krupa, and Jimmy Dorsey. He went to Los Angeles in 1940 with Lionel Hampton’s first big band tour, and he stayed.” By 1945, Johnson had opened the Finale Club in Los Angeles, transforming the former

hall for a Japanese cultural organization into a jazz cabaret with a house band that might include, on any given night, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Howard McGhee, Art Farmer, and/ or Gene Montgomery. The club became a magnet for young modern jazz musicians and a

BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 269 showcase for great dancers. The house floorshow began at 3:00 am and featured shake, comedy, and such tap dancers as Prince Spencer (of the Four Step Brothers).“° In 1980, jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks brought his well-received revue Evolution of the Blues to the Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles. It was born in 1960 at the Monterey Jazz Festival and was revised in the 1970s for a four-year run in San Francisco, where it played an unprecedented five years at the Broadway Theatre. Johnson had been a featured dancer in the Los Angeles production, garnering great notices. “I never saw a man as refined as Foster—except Duke Ellington,” Hendricks recalled. “He was so elegant, and his dancing reflected that. It just flowed. I’m supposed to be the poet laureate of jazz, but when it comes to Foster Johnson, there aren’t enough words about him. He was so rich in his gifts.”” The bestowal of Foster Johnson’s rich rhythmic gifts to such dancers as Linda Sohl-Donnell, who studied with him four times a week from 1980 to 1981, was short-lived. He died of an aortic aneurysm on October 30, 1981, leaving his many young West Coast students devastated.

SOHL-DONNELL IN THE 1980s For Linda Sohl-Donnell, the moment had come to commit herself fully to tap dance. In the fall of 1979, she had begun to build an eclectic duet repertoire of movement pieces with Toni Relin which included modern dance, rhythmic explorations, and political dance-theater works. They presented their first full concert at the House in Santa Monica (March 6-8, 1981), in which Sohl-Donnell performed Foster Johnson’s tap “Acappella” solo. In the summer of 1981, SohlDonnell presented her first tap choreography: a pair of duets performed with Karol Lee that included Breezin’ and Overtime, which combined tap dance and contact improvisation. As Sohl-Donnell described her work: “I was leaning on her [Lee], and rebounding, like this partner thing, but tapping .. . and eventually it trudges along, breaks apart, and comes back together.” The duet Karol’s Boogie (to music by Earl Hines) was later added to the suite. In 1982, Sohl-Donnell and Relin named the company LTD/Unlimited, for its repertoire of modern, rhythmic, and theatrical movement works. In The Essence of Rhythm (February 18-20, 1983, Embassy Arts Theatre), Sohl-Donnell produced a three-night tap extravaganza with her designer husband, Cecil Donnell, in celebration of the eighty-first birthday of the “Father of Rhythm Tap,” John W. Bubble’s. In this production, Sohl-Donnell presented her first largesroup choreography, Tap Rhapsody/Part I, a suite of short contrasting works for five women dancers—herself, Lee, Beverley Scott, Darlene Carpenter, and Monie Adamson—to live music composed by Steve Fowler for bass and flute. “The easy interplay in ensemble sections,” Lewis Segal wrote about the 1984 expanded version of Tap Rhapsody, “avoided all the mechanicalunison clichés of troupe-tap and suavely complemented the elegant live accompaniment.”* In 1984, LTD/Unlimited codirector Toni Relin went on to other pursuits, leaving Sohl-Donnell as the sole artistic director of the company, which in 1988 would be called Rhapsody In Taps. Through the eighties, for her mostly female company, Sohl-Donnell choreographed such tap works as Goin’ Home (1984), a tap quartet accompanied by an ensemble of five musicians directed by Steve Fowler; Seven Steps to Heaven (1985) a solo to live music; Dark Eyes (1986), a quintet with an all-star jazz band playing a chart arranged by Phil Wright; and Duet (1987), for which SohlDonnell danced solo and Brent Lewis played twenty-two chromatically tuned Ikauma drums. She also created such tap/modern dance fusion works as Four/Four on the Swing Shift (1984), which had four dancers in tap shoes and four in jazz shoes dancing to a recorded drum solo by Brent Lewis; Stickato (1985), a rhythm work for five tap dancers holding sticks, diving onto and off of the floor and striking sticks while doing large movement phrases to a score by Swami Deva Asanga; and Live Wire (1985), a quintet for dancers in tap shoes and jazz shoes to a score by Fowler.

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Though Sohl-Donnell was lauded as a tap soloist, she was increasingly attracted to composition and choreography, and her talents in those areas were duly noted. “Each time the company performs,” Sasha Anawalt wrote about Rhapsody In Taps’ premiere of Crossroads (1987), which was praised for its galloping rhythmic substructure, “it strides ahead, broadening definitions of tap dance so that it’s not just the rat-ta-ta-tat of ten busy feet we hear, but the metaphorical consequences of their tapping.”” From 1984 onward, as the sole artistic director of Rhapsody In Taps, Sohl-Donnell was especially cognizant of the black rhythm tap tradition from whence she came. After the great rhythm dancer Eddie Brown moved to Los Angeles, Sohl-Donnell and her company dancers

studied with him. Brown became the guest soloist with Rhapsody In Taps, as would Honi Coles, Sandman Sims, and Jimmy Slyde. “We were five white women, with Eddie Brown as the

featured soloist, and we used to bring in Sandman Sims as guest artist,” said Sohl-Donnell, recalling how her company’s concerts with the black tap masters inevitably invited comparison. Reviewing the Essence of Rhythm concert that Sohl-Donnell produced in 1986 at UCLA, with guest artists Brown, Coles, Sims, Leonard Reed, Steve Condos, Francis Nealy, and the original LTD/Unlimited company of women (Monie Anderson, Beverly Scott, Karol Lee, and Pauline Hagino), the Los Angels Times reviewer Lewis Segal wrote:

Between Nealy’s generation... and the faceless, rhythm-is-of-the-essence Tap Revival era defined by Sohl-Donnell and her company, some sort of lock down of expressivity occurred for women in tap. Perhaps because tap used to be an almost exclusively male domain, most of the current crop of female revivalists seems to have appropriated not only male attire but also what they consider to be male impassivity. That’s the greatest limitation of LTD/Unlimited right now: a kind of unyielding, desexualized efficiency that fails to address who might be dancing these routines— and why.°°

“You couldn’t win for losing,” Sohl-Donnell reflected about that time. “If we were doing something that was feminine, we were lacking because we weren’t hoofing like the men; and then, if we were doing something that wasn’t so feminine, then we’d never be like the men.”*! With Piru-Bole, which premiered at the Japan American Theatre in Los Angeles in February 1989, Sohl underwent her most challenging choreography working from a score. A playful duet for Sohl-Donnell and percussionist Mark Berres, the work used a set of twenty-two chromatically

BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 271 tuned Indian tabla drums, with changeable pitches and volumes, set in a semicircle. Berres played the percussive score by John Bergamo (originally for Indian tabla, Chinese bowls, vocal chants, and taps). The two began by reciting musical syllables in intricate Indian rhythms; then Sohl-Donnell duplicated Berres’s rhythms beat for beat, accent for accent, with her taps. PiruBole represented a major artistic breakthrough for Sohl-Donnell, who, at the time, was studying with Leonard Reed. He told her: “If you are going to hoof, hoof—and if you are going to do all that other modern stuff, then do that—but don’t put them together.” At the premiere of PiruBole, however, Reed, seated in the front row of the theater, sprang from his seat, yelling out “Brava!”

“And for me, that was my ticket,” she later reflected. “I was given the permission to do my experiments. ... Because I was nervous about how Leonard [Reed] or Honi [Coles] and even how Foster [Johnson] would have viewed this.” When asked why she felt the need for Reed’s “permission,” Soh]-Donnell answered: “It was liberating because I was so careful. I did not want to offend. This was an art form I was studying from older black men who were my mentors, who were teaching me this material. And for me, to take it to such a different direction, I was concerned they would be offended. So I felt like I needed some little kind of approval— even though, I was gonna do it anyway.”

Feminist Modernists The tap choreographies of Bufalino, Dally, and Sohl-Donnell raise the question of whether there emerged in the 1980s a particular style of tap that was “feminine” in structure, form, presentation, or rhythmic sensibility. Certainly, some women were reacting in large part to the prevalent attitude by male teachers to “look” feminine by purposely adapting costume and rhythmic style that was “anti-feminine.” Said Bufalino: “The male tap dancers wanted you to look feminine. They’d say, ‘Oh, where’re your high heels? You do the part that looks feminine.’ But if you did, you weren’t taken seriously for half a minute. You had to fight. Fight really hard. You had to really be aggressive.”*’ For Sohl-Donnell, there were certain steps in the rhythm-tap lexicon she was taught that were deemed indelicate in a female. Recalling the end of her private tap lessons with Honi Coles, she said: “I would sit down, and he’d start showing me flash steps. He wouldn’t teach them to me, but he’d perform them. He said he didn’t think women could do certain steps.”

The question of what might be “feminine” in the performances and choreographies of woman rhythm-tap dancers in the 1980s has less to do with the gendering of steps or what the masters preferred their young female pupils to dance than with the creative process itself—the aesthetic choices made by those women choreographers refashioning old materials in the then-feminist vein. When Katherine Kramer stated that in the late 1970s the kind of tap she and other young women were going after felt “very male” and that “it took a while for most of us to find our voice and begin to feel how to make it female,” the question was and is: What was the “how” of making tap “female”? For Kramer, the process of choreographing suggested a less competitive interaction among dancers, less of an orientation toward flash and gimmicks. In some cases, compositions made by women were more melodic and less focused solely on rhythm; often, there was a more emotional and dramatic line in the choreography.** Idella Reed—Davis, a founding member of Rhythm Iss, an all-female tap company, has said, “When men dance... I’m so awed, so caught up in the tension. ... But when women dance you can sit back, absorb what it is that we’re doing. You can feel. You can be in the moment with the dancers. [Tap] is an emotional release.”**

272 TAP DANCING AMERICA

PEGGY SPINA: A PIANO RATHER THAN A DRUM “I have always worked with women,” said Peggy Spina about the Peggy Spina Tap Company she first organized in 1981. “It’s not that I don’t like men; but there are more women dancers, and they want to be involved in a group. Men want to be soloists, women always have a group inclination.” Spina has found female dancers less competitive, more willing than men to engage in ensemble work. Born in Long Beach, California, on May 23, 1940, Spina studied tap dance as a child, but when she came to New York in 1962 it was as a modern dancer. She studied for one year with Martha Graham and for twenty years with Merce Cunningham. She performed in the modern companies of Merle Marsciano, Marjorie Gamso, and Katherine Litz. In 1974, she saw Baby Laurence at one of his several “tap jams” at the New York Jazz Museum. “He had feet like a machine gun,” she said. When she arrived at Jerry LeRoy’s studio on Eighth Avenue and Fortyseventh Street for her first private lessons with Baby Laurence, she brought high-heeled tap shoes. He was making heel thumps with heavy low-heeled shoes, however, so she changed to low-heeled shoes and forever remained a low-heeled rhythm dancer. She also studied with Honi Coles, and was “blown away” when she saw Jane Goldberg’s presentation of the old hoofers in New York in the 1970s, which included Lon Chaney. During that time in New York lots of people were crossing over from modern dance into tap—Spina followed suit. The Peggy Spina Tap Dance Company was first presented at Cami Hall, directly across from Carnegie Hall, in October 1981 as a joint venture with Tony White (one of the hoofers who participated in the 1969 Tap Happenings). By 1984, her company of two to fifteen dancers (mostly women) was performing works by Spina that used intricate rhythmic patterns and created composite moods. Reviewing Syncopate and Swing, a show performed at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre in April 1984, New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson wrote that in Tap Doodles, “Miss

Spina favored a light, deft style notable for its rhythmic variety” which made her taps sound like “merry chattering”; Cocktails for Two sounded out “whispered confidences”; the tap steps in Things Ain’t What They Used to Be “murmured and insinuated”; and in Spina’s solo Honi (an homage to Honi Coles), “bursts of tapping started and stopped and came and went as if by magic.” Anderson was equally enthusiastic about the Fascinating Rhythms concert at the same theater in November 1985. Spina’s repeat of Tap Doodles had “murmuring footwork occasionally interrupted by excited outbursts and changes of rhythm, as if Miss Spina were a conversationalist with her feet who had suddenly thought of new ideas.”*”’ Describing Spina’s dancing in a 1988 performance at Dance Studio S$, Anderson praised Spina for turning “the floor into something her feet could either brush against or dig into . . . she possessed considerable rhythmic subtlety.”* Given Anderson’s lexicon of descriptors of Spina’s footwork (“murmuring,” “chattering,”

“whispering”), he suggested that Spina explored rhythmic expressivity and subtlety (never a hard-hitting, piston style) with lyricism and musicality and that her choreography avoided flash. “I have always thought of myself as a piano, rather than a drum,” said Spina. “Gregory Hines has always thought of himself as a drum, extremely percussive and sharp, but lam a lyric tap dancer—I always hear the melody.””

Tap Festivals In the summer of 1986, a tap festival of historic significance—led by Marda Kirn, director of the Colorado Dance Festival, and Sali Ann Kriegsman, dance consultant to the Smithsonian Institution and director of the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts—took place in Boulder, Colorado, and placed tap dance in the domain that had been previously

BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 273 reserved for modern dance and ballet companies. Called Fascinatin’ Rhythms, the two-week festival offered classes taught by tap masters, as well as lectures, films, panels, and performances. The conceptual framework for that tap festival, following one set by Jane Goldberg’s three festivals, By Word of Foot I (1980), II (1982), and III (1985), was a self-sustaining model for dance production which bypassed middleman producers who controlled the larger venues. The festival model helped solve the problem of tap dancers having to find venues for teaching, learning, and performing. It became a kind of global village for tap participants, practitioners, and spectators: it remains intergenerational, interracial, and inclusive of male and female tap artists; it provides the gathering place and the social structure for which tap dance flourishes. At the same time, the festival model invented tap’s own unique way of being passed down from generation to generation, not through a codification of style but through individual study and with the rhythmic language of the individual artists.

EACH ONE TEACH ONE “Tap’s going to hold on if we continue to teach it as it should be taught,” said veteran Chicago tap dancer Jimmy Payne to Jane Goldberg in 1984. “When good tap teachers start teaching again, then it will stay.”°° The festival format, with its emphasis on the individual teaching of one’s style, also took tap dancers and dance teachers out of obscurity. Steve Condos: Rhythm-Tap Rudiments. Steve Condos, the virtuosic rhythm-tap dancer who, as one of the Condos Brothers, appeared in Hollywood musical films in the 1940s and on Broadway in the 1970s, resurrected himself in the eighties tap resurgence as a gifted teacher. He used the venue of the tap festival classroom to perfect and teach his tap rudiments—exercises for attuning to sound and precision. As tap dancer Anita Feldman described them:

As a drummer does with his sticks, so Steve produced innumerable mathematical variations on how many strikes each foot could do in a row, and in what order ... [and then] practice the combination at lightning speed, getting as fast as a drummer with a drum roll. Making variations was an endless and exciting process. Each time he changed an accent or added a pause, he created a totally different feeling. . .. He would, as he called it, “sculpt” the rhythm. He would practice these numerous combinations so that he could perform them fluidly and draw on them at any point for his improvisational performances.” The Condos technique was a guide to improvisation in performance—it was not repertory that he was teaching but, instead, a musical technique from which to improvise material. “Steve starts his performance firmly grounded. Rudiments begin. Repetitious. Infectious. Bubbling up from way down deep,” Dorothy Wasserman recalled of Condos’s festival classes. “Sometimes he would appear to be in a ‘state,’ so absorbed in his patterns that you think he’d forgotten his audience. No sir. Once he establishes his ‘groove’ he explodes with fast, clean, intricate, complex patterns that take you with him to higher ground.”” That Condos’s rudiment technique lives in the teachings of Jason Samuels Smith, the improvisational performances of Marshall Davis Jr., and the work of a host of millennium-

generation dancers is testament to the invincibility of this hard-core systematic training which frees dancers to explore any and all permutations of rhythm. Eddie Brown: Scientific Rhythms. Eddie Brown, the superlative rhythm dancer known for clarity of taps, complexity of phrasing, and rippling musicality, was also a mainstay of tap-festival

274 TAP DANCING AMERICA teaching. Born on August 7, 1918, in Omaha, Nebraska, he learned to dance at an early age from his uncle, a flash dancer. “Everything I did was up tempo, home again and down, and I could do twelve choruses,” he recalled. At the age of sixteen, he was discovered by Bill Robinson at a tap dance contest held in his hometown. At age eighteen, Brown joined the Bill Robinson Revue at New York’s Apollo Theater; he remained with the show from 1933 to 1939, able to

withstand the strict demands of Robinson, a perfectionist. Performing his hometown style of up-tempo flash dancing at Small’s Paradise, Brown saw that young hoofers at the time were dancing to slower swing tempos which allowed them to insert more beats into the bar. “So I woodshed for three weeks and found out that rhythm dancing was flash dancing cut in half,” Brown recounted. He returned to Small’s and delivered two choruses of rhythm tapping, asking the musicians for a slower tempo, and performing two tasty choruses of rhythm tap to a slow swing tempo. By the time the show he was touring with arrived in San Francisco, Brown was no longer doing flash. “Everything was rhythm, down-to-earth rhythm.”® In San Francisco, Brown formed a trio with Carl “Busboy” Gibson and Jerry Reed; the sroup later split, Brown and Reed forming the Mad Cats of Rhythm. Brown also worked as a soloist, teaming with drummer Dave Tough in an act in which they played off each other in a drums-and-tap dialogue. From the 1940s, Brown appeared with Billie Holiday and Joe Turner at the Savoy, in Art Tatum’s show, and with the bands of Jimmie Lunceford, Dizzy Gillespie, Cal Tjader, and George Shearing. In 1970, Brown was featured in Jon Hendrick’s San Francisco production of Evolution of the Blues, which ran five years there at the Broadway Theatre. In 1982, Brown moved to Los Angeles, where he mentored a number of West Coast dancers. As guest artist with Rhapsody In Taps from 1983 to 1992, he was featured in the company’s Los Angeles seasons in performance at the Japan America Theatre, at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and at the Wadsworth Theatre. In the 1980s, Brown was invited to most of the new tap festivals that were organized in San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Boulder, Houston, and New York. “Eddie Brown always opened our [| festival] shows,” Brenda Bufalino recalled. “Dressed in his white tuxedo and white broadbrimmed hat, he set the tone for the whole show, quickly and emphatically. He swung his short, four-chorus dances at a medium tempo, developing his rhythms by accenting and doubling up his heels. He set his tempos with crisp, syncopated time steps to which he returned after executing breaks with a flourish of very hip and complex patterns.”™

“Where Are the Women?” Although Honi Coles, Gregory Hines, and Jimmy Slyde were among those invited to teach and perform at the Colorado Dance Festival’s Fascinatin’ Rhythms in 1986, no female tap dancers were invited to perform that first year. Jane Goldberg, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and Lynn Dally—despite having tap companies of which they were artistic directors—were asked only to participate on panels, to discuss the art of the elder statesmen of tap. At one of the panel discussions, Terry Brock stood up and asked, “Why aren’t these women teaching? They are our mentors.” Her sentiments were echoed by others in the audience. The uproar over the controversy brought news of their exclusion to Gregory Hines, who, one night during the performance, yelled out “Where are the women?” Bufalino, Dally, Goldberg, Dianne Walker, and Dorothy Wasserman were called to the stage. Bufalino had worn a dress to the concert and had no tap shoes; Hines lent her a pair of his pants and tap shoes. “They were both much too big,” she recalled, “so I stuffed my socks in his shoes, pulled his pants up to my breasts, tied his belt in a knot around my waist, and hit the boards.”® There is a slight irony, though unrecognized, that once onstage the women improvised around the shim sham shimmy—the one-chorus routine created by Leonard Reed with female chorus dancers in the 1920s. What all realized, however, was that the call of women to the stage had broken the taboo spell that hung over the event.

BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 275 Women dancers were fully integrated into the Colorado Dance Festival in 1987. That same year the idea was presented of forming an international tap association that would create an open forum for tap dancers around the world; members would receive a newsletter that would include a listing of upcoming performances and festivals, and articles written by tap dancers would share ideas and illuminate philosophies of the form. The International Tap Association (ITA), under the direction of Marda Kirn (who also undertook the editorship of the ITA Newsletter) was dedicated to “serving the needs of the tap community and to promote greater understanding of tap throughout the world.” Under Kirn’s direction, the Colorado Dance Festival (which ran until 1992), with its lectures, workshops, video showings, panel discussions, tap jams, and performances, became the model for the tap festivals that followed during the next two decades.

Gregory Hines: White Nights to Tap Dance in America In the 1985 film White Nights, we first see Gregory Hines strutting onto the small stage of a shabby theater in Soviet Siberia as the character Sportin’ Life, in a concert version of George Gershwin’s black folk opera Porgy and Bess (the role the great rhythm dancer John W. Bubbles originated on Broadway in 1935). He is singing “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,” matching the simple boasts in the lyric with scatted vocals and abrupt spins, which personify his street-smart, drug-dealing character. In the film, Hines plays the African American expatriate tap dancer Raymond Greenwood, who left the United States to escape everyday American racism; but he soon realizes that his expatriation brings feelings of being stymied by the lack of familiar cultural markers that might enhance the full expression of his musicianship. He entertains the idea of returning to America with his Russian wife (played by Isabella Rossellini) but is aware of the blatant racial response that would greet his interracial marriage. His problems are further complicated by his aiding a Russian ballet dancer (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov), who is trying to defect. Their entwined dilemma propels the narrative. White Nights is best remembered for the scene that pitted Hines’s tap against Baryshnikov’s ballet in a challenge dance that had them charging at each other across a huge dance studio, each pulling out their fiercest footwork and stretching limbs into inane proportion. (One of Baryshnikov’s testosterone-charged responses to Hines’s ferocious stuttering steps is to splay his leg up against a wall and push into a stretch that nearly dislocates leg from hip). But in the far more quietly dramatic scenes, which played with bittersweet intensity, Hines illuminated some of the deepest, most profound meanings of what it is to be a black man in America. In doing so, he showed how tap dancing (as an act of survival and salvation) became his metaphor of resistance—and how it came to function both as an autobiographical text and a symbol of the broader panorama of the black struggle. Hines had never been overtly political or particularly outspoken about the racial injustices in America. Yet his portrayal of the African American expatriate in White Nights brought the fierce virtuosity of his tap dancing into a broader panorama of meaning. “I haven’t had a terribly traumatic experience as a black person in this world, but I’ve had experiences,” Hines stated. “My nature is to let them go—I wasn’t going to be burdened with a negative attitude. So for White Nights I had to dig, but the pain was there.” In the opening scene of White Nights, after the sung-and-strutted first chorus within the Porgy and Bess show within a show, the Gershwin song reached a climactic moment, when the musicians lay out and Hines launched into an extended cadence of a tacit solo, his rhythms cutting against the swing mood and feel of the tune. “He seems to dance spontaneously, building

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BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 277 rhythmic ideas on top of each other in a deconstructive rush of metric subdivision,” Thomas DeFrantz described aptly. “He establishes a pulse, then divides it with cross-rhythms, the entirety amplified by the film’s sound designer to sound with a crystalline liquidity, at once crisp and resonant.”®’ The furious propulsions of Hines’s dance spilled him off the stage, where he danced in the aisles, winding between members of the Siberian audience who sit in rapt attention. He was forced back to the stage only when the musicians reentered to signal the end of the song. In reluctant retreat, he danced on the house floor, up the stairs leading to the stage, and against the walls of the proscenium. In that short sequence, which hints at the interior drama that drives him to dance, Hines shows us that his improvised rhythm dancing has no musical, physical, or metaphorical boundaries; it is a profound dramatic expression and defiant act of freedom. While Hines surprised his Siberian audience with his broad vista of dance ideas, film viewers were and are swept by his generative creative force into a participatory space of rhythmic discovery—they experience an overpowering surge of exhilaration. And that was the genius of Hines’s tap dancing, why he was so beloved: he was so bodily and soulfully adventurous in his rhythmic forays, and so generous. We saw it in his performance with the Jazz Tap Ensemble at New York’s Joyce Theatre in 1986, where he made a brief but energetic appearance. Hunched over and dancing on a miked-and-raised platform placed center stage, he indulged in a meditation on the paddle-and-roll in which each riff added a new tap sound to the bar. With each new phrase, the audience squealed and clapped— and he had to gesture to them, with the wave of an arm, to wait for him to get through his exploration. In his extended foreplay of the rhythmic phrase, languishing in it and thrusting it into an explosive climax, Hines was intoxicating. He was a rhythmic provocateur—even when facing downward or offstage, he danced to you. He brought sexiness back into the dance. “Hunkered over like a prizefighter, unsmiling, he cocked his head and stared at the floor as if looking for answers,” Sally Sommer observed of the handsome dancer who was muscled, new-schooled, and macho; he was not afraid to wear a T-shirt that was tight, show a body of substance, a line that was strong. “The old-time class act is not his concern. He gives us the sheer power of physical dancing, pouring out an overwhelming technique joined to streetwise banter with the public,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times about Hines at the Joyce. “Mr. Hines ... comes down hard and loud... . He is not afraid to come down flat on his feet. Sound comes first here, and his rhythms are exceedingly complex, brilliantly rendered. The variety of tap sounds, the intonation and volume in Mr. Hines’ dancing, is amazingly varied.”® Like a jazz musician who ornaments a melody with improvisational riffs, Hines improvised within the frame of the dance. His “improvography” demanded the percussive phrasing of a composer, the rhythms of a drummer, and the lines of a dancer. While he was the chosen inheritor of the (black) rhythm-tap tradition, so was he also a proponent of the new. “He purposely obliterated the tempos, throwing down a cascade of taps like pebbles tossed across the floor. In that moment, he aligned tap with the latest free-form experiments in jazz and new music,” wrote Sally Sommer. Hines’s break from the classic jazz cadences of swing and bop (as seen in the 1989 movie Tap, the first to merge tap dancing with hard-driving funk and rock musical styles) was monumental. “It jerked tap out of a pre-1950s aesthetic and pushed it into the 1990s and beyond by roughing it up and giving it emotional weight,” thereby yielding visual elegance to aural power in the complexity and density of sound.”

GREAT PERFORMANCES: TAP DANCE IN AMERICA Hines, a gracious performer and revolutionary who took the upright tap tradition and bent it over and slammed it to the ground,” added new stylistic dimensions and volume to tap, and in doing

278 TAP DANCING AMERICA so elevated perceptions of the tap dancer from entertainer to serious dance artist. He continued that work when, for a Great Performances television special titled Tap Dance in America, he played host to contemporary tap soloists and companies from across the country. Filmed during November 16 to 18, 1988, at the Billy Rose Diamond Horse Shoe Club in Manhattan, the hourlong show, which was broadcast on PBS in March 1989, was the first all-tap program ever made for the prestigious television dance series. It realized Hines’s longtime ambition to make a show that gave audiences some idea of the rich variety of talent and styles in tap dance. “What we’re going to deal with is tap dancing now—what’s happening today,” Hines stated in his introduction to the program. While the elder hoofers Bunny Briggs, Buster Brown, Jimmy Slyde, and Sandman Sims (who played a running gag of nagging Hines about loosening the taps on his shoes) made brief appearances on the program, the next generations of tap artists were given the spotlight. Tommy Tune and Hines performed the Cholly Atkins and Honi Coles classic tap softshoe, “Taking a Chance on Love” (they had been taught the dance by Brenda Bufalino and

coached by Coles who, in performance, sat proudly at a table in the theater). LaVaughan Robinson and Germaine Ingram tapped their faster-than-possible duet-cum-challenge, each trying to top the other with flashy aerial bits, and Broadway tappers Gregg Burge and Hinton Battle one-upped each other with their own flashy aerial bits. Savion Glover, who celebrated his fifteenth birthday during the filming and had recently closed as star of the Broadway musical The Tap Dance Kid (August 11, 1985), performed a virtuosic solo; then Fred

Strickler danced to a Samuel Barber composition played by a string quintet. Camden Richman, Jennifer Lane, and Dianne Walker, announced by Hines as the “women in tap,” danced a short trio, and then each spun out a brief solo. Rounding out the company works, Manhattan Tap—Heather Cornell, Jamie Cunneen, Shelly Oliver, and Tony Scopino—realized the heights of ensemble dancing to an up-tempo arrangement of Charlie Parker’s jazz work “Scrapple from the Apple,” which demanded highspeed precision, synchronous movement, and split-second solos. The American Tap Dance Orchestra—Bufalino, Tony Waag, Mimi Moyer, Margaret Morrison, Bob Kerr, Lynne Jassem, Barbara Duffy, Ira Bernstein, and Neil Applebaum—performed a condensed, three-minute version of Haitian Fight Song to the 1955 jazz music of Charlie Mingus. Lacing the program together were small bits of tapping by Hines—one, a brilliant improvography in which he pitted himself against his double, using the film technology of the split screen, in a tap challenge. He also held informal conversations with the dancers about tap. During the last night of filming, before a live audience of mostly tap dancers, the energy ricocheted between the stage and the audience like lightning. The night’s topper came at the finale, when the audience rose to its feet—in tap shoes—and broke out dancing. Millions of viewers saw Great Performances: Tap Dance in America, and millions more see it whenever PBS uses it during pledge drives. The show gave tap the kind of visibility it needed at that stage of its evolution. Once again, Hines got the opportunity to lead the way in bridging the gap between tap dance and mainstream entertainment—and he did so with skill, talent, and charm.

Dianne Walker: Black and Blue’s Griot and Mistress of Rhythm Tap Somewhat near the end of Great Performances: Tap Dance in America, we see a line of three women; they are costumed in pantsuits (one in purple, the second in pink, the third in turquoise) and wearing black-laced low-heeled tap shoes. The end woman counts out a terse 4/4 time, and all three snap into a thirty-two-count tacit rhythm combination of running flaps,

BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 279 chugs, offbeat breaks and turning slides that bring the house audience to a hooting and whistling applause. “Women in tap!” Hines proclaimed proudly. Sitting at the apron of the stage, he then introduced Jennifer Lane, who performed a spunky solo to “The Lady Is a Tramp” in a medium tempo that mixed chatty rhythms with airily brushed heel clicks. Next up was Camden Richman (on taps) and Tom Dannenberg (on electric bass), trading whispering and heart-beating rhythms as Richman skimmed over brilliantly etched taps and ice-skated into a decelerated ending. Third and last was Dianne Walker, who made a chenee turn onto the stage and, on the last beat of the four-bar introduction to the swinging-Latin up-tempo “Perdido,” snapped into her elegant arms-open-wrists-dropped pose. She sailed into her one-chorus solo, tapping the first A section with double-time stomps lifted onto the tips of the toes, then scatting scissor-steps.

Matching her murmuring cascade of rhythms, in the stop-time bridge, to the screeching accents of brass instruments, she finished with light-skipping trench steps. Looking insouciantly over her shoulder as luscious rhythms spilled from her feet, Walker was both demure and debonair—at thirty-eight years old, she had the radiant, authoritative ease and expertise of a veteran hoofer double her age. Given the star power that she exuded in that one-chorus fifty-second solo, Dianne Walker seemed be a relative newcomer to the tap resurgence scene—even while getting notices in tap shows that she was not in. When she made an appearance at the after-show jam session of Sole Sisters in 1985, for instance, Jennifer Dunning in the New York Times described Walker as “a tapper from whom steps and moves flow like music, she has an easy warmth of presence that makes her dancing incandescent.””* Walker had appeared as one of the Shim Sham Girls, along with Dorothy Wasserman and Jane Goldberg, in the movie Tap, but she was not the film’s star.

Walker was not a modern dancer, a tap choreographer, a director of a tap company, or a suest artist in other companies, but she was nevertheless ubiquitous in the 1980s. Based in Boston, she was a student and protégée of Leon Collins, whose school in Brookline, Massachusetts, she would codirect (with Pam Raff) after his death in 1985. As a teacher, colleague, and collaborator, Walker had gone through a long and venerated tradition of service and mentorship. She was a black woman, and she was committed less to making “art” than to making social connections with the young generation of African American dancers who had not yet been ignited by the resurgence of black rhythm tap. Today, Walker is considered by many

female black tap dance artists as the transitional figure between the young generation of female dancers—including such talents as Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, Idella Reed, Michelle Dorrance, and Ali Bradley—and the “forgotten black mothers of tap,” such as Edith “Baby” Edwards, Jeni LeGon, Lois Miller, and Florence Covan.’* The opportunities (for service to the field) that opened in the mid-1980s positioned Walker as the link from the old to the young, the “transitor” in passing on the rhythms and musicality of the old generation. She was also considered the griot, the holder of the classical black rhythm “canon” bestowed on her when she worked as principal dancer in the Paris production of Black and Blue, as well as principal and assistant choreographer in the Broadway production. That show is today considered the quintessential black-rhythm tap musical of the century. Born Dianne Taylor in Boston on March 8, 1951, Walker had a keen rhythmic sensibil-

ity even as an infant, her mother says. When she was fifteen months old, she contracted polio and spent three months in the hospital and another several months in quarantine. When she was released, for the proper exercise of her legs, she was sent to study dance with Ethel Covan, whose forte was ballet, but even then Dianne’s interest was tap. At age seven she was referred to Mildred Kennedy, who ran the Kennedy Dancing School on

280 TAP DANCING AMERICA Massachusetts Avenue in Boston. Kennedy had begun her own dancing career at age seven, and her first teacher had been Doris Jones, whose Jones-Haywood School of Ballet gave black youngsters in Washington, D.C., the chance to study classical ballet. Nicknamed the “Brown Bomber,” Mildred Kennedy had a successful performing career dancing tap on the New England and New York vaudeville circuits. With her high standards and the school’s top-quality teaching, “Everyone in the school excelled,” said Walker, who studied tap, toe tap (taps affixed to ballet pointe shoes), jazz, and ballet alongside Mildred’s own children, Paul and Arlene.” The late 1950s was a time in Boston when jazz was flowing in the streets. In the racially mixed but predominantly black Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, where Walker grew up, there were many jazz clubs. Sitting outside those clubs were “the old gentlemen of the community,” who impressed Walker. “They dressed well, they carried themselves well, and they were with these women, who accompanied these men who were beautiful, dramatic, they moved with such rhythm, just walking down the street.” Walker later understood that they were the “show biz” people—the dancers, singers, and musicians, the exciting and dramatic people of the community who, she said, “were very caring .. . very kind to us kids. I would go to the store for them and often they would come into the dance studio and watch the kids dance. You looked over there and saw people, you always had an audience.” After her mother remarried, the family moved to the West Coast, and Walker was forced to leave the Kennedy school at age ten. The family lived first at the Edwards Air Force Base, in Los Angeles County, California, where she attended elementary and middle school, and then in Okinawa, Japan, where she attended the Kubasaki High School. She returned to Boston in 1968 and one year later, she married Rodney Walker, and set her life to raising a family. In 1978, Walker was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two, living in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, and working as a staff psychologist at Boston University Hospital when she attended a social affair at Prince Hall Masonic Temple. There, she met the black vaudeville tap dancer Willie Spencer, who sent her the very next day to the studio of Leon Collins in an old piano factory on Tremont Street. “I walked into the studio and I see this little man sitting at his desk with a screw driver adjusting his shoes, and in the background his Baby Laurence album was playing, and he looks up at me, and he says, ‘Hi dumplin’, I’ve been waiting for you—Willie called me and told me you wanted to learn to tap dance.” Collins began his teachings with his Routine #1, which Walker learned in increments, prosressing to Routines 2, 3, and 4; which altogether constituted the core of his teachings. “Each of the routines were four-chorus routines which had no repetitions. The rhythms were beautifully and seamlessly joined, and made so much sense musically,” said Walker, “and they were fit to standard jazz music—so it’s your basics, the foundation, the alphabet.” Eager, talented, and mature, Walker found herself teaching tap to Collins’s Saturday children’s class. She soon became his protégé, along with two of his other students, Clara C. B. Hetherington and Pam Raff.

Leon Collins, Bop Classical In 1978, at the age of fifty-six, Leon Collins considered himself a “retired” professional tap dancer, content enough to be teaching in the Radcliffe Dance Program and the Harvard Summer Dance Center in Boston. Born in Chicago in 1922 to parents of West Indian descent, he wanted to be a prizefighter as a boy, but he became a popular dancer in clubs around town. His big break came when he was offered a five-year contract with the Jimmie Lunceford band; by the late 1930s, he was working with Count Basie’s orchestra in Chicago and New York and with

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that tap dancing is belittling to African Americans—who prevails in tapping out the dreams of his youth. Glover danced some three hundred performances until the show closed in August 1985. “What I learned from The Tap Dance Kid was the basics,” Glover said of his experience on Broadway. He gained a familiarity with stage performing and, as fourth in the role, inherited the tap choreography of Danny Daniels—a Broadway style of tap dance rooted in Irish jig and Lancashire clog tradition. In April 1985, when Glover was being feted in Rome as “Broadway’s Tap Dance Kid,” he had not yet been engulfed in the rhythm-tap tradition that would transform him into the rhythm-tapping virtuoso of the late twentieth century. Perhaps that is why Glover was, as Sumbry said, so taken with his young peers who had come up in that tradition. There was, however, one thing that differentiated Glover, said Walker, from any other kid in the country: “Savion was interested in everything, and he wanted to hear it ten times and then start over from the beginning. My kids could dance, they knew they could and took it for granted .. . but Savion never stopped looking, asking, doing, thinking, being, reading. When he walked into this scene, it all changed.” Walker claimed responsibility for helping Savion: “I took him by the hand, and the guys—even though I love the ground they walk on, and I miss every one of them this very day in my heart and soul—are not the ones who grabbed these kids by the hand and taught them. It was the women who did that.”*° The beginning of the life change for Walker, when she would develop as a tap performing artist, and for Glover, when he would begin his professional apprenticeship with the hoofers and realize his future as a rhythm-tap dancer, came four months after the Tip Tap Festival in Rome, with the Paris, France, production of Black and Blue. The all-black musical revue was conceived and directed by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli and choreographed by Henry LeTang, with blues singers Ruth Brown, Sondra Reeves Phillips, Carrie Smith, and Linda Hopkins, and with tap dancers Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Ralph Brown, and George

Hillman. Glover was cast as the sole member of the young generation taking solo turns along with the hoofers. The revue also featured a tap dancing ensemble that included Deborah Mitchell, Germaine Goodson, and Rashmalla Combo, billed as the Rhythm Queens, and Dianne Walker was principal soloist. What was to be a twelve-week stay in Paris, with an

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opening at the Theatre Musical de Paris Chatelet Theatre, lasted eight months, thanks to the overwhelming response. It was during that period of time, from September 1985 to May 1986 in the Paris production of Black and Blue, that Savion Glover was initiated—absorbing all he could from Walker and all the black hoofers who took the fourteen-year-old under their wing. “Black and Blue was when I realized I could create my own kind of dance,” Glover recalled. “During the show I'd go out and do double time steps, trying to please the audience, and then afterward I was hanging out with Slyde and Chaney, and just by watching them, I saw it wasn’t about pleasing an audience, it was about expressing yourself.”*! So would Dianne Walker during this period begin to find her own position within the form: “I think you have to find your own truth, because it can’t be defined by anybody,” she reflected. Leon got me in touch with jazz—he got me in touch with clarity and sophisticated rhythm patterns. But I had something inside that I always wanted to get out to express myself as a tap dancer, and when I was given that opportunity the second time around .. . there was something that was uncontrollable that just came out. I found myself through my journey in Black and Blue, and when I came away from that, my dancing style was significantly different—and then I went back to the Leon Collins influences and came home.”

Black Rhythm Risen BLACK AND BLUE IN AMERICA Surely, the crowning achievement to the slow but steady rise and recuperation of the black rhythm tap-tradition to the American stage was the Broadway musical Black and Blue, which

opened on January 28, 1989, at the Minskoff Theatre and ran for 829 performances in New York, garnering Tony Awards for Ruth Brown (best actress in a musical); Claudio Segovia

286 TAP DANCING AMERICA and Hector Orezzoli (best costume design); and Cholly Atkins, Henry LeTang, Fayard Nicholas, and Frankie Manning (best choreography in a musical). The musical, conceived and directed by Segovia and Orezzoli, bared the soul of the blues in all its expressive forms. It opened on Broadway in a more flamboyantly spectacular production than in Paris, starring the legendary

blues singers Ruth Brown, Linda Hopkins, and Carrie Smith; hoofers Bunny Briggs, Ralph Brown, Lon Chaney, Jimmy Slyde, and Dianne Walker (who also served as dance captain and assistant choreographer); thirteen adult dancers—Rashamella Cumbo, Tanya Gibson, Germaine Goodson, Angela Hall, Kyme, Valerie Macklin, Deborah Mitchell, Valerie E. Smith, Frederick J. Boothe, Eugene Fleming, Ted Levy, Bernard Manners, Van Porter, Kevin Ramsay, Ken Roberson, and Melvin Washington—and three younger dancers, Cyd Glover, Savion Glover, and Dormeshia Sumbry. They performed the swing and jazz tap choreographies of Cholly Atkins, Henry LeTang, Frankie Manning, and Fayard Nicholas. The New York production of Black and Blue was conceived as a generational depiction show, with its senior ring of legendary blues singers and three generations of rhythm-tap dancers. A legendary jazz orchestra conducted by Leonard Oxley included Sir Roland Hanna (piano), Al McGibbon (bass), Grady Tate (drums), Haywood Henry (clarinet), Jake Porter (trumpet), Britt Woodman (trombone), Jerome Richardson (alto sax), and Claude Williams (violin). The Broadway production was a musical spectacular that encompassed the full spectrum and cadence of distinctive jazz styles and expression—as well as the jazz canon of rhythm-tap dancing. Black and Blue’s first number, “Hoofers A Capella,” was one of hard-hitting hoofing in the one-upping format of the tap challenge. It opened with a seven-man Lon Chaney “track” line

stomping and hooting the beat. Ralph Brown began with a simple time step that he slyly embellished with triplets. Ted Levy picked it up and adding a string of riffs. He traded it to Savion Glover, who lightened the sound with a scurry of quick leaps and perches on the tips of his toes, and passed it to Jimmy Slyde who slipped and spun the beat, only to have it steadied by Lon Chaney with his signature four-square paddle-and-roll. By the time it got to Bernard

Manners, who turned it into a saucy 2/4 time Latin cubanola, the hoofers had taught the audience how, in the democracy of challenge, all were free to show off their style. Cholly Atkins’s “Memories of You” was danced with deceptive nonchalance by Dianne Walker and a sleek pair of henchmen, Bernard Manners and Kevin Ramsay, who turned tap from the cacophonic to the melodic. Encased in a pannier-shaped short skirt, Walker stayed poised as sweet sonorities clicked from her feet; as the trio typed out paragraphs of quiet strolling rhythms, the audience sat in silent rapture. In contrast to Atkins’s impressionistic pianissimo, Henry LeTang’s “Everybody Loves My Baby” demonstrated the dazzling Broadway style of jazz tap dancing, in which there was no need to listen carefully, because it was repeated by the chorus of red-sequined bodies strutting and maxi-fording in a Busby Berkeley-—style collage of entwining circles. That jazz-tap dance could be more the former than latter, with the upper body competing with and finally overpowering the feet, was demonstrated in Frankie Manning’s “Swingin’ to ‘Wednesday Night Hop” and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” to the Duke Ellington classic. Manning had been one of the original members of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in the 1930s who spent a lifetime swing dancing in New York’s Savoy Ballroom style, so his Lindy Hop choreographies for the ensemble oozed authenticity with such classic jazz tap steps as the Suzy-Q, Shorty George, screwball, bump-and-grind, and aerials (flying leaps over one’s partner). Although the feet lacked taps, jazz rhythms emanated from deep inside the chest and flowed into the limbs. Fayard Nicholas’s “I Want a Big Butter and Egg Man” demonstrated the ease with which a new generation of dancers absorbed the Nicholas Brothers’ signature style of jazz-tap dancing.

A classic capturing of Bunny Briggs and his close-to-the-floor hoofing, 1999. (Photo by Karen Zebulon)

Sung by Carrie Smith, it saw Kevin xa

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the off-beat, pulling up high at the end —," . rina Seno

and showing how the lightning-fast . = = ua Ss bop phrasings of jazz tap could be a - a : spiritually enlightened conversation. But it was Bunny Briggs’s interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” that was the most pathetique of jazz expressions. Turning his big doe eyes heavenward, he played his rhythms as if he were chattering with the angels, showing how jazz-tap dancing could be a spiritual ascent and bittersweet celebration of the blues. Jerome Richardson played the opening stanza with a honeyed smoothness, summoning Ellington’s lyrics, In a sentimental mood I can see

the stars come through my room... as Briggs stood in stillness with his head bowed, one leg entwined around the other, as if he were in a cocoon. Wearing a two-piece suit of velvet patches, he looked like an aged harlequin clown with his moppy crown of shiny white hair. In the second verse, he unfurled one leg, then the other, in a splashing patter of taps that launched him into a heel-and-toe paddling across the stage as if, so the lyrics described, he were “on the wings of ev’ry kiss.” In the instrumental B section of the tune, Briggs tiptoes the words, dropping little “rose pearls” to echo the verse. Returning to the head of the verse ever so poignantly, and longingly, he goes into a back-paddling freefall, waving his arms as if to ask the heavens to send energy into him, waving to the spirits of wind for his boat.

In the second chorus, as the soprano sax turns into a songbird, Bunny responds to each of the high-note flutterings with a rush of crisp sixteenth notes in filigrees of motion, as if

288 TAP DANCING AMERICA recalling the musical and lyrical memories of his youth, dancing to Ellington; he becomes the literal embodiment of sentimentality in the sensuous pattering of retrospection. As he returns to the present, as if jolted by Richardson’s flutelike calls, he turns emphatic with his taps— stomping, slapping, cramp-rolling the floor; darting his eyes quickly right and left like stop lights; then returning to his meditation, only to be startled out of it again and again. The last chorus propels him into a continuous slapping out of high-pitched notes, summoning all the spirits with stamping, drumming the floor like a piston. Then, as he has found his hallowed ground, he makes a scudding stop, back to standing stillness, bends over and presses the open palm of his hand to the floor, as if to draw up all the spirits that lie beneath his feet— In a sentimental mood,

the soprano saxophone sings, in the last stanza, and indeed, Briggs is ... within a world so heavenly,

as he comes to an upright standing position and takes three gracious poses—each with a foot pointed in tendu and an opened palm extended heavenward— For I never dreamt that you’d be loving Sentimen (Pose)- tal (Pose) me (Pose).

NATIONAL TAP DANCE DAY By 1989, and especially with Black and Blue on Broadway, tap dance had resurrected its masters and founded its canon of classical works. It had opened its doors and begun to inspire a young generation of dancers and a new generation of choreographers, gathered a sizable and rapt audience eager for the nostalgic and the experimental, and planted seeds for a new generation of dance artists who would imbue the form with yet-unrealized rhythmic sensibilities. The most substantial physical proof of tap’s dance’s foundational growth as an American vernacular art form was the sheer number of tap dance companies that had mushroomed across the country throughout the 1980s. In the Northeast, the American Tap Dance Orchestra was a five-to-thirty-member company dealing with new approaches to tap, particularly ensemble work, directed by Brenda Bufalino.

Andrea Levine Jazz Tap was a three-to-fourrmember company continuing the tradition of rhythm-jazz tap. Anita Feldman Tap was a two-to-six-member company of dancers and musicians exploring integrating rhythms with and to percussive acoustic and electronic scores. The Changing Times Tap Dance Company was specializing in the connection between language and tap, and the rediscovery of women’s role in tap’s evolution. Balletap USA was dedicated to the fusion of ballet tap and directed by Maurice Hines and Mercedes Ellington. The Copasetics still performed as the masters of tap from vaudeville, film, and the Broadway stage. The Gail Conrad Dance Theatre was composed of five to ten dancers presenting new full-length narrative works. DancEllington was a tap ensemble directed by Mercedes Ellington and dedicated to preserving the heritage of tap and bringing it into the twenty-first century. The Hoofers (veterans Ralph Brown, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, Jimmy Slyde, George Hillman, and the younger Bernard Manners) were still performing traditional styles of rhythm tap. Collins and Company, the Boston-based company of Leon Collins, consisted of C. B. Hetherington, Pamela Raff, and Dianne Walker. Manhattan Tap comprised four dancers and three musicians committed to old and new tap styles, repertory works, and collaborations under the direction of Heather Cornell and Tony Scopino. The Peggy Spina Tap Company had two to fifteen dancers performing in the

BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 289 New York area starting in 1981. Philadelphia Tap Dance consisted of great rhythm-tap performer and teacher LaVaughan Robinson and lawyer/dancer Germaine Ingram. Rhythm Anonymous featured Lynn Jassem offering solo performances. Silver Belles was a company of elder women who had performed with the great names of show business. Ten Toe Percussion was a company

of dancers and musicians under the artistic direction of Ira Bernstein who used a variety of percussive dance styles, mixing clog and Irish step dancing, flamenco, and tap. On the West Coast, the Alfred Desio Zapped Taps was a team of two; Rhapsody In Taps com-

prised five dancers and four musicians, plus the legendary Eddie Brown as guest artist, under the direction of Linda Sohl-Donnell. The Jazz Tap Ensemble had three tap dancers and three musicians performing a variety of tap styles, under the artistic direction of Lynn Dally. Hot Cross Buns had been, since 1987, a collaboration between classical guitarist-dancer Myrna Sislen and dancer-choreographer Yvonne Edwards. In the Southwest, Austin on Tap was an all-female Texas-based company founded in 1979 by artistic director Debra Bray, whose company member and managing director Acia Gray, with Deidre Strand, would in 1989 form Tapestry, a multiform company of modern, jazz, contemporary ballet, and rhythm tap. In the Midwest, TAPIT was a Madison, Wisconsin—based company directed by Donna Peckett and Daniell Dresdon. NAWJA was a Chicago-based company of twenty dancers and musicians performing tap, Afro-American, jazz, and West Indian dance, directed by Nawja I and LaQuietta Hardy. This list, although far from being complete, shows the impressive representation of the performing groups and companies throughout the United States in the 1980s devoted to the art and practice of tap dance. Their presence helped to substantiate passage of the U.S. Joint Resolution declaring May 25 to be “National Tap Dance Day.” The result of hard work by Linda Christensen, Nicola Daval, and Carol Vaughn of the Tap America Project, the resolution was introduced and shepherded through the process by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) and Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY), and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush on November 7, 1989. It read: HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION 131 TO DESIGNATE MAY 25 AS NATIONAL TAP DANCE DAY

Whereas the multifaceted art form of tap dancing is a manifestation of the cultural heritage of our Nation, reflecting the fusion of African and European cultures into an exemplification of the American spirit, that should be, through documentation, and archival and performance support, transmitted to succeeding generations; Whereas tap dancing has had an historic and continuing influence on other genres of American art, including music, vaudeville, Broadway musical theater, and film, as well as other dance forms;

Whereas tap dancing is a joyful and powerful aesthetic force providing a source of enjoyment and an outlet for creativity and self-expression for Americans on both the professional and amateur level;

Whereas it is in the best interest of the people of our Nation to preserve, promote, and celebrate this uniquely American art form;

290 TAP DANCING AMERICA Whereas Bill “Bojangles” Robinson made an outstanding contribution to the art of tap dancing on both stage and film through the unification of diverse stylistic and racial elements; and Whereas May 25, as the anniversary of the birth of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson

is an appropriate day on which to refocus the attention of the Nation on American tap dancing: Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that May 25, 1989, is designated “National

Tap Dance Day.” The President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such a day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

| ] (NINETIES)

NOISE AND FUNK

CHALLENGE! Savion Glover versus Colin Dunn The Thirty-ninth Annual Grammy Awards, February 27, 1997

ON THE EVENING OF THE 1997 GRAMMY AWARDS, Colin Dunn, the star of Riverdance—The Musical, and Savion Glover, the choreographer and star of the Broadway hit Bring In’Da Noise, Bring In ’’Da Funk, faced off in a battle of the feet staged to celebrate the two hottest musicals in New York City. Yet little was really festive for them, because not only were their own names and reputations at stake but also the percussive dance traditions—lIrish step dancing and African American rhythm tap, respectively—to which each belonged.

Dunn went on first. In Irish tradition, he stood tall and straight. With his back to the audience and his hands planted neatly at the waist of his slim black pants, he spun around on the introduction and, with a stamp of his high-heeled shoe, drew himself up onto the balls of the feet to click out, in place, neat sets of triplets and cross-backs. The camera zoomed

in on the dazzling speed and precision of his footwork, zoomed out on the handsome symmetry of his form, and then quickly panned right to reveal the hulking presence of Glover, who was crouched down and peering at Dunn’s feet. Without an introduction, Glover then slapped out a succession of flat-footed stomps that turned his black baggy pants and shirt, and his mop of dreadlocks, into a stuttering spitfire of beats. Hunkering down into a deep knee bend, he repeated the slamming rhythms with the heels, toes, and insteps of his hardsoled shoes. Dunn heard the challenge. Taking his hands off his hips, he turned around to face Glover and delivered a pair of swooping scissor-kicks that sliced the air within inches of Glover’s face; he then continued to shuffle with an air of calm, with the fluid monotone of repeated cross-back steps bringing his sound volume down to a whisper. Glover interrupted Dunn’s meditation on the “ssssh” with short and jagged hee-haw steps that mocked Dunn’s elegant line, thus forcing the conversation back to the sound, not the look. They traded steps, spitting shards of rhythmic phrases, daring each other to pick up and one-up. Dunn’s crisp heel-clicks were taken up by Glover with heel-and-toe clicks, and in turn by Dunn with airy flutters, which Glover repeated from a crouched position. Tired of trading politely, they proceeded to tap over each other’s 291

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Jamming at Café Forty-One; from left: Roxane Butterfly, Laura Scariano, Michela Marino Lerman, Hank Smith, James Buster Brown, unidentified dancer, Dominique Kelly, Aaron Johnson, and Andrew Nemr. (Photo by Karen Zebulon)

Riverdance’s arrival in the United States was a coming home. Its two original principal dancers had been born and raised in America by immigrant Irish parents. Jean Butler was born in Mineola, Long Island, on March 14, 1971; her mother was from County Mayo, Ireland. She began her training in Irish dance at age four with the widely respected teacher Donny Golden, and she competed in regional, national, and international championships; she won numerous national titles and regional titles and placed well in international competitions. At age seventeen, she debuted at Carnegie Hall with the Chieftains, a musical group founded in 1963 that was best known for making Irish traditional music popular around the world. Michael Ryan Flatley was born on July 16, 1958, on the South Side of Chicago; his parents were from County Sligo and County Carlow in Ireland. His grandmother, Hannah Ryan, was an Irish dancing champion. He was first schooled in Irish step-dancing at the age of eleven in Chicago, where there was a sizable Irish population. In 1969, he became the first non-European to win the All-Ireland World Championship for Irish Dance; in May of 1989, he set a Guinness Book world record for tapping speed at twenty-eight taps per second; when this record was broken, he set another record (February 1998) with thirty-five foot taps per second.

The main Irish dance numbers in Riverdance were choreographed by Michael Flatley,

who unabashedly mixed traditional Irish step dance and the sensuous flow of Spanish flamenco rhythms. In fact, the pure essentials of Irish dancing—the frankness of the frontal presentation, the calm neutrality of the torso, arms, and pelvis, the insistent footwork, the blithe verticality of the body—all glorify a centuries-old Irish (even Celtic) dance tradition. Flatley’s choreography did away with the idea that Irish step dance had to be petrified into academic Irish rigidity. The traditional step dance, with arms held to the side and legwork concentrated below the knee in flicks, stamps, and kicks, was souped up with a more pop veneer. The women wore miniskirts and black hose, and the solos or small groups were occasionally expanded into patterns that would do the Rockettes proud. The reels that whirled across the huge stage in circles acquired the resonance of a universal communal round. “Yet for all its overworked theme of a common humanity, of which Irish culture is a part,” wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, “Riverdance comes across as an expanded televi-

sion special.”*? And indeed—the aerality of the jigs were turned downward, to accelerated

306 TAP DANCING AMERICA tempos, as dancers accented their footwork with detailed taps to the front and back and into surprising new types of phrases. The jigs were also accented with springs into the air—a way to make them more glamorous. Riverdance also captured a more cosmopolitan flair by structuring a production that was full of cultural cross-references. It opened with slides and narration that offered a pop version of the Creation myth; then it led into a variety of social messages. The lyrics (by Whelan) sung by the choral group Anuna, leaned on water metaphors, especially that of a life-giving river. While Part I spoke of Irish elements, Part 2 spoke of various peoples drawn by poverty and enslavement to the New World. Bass baritone Ivan Thomas delivered a song about freedom; three Russian couples performed a medley of Moiseyev dances; and a Spanish flamenco dancer performed to the accompaniment of an Irish percussionist’s traditional take on spoons—beating spoons against his chest. In its global co-opting of percussive and rhythmic traditions, as if they all were in the “Irish family” of world rhythms, Riverdance also featured three African American tap dancers in a staged tap challenge. Channing Cook Holmes, Walter “Sundance” Freeman, and Karen Callaway opened in Riverdance on Broadway; Herbin Van Cayseele, Tarik Winston, Danny Wooten, and Van Porter would perform in subsequent touring productions. The program reads: “On the sidewalks of New York, our travelers meet new cultures, and new challenges. Immigrants from other places display their native styles and steps and the newly arrived response with their own display of skill. The contest develops into a celebration of shared dexterity and pride in their distant heritage.”*° The original choreography for that scene is credited to Colin Dunne and Tarik Winston, which suggests that the scene had originally pitted an Irish step dancer against an African American rhythm tap dancer. Though the producers of Riverdance may have attempted to unite all percussive dance forms under one Gaelic-Irish umbrella, the tap challenge that was performed by African American dancers served to distinguish their style of dance from Irish step dancing, whether traditional or modern. Herbin Van Cayseele (Tamango), who appeared in the “Trading Taps” scene in a Riverdance touring production, was asked by Roxane “Butterfly”: “As a tap dancer, can you say that you have been influenced by what you saw in Riverdance?” Cayseele answered: “No, it didn’t really inspire me. I find the rhythms in Irish dancing (clog, step dancing), pretty limited. What makes a good clogger is the fastness, which is not necessarily the concept of tap dancing. Personally, I need to feel attracted musically. Which didn’t happen in Riverdance— though, I have to admit that one hundred dancers on stage is an amazing thing to see.”*” What

were the similarities between clog dance and tap dance, Butterfly asked. For Cayseele, they were two different languages that had three words, three patterns, in common: the flap, the stomp, and the shuffle, but they were used in a different way: “Again, it [clog] is a social dance, it is not about music. Tap is. Tap is related to jazz and improvisation, so [it has] a rhythmical purpose.” He added that his largest disappointment with the seven-minute-long tap-challenge scene was that it made no link between the black tap dancers and the Irish step dancers and was used as a mere transition between the other acts. “Our piece was short, always interrupted, and on top of that, it was choreographed. So, not much freedom.”

The Savion When asked in 1994 what he thought was “new” in tap, Gregory Hines answered:

I’d say the young dancers of today are more concerned with expression of the form. .. . The younger generation—who are being led by possibly

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 307 the greatest tap dancer that ever put on a pair of shoes, Savion Glover— is reaching for something that they don’t know what. They’re reaching to express. They’re not satisfied, they think of themselves as still learning. ... I feel there is going to come a wave of tap dancers in the next five years that’s going to establish the form as one of the most powerful expressions we have.*®

Savion Glover, affectionately nicknamed “the sponge,” has been regarded as a savior of tap dance—the ultimate copier and absorber of tradition—and yet also as the saving grace of tap’s near decline. “I’ve seen a lot of great acts ... who all made their dedication in life to dance, and it looks like you’re gonna do the same thing,” said an admiring Jimmy Slyde, in conversation with Savion Glover in the 1989 PBS television special Tap Dance in America. “I want to,” Glover, then sixteen, murmured shyly. Since his Broadway debut at age nine as the title character in The Tap Dance Kid, Glover has been considered the artistic grandson of the most revered figures in jazz tap dance—Jimmy

Slyde, James Buster Brown, Honi Coles, Arthur Duncan, Chuck Green, Harold Nicholas, Lon Chaney, Bunny Briggs—and the heir to the younger generation of dancers led by Gregory Hines. He did not disappoint.

JELLY’S LAST JAM While the 1985 Paris production and 1989 New York production of Black and Blue sanctified Glover’s apprenticeship with the elder generation of rhythm tap dancers, his liaison with Gregory Hines in the 1992 Broadway musical Jelly’s Last Jam would bring him to the threshold of his own artistry. “Jelly’s was really the turning point, the first time I ever performed in a show and felt like it was me, Savion, up there, getting the applause and not the character I was pretending to be,” admitted Glover. “But mostly, Jelly’s was important to me because of Gregory. He took me under his wing after [his 1989 film] Tap. For me, knowing Gregory is like knowing you have a pops, but not meeting him until you’re twenty years old, and it turns out he’s been very cool all this time.” Written and directed by George C. Wolfe, with tap choreography by Gregory Hines and Ted L. Levy, Jelly’s Last Jam was based on the life of jazz legend Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, the hyperbolic pianist, composer, and bandleader whom some call the first true composer of jazz music. It took place in a lowdown club called the Jungle Inn, “somewhere ’tween Heaven and Hell,” on the evening of Morton’s death, thus allowing the character to revisit scenes from his life. In an unusual theatrical pairing, Hines and Glover played the same character—Hines played Jelly Roll Morton and Glover played Young Jelly. In one show-stopping scene, in which Young Jelly leaves behind his strait-laced Creole upbringing to assimilate the authentic indigenous music of a diverse army of New Orleans street singers, there is a tap challenge between the old and young Jelly. Although their heads, wrists, and elbows appeared to be as tightly choreographed as their feet, in truth it was largely improvised, thus granting Glover the golden opportunity, on stage and before an audience, each and every night, to engage with the most brilliant tap dancer of his time. “Mr. Hines’s brilliance is no secret,” wrote Frank Rich. “Few, if any, tap dancers in this world can match him for elegance, speed, grace and musicianship, and, as if that weren’t enough, he also happens to be a silken jazz crooner, supple in voice and plaintive in emotions. . . . Even when the band is taking a break, every note he hits rings true.”*” Hines, in 1994, may

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have self-effacingly proclaimed Savion Glover as “the greatest tap dancer that ever put on a pair of shoes ... who would establish the form as one of the most powerful expressions we have”’— but it was from the bodily wisdom of Hines, playing the musical genius who with energy and pain gave birth to jazz, and their nightly tap challenges, with bravura bouts of mimicry and one-upmanship, that Glover would be reborn as rhythm tap’s savior.

BRING IN ’DA NOISE, BRING IN ’DA FUNK It was not Gregory Hines, however, that Savion Glover would acknowledge in his deeply affecting solo in the tap musical Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk. There, he danced before a bank of mirrors while his recorded voice talked about the influences of his black paternal heroes—Chuck Green, Lon Chaney, Buster Brown, and Jimmy Slyde. Meticulously and respectfully he demonstrated their styles of hoofing—Green, whose feet never missed a sound; Lon Chaney, who invented the paddle-and-roll and, because he had been a boxer, ended each number with his arms held wide open as if he had won a bout; Buster Brown, who danced fast and light; and Slyde, whose cascading bop lines presided over La Cave and La Place. Glover then blended them all into his own exultant stylistic brew, in true homage to that first generation of elder masters. Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk was an auspicious collaboration between George C. Wolfe, Reg E. Gaines, and Savion Glover. The playwright and director was Wolfe, whose 1986 production of The Colored Museum at the Public Theatre offered a biting postmodernist satire of black cultural history. His Spunk (1989) was an adaptation of three plays by Zora Neale Hurston, which won an Obie Award for best off-Broadway direction. His Broadway production of Jelly’s Last Jam (1991) received eleven Tony nominations. The spoken word poet and Grand Slam champion Reg E. Gaines contributed the lyrical rap commentary. Savion Glover was the choreographer and star performer. The show first opened on November 18, 1995, off Broadway, at the Newman Theatre of the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. It moved to Broadway’s

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 309 Ambassador Theatre (opening April 25, 1996), where it won Tony Awards for best musical, best original score, best featured actress in a musical, best lighting design, best choreography in a musical, and best direction of a musical. Subtitled “A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat,” Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk was conceived of as “a chronicle of tap-dancing in black America in which the sounds of one people’s history come foremost from the feet.”*' Toward this end, Glover

assembled a fresh young crew of male dancers who brought the raucousness of rhythm dancing to blasting proportions. They included Vincent Bingham, who began dancing at age seven as a student of Henry LeTang; Jimmy Tate, who had starred as Willie in the Broadway production of The Tap Dance Kid (1983); Dule Hill, Glover’s understudy in The Tap Dance Kid, who performed on Broadway in Black and Blue (1989); and Baakari Wilder, a professional dancer from the age of nine who was, at the time, a sophomore acting major at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The cast also included percussionists Jared Crawford and Raymond King, vocal soloist Ann Duquesnay, and musicians LeRoy Clouden (drums),

Lafayette Harris (keyboard), Vince Henry (reeds), Luico Hopper (bass), and Zane Mark (conductor, keyboards).

With this extraordinary assemblage of rhythmic talent, which included the poetic rappings of Reg E. Gaines as “Da Voice,” Wolfe’s musical aspired to a more radical level of profundity: more than a history of tap dancing in black America, Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk was a history of black America told through the historical trajectory of “the beat”—the story of

the survival of “the beat” therefore became the metaphor for black identity. From the first scene’s “The Door to Isle Goree” and “Slave Ships,” with the painful announcements of the names of the slave ships that made their transatlantic delivery of many thousands of black people, a crouched slave (Glover) quietly rose to a standing posture, all the while trading rhythms with his toes, to “Somethin’ from Nothin’,” in which plantation slaves transformed the sacred circle dance from African soil to a juba-inspired Ring Shout that rose in ecstatic jubilation into a buck-and-wing jam. Then came the pounding out of the rattle and chains by industrial workers in “Industrialization,” with Crawford and King using hands and drumsticks to create a symphony of notes—in pots, pans, plastic buckets, and even taps on tap dancers’ feet, which recalled work gang slave labor. Next, in “The Lynching Blues,” a man (Wilder) took a standing posture that stretched him upward to give the imagery of a lynching—with only the tips of his toes tapping as one’s last breath—it is “Da Beat,” which sounds out the story of the black experience in America. Wolfe’s story, however, was not without a cynical postmodernist commentary on the history. The “Where’s the Beat?” scene, which tells the story of how a dancer loses and finds his own style in the Hollywood of the 1930s, opens on two tuxedoed tap dancers named Grin and Flash (played by Tate and Bingham), who are shuffle-and-winging through the Hollywood ’30s as mere entertainers, sellouts who do not tap only from the waist down and who therefore lack rhythm—dancers who have lost “Da Beat.” Who else could these precociously sophisticated dancers in patent-leather shoes doing double-imaged precision movement be but the Nicholas Brothers, who were the most famous jazz-tap dancers of that Hollywood era? The Nicholases thereby served as the laughingstock at the center of Wolfe’s ridicule in that scene; thus were

they made to be misunderstood. Although as teenagers in the 1930s, the Nicholas Brothers had performed for white audiences as the Cotton Club in Harlem, they also played the Lafayette Theatre just blocks away to mostly black audiences—and with the same costumes and routines—to raucous applause. As Fayard Nicholas said of their doubling, “We were gentlemen, and talked well to all people from Harlem to Broadway. And in that way, we showed them that black people had class.””” For the Nicholases, entertainment was never a dirty word.

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For Wolfe, the desire to please/entertain a white audience led to a sellout, and Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk was his script. To that end, Wolfe’s point of view, in his retelling of the black experience in America (with an all-black-male cast of musicians and dancers) was from the black-male perspective. So, too, was his story of tap dance in America (as a survival story of “da beat”); as written by Wolfe and choreographed by Glover, it was recounted as a black male rhythmic expression—and clearly also as an expression of black rage and of salvation. “The various texts offered an inevitable conflation of youth, blackness, underclass, violence, and immutable masculinity,” wrote Thomas DeFrantz about the show. It had, he said, “made a spectacle of hip hop tap—that is, dancing to music with a prominent booming bass and complex layering of rhythms programmed by electronic equipment.” Along with Wolfe’s concep-

tual direction, Glover’s startling innovations, DeFrantz continued, as a choreographer and performer, articulated an argument for tap dance as being “urban, aggressive, masculine, and profoundly ‘black.’”*”

The unique style of Glover’s rhythm-tapping bore out all those descriptors. His flatfooted, piston-driven, heavily emphatic paddle-and-roll tapping reclaimed all areas of the lowheeled, leather-soled, laced men’s oxford tap shoe—the outside rim, inside rim, ball of the sole, and tip of the toe—as fair territory for driving the sound. It was a style of rhythmtapping that Glover called “hitting.” It was blunt and driven by an internal fury; a style of tap dancing that could only be done in the low-heeled, leather-soled, and heel-metal-plated men’s oxford shoe. If the technique and tone of Glover’s funk-driven style smacked of the “masculine,” so, too, did his dress (baggy pants by FUBU or Phat Farm, two of the Afro-conscious companies that market goods to self-defined hip-hop “hedz”; baggy shirt and a string of carved African wood beads slung around his neck); his long dreadlocks (worn free, so that it often obscured his face); his demeanor (cool and aloof, he seldom gazed toward his audience but tapped while facing offstage, bebop style, obscuring his facial expression from the audience); and his bodily style (hunkered-over and crouching, with no attention to the carriage of the arms). All was configured into a quintessential embodiment of hip-hop, “an aggressively radical black expressive form inevitably configured as masculine and indebted to the power of technological amplification.”“ The critics, in fact, commented that Glover’s feet in the show spoke hip-hop—with its fast, loud, and furious machine-gun volleys of sound and freewheeling cadences; that he was the first young tap dancer in his generation to reawaken the

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 311 art form within that generation, thereby bringing the history of rhythm in America up to date—making tap dance cool again. “His ticket: size 11 1/2 EE feet, an instinctual musicality and a life spent on inner-city stoops and basketball courts,” wrote Patrick Pacheco in Playbill News:

When he’s not onstage, Glover can usually be found on the basketball court where he is a fierce and dynamic player. (“I’m a basketball freak,” he says.) But when he’s not driving forward on the court, chances are he’s teaching in a dance studio, a veteran and respected master at all of 22. He takes his mandate seriously, having recently conducted a midnight seminar, “Midnight Madness” at the Broadway Dance Center after a performance which drew 200 dancers who kept “hitting it” into the wee hours of the morning.” If Glover’s self-described “rough, raw, and ragged” style of tap dancing*® was an expression of sorrow, exasperation, and the fierce anger of hip-hop’s rapping and break-dancing culture, so, too, did it seem a salvation to the young and disenfranchised males of that subculture whose material and psychosocial conditions were perilously self-destructive. Glover himself, on sev-

eral occasions, ventured a “tap as salvation” message, saying, “If I didn’t have the dance to express myself, I would probably be stealing your car or selling drugs to get high now. I got friends who do that, but tap saved me.”* Thus the visceral eloquence of Glover’s iconic hip-hop tap dance style was “miles away from the mechanically cheerful tapping of mainstream musicals,” Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review, and was “more convincingly presented as a worthy peer and ancestor of such forms as blues, jazz and gospel.”** It was absorbed wholesale by the new generation of tap dancers. It began with the young men who performed with Glover in Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk (on Broadway and in the subsequent national and international tours). It continued with a number of tap dance companies that Glover formed during the next decade to showcase the tap of his young disciples who—in their idolatry of Glover and with the ferocious zeal of their feet—woke the town and told the people of their newfound freedom in ’da beat.

THE SAVION DIASPORA Savion Glover brought not only the noise and funk of tap dance to audiences of thousands, but he ushered in a whole new generation of black urban dancers who were newly embracing the rhythm-tap tradition. In the r960s and 1970s, that black urban generation had turned away from tap dancing—seeing it as a form of Uncle Tomism in its tradition of shuffles and flashy smiles as epitomized by the way Bill “Bojangles” Robinson had been depicted in Hollywood films. “African American dance has been wounded by those stereotypes inherited from the minstrel shows. We didn’t want to see ourselves on screen, strutting and gliding. The artists were hurt, because they seemed to represent something we couldn’t be proud of,” explained Sandra Burton, a Williams College dance professor. She continued: “But the thing about tap is that it’s a genuine vernacular dance form. It’s now linked to hip-hop just as it used to be linked to be-bop. So now I just see it moving into the next phase.”” The dancers who took tap to the next level had been so profoundly influenced by Glover that they danced like him, dressed like him, even braided their hair like him. Over time, however, they would not remain imitators. Unlike ballet, with its codification of formal technique, tap dance is learned by listening to and watching others dance in the street, dance hall, or social club, where steps are shared, stolen, and reinvented. “Technique” is transmitted visually, aurally, and corporeally in a rhythmic exchange between dancers and musicians. Mimicry is

312 TAP DANCING AMERICA necessary for the mastery of form. In a very short time, the dancers who first followed in Glover’s footsteps blazed their own paths.

Baakari Wilder After Baakari Wilder was cast in the original production of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, he became the replacement for Glover, in the role of "Da Beat, on Broadway. Wilder was born on December 1, 1976, in Washington, D.C., to a teacher (his mother) and a psychologist (his father). His mother sent him to a community center when he was three years old, and there he studied a number of arts; his first memories of seeing tap dance was watching such Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson films as Little Colonel (1935) and The Littlest Rebel (1936). When Wilder was twelve, Gregory Hines taught a master class at Wilder’s dance studio in Bethesda, Maryland, and he became caught up in the larger fabric of tap dance. It was not just about the steps and rhythms that Hines was showing but, said Wilder, “in the way he showed a lot of love to the people in the audience ... wherever he went, he embraced everybody.” From Hines, Wilder received his first important lessons in tap: “By imitating, just to try to feel the vibe and beat, from watching him, I tried out his steps, his swagger and his coolness. . . . Gregory had a powerful rhythmic language; it was strong and cool and masculine. I had grown up with ladies; this was a positive way to see a young man and see how he got it off, how he was open.””?

Slowly, the need in Wilder to do tap as an expressive art emerged. He began to dig more deeply and became more involved in the history of the dance and its rhythmic aspects. He attended a magnet high school with accelerated classes in ballet, jazz, and tap and studied with Renee Kreithen and Yvonne Edwards, joining their Washington, D.C., troupe Tappers with Attitude. In 1991, Wilder went to his first tap festival, in Boulder, Colorado, where he continued his rhythmic explorations with Jimmy Slyde, Eddie Brown, Honi Coles, Cholly Atkins, and Brenda Bufalino. In 1994, he performed with the American Tap Dance Orchestra while enrolled as a freshman in the undergraduate acting program at New York University. One year later, he was chosen by Glover to perform in Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk at

the Public Theatre, and from there he went to Broadway with the production as Glover’s understudy. Wilder’s talent lies in his rhythmic versatility. He can be boot-stomping loud and funky, as he was in the “Industrialization” number in Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk. But he can also be nuanced and understated, as when he performed Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” in his tribute to Bunny Briggs, who was inducted into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame at the 2006 New York City Tap Festival. In that number, Wilder was an incarnation of the great bebop-rhythm dancer who performed it in Black and Blue on Broadway in 1989. Hovering over the floor with a wash of sixteenth notes, he displayed supreme restraint in his splashing patter of taps that launched him into Briggs’s signature heel-and-toe paddling across the floor. In one chorus, he assiduously fused his own emphatic flat-footed style with Briggs’s

rippling bop-inflected beats, demonstrating (to his hard-hitting young male peers) the full spectrum of rhythmic expressivity. And yet it is to Savion Glover that Wilder attributes that capacity for rhythmic inclusiveness. “Until Savion, I could not begin to appreciate steps... . I am very serious about what I am doing with my feet, to get the sound. For me, it’s exploring how to make it fluid. For me, rhythmically, it’s an even more fluid approach, having to do with balance. I understand I touch people, but for me, personally, I’m still going through it. I want to figure out how to keep growing. I want to challenge what I feel comfortable with. Spirituality is where I get my confidence.”*!

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 313

Funk University With the success of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk at the Public Theatre in 1995, and in preparation to move the production to Broadway, it became clear that a new group of tap dancing men needed to be recruited and trained in Glover’s signature “hitting” style. Late in 1996, the New York Shakespeare Festival Institute of Tap—nicknamed “Funk University’— planned to enroll dancers ages fourteen to thirty, with scholarships offered to some students. Classes were to be held Monday through Friday, 11 am to 7 pm, taught by the extraordinary Broadway dancer Ted Levy. Ted Lewis Levy was born on April 25, 1960, in Chicago. His mother was a chorus dancer

at the famed black-owned Club DeLisa, and he was trained at an early age in the rhythm-tap style of the renowned Sammy Dyer (who choreographed the 1939 Broadway musical The Swing Mikado) by Shirley Hall-Bass and Finis Henderson. Levy was “discovered” by Dianne Walker and members of the Copasetics when they performed in the 1985 Chicago production of Shoot Me while I’m Happy. He made his Broadway debut in Black and Blue (1989), in which he was featured in “Butter and Egg Man,” choreographed by Fayard Nicholas. As a versatile theater artist, skilled in acting, singing, and tap dancing, Levy directed the workshop production of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk. When that show, as directed by Wolfe, became a smash hit, with a planned move to Broadway, Levy was charged with recruiting and training young dancers in Savion Glover’s hard-hitting rhythm-tap style.

In February 1997, eight male students were enrolled in the first three-month course in which Levy taught the rhythm-tapping styles of such masters as Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, and Jimmy Slyde, who had described the tradition as “the art of sound.” At New York City’s 1997 Tap Extravaganza, celebrating National Tap Dance Day, three graduates of Funk University (Marshall Davis Jr., Savion’s brother Abron Glover, and Dominique Kelly)

demonstrated what they had learned in a medley that included James Buster Brown’s signature tune, “Cute”; Slyde’s “Perdido”; Green’s “Caravan”; and Chaney’s “Dearly Beloved.”

Not Your Ordinary Tappers (NYOT) In 1998, after the phenomenal success of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, the twentyfive-year-old Savion Glover formed his own company of tap dancers who were, as its name proclaimed, Not Your Ordinary Tappers (NYOT). They included the twenty-three-year-old Omar Edwards and the seventeen-year-old Jason Samuels Smith, who had performed in the Broadway production of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk; Glover’s twenty-sixyear-old brother, Abron, who had performed in the Paris production of Black and Blue; and

the company’s only female dancer, the twenty-three-year-old Ayodele Casel, who had trained with Ted Levy at Funk University. NYOT made its debut on April 2, 1998, in a special six-performance series that closed the twentieth-season of New Jersey’s Crossroads Theatre. By the time NYOT made its New York City debut a month later, at the Variety Arts Theatre, in Savion Glover/Downtown, it had already gained a reputation as an uninhibited, slam-banging

company that was as emotionally eloquent as it was joyous. The program listed some thirty numbers (solos, duets, and group numbers choreographed by Glover and Levy) as part of a repertory from which Glover, members of NYOT, and a number of guest artists might select to perform on any given night, accompanied by a house band that comprised Eli Fountain (percussion), Gregory Jones (bass), Tommy James (keyboards), and Patience

314 TAP DANCING AMERICA Higgins (saxophone/flute). This was the ideal structure for Glover to explore new solo and group choreography. NYOT’s show offered a fairly steady diet of Glover’s signature “rough funk” style, but Glover’s solos explored other dynamic realms. “He is capable of the most breathtakingly light, delicately nuanced and articulated footwork,” wrote the dance critic Jennifer Dunning in the New York Times, “and there is considerable cerebral pleasure to Mr. Glover’s probing

of the music, burrowing into it—and the ground—with footwork that digs rather than skims or bounds from the floor. His upper body hunched, he seems to be searching his dancing feet for the heart of the music, effectively drawing a curtain around himself as he does.”* Glover’s signature look in this period was that of dancing hard and fast and in profile (facing stage right and left wings, traversing the stage in moving forward and back, with no depth of field). This deeply concentrated inner focus, in solos such as “Ina Sentimental Mood” and “Caravan,” allowed him to plunge with great depth into the music. “Mr. Glover uses his body as a jazz instrument engaged in freewheeling improvisation with the musicians. This is not unusual in tap. But here the line between dancer and musician is nearly erased.””* Glover also used his Downtown show as an opportunity to choreograph; “Silk Suits,” “Billy’s Bounce,” and “Swing a ‘Lil Funk into Gang Gang” were impressive and exciting group numbers that showed Glover’s penchant for group choreography.

Ayodele Casel It was impossible to ignore that the singular new element of Glover’s NYOT company was Ayodele Casel—such an unusual addition as the company’s first and only woman dancer that when she partnered with Glover in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers’ styled “Cheek to Cheek” (from the 1936 musical film Top Hat), critics were awkward in describing her. “The only female dancer is beautiful, exotic Ayodele Casel, who has been dancing for only four years,” wrote Melba Huber.” “A teasing duet danced by Mr. Glover and the minxish Ms. Casel is charming,” wrote Jennifer Dunning.” Sexist adjectives seemed all these critics could muster to account for the anomaly of a female dancer in Glover’s new company. Casel was beautiful, but she was neither exotic (foreign, strange) nor minxish (saucy, forward) as a tap dancer. Born in the Bronx on June 5, 1975, of Puerto Rican heritage, Ayodele Casel was raised by her mother, Aida Tirado; her father, Tayari Casel, was a renowned martial artist from Chicago. She spent her formative years in Rincon, Puerto Rico, where she attended school from fourth to ninth grade. There, her rhythmic sensibilities were etched by the music of salsa—a mixture of Spanish and African music based on the son and Afro-Cuban Latin jazz, which includes meringue, songo, son, mambo, Timba, bolero, charanga, and cha-cha-cha. Casel returned to New York City in 1990, but it was not until the fall of 1995, in her sophomore year in the acting program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, that she became interested in tap dance, studying under Charles Goddertz. One year later, she met and befriended Baakari Wilder,

a theater major at NYU. Wilder was by then a principal dancer in Savion Glover’s Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, which had opened at the Public Theatre and was being prepared for its Broadway opening. Wilder began showing Casel tap steps in the NYU dorms. “I give him credit,” says Casel. “It’s not everybody who so openly and willingly gives you information; and he wanted to expose this to me. I love tap dancing—I loved how it looked, how it made me feel. I knew my life was about to change.”*’ Wilder took Casel to tap jams at Fazils and the Lower East Side club Deanna’s,

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 315 where she met Roxane Butterfly, Max Pollak, and Herbin Van Cayseele (Tamango); and where she learned to improvise and the importance of being open and of giving. After a year, Wilder said to her, “I can’t give you any more,” and sent her to the American Tap Dance Orchestra principal dancer Barbara Duffy, whose classes became “my first class of professional tap dancers.” Wilder was also the first to introduce Casel to Savion Glover backstage at the Ambassador Theatre, when Noise/Funk moved to Broadway. Glover continued to hear about the young female dancer hanging with the guys backstage and learning the choreography. Then he saw her dance one night, at the Nuyorican Poets Café (the New York Puerto Rican performance space at 236 East Third Street), where she was one of few women who would get up and jam. “In fact—and I have on tape one of those jams—you see Baakari... and I’m the only girl, and there were women there. The women don’t challenge, they’re afraid of inability and judgment, of ‘I’m not good enough.’”** At the Nuyorican, Glover opened the floor, and Casel went up and danced. After that night, he got her number and called to tell her he wanted to work with her. “He asked me to come up

with a four-bar-phrase, and I said ‘When?’ And I remember the four-bar phrase—only he never asked me for it!” In March of 1997 Glover proposed a project—a taping of a performance that would serve as the opening credits to the 1997 ABC-TV Monday Night Football, a live television broadcast of the National Football League. Glover had included dancers Jason Samuels

Smith and Omar Edwards. “I was so nervous for that first rehearsal for Football,” Casel recalled:

I remember I went to the studio and the moment he [Savion] spit out the first thing—he doesn’t really break anything down, he spits it out and you have to get it—I was just on it, and I whizzed through the first rehearsal. | remember him going to Omar [Edwards] and saying, “Dele’s nasty!” | learned to pick up like that, out of the pressure of not wanting to disappoint, and of wanting to step up to the plate.” Casel was not yet aware that that was the beginning of Glover’s idea to organize NYOT. That a woman had been chosen by Savion Glover to be in his company was a must-see-to-believe surprise. In 1997, tap dancer Jenai Cutcher remembers sneaking into a rehearsal for Glover’s newly formed company to see for herself and, lying on the floor between two rows of seats in the theater, to listen. “I just assumed that the female voice amidst the conversations and laughter from the stage was someone from the technical crew or the press or maybe even a dancer’s

girlfriend. Seated in the audience later that night, when Ayodele Casel took the stage with Glover and the rest of the male ensemble, I realized how wrong I had been. The female voice was Casel’s, and it was suddenly speaking loud and clear through every heel drop, shuffle, and

wing.” It was Casel’s own solo in Savion Glover/Downtown, set to a tango with original music arranged by the band that showed her off as a rhythm-savvy soloist. For the next two years, Casel continued to perform with Glover and the NYOTs—at Carnegie Hall in a tribute to the Nicholas Brothers, on the television special In Performance at the White House, and at Radio City Music Hall. In February 1999, she set out on her own when she starred in and directed three sold-out tap concerts of /Ayo! at the Triad Theatre, tap dancing with a Latin

band that included Joe Medina (violin), Sammy Galvez (flute and vocals), Gil Suarez (piano), James Guevarez (timbales), Danny Del Valle (congas, vocals), Edward Iglesias (trombone), and Wilson Aponte (vocals and small percussions). With special guests that included the poet Shihan and tap dancers Jason Samuels Smith and Jason Bernard, they

316 TAP DANCING AMERICA performed selections from a repertory that included such popular and original tunes as “Hay Que Saber Comenzar,” “El Paso De Encarnacion,” “El Baile Del Suavito,” and the classic danson tune “Almendre.” She also included many different Latin rhythms and styles—guajira, a Latin blues; cha-cha-cha; danzon; and peonas, a Puerto Rican up-tempo rhythm. “It was the music

I grew up with,” Casel explained. “For me, it was a cultural awakening—there were musicians playing longer than I had been alive—musicians who had played for Celia Cruz and Eddie Palmieri.”® In an interview with Melba Huber in which Casel reflected on her work with Glover, she offered advice to female tap dancers: “If you want to dance, work hard to get the information and improve your skills. You can get it if you want it. | worked hard to get that information. As women, we need to keep our dignity and respect. You do not have to compromise to succeed. ... It is important to see women our there. Competent women.””

Jason Samuels Smith Before he died in 2003, Gregory Hines called Jason Samuels Smith, whom he had just spied in a tap jam, “possibly the next ‘Greatest,’” thus placing Smith, at the age of twenty-one, in Hines’s own league—the same league as John Bubbles, Honi Coles, Baby Laurence, and Savion Glover—when it came to skill level in feet.°* Wrote Melba Huber about Smith’s “Murder” solo

in Savion Glover/Downtown: “Jason Samuels produces the most complex foot patterns that are probably the closest rhythmic patterns . . . to Savion’s footwork. With his exceptional rhythmic sense, this young man is the ‘Savion’ of a slightly younger generation.”™ With dreads, baggy pants, and a hard-hitting style, the eighteen-year-old Smith may have looked and sounded like Glover, but there were profoundly deeper musical and cultural influences that would, in a very short time, individuate him from his peers and transform him into a jazz-tap artist with virtuosity and vision. Jason Samuels Smith was literally born into jazz, on October 4, 1980, and grew up in what he has proudly proclaimed as the “Hell’s Kitchen” section of New York City (the midtown west side of Manhattan). His mother, Sue Samuels, was of mixed European descent and was a jazz dancer and teacher who had performed in the 1979 Broadway musical Gottu Go Disco. His father, Jo Jo Smith (Joseph Benjamin Smith), was an African American and a renowned jazz dancer and choreographer. Jo Jo’s mother, Anna Grayson, had been a dancer with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, and his father, Benjamin Smith, had been a great Chicago tap dancer who taught the renowned Nicholas Brothers. Jo Jo had performed on Broadway in the 1964 revival of West Side Story (1957) and the musical A Joyful Noise (1966), but he was best known for being the dance consultant to the 1978 film musical Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta. Jo Jo Smith was also the charismatic co-director, with Sue Samuels, of Jo Jo’s Dance Factory, on Broadway at Fifty-fifth Street. That dance studio occupied the entire fourth floor of a large building, and was the predecessor to the world-famous Broadway Dance Center, which, when founded in 1984, absorbed Jo Jo’s Dance Factory and the Hatchett and Hines Performing Arts Center and grew to become one of the largest “drop-in” dance training centers in the world. It was at Jo Jo’s Dance Factory, with a faculty of ten instructors that Jo Jo taught daily jazz classes to professionals in television and Broadway shows. He also taught elegant disco moves to vast numbers of middle-aged women seeking to dance in the sexy Travolta-style. One of those was Lola Finkelstein, who, in a 1978 article written for the New Yorker, recounted

how she and her lady friends, looking chic, tall, eager, and ready for action, took a disco-jazz class with the five-foot-six-inch-tall Jo Jo, “a very amiable, ageless-looking man with a

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toothy,dress,” and wearing a crisp ena |aeam aieuemees little “i white stood up to watch the action. Jo Jo would put on a record—“Come Get It!” by Rick James’s Stone City Band—face the mirror, his students lined up behind him, and begin his disco-styled jazz dance moves. As Lola Finkelstein recalled:

First the head moving separately from the neck; them the neck moving separately from the shoulders; then the shoulders moving separately from the torso; then the hips moving all by themselves; and then the legs. Step, one foot behind the other, fingers snapping, arms swinging. Open. Close Snap. Foot behind. One-two. One-two. One two. One-two. Jo Jo looked marvelous, dancing beautifully. Head in the John Travolta attitude, hands extended and curled slightly, hips rolling gently, feet moving effortlessly. “My kids had to be in my classes, they were always around the dance studio,” said Sue Samuels (who directed the studio after Jo Jo left for California, through its transition to becoming the Broadway Dance Center) about her daughter, Elka, and son, Jason, who, at the age of two “was doing hip-hop—doing the worm on the floor. He was very coordinated. He could just always dance.” It was in the studio, watching their parents teach, that Elka and Jason listened to and looked at the choreographic translations of rhythm and blues, funk, and jazz. Samuels also made sure that her kids could count the music—whether it was a 4/4 blues, a 2/4 samba, or the more unusual 5/8 time signature of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”—and think about it. Jason was enrolled at the age of seven in Frank Hatchett’s Children’s Program at Broadway Dance Center, where he studied ballet, jazz, and tap with Judy Bassing, his first teacher. He made appearances at the age of nine on Sesame Street, the popular PBS-TV educational children’s program that featured Savion Glover as the tap dancing cowboy. But whereas Jason had been totally immersed in the dance world during elementary school, he was more interested in sports during middle school and high school. “Jason really did not want to tap. He went back and forth between sports and tap dancing,” Samuels said of her son, who played on

318 TAP DANCING AMERICA the Junior Varsity basketball team and in the Peewee League for baseball. It was not until Glover began teaching master classes at the Broadway Dance Center that Jason’s interest in tap dance was sparked: “He treated me like family and I had a lot in common with him,” he said of Glover. “We liked the same music and dressed similar. In my other classes I learned tech-

nique and style and more visible dancing. Savion’s classes were more rhythmic and I was more in tune with the heavier hoofing style than with the lighter visible style.”°* Jason Smith was fifteen years old when he was signed in August of 1996 to a contract as an understudy in the Broadway production of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk. By the summer of 1997, he was incorporated into the show as principal dancer, and by 1998, as an understudy to the choreographer. Attaining the star role in that show and then becoming a member of NYOT are only highlights of Smith’s story. If his early orientation in jazz and rhythm and blues (from his jazzdancing parents) and his tenure dancing Glover’s hard-hitting rhythm-and-funk style were two important developmental phases in his evolution as a rhythm-tap artist, a more crucial phase came in Smith’s early twenties, when he became an avid collector and trader of film clips of black tap dancers in old movies (which he stored in his iPod and viewed and reviewed at every waking moment). He also deepened his listening to modern jazz musicians (Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie) and began an investigation into his roots as a socially conscious African American performance artist: “I really wanted to learn more about my [African] ancestors,” he stated in 2002. It was at that phase that Smith began to embrace his multiracial and multicultural roots, to fuse his own style, which he described as “a mixture of the younger generation of now and the older generation.”” In his solo performance at the first annual Los Angeles Tap Festival, which he founded and organized (with Chloe Arnold) in August 2003, Smith changed the time signatures in his renditions of “Jitterbug Waltz” and Neil Hefti’s “Cute” so often that it was hard for Jane Goldberg to keep up with him. Reviewing the show for Dance Magazine, she wrote: “He has invented a whole new vocabulary of rapid fire heels and toes. His taps are never so crowded that they overpower his unusually long phrases.””° In the millennium, Smith emerged as a multitalented leader in the art form of tap—as performer, choreographer, and director. Teaching an advanced tap class at the New York City Tap Festival in July 2003, he also showed himself to be a fantastic teacher who fused the foursquare alphabet of stomp-brush-toe-heel into slamming, fun articulations of the feet that explode with energy. “Do it again and again, like yoga,” Smith told his jam-packed class, as they

repeated the blocks of rhythmic phrases that could have been patterned after the repeating geometric designs of an African kente cloth. “You’ve got to change the pattern of the way things are going,” Smith said about the next phrase. “It’s not the way things are going, it’s not how you look—it’s the sound, delivery, music and an awareness of which pocket you

stein.” Smith follows in the footsteps of his father and mother, peers, and masters but is changing the cadence and the pace of those steps for the new generation—he’s a drum machine—a strikingly aggressive player who, while handling the phrase with great aplomb, is also full of complex and often abrupt syncopation and stabbing staccato phrases. He demonstrates how an artist, in being the sum total of all parts, can synergize those individualities into brilliant new forces of energy. He has also synergistically and respectfully taken on the responsibility of paying homage to the art form while passing it on to the next generation: Tap was already struggling to survive in this modern world, and now it’s even harder for tap dancers to get work. We need to come together as a tap

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 319 community, as a dance community and as a music community, and help each other. Basically, tap is all about love. It’s all about your love for music, your love for dance, and how much you enjoy doing it... . It should be about inspiring others to enjoy life. That’s really what I’ve gotten out of tap—the love for and the joy of life.”

Omar Edwards Among NYOTs, known for their hard-hitting, funk-driven style, how odd it was that Melba Huber, in reviewing Omar Edwards’s solo “What the World Needs Now,” described him as an “exciting” dancer who “now has a smooth style.””’ At the time, the twenty-three-year-old Edwards was the most unordinary of the group, and he had always distinguished himself— whether he chose to or not—as the odd man out. After his tenure with Glover as a dancer in Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk and a member of NYOT, Edwards would evolve a succulent lyrical style of rhythm dancing that was the most unlike Glover’s and would become the high-thinking philosopher of tap dance—resurrecting the earth-stomping rhythms into their highest spiritual dimensions. Tap dance for Edwards was a spiritual journey, and he was supremely grateful for the opportunity to go on the trip. As he self-effacingly wrote in his one-line bio in the Savion Glover/Downtown program: “Omar Edwards is very happy to be here.” He was born Omar Anthony Edwards in Brooklyn, New York, on July 2, 1975, and raised by his grandmother in Far Rockaway, Queens. His Liberian-born mother, Balee Edwards, died when he was ten years old; his father, Anthony William Edwards, went to prison when Omar was three, and during his twelve years there earned six degrees in philosophy. Edwards had little awareness and no interest in tap dancing until the age of ten, when his grandmother showed him a newspaper ad for The Tap Dance Kid and informed him that the thirteen-year-old star of that Broadway show, Savion Glover, was his cousin (Omar’s grandmother and Savion’s srandfather, Wilbert Lewis, were brother and sister). It was a confusing surprise, as Omar thought the “tap dance kid” was Alphonse Ribiera—who had indeed originated the role when it opened on Broadway. Omar remarked on it when he met Savion for the first time at a family cookout in New Jersey: “It was just me being silly, but I told Savion he was not the tap dance kid. And he looked me in the eye, furious, and said, ‘I don’t want to hear that,’ and walked out the room. That was the beginning of our relationship,” said Edwards. It was also the beginning, though he did not realize it at the time, of his interest in tap. “I was a kid who always worked—my dream was never to tap dance. My only dream was to be the head of a black family, so I always wanted to prepare for that. So I attacked work, and I prayed at Jehovah’s Witnesses, bringing the good news of the Kingdom.” Then the movie Tap, starring Gregory Hines, came out. “I read something about it in a Jet magazine article, and Savion was in it, and I started thinking, tap! And one day, walking home with my grandmother from Kingdom Hall, I said to myself, ‘I want to do that.’ I got my grandmother’s phone book and looked up Yvette Glover, and made the call.” Yvette Glover, Savion’s mother, said, “Little Omar, I know who you are.” He told her he wanted to dance, and she said, “All right. Meet me downtown, Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan, the Minskoff Theatre.” He was twelve and a half years old. He took the train from Far Rockaway to Forty-second Street, and walked to the theater where Black and Blue was playing. He went up to the doorman, told him he was Savion Glover’s cousin, and was taken downstairs to Glover’s dressing room. And Yvette there with a pair of tan-colored tap shoes for him.

320 TAP DANCING AMERICA The year was 1989, and with his first pair of tap shoes given to him by his aunt, Edwards began to take the nightly train ride from Queens to Manhattan to see Black and Blue. For the next two years, he hung around masters Jimmy Slyde, Buster Brown, and Chuck Green, as well as Van Porter, Tarik Winston, and Dule Hill, who, says Edwards, “showed me so much love, and always gave me beauty.” He went on: “Slyde was the first person I was attracted to, I didn’t even know how killer he was—I was attracted to the flash, and I was attracted to him. | had real interactions with these men—it was not about steps, it was about being with the men.” Edwards also went to the studio of Henry LeTang. “I told him I had no money, but I really want to learn how to dance. He told me to go into the studio and write down all the steps I knew. I would do a step, and he would correct it, and then he left the room to go teach privates [private pupils], leaving me to work on my own steps.” Edwards began working all the time, everywhere, on his steps, practicing on the street, in the launderette, and on the train. His srandmother got calls from his teachers at school saying, “Omar has been tap dancing in class again.” By the time Black and Blue closed, in January of 1991, Edwards had learned enough tap dance to parlay it into a team effort. At sixteen, Edwards formed the tap duo Toe Jam with Daniel B. Wooten Jr., who had also performed in Black and Blue, and together the high-energy, exuberant team (known for dancing in Capezio K36o0s that were reinforced for all their toe stands) appeared thirteen times on Ed McMahon’s Star Search. They won the grand prize Star Search championship competition on February 22, 1994 (coached by Van Porter), becoming the youngest adult dance champions to win, with an award of $25,000.” Success was immediate. The troupe made appearances on the Arsenio Hall Show and performances for New York City’s Tap Extravaganza and Gus Giordano’s Dance Congress. Just when Toe Jam was getting raves for being as classy as the Nicholas Brothers and as athletic as the Four Step Brothers, during a tour in Europe, Danny Wooten injured himself, leaving Omar to work solo, doing eight shows a week with a piano player in a bar. Edwards returned home to audition for the international touring production of Black and Blue, and a dream came true. “It was the turn on show, the show that got it all started,” said Edwards, who got to work with such original cast members as the singer Linda Hopkins, the sreat tap dancer Bunny Briggs, and the young dancer Dormeshia Sumbry, whom he had first seen as a twelve-year-old dancer in the original production. While he was on tour with Black and Blue, someone put on the bulletin board a photocopied picture of the cast of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, which was about to open in New York. The picture stayed on the board for about three weeks, then disappeared. “Know why?” Edwards asks. “It was under my pillow. Under my pillow—now I got this new goal.” The Black and Blue tour finished, and Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk opened at the Public Theatre without Omar Edwards. But he did make it to Broadway when in 1996 he joined the cast as understudy to Vincent Bingham, Dule Hill, Jimmy Tate, and Baakari Wilder; in a short time, he became a permanent cast member. It was while performing in that show that Edwards became reacquainted with the young tap dancer Dormeshia Sumbry. Friendship blossomed into love after Sumbry was invited to join the international touring cast of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk. They were married in 1998, taking on the challenge of raising

a family while maintaining separate careers as tap artists. Edwards regards his wife as a supremely gifted dancer and “psychotic technician,” as he explained to Karen Hildebrand in Dance Magazine: “Savion will choreograph something that’s pretty hard for your brain, and she will suck it up like it’s nothing.””° Omar’s own dreams for tap dance would take him into the more abstract realm of the spiritual and metaphysical. Soon after marriage, Edwards began to experience a change of attitude; he began to grow out of what he calls the “wilding” of the Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In

NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 321 ‘Da Funk scene. “With Noise/Funk, there was incredible motivation. I got a chance to express feeling through dance because there was so much story. With NYOT, it was not so easy to see story attached to the dance. It became math, hard things to do even though it wasn’t hard. After two weeks, it wasn’t scary anymore. I didn’t practice or cram. There was nothing in me to say, ‘you gotta get this!’” Edwards was the first of the NYOTs to break away from the Glover compound. “From my

interpretation of Savion’s work I realized that tap dancing was music,” said Edwards. He announced “I want to be a musician with my dancing, a straight-up soloist musician.” In 1998, he walked into a studio and in three hours recorded eighteen “songs” (tap/instrumental numbers) for his album Tap Dancing Is Music, which has sold over 5,000 copies. In June 1999, he presented Working on My Music at downtown New York’s Duplex Cabaret Theatre. Working as a tap soloist with his group named Jubali (for his mother), a musical ensemble that included bassist Andy McCloud and violinist Leonardo Suarez Paz, Edwards demonstrated how “music is tap and tap is music” by turning the cabaret into “a musical space” that spun the audience “into a muse of feelings.” One night, “Savion came backstage and said, ‘Thank you for this journey,” Edwards remembered. “I was inspiring to him.” There are more ephemeral and experimental works that Edwards has produced, which in the sheer audacity of their conception distinguish him as a wildly imaginative and free jazz artist. At Minton’s, the infamous after-hours jazz club in Harlem where Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk once engaged in all-night cutting sessions, Edwards would show up for his weekly gig with his band, Seven Less, and a large black box: “I made this box in which you could not see me get in or out. I stepped into it, and it covered me from the top of my head to my knees, so you could only see my feet,” Edwards described about the first fifteen minutes of the show. “People never knew we existed,” said Edwards about the hour-

long sets that challenged the audience to focus its attention on disembodied sounds. He persisted nonetheless in making appearances with his black platform boxes at such latenight, open-mike jazz clubs in Manhattan as the Iridium, Smoke, Showman’s, and Saint Nick’s Pub. In his solo performance at the New York City Tap Festival’s Tap All-Stars at the Duke Theatre in 2002, Edwards presented another unusual solo. On a totally darkened stage, he stepped onto a square platform, into a tightly lighted spotlight, that revealed only his two bare feet— and proceeded to dance African-style, by making succulent flat-footed slapping and shuffling sounds on the wood. Minimal and severe, with only those agile feet framed in the light on the large black stage and whisking out rhythms, his flat-footed giowbe was a startling and illuminating reminder of the roots of tap in the ancestral soils of black Africa.

| 2 (MILLENNIUM)

HOOFING IN HEELS

CHALLENGE! High-Heeled Angels versus Bebop Kings

CHARLIE’S ANGELS was Jason Samuels Smith’s 2006 tap choreography for his three muses of dance. Set to a suite of historical recordings by the bebop saxophone virtuoso Charlie “Bird” Parker, it opens with Parker’s flickering, birdlike four-bar entry into “Star Eyes,” which then flattens out into a smooth crooning of the theme, as tap dancers Chloe Arnold, Ayodele Casel, and Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards execute elongated wipes that sweep their legs off the floor. Dancing in unison precision, not only in step but in the exact millimeter of their slides, they are a commanding triple-etched threat on the massive stage of Chicago’s Harris Theatre; the basic pulse stated by Ray Brown on double bass is a throbbing undercurrent. Casel and Arnold split the first section of Parker’s improvised chorus. Casel follows Parker’s notes, but meanders off to hit her own tap style of heel-and-ball paddle-and-rolling; Arnold curvaceously shapes the notes with arms and leg-sliding ronde de jambs made frilly by the swishing skirts of her black halter-necked dress. Sumbry follows, melting into the elegant Hank Jones piano solo by setting down each of her taps with soulful selectivity—then not so dutifully, jutting into her own glittering steps in counterpoint, to break Brown’s bass phrasings out of its meditation. The women join together, in the final A-section of the second chorus, for a muted obbiigato of shuffling waltz clogs and tapping turns—a finishing sendoff to Parker’s flyaway riffs. Chloe Arnold then dances with an exhilarating joie de vivre in her brazen solo to “Mango Mangue,” played by Francisco Raul Gutiérrez Grillo’s Machito Orchestra, with Parker on alto sax. Behind the seeming abandon and hothouse fire ignited in her feet is a calculated design in how Arnold presents herself—a sassy assuredness in using legs, hips, and snaking arms while delivering piston-slapping beats in two-inch high heels. In her solo to “Moose the Mooche,” Ayodele Casel takes on each of Charlie Parker’s saxophone riffs note for note; like the “mooche’” in the title, she surreptitiously reclaims the paddle-and-roll for her high-heeled shoes. Treading sideways, head cocked in the opposite direction from where she is traveling, with arms crooked at the elbows and wrists dangling daintily over scuffling feet, she cruises with the beat. Her beboppity rhythms add 322 up to small nuances of pulse, accent, and division of beats that perforate Parker’s melody line.

\)iB 72

Michelle Dorrance, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, and Chloe Arnold in a 2007

. La performance of Jason Samuels Smith’s 4 Charlie's Angels, New York City Tap y .. Festival. (Photo by Debi Field)

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_ acai ae \ We rhythm dancers, typing right over 4 A Bm = Parker’s improvised flight in her 2S i cam high-heeled, t-strapped shoes. Her ap-y,*sixteenth-note | 4 delivery, a tight-lipped shuffles anddiatribe flaps, of is given momentum by twisting, turning, and spiraling her torso to meet the back leg as preparation for a step. Her technical mastery is staggering—her acid-cool delivery driving like drumming-in-tongues. Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts,” played by Gillespie (trumpet and vocals), Curly Russell (bass), Sid Catlett (drums), and Parker (alto sax) defines the bop idiom in its primal form. Dramatic, restless in attack, and full of sharp contrasts, it creates a dynamic sense of insecurity in listeners who feel attacked from unexpected angles. The women are up for it. Raising their arms in a three-fisted salute, they disperse into conjoining spotlights to conduct a three-ringed attack on the band’s wildchild delivery of non sequiturs. Tapping in unison, they take on one risk after another in a furious, note-for-note matching of the lines. Then they divide up to conquer—Arnold going head to head with Russell’s bass, Sumbry water-snaking over Parker’s lines; and Casel matching Gillespie’s stinging, elaborately detailed, and daringly high-flown phrases. Joining together in a screeching finish over Catlett’s drum solo, their bullet taps fuse into a stuttering diatribe—a headlong collision with the ghosts of those bebop kings. If only Parker and Gillespie were alive to witness these dancers and their tour de force interpretations, they would fall to their knees in mesmerized awe to kiss the feet of those tap dancing furies.’

324 TAP DANCING AMERICA

To Dance Not Like a Man Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards began tap dancing at the age of three in Los Angeles, and became the only woman to join the touring production of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk as dancer, dance captain, and understudy to the star, Savion Glover. Ayodele Casel began dancing at age eighteen, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and was the only female in Savion Glover’s company Not Your Ordinary Tappers (NYOT). Chloe Arnold was a ten-year-old junior member of the National Tap Dance Company’s Flying Feet when Savion Glover made her a member of his Washington, D.C., “crew.” In Charlie’s Angels, all three not only showed themselves as masters of Glover’s flatfooted style, but also quite ably delivered Glover’s low-heeled, hard-hitting lexicon in two-inch high-heeled tap shoes. They would not tell you they were in competition with Glover or with any of the schoolboys from the noisy rhythm-and-funk school,

many of whom they had danced beside. They would not even regard their performance as a “challenge” to the men because, as the Apollo Theatre chorus dancer Bertye Lou Wood used to say, “Women didn’t challenge. That was something men did.” Yet the intent, approach, and presentation of every step tapped by the women in Charlie’s Angels was a full-brigade charge in the face of that tradition; the women took on that foot-stomping style and blithely one-upped it.

Savion Glover shunned the presentational in performance and, like pioneer bebop jazzmen of the 1940s, turned sideways, gazed downward, and turned his back to the audience—as if saying, “Just hear what I have to say.” The new idea in the women’s approach embraced look and sound. And why not? As Charles “Cookie” Cook used to say, “Use it all!” In the 1950s and 1960s, women were expected to show a lot of leg below their beaded leotards. That necessitated wearing a higher heel; but they were not expected to dance the same steps as the men. A half century later, the high-heeled women in Charlie’s Angels were literally and figuratively upping the “ground” rules. As their choreographer Jason Samuels Smith said with pride and awe: “There’s power in the heels. It’s the one thing the man can’t do. All you see is thigh, and thigh, and thigh. They can do everything I can do, only in heels!”’ Not since John Bubbles, in the 1920s, began loading the bar and dropping the heels had there been a new approach to rhythm-tap steps—and here it came from the core of the female body. The concept for Angels belonged to Jason Samuels Smith, who choreographed the open-

ing and closing numbers and tacit segues between each section, but Smith wisely left the musical selections and solos to the discretion of the women. What they achieved by feminizing the rhythm-tap lexicon may not have ended the century-long male dictatorship in dance direction and tap choreography, but it foretold a radical shift in thinking for millennium-age women: to achieve virtuosity and authority in the form, they no longer needed to dance like a man, but as a woman.

Hoofing in Heels It was 1988, when the six-foot-tall ballerina Melinda Roy rose up onto her fiberglass-reinforced point slipper to tower over her partner, Albert Evans, in New York City Ballet’s premiere of William Forsythe’s Behind the China Dogs. With that, the image of a female on point took on an empowering new meaning. Wielding the long line of her torso, from hip to leg, down through

the foot to the tip of her toe, Roy sliced the air over her male partner’s head as if it were a rapier. In this American Music Festival premiere, sponsored by philanthropist Irene Diamond as a showcase for a new generation of ballet choreographers, the women were magnificent. Wearing one-piece black velvet bathing suits with V-shaped bodices that plunged to their

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 325 navels, the sheer black veiling that sheathed their arms and legs gave them a sleek coutured look as they moved like a tight and aggressive pack of dogs to Leslie Stuck’s high-tech musical score of barks, groveling howls, and slamming trash cans, punctuating the music with a ribald flick of a limb. As the line of women bourreed behind the male soloist, stapling their stilettopoints into the floor, executing developpes and penche arabesque as rapid-fire kung-fu kicks, and sling-shotted their legs across the space, it became face-slapping clear that the choreographer was inscribing the point shoe with a new meaning and function: it was a rise to power. Just as rising onto point emboldened the ballerina, so, too, the tap dancer who slipped her foot into a high-heeled shoe found a strategically empowering position from which to delegate rhythms. The act of rising onto the balls of the feet, staying poised to chisel the sounds into the

floor, instead of pounding out the beats flatfooted, demonstrated a physical prowess while maintaining a rhythmic sensuality. The relatively new power of the high heel also referenced—

or reengendered—its controversial history. If the high-heeled tap shoe has been the most enduring icon for women in tap, so has it been the most divisive. The shoe that brings the dancer onto the balls of her feet, enhancing the long line of the leg, is also emblematic of the female chorus-line dancer who—though admired for her pretty legs and clean tapping, was deemed incapable of the rhythm-tapping virtuosity of her male peers. The high heel was what female tap dancers coming of age during the women’s movement of the 1970s flatly rejected, in favor of the low-heeled men’s oxford. They reasoned that the low heel enabled them to per-

form the piston-driving steps of rhythm tap, which helped to earn the most superlative of compliments for a woman: “You dance like a man.” The high-heeled tap shoe is what women in the millennium have reclaimed. Demonstrating their ability to execute, with facile expertise, all the steps of male tap masters in high-heeled shoes, they have one-upped the men. Some women have even offered instruction in “master-

ing femininity in tap,” to the dismay of elder-generation women who have questioned the feminist implications of restoring the high-heeled shoe.

“MASTERING FEMININITY IN TAP” In August 2006, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards announced, by e-mail, a new course in her Harlem Tap Studio: “Mastering Femininity in Tap,” or MFIT, a four-week tap class that promised to “Develop your elegance and style... develop your ability to dance effectively in heels.”*’ The suggested footwear for the class was high-heeled tap shoes. In the click of a keyboard, that e-mailed announcement raised the graying hairs of some tapping women, self-proclaimed second-wave feminists, who had labored from the 1970s in their low-heeled men’s oxford shoes. With such recent articles as Jenai Cutcher’s “Dancing Like a Girl: The New Tap Women Are Putting Femininity Back on the Boards,” which had appeared in the May 2006 issue of Dance Magazine, talk about the new young women and the new femininity being reclaimed in the high-heel shoe struck some low-heel tap dancing women as being weirdly regressive. It also had them worrying about the divisiveness that such talk was leading to—antifeminist femininity.* Perhaps the strong reaction by the second-wavers to the new femininity came from feeling rejected by the “new tap women” and a perceived ungratefulness and postmodern ahistoricity: some had come so far as to not even regard themselves as feminists—as being part of the century-long struggle to eradicate the cultural, political, and economic practices and inequities that discriminated against women. “We have come a long way, baby, but who cares or even knows how we got here?” the so-called antifeminists appeared to be saying. “I can dance in high heels and low-heels, and not like a man. What’s wrong with just wanting to dance?” The great abyss between the “second-wave feminists” of the 1970s and the “new young women” of the millennium was actually not so great. Like Eleanor Powell working alone for

326 TAP DANCING AMERICA twelve hours a day on a soundstage to prepare for a shoot, Marion Coles standing in the wings of the Apollo Theatre to memorize a tap routine to bring to the chorus, and Brenda Bufalino choosing a white tuxedo to dance with male hoofers, women in the millennium (both selfprofessing or denouncing of feminism) had their own strategies for survival. Ayodele Casel says she first really learned to tap dance not in Charles Goddertz’s class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts but backstage at the Ambassador Theatre when Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk played Broadway. There, with her friend Chloe Arnold, she became a “fixture” on the scene, memorizing Savion Glover’s choreography and jamming backstage

with the men in the cast during their preshow jam. These young women managed to hold their own, but trying to establish themselves as hard-hitting improvisers had its challenges. Not until she joined Savion Glover’s Not Your Ordinary Tappers (NYOT), as its only female dancer, and received “one-too-many shocked responses from people who learned that there was even such a thing as a female hoofer,” did she became aware of the history of discrimination against women in tap.” When dancing with NYOT, Casel wore low-heeled oxfords that had

been reinforced with extra layers of leather sole (almost to the thickness of a clog shoe, and nearly making its noisy sound) by Pete Ktenas, the Greek shoemaker at Capezio who worked on all of Glover’s tap shoes. Casel first tap danced in high heels in Derick Grant’s 2006 tap musical Imagine Tap! Wearing “heels” at that time, she said, was not the vehicle through which she “mastered” her femininity but was instead a confirmation of the “womanhood” she was in the process of realizing. “Heels don’t allow you necessarily to find that femininity, that’s misleading,” she said. “For me, it’s owning your womanhood. | started changing my style before I ever put heels on. I felt myself moving differently, even with flats. A couple of months later, I said, ‘I’m tired of flats.’ I put on a pair of heels, and it felt prettier. The feminine style I felt before I put the heels on.”

CHLOE ARNOLD Chloe Arnold, too, remembers wearing low-heeled shoes when she jammed backstage with the guys from Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, but it was less about losing her femininity than about learning to compete. “I’d put my shoes on, and I’d jam, and it sucked... . My whole thing was facing your fears. I didn’t care. I knew it would be embarrassing, but I was going to do it.” Arnold admits to being ambitious and persevering young woman. She says that

opportunities to dance came from accomplished male dancers but that her confidence as a rhythm-tap artist was largely instilled by women, beginning with her mother.’ Arnold was born in Washington, D.C., on August 5, 1980, of an interracial parentage. Her white French mother enrolled her at the age of six in the Wheaton Studio of Dance in Silver Spring, Maryland. As the only student of color there, Arnold said that she learned early on— when her mother had to re-choreograph an inferior tap routine she was to perform at a dance recital—about “the struggle of people holding you back.” At age nine, she auditioned for the National Tap Ensemble’s junior company, Flying Feet (directed by Chris Baker), and was soon

taken into the company. In 1990, Savion Glover auditioned and accepted the ten-year-old Arnold into his resident program at the National Tap Ensemble, but while Glover gave out the

steps, drill and practice were left to rehearsal director Barbara Duffy, who, said Arnold, “affirmed the idea that I could do this.” Arnold was accepted into Glover’s workshop three years in a row, and in 1991 was taken to New York City to perform; there, she got to see Jelly’s Last Jam, starring Gregory Hines and Glover. She returned to Washington, D.C., to study with Toni Lombre, her first black female teacher, and to join Taps and Company. Lombre, who had performed on Broadway in Maurice Hines’s Uptown . . . It’s Hot! (1986) and with Mercedes Ellington’s DancEllington, demanded that her dancers study ballet, jazz, and modern dance as

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 327 well as tap. “It was an all-black female tap company—six girls—and all of us had hips and boobs,” said Arnold. “So we used us—with choreography. It was one of my most important developmental periods. Toni took me from a young girl to a young woman. I progressed as a performer and developed self-confidence.”!” In 1998, on a visit to New York City, Arnold was backstage at Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre meeting the cast of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk when she got her big chance to witness—and participate in—a tap jam. “I’m in the dressing room, and they start jamming,” she remembered. “It was the pre-show jam and they said, ‘Do you have your shoes? Put your shoes on.’ I was a mess, but they were so cool. It put my eyes up as to where my training needed to go.”"! She returned to New York later in 1998, enrolled as an undergraduate film major at Columbia University, but continued to jam with the dancers from Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk and NYOT. Her next most important influence was Debbie Allen—the African American actress, jazz dancer, choreographer, and director (best known for her role as Lydia Grant in the hit 1982 television series Fame), who cast Arnold in the musical Brothers of the Knight, which was presented at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Wash-

ington, D.C. “I was sixteen. My jazz teacher taught me to go for it, and Debbie liked that. I ended up being one of the twelve girls. We had to dance, sing, and act, the whole spectrum of performance. Debbie was nurturing yet strict. Every element had to be perfect. She was a woman, and seeing a woman in this position was something.” In 1999, Debbie Allen cast Arnold in the musical Soul Possessed, starring Patti LaBelle, in which she performed jazz and African, as well as tap dance choreographed by Jason Samuels Smith, who was then nineteen. That connection led Arnold into a professional relationship with Smith that was marked by creativity, collaboration, and camaraderie. As a friend and colleague, Smith admired Arnold’s drive and aggressiveness; he was also attracted to the fullbodied sensuality in her dancing, which is why he chose Arnold, along with Casel and Edwards, for Charlie’s Angels. Said Arnold: “In high school, I was very athletic. I loved being aggressive, and that transferred into my tap dancing. At the same time, I like to feel sexy. I like to be able to express different moves, to be hard core with a feminine touch.” In Charlie’s Angels, with a

number like “Salt Peanuts,” Arnold was 100 percent aggressive: “We were finding all the moments where we could use our hips, use the things that are clearly a part of who we are.” All too aware of producers in mainstream media who have wanted women to do simple steps and look pretty, while the guys do “the nitty-gritty” footwork, Arnold adds, “I still wear my flats a lot because for me, heels would not always be effective in the long run. I’m not just talking comfort—I am for preservation.”!’

DORMESHIA SUMBRY EDWARDS Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards was an exceedingly shy little girl. She remembers Paul and Arlene Kennedy’s dancing school and doing all the steps exactly as shown, but with no expression. “She’s so cute, if only she can smile,” she heard at the age of five and six. “But I’m doing the steps, what do I need to smile for? My arms are here, my feet are clean, and I know my dance,” Sumbry recalled. “A smile? Whatever.” At dance competitions she wore the choreography out and folks would say: “Wow, she ain’t missed a beat, but she ain’t smiling!” Mr. Kennedy would say to her, “This is not Maybelline, this is Colgate! You’d better smile up there, Mary. You’ve got your teaching in your ear and you got people out there, your family.”" Although all little girls of that time who dreamed of growing up to be star dancers were taught about the necessity of the smile, Dormeshia Sumbry blithely defied that teaching to become one of the most ferocious tap dancers of her generation. Born in Englewood, California,

on January 16, 1976, Sumbry had the rhythm in her from the beginning. She remembers

328 TAP DANCING AMERICA being three years old and watching her teenage sister dance and “being all in the way, getting right behind her and doing her steps.” Her mother wondered what would happen if she put her in a dance class and so enrolled her in Paul and Arlene Kennedy’s dancing school in Los Angeles; there, her extremely shy and unsmiling little girl picked up every step—and repeated it exactly as shown. In the summer of 1984, the year the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, Sumbry and Cyd Glover were the two girls chosen to perform at the Tip Tap Festival in Rome, Italy; and where the eight-year-old Sumbry, tap dancing thousands of miles from home before an enraptured audience, realized her future as a tap dancer. Fast-forward to 1989, when at age thirteen Sumbry joined the Broadway production of Black and Blue, representing The Young Generation (with Cyd Glover and Savion Glover). Wearing low-heeled shoes, all three performed a stair dance, but as a member of the chorus, Sumbry also performed Henry LeTang’s rhythmically complex tap routines in two-and-a-half-inch heels: “I’m a mutt when it comes to this tap dance thing because I grew up, I want to say, tap dancing. But physically, as far as what the feet were doing—the choreography and the steps—it was definitely hoofing, except the approach in the upper body looked like this tap dance thing,” Sumbry explained about her fullbodied style, in which the taps are rhythmically complex while the torso and arms remain expressive.” In the 1990s, dancing with Lynn Dally’s Jazz Tap Ensemble, Sumbry made visually engaging designs in such works as All Blues and Oracle (a quintet in which she and Derick Grant skated effortlessly across the stage with crossed arms, turning under each other’s arms, dancing as one and in counterpoint to each other). Not until the late 1990s, after joining the international cast of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk did Sumbry begin hearing comments about her dancing like a man: “First they would just kinda say, ‘Wow, you were really keeping up with those guys.’ And I’m like, ‘Is that what you want to say to me? Really?’ I’m the only girl up there,

and that’s what you want to say?” Savion Glover, meanwhile, would send the guys to her for help: “He would just say, ‘Go ask D,’ if he didn’t feel like dealing with the situation. Or Mother— Mother is something he ended up calling me for a while. And it was soon after I was first pregnant, and I thought it kinda had something to do with that, but it was more along the lines of respect.” The mothering aspect is not what Sumbry felt she brought to tap dance: “I’ve brought sexy back! I’m only kidding,” she said. “Maybe sensuality more than sexuality, but more than that, femininity—having to be very girly—arms and fingers and smiles and the oohs and ahhs, hips, lips, fingertips—and the rhythm going down below, because that’s really what was

first." The technique of tap dancing in heels that Sumbry developed in her “Mastering Femininity in Tap” classes was female-centered. The approach to steps that in the rhythm tap/hitting style had mandated a downward-driving, piston-driven attack, for the female in the heel, had to be strategically reconceptualized and structured along more circuitous paths of attack: cir-

cular steps in ronde de jambe shapes; pullbacks that used the momentum of a traditional straight-back pullback but that were circular and aerial; preparations for shuffles made by twisting and spiraling the torso. The technique was built around the idea that the dancer was in the center of a spherical universe, with access all around the 360 degrees to rotaries from which to launch or descend steps. It utilized the same aerality as Irish step dancing, except that the beats of steps were divided into unevenly accented sixteenth notes, putting it into a strictly bop orientation. “Mastering Femininity in Tap” was in fact less about mastering femininity in tap than about regaining it through a revolutionary new approach to technique. When asked what she had to offer the legacy of tap dancing, she replied:

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Mable Lee (far left) and her high-heeled Dancing Ladies performing Fats Waller's “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at the New York City Tap Festival’s Tap and Song, 2008. Among the performers were Maud Arnold, Ali Bradley, Marietta Clark, Michelle Dorrance, Karida Griffith, Yuka Kameda, Monica Kendell, Michela Marino Lerman, Traci Mann, Beverly Moore, Carson Murphy, Claudia Rahardjanoto, Courtney Runft, and Shoko Taniguchi. (Photo by Debi Field)

I want to do a dance that has the shoes and flats, but the next number has to be very pulled up. Because rhythmically it keeps going, but up here, this is doing something else that would probably not be naturally done. Yes, it takes control. And yes, I do have on this heel, but you want that heel to sound like a heel when you put it down. You don’t want it to sound like a high heel. You want it to sound like a heel.

“So Savion is not the only one?” Sumbry was asked about those who were approaching tap from new directions. “We’ve been knowing that,” she answered.”

Bring in Da Tap and Make It Last In the first decade of the twenty-first century, tap dance was regarded as a national treasure, a veritable American vernacular dance form. It was celebrated annually on National Tap Dance Day, May 25, which was Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s birthday—in big cities and small towns in every state. Tap festivals, from three days to two weeks in length, were held every month of the year in more than twenty-five U.S. cities. There were also hundreds of tap classes, workshops, and festivals all over the world. In Cuba in 2001, for example, Max Pollak established that country’s first tap festival and performed with an all-star ensemble, made up of Cuba’s finest jazz musicians and led by Chucho Valdes. Tap dancers as performance artists were also acknowledged in all forms of the media. Savion Glover received a review by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker with a full-page photograph taken by fashion and fine arts photographer Richard Avedon—an action shot of Glover with one leg raised to show bottom taps on his shoe; the other foot askew to show metal taps; around his neck a string of hand-carved wooden beads from his grandfather and a laminated photograph of Gregory Hines on a chain, like a security ID."* Glover also appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine (May 2004), as did Jared Grimes (June 2007) and Michelle Dorrance

330 TAP DANCING AMERICA

(May 2008). Melinda Sullivan made the cover of Dance Spirit (May/June 2003), as did Ayodele Casel (May/June 2006) and Jason Samuels Smith (May/June 2008); and Gregory Hines with Michela Marino Lerman made the cover of Dance Teacher (February 2002).

In advertising, the entire Edwards family—Omar; his wife, Dormeshia; and their two children, Jeremiah and Eboni—became the poster family for Capezio tap shoes; their smiling faces and tap-happy feet were shown on billboards and in dance publications. Jumaane Taylor wore Brenda Bufalino’s Tap Shoe for Leo’s Dancewear. Jason Samuels Smith became the corporate spokesperson for Bloch dancewear, engaged in a team effort to develop a new tap shoe offering quality and affordable options for professionals. There were awards aplenty: Channing Cook Holmes (2001) and Joseph Wiggan (2005), as apprentices with the Jazz Tap Ensemble, received the Princess Grace Award for aspiring young performance artists in America. Jason Samuels Smith won the 2003 Emmy Award, as well as an American Choreography Award, for outstanding choreography for the opening number on the Jerry Lewis/Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. Tap dancing to the Mongo Santamaria

jazz standard “Afro-Blue,” Smith staged three generations of dancers for the three-minute number that ended with a salute to a projected image of the late Gregory Hines. A John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship was awarded to Constance Valis Hill (in 2006) to write a cultural history of tap dance in America since 1900; and tap dancers Roxane Butterfly and body percussionist Keith Terry were recognized (in 2007 and 2008, respectively) in the category of dance and performance. Veteran master hoofers hit the academic jackpot on February 22, 2002, when Oklahoma City University awarded nine “Honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts in American Dance” degrees to world-famous African Americans in tap: Charles “Cholly” Atkins, Bunny Briggs, James Buster Brown, Jeni LeGon, Henry LeTang, Fayard Nicholas, Leonard Reed, Jimmy Slyde, and Prince Spencer. Marion Coles received an honorary degree from Queens College (CUNY) in 2002; and Harold Cromer received one from New Jersey’s Bloomfield College in 2008. New tap studios were opened, such as Dormeshia Sumbry and Omar Edwards’s Harlem Tap Studio in the legendary Sugar Hill section of Harlem. New tap companies were founded, such as the all-woman Barbara Duffy and Company; Jason Samuels Smith’s Anybody Can Get It (ACGI); and Ayodele Casel and Sarah Savelli’s Tandem Act Productions, aimed at promoting female tap choreography. Elka Samuels, big sister to Jason Samuels Smith and herself a tap dancer, founded Divine Rhythm Productions to produce, represent, and exclusively manage tap dancers. In 2006, Savion Glover, on the occasion of his twenty-fifth year in dance theater, founded Savion Glover Productions, a self-producing and managing company that was inausurated at a formal reception and dinner at New Jersey’s Performing Arts Center on National Tap Dance Day. There, Glover honored fifteen “responsibilitors” of tap dance—historians,

producers, and practitioners—“for giving tirelessly to the spirit and legacy of tap dance”: Marshall Davis Jr., Hannah Leah Dunn, Jane Goldberg, Megan Haungs, Al Heywood, Melba Huber, Delilah Jackson, Peter Ktenas, Sali-Ann Kriegsman, Deborah Mitchell, Cobi Narita, Frank Owens, Carl Schlesinger, Hank Smith, and Sally Sommer. On May 25, 2009, Glover founded his own tap dance school in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. On television, Marvin, the Tap-Dancing Horse brought down the house in his big Broadway-style production number. Savion Glover and company performed on Dancing with the Stars (September 2007). And for the short-lived Secret Talents of the Stars (April 2008), Jason

Samuels Smith choreographed a production number for rhythm-and-blues singer Mya Harrison (whose secret desire was to be a tap dancer), using fifteen hot young tap dancers. At Radio City Music Hall, the precision tap dancing of the Rockettes continued in showstopping numbers—five shows a day, seven days a week. On Broadway, the chorus kids in

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 331 choreographer Randy Skinner’s Broadway revival of Forty-second Street (May 2001), the tap dancing flappers in Thoroughly Modern Millie (April 2002), and the show-stopping soft-shoe dancers in Jerry Mitchell’s Hairspray (August 2002), certified, as did the City Center Encores! production of No, No Nanette (May 2008), that “tap is the language of love.” In Nanette, Sandy Duncan stared in the role played by Ruby Keeler in Burt Shevelove’s 1971 Broadway revival of the 1925 musical; her tap dancing Charleston exuded “such generous joy in her craft that her smile becomes yours; she is a human antidepressant,” the New York Times reported.'° On film, the romantic hero in the Academy Award-winning animated musical Happy Feet (2006), was an unstoppably cheerful penguin named Mumble, who could not sing but could dance, tap dance—and that he did brilliantly. Slapping his webbed feet on the icy Antarctic terrain, his body upright and flippers hanging rigidly out at his side (almost passing for an Irish step dancer) while his feet made dazzling ornamental flourishes, Mumble the penguin was an exact spin-off of Savion Glover. That’s because Glover was Mumble—he provided Mumble’s dance moves by computer. The film’s director, lead screenwriter, and producer, George Miller, explained how the entire film hinged on persuading Glover to don a motioncapture body suit to become the tapping feet of “our tap-dancing-fool-hero.” He was convinced that the only way to tell the story of Mumble was to cast the virtuoso hoofer—‘“without question the greatest living tap-dancer”—knowing that it would otherwise take a lifetime for the best animators to draw all the moves that a gifted dancer could provide.” If Glover, as tap dance’s superstar, continued to play sold-out runs at the Joyce Theatre in New York City and dozens of theaters across the country, scores of talented dancers were still hustling, both for gigs and respect. Claudia La Rocco reported in the New York Times that nine years after Glover’s Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, which fundamentally altered the tap landscape when it hit Broadway in 1996, no consistent performance schedule existed beyond the growing but still small tap festival network.”! Pioneered by the dancers, the festival revue accounted for nearly 90 percent of the venues for tap dancers. Despite the superb critical press tap was receiving, many tap dancers continued to believe that dance critics, in general, were ignorant of tap’s history and its nuances. “They come with their modern dance or ballet goggles on, and it [tap] gets lost in translation,” said Derick Grant. If you asked a tap dancer what tap really meant, you’d hear a litany of pronouncements regarding its integrity, its political and social dimensions, and its spirituality. You would hear stories about how early tap dancers began and how many decades they stayed on the wood, and of how fiercely proud current tappers were of their elders, many of whom went unheralded or fell on hard times. Tap’s artistic tradition was never, and will be never be, separated from its long history of hardship—from slavery to blackface, to what some saw as the continued favoring of European traditions over improvisational African American forms. The burden of that sobering reality has been carried by many young dancers as a badge of honor. “The people who carried that specific title [tap dancer] had such a specific struggle,” said Jason Samuels Smith. “Being a tap dancer represents all of those struggles and I feel a commitment, personally, to the title ‘tap dancer.’””

Smith, however, was not committed to struggling in obscurity. Confronted with the challenge of how to stay true to one’s roots while cultivating bigger audiences, of balancing the artistic and social integrity of the form with its commercial viability, he has become one of a number of young hoofers pushing to expand tap’s possibilities, from creating bigger shows to infiltrating television and film. Smith and Chloe Arnold, for instance, tapped in the culminating scene of the 2007 film Idlewild, starring the Outkast rap duo of André Benjamin and Antwan Patton. Whereas some dancers, from Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk, including Marshall Davis Jr., an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Queens College who

332 TAP DANCING AMERICA

teaches tap, worried that the push to drive tap into the mainstream could dilute the art, a number of others, Ayodele Casel among them, saw that self-protection could become a straightjacket: “We are entertainers, people. We are artists, yes, but we are entertainers. As much as I like practicing in my kitchen, I would like to share it.” In 2007, she collaborated with composer/conductor Rob Kapilow in creating Paddywock: A Tap Dance Concerto, performed as a solo tap dance with a twelve-piece chamber ensemble at New York’s Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall.

Inclusivity and Exclusivity: Tap Is and Is Not... Opening up the form, sharing tap with new audiences, involving young dancers, and pushing out the boundaries of tap choreography, were only some of the ideas that tap dancers had for invigorating the form. In a weird throwback to 1970s nostalgia, there remained the temptation to pigeon-hole tap dance into what it had been, so many years ago, keeping it in its so-called pure form.

SAVION GLOVER’S IMPROVOGRAPHY Reviewing Savion Glover’s Improvography, which opened at the Joyce Theatre in December 2.003, Joan Acocella wrote glowingly for the New Yorker of Glover’s solo performance: “The first

half, the forty minutes before intermission, was just Glover, solo, with a five-piece jazz band, and it was the finest tap dancing I have ever seen.”*? Tap dancing with the band (pianist Tommy James; saxophonist/flutist Patience Higgins, bassist Andy McCloud, and drummer Brian Grice), Glover was “like lace, complicated, but still ingratiating,” turning out “eighty-step equations which math professors need three blackboards to write out. The rhythms declare themselves, then change, then take flight, then zoom off in a different direction, then circle back, than take off again.” She described Glover’s style as classic: “floor-bound, not aerial; aural, not visual; a drummer, almost, more than a dancer—and his shows are always full of tap pietas, invocations of the elders.” She had issues, however, with the second-half of the program, devoted to ensemble dances choreographed by Glover for his new company, Ti Dii—Alexandria Bradley, Marshall Davis, Jr., Michelle Dorrance, Hanya Heller, Maya Smuyllan-Jenkins, Andrew Nemr, and the fourteen-year-old Cartier Anthony Williams:

Everything about this act was as open and expansive as the first act was closed and concentrated. The music (on tape now) was more upbeat. There were women and men, white dancers and black dancers. The lighting and costumes changed from number to number. So, in some measure, did the mood. “Look at all these things!” Glover seemed to be saying. “Tap is more than solo, more than me.” And none of it was half as interesting as he had been.

After pondering the reasons for the “failure” of Glover’s ensemble choreography (“Maybe Glover didn’t have enough time. Or maybe he needs a director. He had one, George C. Wolfe, for ‘Noise/Funk’”), Acocella posited: “There’s another possibility: that tap really isn’t supposed to be an ensemble form.” Acocella (an esteemed dance critic who has written extensively about ballet and authored a critical biography of modern dancer Mark Morris) informed her readers that (for her) tap dance was “fundamentally a solo form, because at its best it uses improvisation, and you can’ t make group patterns if everyone is doing his own thing. From this limitation—solo improvisation—comes tap’s great strength, its status as an act of personal heroism:

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 333 naked, here-I-stand.” She concluded: “Perhaps tap is meant to be this way—not a lot of things, but just one thing, a product of deep and private thought.” Acocella’s remarks were taken by some in the tap community as being patronizing, limiting, and dismissive of the tradition of tap choreography that had been established since the 19708, especially by [white] women in tap. Her view was also taken as “part of a myth in tap dance that considers ensemble choreography a ‘new’ or ‘inauthentic’ expression of tap dance, while solo, male performance is real tap,” as expressed by tap dancer Margaret Morrison.” She believed that Acocella’s argument pitted predominantly white women (who choreographed, led, and performed in tap ensembles) against African American male tap dancers, ignoring the history of black and white dancers who performed in choreographed duos, trios, ensembles, and chorus lines during the heyday of tap in the 1930s and 1940s. Morrison saw Acocella’s

theory, however, as even more deplorable, since she gave neither specific description nor analysis to the group works. Other critics at least commented on unevenness in transferring Glover’s signature steps and style to his dancers. Jack Anderson wrote for the New York Times that “the men’s steps tended to be emphatic while the women were jaunty and occasionally saucy... and were generally less inventive than the solos.”” Brian Siebert in the Village Voice commented that “Glover’s choreographic use of gender difference hasn’t yet grown beyond cute (here come the ladies!), but the inclusion of so many hard-hitting women shows a willingness to find talent wherever it appears. The company is also mixed-race.””° Acocella’s critique went way beyond Glover’s inadequacies, however. By deeming “that tap really isn’t supposed to be an ensemble form,” she was articulating a certain cultural, social, and aesthetic canon that was narrow, which denied ensemble tap a significant place, recognition, and legitimacy. By relegating it only to the “talent” of the solo jazz tap dancer, she pre-

sented an elitist evaluation of a historical form—based on her own aesthetic concerning Western classical notions of choreography. It was also a cynical attitude, as stated clearly in the last paragraph of her review: “If Glover wants to lead tap, or some tap, away from this burning center, good luck to him. The Joyce show doesn’t prove he can’t do it. He did it in ‘Noise/Funk’; maybe he can again. But, if he can’t, and tap remains centered in the solo-improvisation tradition, that is a great tradition.””” And it was all wrong.

JOSH HILBERMAN’S THE WARRIOR At the New York City Tap Festival’s performance of Tap Choreography, presented on July to, 2002, at the Duke on Forty-second Street, master of ceremonies Tony Waag introduced the North American premiere of Josh Hilberman’s The Warrior, which premiered in Nuremburg, Germany, at the Paddle Battle 2002’s World Championship of the Paddle and Roll. In that same week, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (during the first term of President George W. Bush) directed the Department of Justice to spend $8,000 for draperies to cover the female art-deco sculpture “Spirit of Justice” (with one breast exposed, from her toga) and her male counterpart, the “Majesty of Law” (albeit with a cloth placed strategically around his waist). Both were in the podium of the Justice Department’s Great Hall, where the press and photographers had gone to great lengths to capture the female statue as background when the Justice Department’s top brass addressed the world press. ABC News reported that the decision was taken at the request of the conservative Mr. Ashcroft, who had been photographed speaking in front of the sculpture several times since the September 11, 2001, attacks.”® Meanwhile, The Warrior opened with Josh Hilberman in a crouch, slowly rolling up to standing position to face the audience. Squarely built and muscular, he wore little but a bit of mail that hung loosely over his lower torso—a jock strap adorned with five metal toe-taps (one tap strategically placed to hang vertically at the crotch). He also wore a black headband with a

334 TAP DANCING AMERICA metal tap affixed at the forehead; a bracelet of taps around his biceps and shins; and a pair of black laced oxford tap shoes. He began with a steady beat in the heel, which became the base rhythm, to which he added a patting sound from the tap affixed at the heart; then, a tap at the forehead and a riffling of taps at his knees and arms; he clapped, paddle-and-rolling his feet;

and, much to the amusement of his audience, lightly patted his crotch, heart, biceps, and shins. The escalation of beats became a tense foreplay, both comical and foreboding. If you closed your eyes, you would hear a multitoned timbre of metallic rhythms, building in speed and intensity from whispering rushes of the beat to a fiery polyrhythmic brigade. Yet it was with eyes and ears wide open that Hilberman wanted his audience to enjoy his tap dancing assault on conservative views of “decency,” such as those that would motivate the Justice Department to drape nude statues. His audience was at times shocked, amused, and enlightened, and it met the end of his performance with rigorous applause. “So that’s what they’re doing in Boston!” said Tony Waag when he returned onstage—and someone shouted back, “Not all of them!” Another shouted “That’s not tap!””’ At the next evening’s performance of Tap All-Stars, when dancer Omar Edwards took to the stage with his rhythmically succulent style, Savion Glover, who had been to the previous night’s performance and seen The Warrior, stood up from his seat in the house to proclaim that what Edwards was doing was tap dancing: “Some people came out last night and we didn’t know what it was,” Glover shouted to Edwards. “So thank you for explaining, Omar, I love you.” At the end of the show, Waag invited Glover to the stage for an impromptu tap dance. Glover he said he wanted to talk before tapping. “Where are we?” he asked the audience. “I want to be here, I love here, but I just want to ask the question: Where’s the dance? Where’s the art form?” When Glover got up to tap and began to lay down some rhythms, he mimicked the pat-tapping motions to the head, heart, and crotch that had been made on stage the previous evening, followed with a cringing gesture. “You saw that! That’s how I felt the other night when I saw the dance. But that’s not what it’s about!” Glover shouted, showing the audience what his extraordinary style of tap was about.*° In an interview with Jane Goldberg for Dance Magazine, Glover explained: “I’m just trying to hold down the art form. Keep it present, teach the youth coming up, carry on the tradition of whatever you call it: tap dancing, hoofing, hittin’, bringin’ it—I’m doing all of that. It’s basically just plain old tap dancing. Metal to the wood.”*' Glover has indeed held down the form and, true to his name, has been a savior to tap dance—he has attracted a new young generation of dancers and greater audiences. Does that authorize one to be tap dance’s arbiter of taste, to proclaim what tap dance should be?

DERICK GRANT’S IMAGINE TAP! The name of the most groundbreaking tap musical of the millennium was misleading, and the Chicago reviews of the premiere on July 11, 2006, at the Harris Theatre got it only half right: Imagine Tap! with its cast of blues-gospel-pop singers and eighteen of the freshest rhythm tap and break dancers, was not vaudeville.” It was intended as a surreal, acid-induced tap dance dream. Choreographer-director Derick K. Grant, with cocreator Aaron Tolson and musical director Zane Mark, envisioned tap dance as a movie musical come to life, its dancing stars raising their glistening gowns and tuxedo pants to hoof the audience into ecstasy. Thus, tap dance, in the number “Echoes,” became a heaven of harmonizing voices, chattering feet, and a black Jesus (Grant) whose stuttering rhythms resurrected him into white light. Tap dance, in “Three Chefs,” was the buck-and-wing fervor of love-struck boys (Jared Grimes, Jason Janas, and Joseph Wiggan) in white jackets and chefs’ hats, strutting, slinking, and falling head-overheels in flips, splits, and somersaults for the blues-singing diva (Vanessa Jones). Tap dance was

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The spread-the-word news about

. Imagine Tap! was that Derick Grant had of expanded tap from a virtuosic solo form

into group choreography by designing eye-catching movement patterns that focused attention on rhythmically brilliant feet. “Somebody give the Lord a hand,” the preacher (Martin Tré Dumas III) implored his foot-stomping congregation in “Dance Like David,” as he coaxed the nonbeliever (Brill Barrett) to “catch the spirit” with his large flapping feet. So, too, did Grant catch the spirit of tap when he dared to imagine such myriad expressions of tap as turning a junior high classroom into a rocking house party in “Detention”; taking a two-bar soft-shoe break and, literally, dropping it to the floor for a break dance in “Hip Hop A-Tea for Two”; and venting a woman’s blues on a hot summer day in “Subway Heat.” Born in Boston, on May 19, 1973, Grant trained with Dianne Walker at the Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts in Boston (directed by his aunt Andrea Herbert Major) and with Paul and Arlene Kennedy at their Universal Dance Design Studios in Los Angeles. Grant says he created Imagine Tap! because “I stopped expecting other people to solve the problems. For many

years we sat around the campfire, and everybody vented. We can do that till the cows come home. We have to take responsibility.” He hoped to generate new energy for tap dance with an over-the-top extravaganza: “It’s my attempt at creating an environment in which all the different disciplines and styles of tap dance can share the stage and coexist.” The inspiration came from what he saw as a divide in the tap community, “where it seemed that everything was black or white, male or female, old or young.” He wanted to celebrate all those things, proving the form could cultivate younger and bigger audiences while staying true to its roots.* Many of Grant’s tap dancers were stars in their own right. There were to be no stars, however, in Imagine Tap! “I was so determined to create a chorus that people wanted to be proud of. Everybody is so geared on being soloists, there’s no collaboration. It’s all a bunch of individuals. I wanted to make a piece to collaborate and be a part of a team, to celebrate each other and togetherness.”*° Yet the real driving force for Grant was the need for the tap community to unite; to get

336 TAP DANCING AMERICA past the divisive boundaries of race, gender, and tap style. Grant said that he created one piece— “Mr. Happy,” with Broadway-style dancer Ray Hesselink cheering up a sad and foot-dragging black man, Aaron Tolson, in a Superman suit—explicitly to show the tap community how to coexist. “We have this divide between rhythm-slash-Broadway tap, and it’s driving me crazy because you have to love one another; it’s like a gang or something. The two can’t love each other, which is lame.”

Grant once flirted with the idea of bringing together dancers from Savion Glover’s Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In ’Da Funk and from Gil Stroman’s Break the Floor, a multiracial ensemble of male and female dancers that presented an “exuberant if ragged wedding of tap dancing and rock music” when it played New York’s Henry Street Settlement at the International Fringe Festival in 2001.*° Both had been on the forefront for young people, said Grant. “Savion had the young rhythm kids, young people coming up with this new style. And Gil Stroman had a tremendous following of young people. It just so happened that the majority of Savion’s were black, and the majority of Gil’s were white.” He continued, “What did not exist was a

bridge.” That bridge Grant was determined to build: “Tap dance is a free form that can fit anywhere—it’s about celebration. We can play with different kinds of emotion but it’s still about celebration. So yes, still let’s have fun. Black, white, male, female, young, old, gay, straight, we are everything, and I’m proud of that. Just to show again, to the public and tap community alike, that we should not only co-exist but celebrate one another, and share and enjoy in doing so.”*’

Snapshots: Each One Teach One SNAP 1: GREGORY HINES (UCLA, FEBRUARY 14, 2001) Skullcap covering his head, wearing his characteristic round-rimmed eyeglasses, Gregory Hines was teaching a complex bebop combination to students at UCLA, talking about sometimes it’s the notes you do not play that are important. He told stories about Teddy Hale, remembering how “he was doing something very different than what anyone else was doing,” and asked students for questions. “Who gets you the most excited now?” one asked. “This woman,” he said. “I’ve met this woman and I feel like I’m seventeen again. I am definitely in love, and I feel like I met my soul mate in this life. It’s a good time in my life. I have a threeyear-old granddaughter, a six-year-old grandson; I have a twenty-eight- year-old daughter, a writer, and my oldest daughter is a model and designer. I have an eighteen-year-old son who is completely out of his mind, but having a great time—and thinking of applying here next year, so he may be on campus. My father’s alive. I get along really well with my ex-wife. I’ve learned a thing or two there. And I am in this amazing relationship that is motivating and inspiring me.”** Everyone then sang “Happy Birthday” to the exultant fifty-five-year-old Gregory Hines, with a thunderous coda of stomping feet. No one knew that Hines would not be celebrating many other birthdays. He died on August 9, 2003, at the age of fifty-seven, from liver cancer.

SNAP 2: JASON SAMUELS SMITH (N EW YORK CITY TAP FESTIVAL, JULY 10, 2003) Looking like an Afro-Indian god, with chest-length dreads that are entwined around aquiline features, and wearing denim shorts that bag over hairy skinny legs, and tap shoes without socks, Jason Samuels Smith began his advanced class at Tap City’s New York City Tap Festival

with his own take on the Steve Condos rudiments. He turned the piston-drilling “one-and-atwo-and-a-” hits into African talking drums. Twenty-five dancers, black and white, male and female, ages eighteen to twenty, in rapt attention, delivered however he asked for it—from

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 337 half-time to triple time. “That’s good,” said Smith, “but I have this big question—word—you gotta take the left [foot] home with you . . . ease it, practice, open up... ain’t no joke.” At age twenty-three, Smith is a rhythmic guru who fuses the four-square alphabet of stomp-brushstep into slamming articulations that explode with energy. “Do it again and again, like yoga,” he told them. “Take the posture until you melt into it.”*

SNAP 3: AYODELE CASEL (CH ICAGO HUMAN RHYTHM FESTIVAL, AUGUST 4, 2005) Ayodele Casel was teaching one tough tap routine, given that it was to a recording of Errol Garner’s “Summertime,” reminding us that “the living is easy.” Yet Casel minced no words with what she heard in those feet. “I buy some of it. And some I don’t buy,” she told the packed symnasium of dancers. She repeated a step with hurried impatience, cramming beats into a two-bar line between the beginning and end of a time step, by adding more toe slides and six-beat cramps than the ear can hear. They copied her in split-second time. “That’s loud. Okay, again,” Casel repeated, insistent that those old steps be done her way: Double- and tripletime breaks that turned the body clockwise, forcing the right working foot to stay crossed over until forced to ricochet back; thudding one-note stomps replaced with chatty cramp rolls that fractured the step into a million little pieces. Casel likes to drag her feet while walking, cramming the drag with a bunch of accented beats. She likes to float like a butterfly while shuffling away on the balls of the feet, her shuffles loose as jingle taps. If her cramp rolls are rhythmically heftier than the standard four-square toe-toe-heel-heel—because of tagged-on echoes of heel-and-toe beats further extended by toe-drags—they are not like the floating mass of beats of a Bunny Briggs kind of bebop dancer. Casel’s cramps are heavy-footed and emphatic but ultracool—and she likes them that way.“

SNAP 4: BRENDA BUFALINO (NYC WINTER TAP INTENSIVE, FEBRUARY 17, 2007) At sixty-nine, Brenda Bufalino returned to an old theme and an old hero, choreographing a new work-in-progress to Charles Mingus’s “Meditation on Integration.” Although her dancers, as well as her young pianist, Theo Hill, were new to the material, Bufalino has had a long and complex history with Mingus’s early-1960s composition: “I always played with it, heard it, but never knew what to do with this crazy three-four pattern that doesn’t swing. It reminded me of Fellini. It’s so profound and so deep about integration, different time signatures over each other, it’s just sheer culture.” Bufalino’s “Meditation,” like Mingus’s music, unfolds through motific development, along melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic planes. Lines of dancers crosscross the studio, turning it into a battleground of darting paddle-and-rolls, and then coalesce into a mass of bodies tapping out a 6/8 waltz clog with a whispering lyricism, as one dancer emerges from the group: “If you desire cacophony, create assonance,” recites Ann Kilkelly. As she dispersed into the mass of swirling bodies accelerating into a tornado of rapid eighth-note triplet steps, Bufalino smiled. Perhaps she was thinking of Mingus: “When I do that monologue, ‘My mind’s on Mingus,’ what I mean is, how Mingus sets his mind on meaning and memory. He manipulated everything and that’s what I liked, and I still like it.”*"

SNAP 5: DIANNE WALKER (TRADITION IN TAP, NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 9, 2007) In sharing the secrets of the Leon Collins style, Dianne Walker used a nursery rhyme, matching step with lyric: “Yankee Doodle went to town a riding on a pony .. . Old King Cole was a

338 TAP DANCING AMERICA very old soul... now bring it back to here,” she sang, as her students were amusingly led into the grammar of musicality. “Now listen to this,” she said, scat-singing “bop ba bee boop/ ba be boop,” telling them to “exaggerate the step, just make the point,” so that each of the florid phrases have the clear-cut “ting” of a crystal bowl. She paused to philosophize: “Little things make big splashes of sound when you're playing the theme,” and then turned concrete: “If it’s not right, then what is it? It’s WRONG.” Many years have passed since Walker was a devotee and protégé of Leon Collins. She has since evolved her own more feminized, sensuous translation of that style that opens up the body to a more expansive rhythm experience. “If your body is not moving along the way of the phrase, it gets in your way. We have to maximize your potential for movement; if not, it closes in and gets tight... . When you get comfortable it opens up automatically.” Her teaching is based on “how to get more in the body” if you don’t hop; an attention to detail; recognizing the little things; and her mantra, “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.””

In Performance DIANNE WALKER (CH ICAGO HUMAN RHYTHM FESTIVAL, AUGUST 5, 2006) In the 350-seat Marshall Theatre at Northwestern University on August 5, 2006, the grand “Lady Di,” the “Ella Fitzgerald of the tap community,” took her first long moment onstage to offer gratitude to students and faculty. Then, “What do you feel like doing?” she asked. With a nod to the musical trio, she began her exquisitely lyrical signature number, “Emily,” in 3/4 time. Barely lifting her shoes off the floor, she cast perfect pearls of sound across the waters. Acknowledging our floating exuberance, she said that this was a really good time for tap dance, that she felt such gratitude. She expressed it ever so deftly, by drifting into “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise,” done in complete connaissance with the pianist and bassist. There was no one to approach her in that moment. So delicate, so sweetly rhythmical, it was a musical masterpiece,

a supreme achievement in jazz improvisation, and one of the most supreme moments of looking at and listening to tap dance.

TONY WAAG, “BY MYSELF” (NEW YORK CITY TAP FESTIVAL, JULY 13, 2007) It was hard to believe that the man in the black tuxedo singing the soft and sad “By Myself” was Tony Waag—that elegant funny man of tap dance, and producing director of the New York City Tap Festival. Interspersing soft-whispering shuffles and slides into the lyrics of the song made famous by Tony Bennett, Waag turned the tune into a poignant song-and-dance. In Tap Forward’s evening of works, which jolted the audience into glimpsing the bold new directions of tap, it was upsetting to glimpse the sadly bittersweet fifty-year-old dancer, the man who had howled audiences with the character of Lloyd—the bespectacled, stiff-shirted, love-struck music man who could only express his amour to Bunny (his middle-aged musical partner, played by Ann Kilkelly, wearing Playboy Bunny ears and a bosom-busting bustier) by plucking the strings of his ukulele. “I was very proud to come up with that [“By Myself”] against Lloyd and Bunny,” reflected Waag. “It was nice to show that range, that serious side. It came from a real deep place.” What happens when a tap dancer turns from performer to producer, and allows himself a three-minute performance spot on the program—what to choose? Choosing can be excruciatingly difficult, but precious, said Waag: “I have enjoyed performing much more because it is a rare moment.” Born in Fort Collins, Colorado, on September 8, 1957, Tony Waag was a nineteen-year-old

art major at Colorado State University when he joined a group of sweating young dancers

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 339 going through the paces in a tap class conducted by Leslie “Bubba” Gaines and Charles “Cookie” Cook of the Copasetics who, along with Brenda Bufalino, were at the college for a weekend workshop and performance.* “They were laughing and joking, and they loved what they were doing,” Waag recalled about the casual humor of Bubba Gaines and Cookie Cook. “They spread

this kind of joy, that everything’s okay as long as you have friends and are pursuing your dream. It wasn’t so much about tap dance as it was about fraternity and community—that was the Copasetic philosophy I wanted to pursue. I decided I wanted to dance.”** Waag would develop into a sophisticated and superb rhythmic technician with Bufalino and become a founding member of her American Tap Dance Orchestra. But it wasn’t until years later, when he started developing his own style, he says, “that I realized that that was not my style at all! It wasn’t even close! My body didn’t want to do that! That’s when I went full circle and started to sing. I liked comedy—Ray Bolger and Donald O’Connor, and I wanted to be a Copasetic—I was a Copasetic! I was more liable to get into a room and pretend to be rehearsing—that’s my nature!”

Waag’s specialty mix of rhythm tap and eccentric was first realized in the American Tap Dance Orchestra’s American Landscape (1991) when he sang, sand-danced, and soft-shoed to Hoagy Carmichael’s classic song, “Old Buttermilk Sky.” And it was perfected in 1997 when

he was asked by Al Heywood and the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day to perform a tribute to Donald O’Connor, who was to be honored with the Flo-Bert Award at that year’s Tap Extravaganza. Waag decided on his own rendition of O’Connor’s gravity-defying “Make ’Em Laugh” (from the 1952 MGM musical film classic Singin’ in the Rain, considered one of the funniest dance scenes on film) by singing and dancing, tripping and falling, rolling across the stage, panting, and doing his signature camel impression. The eccentric style of tap dancing draws from a diverse and highly inventive range of grotesque body movements—from twisting and entwining the legs in legomania and snaking the hips to the shimmy and itching. It is a venerated style of vernacular dance that draws laughter from audiences of all ages; and Waag, who considers himself a proponent of that style, takes sreat pleasure in making people laugh. At the same time, he enjoys flipping to the romantic, sentimental, and bittersweet side of the emotional coin. “I’ve come full circle,” he explained. “I can pull off a beautiful soft shoe or a pratfall, if 1 decide that’s where I am going, but I’m not out here to dance my can off. It’s not becoming, and I don’t have the hunger. If there’s a cutting session going on, I’d rather go watch the sunset.” Because producing has become richer and more fulfilling than performing, Waag said, “When I do perform, I am ready to enjoy those morsels of opportunity.” When asked how he would like to be remembered, he answered: “As Tony Waag—tap dancer, singer, eccentric soft-shoe-song-and-dance man . .. and Fool.”

SAVION GLOVER’S CLASSICAL SAVION In the decade of the nineties, Savion Glover stood for the young, the hip, the urban, the meeting of vernacular forms as art in public spaces. In the millennium, Glover produced a repertoire of jazz improvisation masterpieces, full-evening occasions with work less frantic than those from the 1990s, symbolizing a return to his (imagined) roots and his maturation as a visionary rhythm-tap artist. In Classical Savion, the first of his solo tour-de-force performances, which premiered at the Joyce Theatre on January 4, 2005, the stage was beautifully lit with baroque swathes of color. Scalloped drapes framed a red interior space, within which was set a harpsichord. On high-rise platforms, radiating from each side of that golden instrument, were seated a nine-piece string orchestra—four violinists, two violists, two cellists, and one double bassist—all young, many of them Asian. Before them, on a rectangular platform placed center stage, stood the twenty-one-year-old Savion Glover, wearing formal black tuxedo pants and a

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/ accompaniment to his dancing. Taking ! ae}. on the role of renegade instrumentalist, he mined and made audible the life of the

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— lary of steps and beats, making it sound a fresh and making it swing. By alternative- ly working with the score, playing note for

note with his taps, and improvising off it, Glover imbued his dancing with a terse excitement. An Astor Piazzolla tango followed; its strings were as unnervingly dissonant as a modernist work by Arnold Schoenberg. Glover took the tango rhythm and cadence and tamed his lexicon of hard-hitting paddle-and-rolls, offbeat stomps, and drum rudiments into a sensuous mating of feet and floor. In one part of the concert, Glover had each of the musicians improvise while he complemented them with his feet, providing rhythmic accompaniment to swift harmonies. As they plucked and bowed wailing and whining sounds, Glover’s violinists and violists were improvising bluesmen—blurring boundaries between classic, hip-hop, and jazz into the driving, rhythmic soul in all music. A deeply moving moment came when the musicians returned to the formality of their scores to play Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Air for the G String.” Then Glover, having changed from thick-soled metal-clad boots into leather-soled tap shoes, decelerated into a meditation on the most “classic” of all soft-shoe dances, one performed for half a century by the venerated Copasetics (almost all of whom were by this time deceased). With each brush of the foot back, side, and forward that slipped from a crossover into a side-traveling grapevine, each whispering step fitting perfectly with the Bach, it became clear that Glover was resurrecting the old, shuffling, soft-shoe to its highest form of propriety and showmanship—to its classic

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 341 form—and hailing the black hoofers who had toiled through a century but died before their time. Glover brought tears to the eyes of those who saw the apparitions of Honi Coles, Buster Brown, Bubba Gaines, and the recently deceased Gregory Hines, whose gold-framed portrait was placed on the ebony-lacquered grand piano. They were all hearing Glover tap dance for them and nodding “yes, yes.”

Tap International In 1997, Terry Monaghan, in his program notes to the tap concert Afroceltic Connection, wrote:

The recent growth of awareness of diverse world cultures has begun to reverse the cultural nationalisms that have dominated the past century. Musical innovations in the past decade have effortlessly merged strands of

Celtic, African, and Indian cultures, and the huge audiences that these artists have attracted indicate a deep underlying cultural consciousness.”

Fusion, the union or blending together of unlikely elements to form a whole, might be the term that best describes the musical and cultural mix in tap dance that resulted from an explosion of global cultural consciousness in the first decade of the new century. Max Pollak combined taps with Afro-Cuban rhythms and body percussion for his company, Rhumba Tap; Tamango blended tap and Afro-Brazilian rhythms for his company, Urban Tap; and Roxane “Butterfly” Semadini melded tap with flamenco and rhythms from North Africa, not far from her ancestral roots, in her tap work Dejallah Groove. Whereas these fusion works derive from a relatively simple equation, more intricate multistranded weavings have made the term “fusion” (in its form as noun, verb, adjective) in the millennium relatively obsolete.

TAPAGE’S MORANGO... ALMOST A TANGO What do we call the multiple cultural intertwinings of Tapage, the dance company of Olivia Rosenkrantz and Mari Fujibayashi? Born in Briey (Lorraine), France, on February 22, 1968, of French-German descent, Rosenkrantz moved to New York City in 1988 to study modern dance with Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolais and tap dance with Brenda Bufalino (whose American Tap Dance Orchestra she joined in 1991) and with Manhattan Tap. Her five years of experience with Ka-Tap, a North Indian music and dance ensemble that blended jazz with tap, nourished her choreographic interest in crossing rhythm tap with the music and dance styles of other cultures. Her dance partner Mari was born in Kyoto, Japan, on July 28, 1963, and was the first dancer to be awarded a grant from the Japanese government for artistic studies abroad. In New York, she also danced with the American Tap Dance Orchestra and with Manhattan Tap. The two founded Tapage to create a unique vocal and choreographic approach to tap that would incorporate dramatic intensity and rhythmic complexity with contemporary gesture. In Morango ... Almost a Tango, which they performed at the Joyce Theatre on June 29, 2005, tap dance was presented as an abstract narrative: They made their entrance dancing one behind the other, as if they were inseparable twins; circumscribed a large square that was brightly lit on the dark stage; and tapped while making meticulous pivots of the head, sweeping the arms, and leaning their torsos on the diagonal. Projected behind them were black-and-white home movies of each dancer as a baby. The films presented a narrative of girls learning to walk, clap hands, and skip across the grass into the loving arms of their mothers. Before these enormous

342 TAP DANCING AMERICA images, they tapped out strict phrases of rhythm. Explosive, sensual, and emotive, Tapage sets rhythm tap within a multicultural mélange of Asian, European, and American postmodern

sensibilities. It is but one of several international tap groups that have taken the American tradition and have expanded and exalted it.

URBAN TAP’S “BAY MO DILO (GIVE ME WATER)” Tamango’s Bay Mo Dilo, performed by his company Urban Tap on March 20, 2007, at the Joyce Theatre, is a visualization of his ancestral roots, realized not through a fusion of elements but by an incorporation of separate elements that reference and cross-reference one another. Tamango was born Herbin Van Cayseele in rural Cayenne, French Guiana, and was raised in Paris, where he studied tap dance at the American Center with Sarah Petronio. He moved to New York in 1988. The set for Bay Mo Dilo was created by “Naj” Jean de Boysson and featured huge projected videos of a moon seen through dark foliage, raindrops falling on a banana leaf, and similarly luscious tropical visions, along with street scenes. It created a Caribbean atmosphere, within

which were musicians Eric Danquin and Daniel Soulos (from Guadeloupe), and “Bonga” Gaston Jean-Baptiste (from Haiti); the remarkable Vado Diomande, who offered the acrobatic stilt dancing associated with West African ritual; actor/dancer Jean-Claude Bardu, who played the amiable fellow-about-town, limbs akimbo; and Haitian dancer Belinda Becker, who in a long white skirt (as Oshun, the Yoruba spirit goddess [orisha], reigning over love, intimacy, and beauty) performed the fluid spinal undulations, swinging her arms, in the West African—styled mangianti.

Tamango appeared, wearing a jingling belt over a pair of black pants so thickly fringed

with shreds of fabric that they suggested the costumes of featured dancers in certain West African rituals. His bells resembled the percussive embellishments (gold and bronze ornaments, fetishes, jewelry) worn by some tribes in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast—they created, as he danced, body music. Yet onstage in heavy-booted tap shoes (wired to amplify sound), his trail of flat-footed paddle-and-rolls sealed his pedigree in the old

rhythm-tap tradition of African American hoofers. In a performance filled with visual and aural lushness, one powerful moment came when the stilt dancer Diomande appeared from the projections of lush foliage to stand behind Tamango and pour sand, with the sanctity of a baptismal, over his bowed head. The sand spilled onto the small platform, onto which the barefoot Tamango performed a sand dance. That moment provided a rare conflation of past and present, the grains of sand intermediary between cultures ancient and urban.

INDIA JAZZ SUITE India Jazz Suite, a 2005 collaboration of the sixty-two-year-old foremost East Indian kathak guru Chitresh Das and the twenty-six year-old rhythm-tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, sought not to fuse East and West but instead to present an interactive conversation between the two forms. What the audience got to watch was a thinning of boundaries between two generations. The two men met in 2004 at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina. Smith was drawn to Das’s charisma, intrigued by the intricate patterns the kathak artist could weave with bare feet and five pounds of bells on his ankles; Das was intrigued by Smith’s intense American energy and improvisational skills and rudimental articulations. Their collaboration, in which each performed with his own native musicians, showcasing each form conscientiously while highlighting its likeness to the other, was based on one shared quality: footwork. Across cultures came two sets of musicians as well: North Indian classical music was represented by the foursome of Ramesh Mishra (saranji), Abhijit Banerjee (tabla), Swapnamoy Banerjee (sarod),

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While Seosamh had indeed “lost face,” the best moment in the evening came when the house bandleader and trumpeter, Joey Morant, spoke with Seosamh during a break. “What do you listen to in jazz?” Morant asked: “I do not listen to jazz, I only know Irish music,” Seosamh answered without apology. “Well, that’s the problem—when you go to a jam you have to know what tune to call. What’s your tune?” asked Morant. “The Priest in the... you wouldn’t know it, it’s Irish,” said Seosamh dismissively. “I know, you Irish like to dance to this tune,” continued Morant as he hummed “The Irish Washerwoman.” Seosamh, filmmaker Paddy Hayes, and his film crew flinched; the choice of that tune by a foreigner would be considered an Irish stereotype. “Well, about that tune,” Hayes injected, “it’s the same structure as ‘Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.’” “Yes,” said Morant, “I can see how your six-eight fits with our four-four.” By that time, Seosamh was sulking, answering in oneliners, but Morant continued: “I got it! Your tune is ‘Cute’! That’s a jazz standard, that’s where your six-eight will fit, if we play it slow.” Over the din of the crowd, Morant sang the tune, tapping his feet in the open four-bar break to show Seosamh how to dance it. Morant then offered another small piece of the olive branch: “We got all the steps from the Irish— but we gave it the rhythm!” At high noon in Times Square, on the day of the tap challenge between Jason Samuels Smith and Seosamh O Neactain, the film crew made its last-minute sound check at the square wooden platform set up on the small concrete island at Broadway and Forty-fourth Street. The contenders sat in a nearby luncheonette, drinking coffee and talking tap. They were cordial and unusually chatty until they got calls from each of their cell phones that the crew was ready and a crowd had assembled. “I’m going to blast him,” Smith whispered as he walked out the door. “I’m ready to kill it to him,” O Neactain murmured, in a discreet aside.” With the cameras focused and microphone booms set, the dancers took their places on either side of the platform, surrounded by a thick crowd of curious passersby. There was no musical accompaniment, no stop-time banjo, with a plunk at the beginning of each bar to mark the set; there were no judges placed aside the stage to evaluate the sound, speed, precision, and presentation of the dancing. Yet as each took his turn on the wood, mimicking and one-upping the other’s steps—O Neactain balling the foot in rapid rhythmic movements, Smith taking it into a paddle-and-roll; O Neactain kicking and stamping forward and back, Smith turning the kicks, stamps, and shuffles into a swirl of turns—they summoned the very essence of tap dancing, brutally demonstrating that it was not the particular step or stepping style, not so much even the articulation of rhythm, but the camaraderie and the rhythmic

348 TAP DANCING AMERICA exchange that had driven the form forward with ferocity and jubilation. And the hooting-hollering crowd, which claimed no winner, seemed to feel the same.

Young Bloods “They’re Young! They’re Hot! They’re Cool!” proclaimed the flier advertising the minitap extravaganza 21 Below! to be held March 1, 2002, at Town Hall in New York. The show, produced by the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day, announced “The World’s Best Tap Dancers 21 & Under” and assured that tap was about to add another hundred years to its history, which was going to be led by such dancers as the twenty-one-year-old Jason Samuels Smith and the eleven-year-old prodigy Cartier Williams. Tapping since age four, Williams at age six won Amateur Night at the Apollo, and at age ten was a member of Savion Glover’s company Ti Dii. 21 Below! was no children’s recital—the participants and the quality of work were professional. Included was the tap quartet comprising the twelve-year-old Devin Arroyo, 2000 and 2001 finalist in the Hispanic Youth Showcase; ten-year-old Shakir Torbert, who had danced with Gregory Hines at Madison Square Garden and who was called by Dance Magazine “the next Bill Bojangles Robinson”; seven-year-old Hannah Leah Dunn, who had performed at Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Town Hall, and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan; and four-year-old Frankie Clemente, who had jammed with Buster Brown at Swing 46 and performed at Town Hall and Tavern on the Green. Two tap solos were presented: by twenty-one-year-old Dustin Conley, who choreographed and danced in From Hoofin’ 2 Hittin’ and was a featured artist in George Faison’s revival of the Broadway hit Bubblin’ Brown Sugar;

and the sixteen-year-old Robyn Watson, who won the Noise/Funk tap challenge and choreographed “Feet Talk” for the tap team Two and Company at the Painted Bird Theatre in Philadelphia. The Young Hoofers, a quartet of teenage males under the artistic direction of Traci Mann—eighteen-year-olds Jared Grimes and Lance Likes and sixteen-year-olds Calvin Booker and Sheldon Gordon—presented a routine confirming their dedication to keeping alive the paddling rhythm-tapping style of the Hoofers, the tap fraternity organized in 1966, which had included Ralph Brown, Raymond Kaalund, Chuck Green, Lon Chaney, James Buster Brown, and Jimmy Slyde.

MICHELA MARINO LERMAN Also on the 21 Below! program, performing two solos—one to the Duke Ellington classic “Come Sunday”—was Michela Marino Lerman, then sixteen. Six years later, Lerman was named by Jane Goldberg in Dance Magazine as “one of the 25 Best Dancers to Watch in 2008.” At age twenty-one, Lerman was a quadruple threat—not just an ace hoofer but also a choreographer

who sang, acted, and directed (at age nineteen) AM+Bu$h+ED, an original show commissioned by downtown venue Dixon Plac, featuring rappers and tappers. “No matter what you do as a young person today, you’re somehow ambushed by the mainstream corporate view on what you think a young person should be,” Lerman stated about the work, wishing to “ambush audiences” into seeing that young people care about the world.* Born in New York City on June 12, 1986, of Italian and Jewish heritage, Lerman began studying tap at the age of six with Bonnie McCleod at Woodpeckers and continued with Robin Tribble at the Chinese Cultural Center, Susan Hebach at Dick Shay’s, and, from age eleven on, with Savion Glover, Baakari Wilder, and Jason Samuels Smith at Broadway Dance Center. “It was about steps that were powerful and loud and commanding,” said Lerman about Smith, who focused on elements of tonality that he had gotten from Steve Condos. “What Jason was

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 349 doing was so much a part of Steve’s warm-up. He was playing the floor, getting all the sounds out, and that’s a big part of what I do—sing the rhythms, try to make my feet sing.”™

In September 1997, she attended the first of the Sunday-night tap jams at Swing 46, hosted by Buster Brown, and he became her most influential teacher and mentor. Then eightyfour, Brown, who was born May 17, 1913, in Baltimore, was known for his speed, precision, and heartwarming wit. He had been a member of the Three Aces, the Speed Kings, Brown and Beige, and the Chocolateers in the 1930s and 1940s; he had danced with Duke Ellington and all the big swing bands; and he was the only dancer invited to become a member of both the Copasetics and the Hoofers. In the 1990s, Brown was one of the most beloved teachers in the tap community, one of the great teachers to see past the color line. “Tap dancing and show business as a whole has done a lot towards getting rid of this black or white thing,” said Brown. “Because once we learn, the dancers enjoy one another. They don’t see color. They see tap, you know, hear tap.””° “Buster was a grandfather to me, always giving advice and moral support,” said Lerman.

“He was just irresistable, cute, and nice, and the most welcoming person. When he taught you, he grabbed your hand and said, ‘That’s your way, that’s how you do it.’”” Brown taught Lerman his signatures works—‘“Laura,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” “Just You Just Me.” More important, she added, “he pushed me to do whatever I wanted. He loved it when I danced fast and hard.” Brown remained an ardent supporter of Lerman’s, even through sickness, and he lived to see her win the Harlem Jazz Festival’s Hoofers Challenge in both 2001 and 2002. Brown died in 2002 just days before his eighty-ninth birthday, when Lerman was just about to turn sixteen. After Brown died, Gregory Hines brought Lerman back to her feet and became her next mentor. He taught her to breathe and to understand how silence was as important as sound. Then Hines died unexpectedly in 2003, leaving Lerman and the entire tap community devastated. LeRoy Myers, one of the last of the living Copasetics (formerly of the tap team Pops and LeRoy), then stepped in to teach her. Myers lived long enough to officially induct Lerman as the only woman (since Sandra Gibson in 1949) into the Copasetics fraternity in June 2003; then his death, in April 2004, forced the near-seventeen-year-old dancer to more pointedly set her goals. “I was a young white girl who was doing this, and I guess my love for it showed to them. Somehow, I conveyed to them that I had love for this, that I had no bad intentions, that this was my soul, the only way to express my utmost thoughts.” Lerman added that her desire is “to bring my generation together, to create something and pull something more out of my hat.” And to stay versatile: “I’ve done high heeled and low heeled, flat and arched; I like both and I think that’s the one up—because women can kill it, and dance as good as a man, and look good doing it.”°°

HARLEM TAP JAM The Harlem Tap Studio’s Tap Jams provided another liberating opportunity for the New York young bloods and young-in-spirit to express themselves. On April 2, 2007, at the late-evening jam (with bongo players, an electric guitarist, a bassist, and traps player squeezed in a corner), Tamango and the twelve-year-old Hannah Leah Dunn, with her tap dancing mother Wendy Levine, stepped into the circle, telling stories with their feet. Then hostess Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards gave some of it up. Host Omar Edwards was a totally free spirit, dancing in his triplesoled, patent-leather shoes with three-inch stacked-heels—was it a retro-disco look, or was he attempting to compete with the high-heeled women? They then deferred their time to Melinda Sullivan, a dazzling young rhythm dancer, and Kazu Kumagai, a heavy-toed dancer who loves emphatic stomps. Kendrick Jones was there, sporting a hat and a sleek pair of pants, as if he

350 TAP DANCING AMERICA had just discovered his cool persona; he slid, scuffed, kicked, and circled his long legs in the acrobatic move called around-the-world. And he was joined by another young virtuoso, Joseph Wiggan, who was back in town. Born in Los Angeles on March 2, 1986, the last of seven children, Wiggan studied tap dance with Paul Kennedy from the age of nine, as had his older sister, Josette, his first dance partner. Dormeshia Sumbry, who taught at the Kennedy school, became his next teacher. At age eleven, Wiggan became a member of the Jazz Tap Ensemble’s Caravan Project and quickly moved from apprentice to company member, demonstrating his double- and triple-timing done with laid-back ease, with all taps making sense, not one out of place. He made his debut with the company in 2002 at the Ford Theatre in Los Angeles, performing such works as Jimmy Slyde’s Interplay and Gregory Hines’s Groove; and became a full company member in 2004. While Derick Grant, in the tradition of Paul Kennedy, was an influence, it was Jason Samuels Smith who presented Wiggan with the model that he sought. “He reminded me of Art Tatum with melodic lines, and he had so many ways of finding new rhythms and patterns. He danced longer and harder and was comfortable with improvising. I had to forget everything I knew and look within to find more materials.” And that Wiggan has done. “Everyone is creating their own niche, shooting for the stars. We will create new tap awareness—the work we are doing is quality work. It takes time, patience, and reflection.”” Michelle Dorrance was the last to slip into the late-night Harlem tap jam that April of 2007. The twenty-six-year-old dancer of Irish-English-Scottish parentage was born on September 12, 19'79, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her father was a soccer coach who led the Women’s U.S. team to the World Cup in 1991; her mother was a ballet dancer who was a member of Eliot Feld’s American Ballet Company; Michelle was exposed to both of her parents’ passions. In the early 1990s, she began tap classes with Gene Medler and joined his company, the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble. She left North Carolina to attend New York University with a self-created major that focused on American democracy and race within the arts. While at NYU, she attended Buster Brown’s tap jams at Swing 46 and was discovered by Savion Glover, who recruited her to become a founding member of his company Ti Dii. Dorrance quickly became a distinctive presence on the New York tap scene with “an untamable, tomboyish force of nature ... rangy, skinny, and unpredictable.”** To know about Dorrance’s style was to look at her shoes—from her Capezio K36o0s with character heels to her heavy LaDuca oxfords and Bloch test models, she prefers hard-soled, fairly heavy tap shoes which she breaks in with a “regiment of rudiments”: first by executing hard, staccato cramp rolls; next, by spending twenty minutes dancing on just the balls of her feet, to break in the shank; then, by doing a series of wings to help ensure flexibility at the ankle. “I do a hundred shuffles in a row every direction,” she told Laura DeSilva in Dance Spirit.*° Her shoe-breaking technique of a thousand-fold shuffles was put into play at the Harlem tap jam that April of 2007, as Dorrance hovered over the floor like a hummingbird, sucking sweet nectar from the rhythms of her drumming feet. That technique has also been turned to choreography for the North Carolina Tap Ensemble and her pick-up company, Michelle Dorrance and Friends. In 2008, Dorrance choreographed large-group tap works to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” for the New York City Tap Youth Ensemble. She also toured in the longrunning off-Broadway show Stomp! with a cast of mainly men, playing the role called Bin Bitch, a character with a tough demeanor who “wears a pissed off, unimpressed look on her face when the jokers of the cast try to show off. Though she’s a newbie, she has the dance chops to stand up against the more experienced cast members. She’s intense—her furiously fast footwork alternates with beating out rhythms on trash can lids, hollow pipes, matchboxes,

and Zippo lighters.”

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 351 Dorrance appeared on the front cover of the May 2008 Dance Magazine for a feature article by Emily Macel, who wrote: “She’s tall and slender with a youthful face and a bright, toothy grin.... She may look young and delicate, but she’s no waif. Power pulses through her body.” Josh Hilberman, who worked with Dorrance for more than fifteen years, summed her up concisely when he stated: “She has technical power that is huge. She has monstrous technique. She has a funny, quirky view of the world. She falls between the young killer women in high heels and the guys. ... [She is] a pluralist for her ability to galvanize influences from all over.”® There has been talk among the new generation of dancers that Savion Glover, despite his enormous contribution to tap’s survival, is not “the only one.” Is Michelle Dorrance the next one?

More Women, More Women: High-heeled and Low In the epilogue to Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968), Marshall Stearns bemoaned that by the mid-1960s, the vernacular tradition had hit a new low. The old skills and know-how were disappearing, whereas ballet was booming. Dance critics, especially of ballet, were seemingly concerned with one aspect of the dance: Is dancing for sissies? “The ballet is a

purely female thing, it is a woman,” said America’s most famous choreographer, George Balanchine, “a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.” The females, meanwhile—

dancers and others—were developing an unflowerlike aggressiveness. In 1966, New York Times critic Clive Barnes, in reviewing the performance of Jerome Robbins’s The Cage by the New York City Ballet, wrote: “But all the girls, athletically piston-legged Furies, [were] pouncing upon Stravinsky’s rhythms like tigers.” In that ballet, a modern gloss of the second act of Adolphe Adam’s 1841 fantasy ballet Giselle, Robbins recast the male-avenging Wilis (spirits of girls

dead before their intended marriage) as man-eating insects with “mandibles that crunch, abdomens that sway and legs that crush.” To Barnes, the choreography, with its sharp startling images, seemed “fiercely and sadly anti-feminist.” With unshakable conviction, nevertheless, Barnes conceded that “women are here to stay.” For women in tap, forty years passed before that Barnes concession became fact. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, their progressive century-long struggle to gain both authority and virtuosity, the women in tap had broken new ground, even regendering the paradigms of rhythm-tap performance. No longer was it held (as Gene Kelly stated on television in 1958) that (tap) dancing was a man’s game, and that each sex was capable of doing things the other could not. No longer would dancers believe that women were weak, lacking the physical strength needed to perform the rhythm-driven piston steps, multiple-wing steps, flash and acrobatic steps that symbolized the tap virtuoso’s finish to a routine—that women were nurturers, not competitors who therefore did not engage in tap challenges. Those “rules of the game” (however ludicrous they sound today) pointed to an “aristocracy of sex,” to use the term of women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Those “rules” also pointed to an authority of the male in tap dancing, which discriminated against and was critical of women, particularly soloists. If tap dancing had been “a man’s game,” it was in the new millennium a woman’s mission—a full-bodied engagement in evolving tap as an expression of the feminine in the form.

As the twenty-first century opened, the women’s movement in tap recalled the women’s movement of the 1970s, with the struggle for liberation (political, cultural, and/or moral) and definition apart from men but as equal participants in the American dream. As in the 1970s, millennium women had varying definitions of what liberation meant—substantial differences

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Michelle Dorrance, Barbara Duffy, Lynn Schwab, and Margaret Morrison hoofing it at Tap City’s Evening Stars, Battery Park, 2007. (Photo by Debi Field)

program Sesame Street. Slyde admiringly commented that Duffy was “small in stature, but big in sound.”’° But it was Gregory Hines who made the most enduring inscription on Duffy’s style of rhythm dancing. He invited her—along with Mark Mendonca and Cyd Glover—to be part of a quartet that would perform in Gala for the President in March 1997 at the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C., for President Clinton and guests. Hines choreographed Boom—a rare Hines tap choreography, since he habitually was an improviser. The work set rhythmically tight-fitting unison tapping against free-style solos. It was also Hines who inspired Duffy to create an all-woman tap dance company, and that she did. In 2000, she began working with some of her best friends, dancers Lynn Schwab, Cintia Chamecki, and Pia Neises; in a short time she formed Barbara Duffy and Company, which made its debut at the New York City Tap Festival in 2001 with Duffy’s Speedball.

Although Duffy continues to teach and choreograph and has conducted workshops in more than twenty countries, it is her solo work that is most often praised, as with her 2002 performance of Soldier’s Hymn at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. She danced “her own choreography of quiet and unhurried syncopation in conversation with the music’s rumbling rumba. Occasionally she introduced more ferocious phrases,” the reviewer for the London Independent wrote. “By the end, as she marked out some gentle swishes, punctuated by a few leisurely staccatos, we were her slaves.””’ In 2008, on a panel exploring the challenges facing women in tap, Duffy spoke about her newly reorganized Barbara Duffy and Company, which made its debut at the New York City Tap Festival in 2007 with Duffy’s 423-4323. “I like the camaraderie of dancing with women” she said about her company, which then consisted of Michelle Dorrance, Karida Griffith, Chikako Iwahori, Maya Jenkins, Carson Murphy, Claudia Rahardjanoto, and Lynn Schwab.” They had recently premiered a full-length work, Stages, using song, dance, dialogue, choreography, and improvisation to touch on issues of friendship and love, self-doubt, and the courage to express one’s true identity. Duffy said that she meant the piece “to connect with a broader audience, leaving no doubt women can hit.”

MARGARET MORRISON Margaret Morrison has been consistently singled out as “feather-footed and musically astute.”” Her solo to Hoagy Carmichael’s “How Little We Know” was praised in the New York Times as “a tour de force for a quietly exciting virtuoso dancer,” and her duet with Robin Tribble to

358 TAP DANCING AMERICA Carmichael’s “New Orleans” was “full of casual ... and sly exchanges of looks and conversational commentary by chattering feet.*” For most of her career she has been a member of Brenda Bufalino’s American Tap Dance Orchestra, yet Morrison is a standout (albeit a quiescent one), an individualist whose evolving feminist consciousness has pervaded her work. Born in Los Angeles on December 24, 1961, she grew up in a secular Jewish middle-class family of medical doctors, professors, and psychoanalysts—no tap dancers. She discovered dance in Vienna, Austria, at age ten, when she saw a televised performance of the Saddlers Wells Royal Ballet with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fontaine. She returned to California to Golden’s School of Dance in Van Nuys, for a weekly class of twenty minutes each of ballet, tap, and tumbling. That led to serious study with Natalia Claire at the Ballet La Jeuness, in Taluca Lake. Even in that period of early adolescence, the seeds of individualism were sprouting. “It was early 1970s.... 1 was fourteen, wearing green leotards and red tights. I was not shaving my armpits. I had big bushy hair. I did not fit in. I was a big girl in a class of little ballerinas, and it was clear after the second year that ballet was not for me. So I stopped dancing.”*’ After seeing the Broadway production of A Chorus Line in 1976 on a visit to New York City, Morrison returned home to study jazz and tap dance. When she returned to New York to attend Barnard College, she majored in English literature while studying modern dance. In 1981, Morrison walked into Brenda Bufalino’s advanced beginner/slow intermediate tap class at Fazil’s and gradually worked her way up, through all levels of rhythmic training, to become one of the founding members of the American Tap Dance Orchestra. From 1981, when she first studied with Bufalino, to the mid 1990s, with the slow dissolution of the company, Morrison said, “I was an instrument of Brenda’s artistic vision. I was the material in her hands.”*” Only after Woodpeckers, the American Tap Dance Orchestra’s home and teaching base, closed in 1995 did Morrison begin to distinguish herself as a rhythm-tap soloist. She began a collaboration with the Haitian dancer Tandu Lett, who played shekere and taught her stepping as body percussion. In 1997, her first one-woman show, Solo Tap Adventures, at the Gowanus Arts Exchange in Brooklyn, was a full evening’s outpouring. She danced a soft-shoe to Hoagy Carmichael’s “How Little We Know” and turned New Orleans, a comic duet she had done with Robin Tribble, into a solo; she then danced to Thelonious Monk’s “Eronel” and “Round Midnight,” arranged in 6/8 time. Also on the program was Fives and Sixes, to a score by the percussionist Robin Burdulis playing the African udu drum, a round clay pot with a narrow opening to the side, resembling, said Morrison, a womb: “I tapped in shoes with no taps on them, so it was leather against wood, which gave it a very soft and watery percussive sound.”* Fives and Sixes was performed by Morrison and Burdulis at New York City’s 2004 Tap Extravaganza at Taft Auditorium. Their performance was mesmerizing, not only for its rhythmic brilliance and invention but for the supersensitized interplay between the two women, dancer and drummer, which opened into a realm of intimacy that has rarely been explored on the tap stage. Because tap dance has been historicized as the competitive rhythmic interplay of male dancers, it has been imbued with sexism and homophobia. There have been same-sex couplings (such as modern dancers Bill T. Jones and his longtime partner and lover, Arnie Zane) on the modern stage, but female partnerings are rare—and especially in tap dance, where the relationship of two women performing is read as sisters or friends, not as sexual intimates. At the 2004 Tap Extravaganza, an air of discomfort arose in the audience, partly because Fives and Sixes, a very quiet, intimate listening piece, was put first on the program. It seemed that the two women onstage had gone beyond agape—and they had—and some in the audience recognized the performance as a quiet triumph. It is precisely the liminality of duality that

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 359 fuels Morrison’s love of the form: “At a very early point I had this awareness of tap dance as an art form that was simple and very happy, but it is also at the intersection of race and sexuality in America. So this very simple, happy-go-lucky art form is actually in this hotbed of conflicts that represent our nation—and that fascinates me, that it is much deeper than it appears.”*™

WOMEN IN TAP CONFERENCE (UCLA) A comment by Idella Reed—Davis, the cofounder of the all-female Chicago-based tap company

Rhythm Iss, on the difference in male and female roles and styles in dance seems to capture the experience of many women in tap: “For so long women have been comfortable in the dance

studio teaching. A lot of the male dancers that have come to the forefront were taught by women. ... When men dance, like Savion [Glover], I’m so awed, so caught up in the tension. But when women dance you can sit back, absorb what it is that we’re doing. You can feel. You can be in the moment with the dancers.”®

From February 8 to 10, 2008, at a historic Women in Tap Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), that comment was demonstrated, in spades, with four generations of female tap dancers celebrating their contributions to the historically male dominated field during the last hundred years. The central aim of the conference, organized by Lynn Dally, director of the Jazz Tap Ensemble and adjunct professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, was to unearth stories about and contributions of women in tap through panel discussions, classes, and performances. There were also workshops with the “mastresses.” Dianne Walker, in her class, taught a routine to McCoy Tyner’s “We'll Be Together Again,” played at a very slow tempo, “slow enough to clean it up,” said Walker. She asked the women to “think about every sound,” because “you’ve got to know the point.” As each phrase was executed, sans noise and clutter, the dance began to take pristine shapes in sound. Keeping the steps of the routine, Walker then upped the tempo with Gene Harris’s “Time after Time,” and the mastery of sound and shape that had already been gotten from the slow tempo allowed the dancers to insert shoulder accents, sharper cut-backs, and hip-swerves. “It’s not about the steps,” said Walker. “It’s a level of accountability. If we don’t hold ourselves to that which is perfection, if we don’t strive, we settle for mediocrity. Let them walk out the door, and it manifests.” There were keynote addresses, historical overviews, and panel discussions on challenging issues to women in tap. The corporeal proof of the conference was its Saturday night concert, which consisted primarily of solos; after decades of effort, women demonstrated a level of acceptance that allowed the new generation to reclaim their glamour and their hard-hitting virtuosity. Miriam Nelson, the eighty-nine-year-old tap dancer and Hollywood film and televi-

sion choreographer (who made her debut in the dancing chorus on Broadway in the 1938 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart musical Sing Out the News) provided a sweet souvenir of pre-jazz-tap song-and-dance showmanship to “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.” The much younger Terry Brock aimed for a perky profile to “Lady Be Good,” conjuring Eleanor Powell, an icon of the 1930s. Deborah Mitchell’s dance to “Sunny Side of the Street” was a moving, brilliantly rich, unpredictable, and disarmingly slinky tribute to her mentor, Leslie “Bubba” Gaines. Barbara Duffy turned to the past, dancing to “Soldier’s Hymn,” her quiet, unhurried meditation of a rumbling rumba. Then Heather Cornell forged a new direction in her solo career by playfully finding new sounds in her leather-soled shoes (sans metal taps) in interplay with pianist Doug Walter. Lynn Dally turned bluesy and bittersweet to “You Gotta Move,” and Linda Sohl-Donnell

(Ellison) broke out of jazz tap’s musical formulas with Espiritu, a collaboration with her husband Monte Ellison. Brenda Bufalino, in My Mind’s on Mingus, brought a conceptual rigor to the program, as well as genuine jazz music—recapturing her lifelong tango with her mentor and jazz counterpart, Charlie Mingus. Acia Gray’s Twos and Threes aimed for stark and

| ae 4 i! ‘. , Bas Bate awe. 2 ¢. ©. ; OP AW AL PLAT IEE RCO) Led eS ‘oe wa pw Whar oe. ae The Tap City Youth Ensemble performing “The Copasetics Song/Coles Stroll” at New York’s Symphony Space, 2008. (Photo by Debi Field)

intricate display dancing. The supremely gracious Dianne Walker skated over “Autumn Leaves” with suave delicacy. And Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards brought passionate spontaneity to her

solo with deliberately rough-edged footwork at maximum velocity—evidence of a tap artist who clearly belongs to the new century, whatever her debt to the past. The evening was crowned—and the fate of future women in tap foretold—by Michelle Dorrance, Josette Wiggan, and Chloe Arnold, the youngest women in the corps, who tore the place apart with their unscheduled trio, the only group work on the program. Based on the challenge dance—the original forum for tap virtuosity—they traded and ornamented steps with joyous vehemence. Separately, Dorrance tapped without music, in darkness, and reminded the audience of the essentials in this percussive art form. Wiggan made a “take-no-prisoners attack at maximum complexity, with a style of dancing informed by contemporary black culture,” Lewis Segal wrote for the Los Angeles Times.*° However, Arnold’s feisty tap adaptation to the Maya Angelou poem, Phenomenal Woman, woke the house and told the people: “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies / I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size.” Changing from low-heeled to high-heeled shoes to hit the floor with sass and fury, she demonstrated where her powers lay—in “the span of my hips, the stride of my step... the swing in my waist, the joy in my feet... the click in my heels ... I’m a woman. Phenomenal woman. That’s me.”

Honoring the Elders: Embracing Tradition, Forging Change Tap dancers take deepest into their hearts the revering of old souls, perhaps because, as a cultural form more than a dance practice, tap eternally binds dancers into a family that always looks back as it moves ahead. The elders are revered and respected, always respected. One could even argue that, like the African talking drums, every rhythm that is tapped on a stage sounds out praise for its elders. Their ghosts are ever present, implicit in every step. Formal and informal tributes to the elders are incorporated into every tap dance festival’s culminating evening of performance, in public honor of the rhythmic wit and poetry the masters have transmitted. A few examples of dancers’ public acknowledgment of their deepest sources of

HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLENNIUM) 361 inspiration include The Rhythm Queens’ (Deborah Mitchell and Germaine Goodson) tribute to Henry LeTang, to “Tap Your Troubles Away”; Josh Hilberman’s reconstruction of a Paul Draper classic at the 2004 New York City Tap Festival); Walter “Sundance” Freeman and Karen Callaway’s ebullient salute to the Nicholas Brothers; and Lynn Dally’s wistful love song to Gregory Hines at the 2005 New York City Tap Festival. Most moving is when young dancers pay tribute to the masters. The stunning young talent Warren Craft, a scholarship student at the School of American Ballet, has reincarnated the elegant tap dancing style of Fred Astaire. And Jason Samuels Smith paid sensitive homage to Peg Leg Bates at the 2005 New York City Tap Festival when he danced to “Come Sunday” with one leg deliberately stiff. Smith’s performance recalled not the tragedy of the one-legged dancer but the great dancer whose deep-toned wooden-peg and high-toned tap-shoe invented new sonorities for rhythm tap. Smith joyously resurrected Bates’s spirit of survival and ensured its transference. The idea of asking young dancers to pay tribute to masters is not nostalgic—as it was in the 1970s with its wish to return to a lost past—but it is regenerative, a tradition that wants its young to honor the masters while making their own inscription on that tradition, realizing the future from the past.

And Everything Will Be... And so it was at the Tap City Youth Concert, held in April 2008 in New York City, when thirtyfour members of the American Tap Dance Foundation’s Tap City Youth Ensemble, a multiracial and multiethnic group of intermediate and advanced girls and boys ages ten to eighteen,

paid tribute to Honi Coles and the Copasetics by performing a suite of dances from that legendary tap fraternity founded in 1949 in memory of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. They performed “The Copasetics Song/Coles Stroll”; “The Mayor of Harlem,” Honi Coles’s lyrics about the great Bojangles; the “The New Low Down,” Robinson’s signature number in Blackbirds of 1928; and the “Copasetics Chair Dance.” The suite constituted an initiation to the classic jazztapping style of 1930s and 1940s, but the words and steps were also a mantra of brotherhood and sisterhood that inscribed the tap dancing: When you feel blue, The best you can do Is tell yourself to forget it

sang the youngsters as they clicked and scuffed their heels in strolling walking patterns that snaked around the stage. Life’s a funny thing It’s really great when you sing,

And everything will be copasetic...

The cheery refrain recalled the Copasetics’ happiest moments onstage. In the preamble to their organization, members had pledged themselves “a social, friendly, benevolent club” that would “do all in our power to promote the fellowship and strengthen the character within our ranks.” Never look down,

Chin up and don’t frown,

362 TAP DANCING AMERICA Don’t let life get pathetic.

Show a happy face to the whole human race, And everything will be copasetic . . .

The lyrics also captured the tenacity of a group of dancers, black and white, who, in the prime of their lives, in the late 1940s, saw the lull in tap that would prompt some to retire their tap shoes but who refused to let it go, and instead pledged to stay proud, to continue their brotherhood in rhythm with a song and a dance and a philosophy of hope, even gay optimism. Greet your fellow man with a wide open hand, Make your neighbor’s burden lighter. A friendly hello everywhere that you go, Is bound to make your day much brighter . . .

As they clicked out the steps first danced by Bill Robinson—then by Honi Coles and his fraternity dancers, the thirty-five members of the Youth Ensemble conjured an assurance that the steps of all dancers would be carried onward. When you feel sad, pretend that you’re glad Smile and you won't regret tt, Laugh your cares away, Tomorrow’s another day, And everything will be copasetic.

Can the actual physical activity of tap dancing heal the body, lift the spirit? And everything will be...

“So long as we pledge to do all in our power to promote the fellowship and strengthen the character within our ranks...” And everything will be... “So long as it remains our every desire to create only impressions that will establish our group in all walks of life as decent and respectable .. .” And everything will be... So long as we have fingers to snap, hands to clap, feet to raise up the beat, Copasetic.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1: TRICKSTER GODS AND RAPPAREES (1650-1900) 1. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 36. 2. In his neat organization of Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002),

Mark Knowles divided tap’s history into three chapters, titled “Irish Influences,” “English Influences,” and “African Influences,” separating social dance from theatrical dance, and judiciously assigning the same number of pages to each of the three in the first twenty-six pages of the book. 3. Brenda Bufalino, “Brenda Bufalino Talks with Acia Gray and Debbie Mitchell,” On Tap! 11, 4 (November—December 2000): 13. 4. Jerry Ames and Jim Siegelman, The Book of Tap: Recovering America’s Long Lost Dance (New York: David McKay, 1977), 38.

5- Constance Valis Hill, “Cabin in the Sky: Katherine Dunham’s and George Balanchine’s (Afro) Americana,” Discourses in Dance 3, 1 (Winter 2005): 59-71. 6. Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (County Kerry, Ireland:

Brandon, 2000). 7. Leni Sloan, “Irish Mornings and African Days on the Old Minstrel Stage,” Callahan’s Irish Quarterly 2 (March 1982): 52. 8. John C. Messenger, “Montseurrat: The Most Distinctively Irish Settlement in the New World,” Ethnicity 2 (1975): 298. 9. Joseph J. Williams, Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica? (New York: Dial, 1932). 10. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 1. Joann W. Kealiinohomoku, “A Comparative Study of Dance as a Constellation of Behaviors among African and United States Negroes,” Congress on Research in Dance, Dance Research Annual 7 (1976): 1-13.

12, Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 37. 13. Knowles, Tap Roots, 192-193.

14. Thomas Wilson, The Complete System of English Country Dancing (1825), completely reprinted in A. H. Thurston, Scotland’s Dances (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1954), 113-114. 15. Lillian Moore, “John Durang: The First American Dancer,” in Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: DaCapo, 1978), 15-37. 16. W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass:.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 53-55. 17. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge

University Press 1997), 66. 363

364 NOTES TO PAGES 9-16 18. Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 52. 19. Ibid., 71.

20. See Williams Thomas White, “A History of Railroad Workers in the Pacific Northwest, 1883-1932 (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1981), 165-167; and Matthew E. Mason, “The Hands Here Are Disposed to Be Violent’: Unrest among the Irish Trackmen of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 1829-1851,” Labor History 39 (August 1989): 253-272, quoted in Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2001), 6. 21. Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color, 6. 22. John P. Davis, The Union Pacific Railway: A Study in Railway Politics, History, and Economics (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1994), 140. 23. Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 28, quoted in Arneson, Brotherhoods of Color, 7. 24. Arneson, Brotherhoods of Color, 7-8. 25. Lafcadio Hearn, Children of the Levee [1876], edited by O. W. Frost (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 85. 26. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2. 27. Knowles, Tap Roots, 99.

28. Music historian and editor Martha Goldstein has commented: “Syncopation was part of European music—not as widespread perhaps or as basic as in Africa but notated in medieval Ars Nova (especially in France, and New Orleans was French). It was used in Baroque, Classical, etc., especially in nineteenth-century Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and Ragtime by Scott Joplin, a trained pianist and composer (whose music was more like a merry Bach than ‘African’ in spirit). So this ‘device’ was around in the late nineteenth century and was an early twentieth century sensibility, whether composed by Joplin or innovated as jazz evolved” (note to the author, 8 August 2008). 29. Maureen Waters, The Comic Irishman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 88; Fred Robinson, “Satirists and Enchanters in Early Irish Satire,” Studies in the History of Religions, ed. David Gordon Lyon and George Foot Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 95-99, 102-105; John Cosgrove, A Genuine History of the Most Notorious Irish Highwaymen, Tories, and Rapparees (N.p.: Borsaland Niles, 1799).

30. Robinson, “Satirists and Enchanters,” 95. 31. James MacKillop, “Finn MacCool: The Hero and the Anti-Hero in Irish Folk Tradition,” in Views of the Irish Peasantry, 1800-1916, ed. Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1977), LOO-101.

32. William D. Pierson, “Puttin’ Down Ole Massa: African Satire in the New World,” in African Folklore in the New World, ed. Daniel J. Crowley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 20-34. 33. Theodore Van Dam, “The Influence of the West African Song of Derision in the New World,” African Music 1, 9 (1954): 53-50. 34. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1988), 5-6, 20-21. 35. Pierson, “Puttin’ Down Ole Massa,” 26, 30. 36. Lawrence Levine, “ ‘Some Go Up and Some Go Down’: The Meaning of the Slave Trickster,” in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 59-77: 37. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn.: James Betts, 1882), 181. 38. Anne G. Gilchrist, “The Songs of Marvels (or Lies),” Journal of English Folk Dance and Song Society 4 (1950): 113-121.

39. Sean O’Suilleabhain, Irish Wake Amusements (Dublin, Ireland: Mercier, 1976). 40. Michael Ventura, “Hear That Long Snake Moan,” Whole Earth Review (March 1987): 28-43, 82-93.

NOTES TO PAGES 16-24 365 41. William Harris, “A Trinidad Playwright Awash in Words,” New York Times, 9 May 1993, I, 21. 42. Roger D. Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983). 43. Moe Meyer, “Dance and the Politics of Orality: A Study of the Irish Scoil Rince,” Dance Research Journal 27, 1 (Spring 1995): 25-37. 44. Troy and Margaret West Kinney, The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life (New York: Tudor, 1935), 174. 45. lbid. 46. Thomas W. Talley, Negro Folk Rhythms (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 296-297. 47. J. R. Goddard, “The Night Groundhog Was King of the Gate,” Village Voice, 26 November 1964, 8-9. 48. Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” in Chronicles of the American Dance, ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Da Capo, 1948), 48-49. 49. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press,

1974), 248-256.

CHAPTER 2: BUCK-AND-WING (TURN OF THE CENTURY) 1. Tom Fletcher, The Tom Fletcher Story: 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (New York: Burge, 1954), 207-309; Jim Haskins and N. R. Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson (New York:

William Morrow, 1988), 34, 52-53; Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 180-188; In Old Kentucky, script, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 March 1895, 3; “Danced for a Silver Medal,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 January 1900, 9; “The Bijou,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 March 1900, 5; “In Old Kentucky,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 February 1902, 37; “In Old Kentucky at Grand Opera House,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 February 1902, 49. Research leads me to believe that Robinson competed on 30 March 1900, as announced in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 March 1900, 5. Itis not known for certain whether Harry Swinton was white or black: Marshall Stearns

intimates that Swinton was an African American dancer but offers no substantiation other than referencing Tom Fletcher and Eubie Blake; Tom Fletcher writes that when he was in one of the touring companies of In Old Kentucky, “1 had the opportunity to learn much from watching such great dancers as Bert Grant, Henry William, Harry Swington” (100 Years, 10), but when he tells the story of Bill Robinson’s competing in the In Old Kentucky buck-and-wing dance contest, he spells the name Swinton: “The star dancer of the In Old Kentucky company that season [1900] was Harry Swinton, and he was Bill’s ideal.” 2. Mark Knowles, Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), 42-43.

3. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 170. 4. Brenda Bufalino, conversation with the author, 14 February 2006. 5. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 64-65, 71. 6. Jerry Duke, “Clogging in the Appalachian Mountains,” Let’s Dance 4, 31 (April 1974): 12-15. 7. Aubrey B. Haines, “Where the Tap Dance Came From,” Dance Digest, March 1958, 92-95. 8. Edward LeRoy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy (New York: Kenny, 1911), 236. 9. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, D.C.:

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 133. 10. F. Z. Maguire and Co., Catalogue, March 1898, 27. 11. “Edison’s Latest Wonders: The Kinetograph,” The Kinetoscope, October 1894, in Musser, Edison Motion, 133.

12. Black Film Center/Archive of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Snippets of film in the 1986 documentary Watch Me Move (KCET-TV, Los Angeles) used this footage to show the relationship between buck-and-wing and break dancing. 13. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 174-175.

14. Roger Allen Hall, “Black America: Nate Salsbury’s ‘Afro-American Exhibition,” Educational Theatre Journal 29, 1 (1977): 49-Go; Fletcher, 100 Years, 41-42. 15. Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 327; F. Z. Maguire and Co., Catalogue, 41; New York Clipper, 25 December 1897, 722.

366 NOTES TO PAGES 24-32 16. Michelle Wallace, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Before and after the Jim Crow Era,” Drama Review 44, 1 (2000): 137-156. 17. Alain Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art

(Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940), in The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Arno, 1968), 139. 18. Fletcher, 100 Years, 287.

19. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 191. 20; IDid.,.176. 21. Ibid., 174. 22. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 12-13. 23. Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 141-143; Kerby A.

Miller, “ ‘Scotch-Irish,’ ‘Black Irish’ and ‘Real Irish’: Emigrants and Identities in the Old South,” in The Irish Diaspora, ed. Andy Bielenberg (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 139; The Irish in America, ed. Michael Coffey (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 227. 24. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 15 March 1900, 7 (emphasis added). 25. Ibid., 27 January 1900, 9. 26. Ibid., 31 January 1901, 7. 27. Ibid., 31 December 1901, 7. 28. Ibid., 10 December 1901, 12. 29. Ibid., 10 November 1901, 38. 30. Ibid., 1 May 1900, 15. 31. Ibid., 12 August 1900, 23. 32. Ibid., 29 April 1900, 25. 33. Ibid., 30 March 1902, 51. 34. lbid., 23 April 1902, 13. 35. Ibid., 17 August 1902, 16. 36. Ibid., 3 December 1901, I5. 37. [bid., 21 May 1901, 6. 38. Ibid., 30 November 1901, 14. 39. Ibid., 16 July 1901, 6. 40. lbid., 25 February 1902, 6. 41. Ibid., 12 November 1901, 6. 42. Ibid., 14 February 1900, 9. 43. Constance Rourke, Troupers of the Gold Coast, or The Rise of Lotta Crabtree (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 137.

44. Barney Fagan to Dick Belcher, “On with the Dance (Footnotes),” ca. 1933, in Rhett Krause, “Step Dancing on the Boston Stage: 1841-1869,” Country Dance and Song, 2, 2 (1992): 4. 45. Kathryn Kari Anne Smith, The Lancashire Clog Hornpipe Dance on the American Stage 1884-1940 (PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1996), 227 n. 34. 46. Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 48. 47. Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Cohan’s latest and best songster: containing a select assortment of popular comic, sentimental and sensational songs and specialties (New York: Popular Publishing, 1885).

48. John McCabe, George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 29. 49. Ward Morehouse, George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theatre (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1943),

39. Cohan’s “grinder step” references the Irish step-dance step called the “grind,” which consists of a hop of the supporting leg followed by four taps on the ball of the feet, transferring weight from one foot to the other after each tap. 50. McCabe, Man Who Owned Broadway, 54. 51. Morehouse, George M. Cohan, 39. 52. Barbara Stratyner, “Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies,” Society of Dance History Scholars: Studies in Dance History 13 (1996): I-13.

NOTES TO PAGES 32-40 367 53. ‘Midsummer Nights’ Entertainments,” Theatre 3, 30 (August 1903), ii. 54. Knowles, Tap Roots, 163; Stratyner, Ned Wayburn, 22. Photograph of Ned Wayburn’s Minstrel Misses (dated 1902), Bertie Herron Scrapbook, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts. 55. Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 183. 56. Aubrey Haines, “Where the Tap Dance Came From,” Dance Digest, March 1958, 94. 57. Barbara Stratyner Cohen, telephone conversation with the author, 5 October 2006. 58. Virginia Writers Project, The Negro in Virginia (New York: Hastings House, 1940), 89. The dance was also called the “Prize Walk,” later the “chalkline-walk” and “walk around” (Fletcher, 100 Years, 103); “cakewalking couples promenaded grandly with high kick steps, waving canes, doffing hats, and bowing low” (Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 116). 59. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 22. Go. David Krasner, “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking,” Theatre Survey 37, 2 (November 1996): 72. 61. Roger Abrahams, Singing the Master (New York: Penguin, 1993), 96. 62. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 March 1895, 3. 63. Fletcher, 100 Years, 104-105.

64. Ibid., 227. 65. Carl Van Vechten, “The Negro Theatre” (1920), in The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten (New York:

Dance Horizons 1974), 36. 66. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (London: Macmillan, 1970), 11. 67. New York Dramatic Mirror, 27 February 1897, 17. 68. See James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: DaCapo, [1930] 1991), 105; and Tom Fletcher, 100 Years, 123. 6g. Sylvester Russell, “Aida Overton Walker,” Indianapolis Freeman, 17 October 1914, 5. 70. Juli Jones Jr., “Chicago Mourns for Noted Artist,” Chicago Defender, 17 October 1914, 7. 71. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking, 1933), 177. 72. Fletcher, 100 Years, 181. 73. Carl Van Vechten, “Terpsichorean Souvenirs,” in The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten, 5. 74. London Times, “Shaftesbury Theatre,” 18 May 1903, 12.

75. Bert Williams: Son of Laughter, ed. Mabel Rowland (New York: Negro University Press, 1923), 60-61. 76, Ada Overton Walker, “Colored Men and Women on the Stage,” Colored American Magazine, October 1905, 573:

77. Walker to Lester A. Walton, “A Living Influence,” New York Age, 22 October 1914, 6. 78. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, 2 (Winter 1992): 271. 79. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” (1903), in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (Washington, D.C.: Library of America, 1986), 847. 80. Colored American Magazine, October 1905, 575. 81. Ann duCille, “The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition,” in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 30. 82. Indianapolis Freeman, 6 October 1906, cited in Henry T. Sampson, The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1988), 372. 83. “News of the Theatres,” Chicago Tribune, 29 May 1906, 8. 84. “Bandanna Land Pleases,” New York Times, 4 February 1908, 7. 85. “Bandanna Land,” Boston Globe, 6 September 1908, 2; interestingly, black critic Lester A. Walton complained that the solo “lacked the excitement of the striptease version,” in New York Age,

27 August 1909, 6. 86. Isadora Duncan loathed jazz and thought it had no place in the making of modern dance. Her vision of American dancing would have music that “would have nothing to do with the sensual lilt of jazz rhythm,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Nor would this dance that | visioned have any

368 NOTES TO PAGES 40-50 vestige of the Fox Trot or the Charleston.” Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Liveright, 1927), 341. 87. “Aida Overton Walker and Abysinnian Girls,” Variety, 17 July 1909, 15. 88. Lester A. Walton, “His Honor the Barber,” New York Age, 3 November I9g1I0, 6. 89. “Ada Overton Walker and Company,” Variety, 22 July 1911, 24. go. “Aida Overton Walker and Co.,” Chicago Defender, 8 November 1913.

gt. Eric Ledell Smith, “Aida Overton Walker: Pioneer African American Dancer and Choreographer,” Sage 8, 2 (Fall 1914); Theodore Krasner, “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking,” Theatre Survey 37, 2 (November 1996): 66-92. 92. Ada Overton Walker, “Colored Men and Women on the American Stage,” Colored American Magazine, October 1905, 573. 93. Robert Toll, On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1976), 99. 94. Allan Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (New York: DaCapo, 1989), 119.

95. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 286.

CHAPTER 3: OVER-THE-TOP AND IN-THE-TRENCHES (TEENS) 1. “The Lafayette Producing Company’s ‘My Friend From Kentucky,’” Variety, 17 October 1913, 9; “The First Nighter: ‘My Friend From Kentucky,’” New York Dramatic Mirror, 12 November 1913, 6; “Everybody Being Helped,” New York Times, 30 November 1913, X6; ”Darktown Follies,” Variety, 12 December 1913, 21; J.Chapman Hilder, “The Darktown Follies,” Theatre Magazine 19 (March 1914): 135; “Follies Prices Soar High Immediately after Opening,” Variety, 5 June 1914, 11; “The Darkest Spot on the American Stage Today,” Current Opinion (April 1914): 279; “Darktown Follies Co. (39), Hammerstein’s Roof,” Variety, 5 June 1914, 14; “Darktown Musical Comedy: Oscar Hammerstein Announces Novelty for the Victoria Roof,” New York Times, 4 May 1914, 9; “Theatrical Notes, The Darktown Follies of 1914,” New York Times, 29 May 1914, 11; “In Vaudeville and Other Playhouses,” New York Times, 31 May 1914, X8; “Grand Opera House,” New York Times, 8 November 1914, X8; Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 25, 92-102, 125-131; James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930), 170; Helen Armstead Johnson, “Blacks in Vaudeville: Broadway and Beyond,” in American Popular Entertainment, ed. Myron Matlaw (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 83. 2. Thomas L. Riis, Black Musical Theatre in New York: 1890-1915 (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1981), 125. 3. “Everybody Being Helped,” New York Times, 30 November 1913, XO. 4. “The Darkest Spot,” Current Opinion, April 1914, 279 5. Thomas L. Riis, Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theatre in New York, 1890 to 1915 (Washington, D.C.:

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 12. 6. New York Dramatic Mirror, 11 November 1913.

7. “The dances in particular [were] handled with much originality and grace,” wrote the New York Daily Mirror, 12 November 1913. 8. J. Chapman Hilder, “The Darktown Follies,” Theatre 19 (March 1914): 135. 9. See Marshall Stearns, “Vernacular Dance in Musical Comedy,” New York Folklore Quarterly 22, 4 (December 1966): 251-252. 10. Variety, 12 December 1913, 21. 11. “Streetscapes: Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre: Jackhammering the Past,” New York Times, 11 November 1990. 12. “Colored Theatre Opens,” New York Times, 16 June 1914, 9.

13. This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, 170-171. 14. Theophilus Lewis, “Magic Hours in the Theatre,” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 March 1927, section 2, I. 15. Ibid.

16. Robert Hudovernik, “Ziegfeld Girls: The Lights of the Follies,” in Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Chenen Johnston (New York: Universe, 2006), 20.

NOTES TO PAGES 51-63 369 17. Barbara Stratyner, “Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine, From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies,” Society of Dance History Scholars: Studies in Dance History 13 (1996): 54-55. 18. Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950), 109. 19. New York Times, 2 June 1914.

20. Ibid. 21. Smith, Musical Comedy in America, 108. 22. Ibid. 23. “Cabarets,” Variety, 29 May 1914, 16. 24. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 77. 25. Maud Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1936), 133.

26, Arthur H. Franks, Social Dance, A Short History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 176. 27. Lewis A. Erenberg, “Into the Jazz Age,” in Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture 1890-1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 153-157. 28. Noble Sissle, quoted in Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 163. 29. “Dancing Times,” untitled clipping, ca. 1918, in Castle Scrapbooks, quoted in Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 163-164. 30. Mr. and Mrs. Castle, Modern Dancing (New York: Harper and Bros., 1914), 4. 31. Robert W. Snyder, Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1980), 19. 32. Don Meade, “Kitty O’Neil and Her ‘Champion Jig’: An Irish Dancer on the New York Stage,” New Hibernian Review 6, 3 (2002): 9-22. 33. Snyder, Voice of the City.

34. “George Murphy Dances. 7 Mins. One. New York,” Variety, 21 November 1913, 17. 35. Jack Donahue, Letters of a Hoofer to His Ma (New York: Cosmopolitan, 1931). 36. Jack Donahue, “Hoofing,” Saturday Evening Post, 14 September 1929, 29.

27 bid.,-244: 38. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 81. 39. Ibid., 76.

40. Ibid., 89. 41. Rusty E. Frank, Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 122. 42. See Nadine George-Graves, The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters (New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 200), 40-43. 43. lbid., 53. 44. Frank, Tap! 126. 45. Ethel Waters, “Hear What the Press Has to Say,” Washington Bee, 23 May 1908. 46. Graves, Royalty of Negro Vaudeville, 45.

47. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 91. While the Stearnses attribute this quote to Bunny Briggs, the author believes it is by Leonard Reed, who was a member of the Whitman troupe (Briggs was not) and who spoke in detail about the Whitmans’ handling of the young dancers in interviews cited in Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. 48. “Vaudeville of the Year,” Variety, 27 December 1918, 15; Variety, 13 December 1918, 18. 49. Variety, 13 September 1918, 1.

50. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 52. 51. Variety, 13 September 1918, 16. 52. Variety, 8 March 1918, 18; Variety, 29 August 1918, 15; Variety, 16 August 1918.

53. stearns, Jazz Dance, 53. 54. Helen Armstead-Johnson, “Blacks in Vaudeville: Broadway and Beyond,” in American Popular Entertainment, ed. Myron Matlaw (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979): 78-80. 55- Fletcher, 100 Years, 291-292. 56. Denver Tribune, 14 May 1912.

370 NOTES TO PAGES 63-74 57. Variety, 2 July 1915.

58. Ibid., 28 December 1917, 84. 59. Ibid., 27 December 1918, 98. 60. During World War I, Bert Williams, Greenlee and Drayton, and Bill Robinson had been the only black dancers to play the Palace (located at Broadway and 47th Street in New York City). The Palace Theatre was the flagship of the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit, the dream child of Martin Beck who, wanting to expand his Orpheum circuit, built the theater. lt opened on March 24, 1913, with Beck becoming a minority owner; 51 percent of the stock was controlled by the B. F. Keith vaudeville interests, led by E. F. Albee. G1. Jim Haskins and N. R. Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson (New York: William

Morrow, 1988), 100. 62. Jack Donahue, “Hoofing,” 29. 63. “Stair Dance,” Harlem Is Heaven (1932), in Hollywood Rhythm: The Best of Jazz and Blues (Kino Video, 2001).

64. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 187. 65. Moe Meyer, “Dance and the Politics of Orality: A Study of the Irish Scoil Rince,” Dance Research Journal 27, 1 (Spring 1995): 25-37.

66. John Cullinane, interview with author, 30 June 2003, Cork, Ireland. 67. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 187. 68. Ibid., 186. 6g. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 70. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 188. 71. Thomas DeFrantz, “Being Savion Glover: Black Masculinity, Translocation, and Tap Dance,” Discourses in Dance 1, 1 (Fall 2002): 17-28. 72. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 153.

73. Ibid., 189-190.

CHAPTER 4: SIMPLY FULL OF JAZZ (TWENTIES) 1. Shuffle Along, script by Flournoy E. Miller and Aubry Lyles, 1921. 2. Chicago Tribune, 17 November 1922. 3. [bid., n.d., Noble Sissle scrapbooks. 4. Chicago Herald Examiner, 17 November 1922. 5. Chicago Journal, 18 November 1922. 6. Chicago Herald Examiner, 18 February 1922. 7. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 136. 8. Charles Collins, “Persons of Color in Jolly Frolic of Jazz and Jest,” Boston Post, 16 November 1922. g. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1940), 223-224. 1o. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930), 186-187. ur. Alan Dale, New York American, 1921, quoted in Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York: Viking, 1973), 99. 12. Chicago Journal, 15 November 1922. 13. “Eubie Blake Gives His Best Recipe for Sure-Fire Song Hit,” clipping from unknown New York newspaper, 1921, in Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing, 108. 14. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 55. 15. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 132. 16. Shepard Butler, caption to a photograph of Miller and Lyles, Chicago Tribune, 17 November 1922. 17. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 197. 18. Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 57. 19. Chicago Journal, 20 November 1922.

20. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 13. 21. Ibid., 134.

NOTES TO PAGES 74-88 371 22. Boston Post, 6 November 1922. 23. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 139. 24. Al Rose, Eubie Blake (New York: Schirmer, 1979), 80. 25. “It’s Getting Dark on Old Broadway,” music by Louis A. Hirsch and Dave Stamper, lyrics by Gene Buck. 26. Variety, 26 August 1921. 27. New York Dramatic Mirror and Theatre World, 27 August 1921. 28. Percy Hammond, New York Tribune, 20 June 1922. 29. Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 382. 30. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 147. 31. New York American, 13 June 1925.

32. New York Telegram, 18 May 1923; Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 197-199. 33. James Barton, clipping file, Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 34. James Craig, New York Mail, 18 May 1923. 35. Burns Mantle, New York News, 18 May 1923.

36. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 203. 37. Ibid. 38. James E. Richardson, “Blame It on Jazz: King Fox Trot Joins the Immortals.” Dance, March 1927, 30-31. 39. Vera Caspary, “The Black, Black Bottom of the Swanee River,” The Dance, March 1927, 15-16; Black

Bottom sketches by Leopold De Sola, posed by Buddy Bradley and Bernice Speer. 40. Elise Marcus, “More Low-Down Dancing: Buddy Bradley Shows Additional Real Negro Steps,” Dance Magazine, January 1928, 41. 41. James E. Richardson, “Blame It on Jazz,” 51. 42. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928).

43. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 289-290. 44. Leonard Reed’s Shim Sham Shimmy, DVD, Rusty E. Frank, On Tap! Productions, 2004. 45. New York Amsterdam News, 31 May 1933.

46. LaVaughan Robinson, conversation with author, 27 June 2002, Philadelphia. 47. “Ned Wayburn’s Home-Study Course in Stage Dancing” (Ned Wayburn Studios of Stage Dancing, 1925) in Barbara Stratyner, “Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies,” Society of Dance History Scholars: Studies in Dance History 13 (1996): 83-106. 48. Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 183. 49. Aubrey Haines, “Where the Tap Dance Came From,” Dance Digest, March 1958, 94. 50. Rusty Frank, Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 174. 51. Ibid., 174-175. 52. Jane Goldberg, “An Interview with Danny Daniels,” Foot Print 1, 2-3 (Fall 1984): 2-3. 53. Honi Coles, unpublished interview with Sally Sommer, 1981. John LeRoy Schotte, the gangly, eccentric tap dancing star of Irish heritage known as Hal LeRoy (1913-1985), told Danny Daniels that he, too, remembered that metal taps did not regularly appear on the toes and heels of hard-soled shoes until the early 1930s. When he did his first Ziegfeld Follies in 1932, he had no taps on his shoes; soon after, everyone started wearing them (Goldberg, “An Interview with Danny Daniels,” Foot Print 1, 2-3 [Fall 1984]: 2-3). 54. Reva Howitt Clar, Lollipop: Vaudeville Turns with a Fanchon and Marco Dancer, ed. Mimi Melnick

(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2002), 38-39. 55, LDIG: sO1, 107,136,

56. Ibid., 127-132. 57. Philadelphia Tribune, 14 February 1929, 7.

58. Undated calling card, Leonard Harper archives, courtesy of Grant Harper Reid. 59. Haines, “Where the Tap Dance Came From,” 94. Go. Cheryl M. Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues of African-American Women Tap Dancers Who

Performed between 1930-1950 (PhD diss., Temple University, 1991), 170-171. 61. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 215.

372 NOTES TO PAGES 88-105 62. Jane Goldberg, “John Bubbles: A Hoofer’s Homage,” Village Voice, 4 December 1978, 112. 63. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 216. 64. J. Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: The Blackbirds Begin to Sing,” New York Times, 10 May 1928, 31. 65. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1945), 49. 66. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 214. 67. Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music (Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 135.

68. Nathan Irvin Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 10-12; John Graziano, “Black Musical Theatre and the Harlem Renaissance Movement,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,

1990), 87-89. Gg. Laurence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 174.

70. Langston Hughes, quoted in Robert A. Bone, “The Background of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Melvin Drummer, ed., Black History: A Reappraisal (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 408. 71. Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm, March 1931, 20. 72. Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: Crowell, 1976), 91. 73. “New Plays in Manhattan,” Time, 9 July 1928.

74. Bunny Briggs, interview with the author, 6 February 2007, Las Vegas. 75. Some claim that the group has mistakenly been identified as the Five Hot Shots; more correctly, the Five Hot Shots, the Five Blazers, and the Three Rockets comprised many of the same dancers. 76, Nathan Huggins, ed., Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 3.

CHAPTER 5: SWING TIME (THIRTIES) 1. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York:

Macmillan, 1968), 339-349. 2. Cholly Atkins and Jacqui Malone, Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2001), 199. 3. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in

American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2003), 13-14, 19. 4. Mel Watkins, Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry (New York: Pantheon 2005), 12. 5. Atkins and Malone, Class Act, 199. G. Interview by Bruce Goldstein, PSI International, 1991, in Constance Valis Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),

64-65. 7. Claude Reed Jr., “A Conversation with Charles Honi Coles,” National Scene Magazine supplement, August 1983. 8. Carol Lawson, “Broadway,” New York Times, 13 May 1983, C3. 9. David Hinckley, “A Honey of a Hoofer,” New York Sunday News Magazine, 7 August 1983. 10. George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” New York Times, 20 October 1935, X1.

1. Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (New York: DaCapo, 1993), 70. 12. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 212-219; Fox, Showtime at the Apollo, 70-71. 13. New York World Telegram, January 1937, in Fox, Showtime at the Apollo, 67. 14. Fox, Showtime at the Apollo, 117-118.

15. Marion Coles, interview with the author, 13 June 1996. 16, Bunny Briggs, interview with the author, 4 February 2007. r7. Atkins and Malone, Class Act, 27-28. 18. Fox, Showtime at the Apollo, 100. 19. Boardinghouse Blues, film directed by Josh Binney, 1948. 20. Plenty of Good Woman Dancers: African American Women Hoofers from Philadelphia, video

documentary directed by Germaine Ingram, Deborah Kodish, and Barry Dornfeld, Philadelphia Folklore Project, 1997/2004.

NOTES TO PAGES 105-128 373 21. Cheryl Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues of African-American Women Tap Dancers Who Performed between 1930-1950 (PhD diss., Temple University, 1991), 246.

22. Pittsburgh Courier, 22 December 1945. 23. Variety, 6 October 1937, 52; Variety, 12 July 1944, 99. 24. Edith Edwards, quoted in Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues, 160. 25. Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues, 156-166; “Baby” Edwards in Plenty of Good Women. 26. Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues, 183-184; Itabari Njeri, “Shadowed Feats: The Forgotten Mothers of Tap,” Village Voice, 28 July 1998, 40. 27. Been Rich All My Life, film documentary directed by Heather MacDonald (New York: Toots Crackin Productions, 2005). 28. Libby Spencer in Plenty of Good Women. 29. Harold Cromer, interview with author, 8 January 2007, New York City. 30. Bunny Briggs, interview with author, 6 February 2007, Las Vegas. 31. Marion Coles in Been Rich All My Life.

32. Harold Cromer, interview with the author, 15 November 2000, New York City. 33. Fox, Showtime at the Apollo, 78. 34. New York Amsterdam News, 2 March 1940. 35. Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 80.

36. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1981), 175. 37. Edward Jablonski, Harold Arlen: Happy with the Blues (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 57. 38. Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: Crowell, 1976), 90. 39. Jimmy Durante and Jack Kofoed, Night Clubs (New York: Knopf, 1931), 11.

40. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 301. 41. Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 56.

42. Ibid., 88. 43. Ibid., 62, 86. 44. lbid., 88. 45. Ibid., 96. 46. Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Stage Directors: An Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia, 1893-1955 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), 36. 47. Don Dunn, The Making of No, No, Nanette (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1972), 134. 48. Richard Watts Jr., quoted in Tony Thomas, That’s Dancing! (New York: Harry Abrams, 1990), 166. 49. New York Daily News, 9 January 1931, cited in Henry Sampson, Swingin’ on the Ether Waves: A Chronological History of African Americans in Radio and Television Programming, 1925-1955 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2005), 51-52. 50. Sampson, Swingin’ on the Ether Waves, 51-52. 51. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2003), 52. 52. Ibid., 50. 53. Shirley Temple Black, Shirley Temple Black: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988),

IO-II, QI. 54. Patsy Guy Hammontree, Shirley Temple Black: A Bio- Bibliography (New York: Greenwood, 1998), 63.

55. [bid., 202-204. 56. Jeni LeGon in Living in a Great Bi Way, video documentary directed by Grant Greschuk (National Film Board of Canada, 2005). 57. “Closing the Gap: Jeni LeGon and Ernie Smith,” On Tap! 11, 6 (March-April 2001): 15. 58. “Bill Robinson Selects White for Film Role; Tapster Is Receiving Coast Criticism for His Choice,” New York Amsterdam News, 20 February 1937, 8. 59. Margie Schultz, Eleanor Powell: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1994), 56. Go. Thomas, That’s Dancing! 255. 61. Variety, 1 October 1930; Washington Post, 19 October 1931.

374 NOTES TO PAGES 128-161 62. Variety, 15 March 1932. 63. New York Times, 23 November 1933. 64. Schultz, Eleanor Powell, 6.

65. Variety, 28 June 1932. 66. New York Times, 19 September 1935; Time, 23 September 1935. 67. Schultz, Eleanor Powell, 11. 68. Time, 3 January 1938.

CHAPTER 6: JUMPIN’ JIVE (FORTIES) 1. William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); William O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971). 2. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 83. 3. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930), 93. 4. Thomas DeFrantz, “Simmering Passivity: The Black Male Dancer on the Concert Stage,” in Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris (London: Routledge, 1996), 108. 5. Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Stage Directors: An Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia, 1893-1955 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), 61. 6. Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (New York: Galahad, 1972), 88. 7. Tony Thomas, That’s Dancing! (New York: Harry Abrams, 1984), 260.

8. Ibid., 178-200. 9. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 52. 10. “George Murphy Dances. 7 Mins. One. New York,” Variety, 21 November 1913, 17. 1. Rusty E. Frank, Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 55. 12. Thomas, That’s Dancing! 179-80. 13. Frank, Tap! 171.

14. Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer, video documentary, American Masters (WNET-TV, 2002). 15. Thomas, That’s Dancing! 179. 16. John Meuller, Astaire Dancing (New York: Knopf, 1985), 247. v7. Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer.

18. Steven Cohan, “ ‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-Dance Man: Fred Astaire and the Spectacle of Masculinity in the Hollywood Musical,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 87-10; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures by Laura Mulvey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-206. 19. Croce, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, 8. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. Dancing Is a Man’s Game, telecast (CBS-TV, 21 December 1958). 22. John Martin, “This Week’s Programs,” New York Times, 16 April 1947; Walter Terry, “The Dance,” New York Herald-Tribune, 26 October 1947. 23. Glenn Loney, “The Legacy of Jack Cole: Rebel with a Cause,” Dance Magazine, February 1983, 42.

24. Author’s description of “Sing, Sing, Sing” comes from the Labanaotated score of the dance work. American Dance Machine, Vocabulary of Jack Cole. Notated by Billie Mahoney. New York: Dance

Notation Bureau, 5-25 August 1976. 25. John Martin, “The Dance, Jack Cole,” New York Times, June 1948, reprinted in Anthology of American

Jazz, ed. Gus Giordano (Evanston, IIl.: Orion, 1978), 27. 26, Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 305. 27. Jack Donahue, “Hoofing,” Saturday Evening Post, 14 September 1929, 29. 28. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 162-173 375 29. Charles Honi Coles, interview with the author, 29 March 1991. 30. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 305. 31. Interview with the author, 29 March 1991. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. David Hinckley, “A Honey of a Hoofer,” New York Sunday News, 7 August 1983. 35. Interview with the author, 29 March 1991.

CHAPTER 7: BEAT, BEBOP, BIRTH OF THE COOL (FIFTIES) 1. “The Passing of Bojangles,” New York Times, 27 November 1949, E8. 2. “Bill (Bojangles) Robinson Dies; ‘King of the Tap Dancers’ Was 71,” New York Times, 26 November 1949, 1; “31,942 File Past the Bier of Bill Robinson; 500 Policeman Assigned for Funeral Today,” New York Times, 28 November 1949, 21; “Celebrities and 8 Miles of Crowds Pay Last Tribute to Bill Robinson,” New York Times, 29 November 1949, I. 3. Ernest Brown, Copasetics Pledge Card, 5 December 1949. 4. Ernest Brown, The Copasetics Membership Card with Preamble; Article II] Meetings; Article II]

Officers; Article [V Suspensions and Expulsions; Article 1V Membership. Subsequent members would include Billy Eckstine, Lewis Brown, Curley Hammer, Timmie Rogers, Charlie Shavers, Leslie “Bubba” Gaines, Dizzy Gillespie, James Buster Brown, Louis Simms Carpenter, Al Gibson, James Cross, Jimmy Wright; and such honorary members as Willie Bryant (who became the honorary Mayor of Harlem after Robinson), Lionel Hampton, Sammy Davis Jr., the Nicholas Brothers, Chuck Green, Joe Williams, and Dick Gregory. 5. Marshall Stearns, “Is Jazz Dance Hopelessly Square?” Dance Magazine, June 1959, 30. 6. Jane Goldberg, “A Drum Is a Tapdancer,” Village Voice, jazz supplement, 30 August 1988, 12. 7. Jane Goldberg, “Jimmy Payne: A Profile,” Foot Print 1, 2-3 (Fall 1984): 8. 8. Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Dance Directors: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1893-1995 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), 118. 9. Goldberg, “Drum Is a Tapdancer,” 13. 10. No Maps on My Taps, film documentary directed by George T. Nierenberg (1979). 11. Stephen Hess, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institute, interview with the author, Bellagio, Italy, 15 May 2007. 12, Max Harrison, Eric Thacker, Stuart Nicholson, Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 2: Modernism to Postmodernism (Los Altos Hills, Calif.: Mansell, 2000), 16. 13. Cholly Atkins and Jacqui Malone, Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins (New York: Columbia University Press), 119. 14. David Hinckley, “A Honey of a Hoofer,” New York Daily News Magazine, 7 August 1983, 4. 15. Variety, 28 November 1950, 18; Variety, 5 February 1951; Variety, 15 August 1951, 51; Variety, 8 August 1951, 52; Variety, 3 October 1951, 51; Variety, 3 October 1951, 51; Variety, 3 October 1951, 52. 16. Variety, 23 May 1955, 69. 17. Klaus Stratemann, Duke Ellington: Day by Day, Film by Film (Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1992), “Interlude 17,” 11 June 1955. 18. Leon F. Litwack, “The Nifty Fifties,” quoted in Taylor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes, eds., Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-century (Tuscaloosa: University of

Alabama Press, 1989), 2. 19. Harriet Browne, interview with the author, 3 February 1996. 20. Ibid. 21. Max Pollak, “Interview With Tina Pratt,” International Tap Association Newsletter 9, 6 (March-April 1999): 3-7; Max Pollak, “Interview With Tina Pratt, Part Il,” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, I (May—June 1999): 32-39. 22. Billie Mahoney, “What We Tap Dancers Were Doing in the 1950s,” International Tap Association Newsletter 5, 6 (November—December 1995): 3-7. 23. Ibid.

376 NOTES TO PAGES 173-191 24. Ibid. 25. Thomas DeFrantz, “ ‘Being Savion Glover’: Black Masculinity, Translocation, and Tap Dance,” Discourses in Dance 1, 1 (Fall 2002): 17-28. 26. Max Pollak, “Closing the Gap: A Conversation Guided by Max Pollak with Buster Brown and Roxane Semadeni,” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, 1 (May-June 1999): 22-30. 27. A Tribute to Gregory Hines, video compilation and documentary directed by Lynn Dally (2005). 28. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 349-350. 29. Clip shown to the author by tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, who keeps the clip stored on his iPod. 30. Posted on YouTube and viewed by the author on 31 March 2007. 31. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 201. 32. Whitney Balliett, “Something Else,” New Yorker, 20 February 1960, 146-147. 33. Songs Unwritten: A Tap Dancer Remembered, video documentary directed by David Wadsworth (1989). 34. Bunny Briggs and Jimmy Slyde, interview with the author, 5 February 2007, Las Vegas. 35. Sally Sommer, unpublished remarks drawn from interview with Jimmy Slyde by Sali Ann Kriegsman, n.d. 36. Jimmy Slyde, interview with the author, 6 February 2007, Las Vegas. 37. Henry Sampson, Swingin’ on the Ether Waves: A Chronological History of African Americans in Radio and Television Broadcasting, 1925-1955 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2005), 5. 38. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, eds., The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946—Present (New York: Ballantine, 1979), 355. 39. Sampson, Swingin’ on the Ether Waves, 633.

40. Ibid., 784-785. Ai. lbid., 740. 42. Los Angeles Sentinel, 6 October 1949, in Sampson, Swingin’ On the Ether Waves, 784. 43. Unknown premiere date. This Is Show Business was first telecast 15 July 1949. It was broadcast from

then until September 1949 from g to Io pm on Fridays. From October 1949 to January 1953, it was broadcast on Sundays from 7 to 8 pM. 44. Pittsburgh Courier, 2 May 1949, in Sampson, Swingin’ On the Ether Waves, 759. 45. Mahoney, “What We Tap Dancers,” 3-7. 46. Atkins and Malone, Class Act, 120. 47. In 1951 and 1954-1955. The Donald O’Connor Show; Texaco Star Theatre’s Here Comes Donald; and The Donald O’Connor Texaco Show.

48. The Jackie Gleason Show, 20 September 1952 television broadcast. 49. Mercedes Ellington, conversation with the author, 15 April 2007. 50. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1-2. 51. Michael Coffey, ed., The Irish in America (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 227. 52. [bid. 53. lony Thomas, That’s Dancing! (New York: Harry Abrams, 1984), 189. 54. Coffey, Irish in America, 215.

55. [his and all subsequent quotes from Bates in this section are from Peg Leg Bates, interview with the author, 22 May 1992, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. 56. Dancing Man: Peg Leg Bates, film directed by Dave Davidson (Hudson West Productions and South Carolina Television, distributed by PBS video, Alexandria, Virginia, 1992). 57. The Chaney quotation is from No Maps on My Taps. 58. This and subsequent quotes by Briggs in this section are from Bunny Briggs, interview with the author, 6 February 2007, Las Vegas. 59. The Milton Berle Show, 18 November 1955.

60. Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (New York: Knopf, 1986), 187-188. 61. John Martin, “The Dance: Heterodox,” New York Times, 9 January 1955, X7. 62. Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: Trouble in Tahiti, Draper, 27 Wagons,” New York Times, 20 April 1955, 40.

NOTES TO PAGES 191-210 377 63. John Martin, “The Dance: Draper,” New York Times, 4 May 1958, X13. 64. “Draper Case Decried,” New York Times, 27 May 1959, 23. 65. Jane Goldberg, “Interview with Danny Daniels,” Foot Print 1, 2-3 (Fall 1984): 2-3.

66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Melba Huber, “Danny Daniels Taps with the Stars,” Dance and the Arts (July/August 1996): n.p. 69. Raymond Ericson, “Concert,” New York Times, 5 June 1975, 49. 70. Melba Huber, “Danny Daniels and the Tap Dance Concerto,” International Tap Association Newsletter

to, 6 (March-April 2000): 3-5. 71. Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Dance Directors, 93-95. 72. John Meuller, Astaire Dancing (New York: Knopf, 1985), 399. 73. Martin Gottfried, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse (New York: Bantam, 1990), 14-15.

CHAPTER 8: TAP HAPPENINGS (SIXTIES) 1. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 342-347; Whitney Balliett, “Groundhog,” New Yorker (12 December 1964): 47-49; J. R. Goddard, “The Night Groundhog Was King of the Gate,” Village Voice, 26 November 1964, 8-9; Chuck Green, interview with the author, 25 May 1991, New York City. 2. Whitney Balliett, “Notes,” New Yorker, 16 July 1960, 84-88. 3. Whitney Balliett, “Something Else,” New Yorker, 20 February 1960, 146; reprinted in Whitney Balliett, Dinosaurs in the Morning: 41 Pieces on Jazz (New York: Lippincott, 1962), 70-73. 4. Danny Richmond to Jane Goldberg, “A Drum Is a Tapdancer,” Village Voice, jazz supplement, 30 August 1988, 12-13. 5. Balliett, “Something Else,” Dinosaurs in the Morning, 70-73. 6. Nat Hentoff, Liner notes to Baby Laurence/Dance Master, recorded on 7 January 1959 at Bell Sound Studio in New York, with Paul Quinichette (sax), Al Hall (bass), Nat Pierce (piano), Skeeter Best

(guitar), and Ossie Johnson (drums); on 11 February 1960 with Bobby Jasper (flute and tenor sax), Arvell Shaw (bass), Roland Hanna (piano), and Gerard “Dave” Pochonet (drums). 7. Whitney Balliett, “The Inheritors,” New Yorker, 21 July 1962, 64-68. 8. George Frazier, “Newport Jazz Festival,” Boston Herald, 8 July 1962. 9. Bunny Briggs, interview with the author, 5 February 2007, Las Vegas. 10. Robin Reif, “Coles of Broadway,” Playbill: St. James Theatre, 1983, reprinted in Jacksina and Freedman press packet for Honi Coles. 11. David Hinckley, “A Honey of a Hoofer,” New York Daily News Magazine, 7 August 1983, I5. 12. Leticia Jay, “The Wonderful Old-Time Hoofers at Newport,” Dance Magazine, September 1963, 18. 13. Ibid.

14. Whitney Balliett, “Duke Ellington,” New Yorker, 9g November 1981, 156. 15. Bunny Briggs, interview with the author, 5 February 2007, Las Vegas. 16. Billie Mahoney, “What We Tap Dancers Were Doing in the 1950s,” International Tap Association Newsletter (March—April 1995): 3-7; “Did Tap Ever Really Die? Tap: From 1960 to 1980—From ‘Entertainment’ to Art Form,” International Tap Association Newsletter (November—December 1996): 3-7. 17. New York Mirror, 16 June 1961.

18. The Johnny Carson Show (31 December 1962; 30 August 1965; 11 September 1965; 12 February 1966); PM East, PM West (1 March 1962); The Jerry Lewis Show (16 November 1963); American Musical Theatre (25 January 1964 and 19 July 1964); The Steve Allen Variety Show (12 October 1964); The Bob Hope Christmas Special (15 January 1965); The Dean Martin Show (30 September 1965); The Belle of 14th Street (11 October 1967). 19. Cholly Atkins and Jacqui Malone, Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), xix.

20. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 358-359. 21. lbid.

378 NOTES TO PAGES 210-225 22. Atkins and Malone, Class Act, xviii. 23. Ibid., xviii—xix.

24. Whitney Balliett, “Newport 1969,” New Yorker, July 1969, 73-78. 25. Patrick O’Connor, “Tap Happening,” Dance Magazine, August 1969, 40-42. 26. Tap Happenings, videotaped performance, 12 May 1969, the Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 27. Ibid. 28. Patrick O’Connor. “Tap Happening,” 41.

CHAPTER 9: NOSTALGIA, AND ALL THAT TAP (SEVENTIES) 1. Jane Goldberg, “A Drum Is a Tapdancer,” Village Voice, jazz supplement (30 August 1988), 12-13. 2. Jo Jones, The Drums (France: Jazz Odyssey, 1973), LP recording, liner notes and narration. 3. John Meuller, Astaire Dancing (New York: Knopf, 1985), 369; Constance Valis Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38-39; Jane Goldberg, “A Drum,” 13; Savion Glover and Bruce Weber, Savion! My Life in Tap (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 43. 4. Goldberg, “A Drum,” 13. 5. Tom Russell, “Bippidy-Boom-Shaga-Daga,” Connoisseur (November 1983): 56-57. 6. David Ritz, Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott (New York: Da Capo, 2002), 42. 7. Goldberg, “A Drum,” 13. 8. lbid.

9. Rigmor Newman Nicholas, conversation with the author, 9 April 2007. 10. Whitney Balliett, “Jazz: New York Notes,” New Yorker, 17 February 1973, 108-109. 11. Don McDonagh, “Jazz Lures Tap Talent to Museum,” New York Times, 27 February 1973, 28. 12. Whitney Balliett, “Newport 1973,” reprinted in New York Notes: A Journal of Jazz 1972-1975 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 96. 13. John Wilson, “Jazz Interactions at Pub Theatrical,” New York Times, 9 October 1973, 41. 14. Whitney Balliett, “Jazz: September 17,” New Yorker, 22 November 1976, 16. 15. Masters of Tap, video documentary directed by Jolyon Wimhurst (London: Riverside Studios, 1983). 16. Tap Dancin’, video documentary directed by Christian Blackwood (New York: Blackwood

Productions, 1980).

7. Ibid. 18. Jennifer Dunning, “Jerry Ames Taps His Message,” New York Times, 10 September 1976, 74. 19. Jerry Ames Tap Dance Company, 1976 program of the Fourth East Hampton Dance Festival, Jerry Ames, programs, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 20. The Jerry Ames Tap Dance Company, videotaped performance, 8 and 12 September 1976; Jerry Ames Tap Dance Company, program, 8-12 September 1976, Marymount Manhattan Theatre, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 21. Jennifer Dunning, “Jerry Ames Taps His Message,” New York Times, 10 September 1976, 74. 22. Clive Barnes, “Stage: No, No Nanette Is Back Alive,” New York Times, 20 January 1971, 24. 23. George Gent, “Nanette Brings Out the Nostalgia Buffs,” New York Times, 21 January 1971, 20. 24. Barnes, “Stage,” 24. 25. Walter Kerr, “A Door Opens, Miss Keeler Enters,” New York Times, 31 January 1971, D1. 26. Barnes, “Stage,” 24. 27. Kerr,” Door Opens, * Dr, 28. Ibid. 29. Angela Taylor, “Young Shoes and the Good Old Days,” New York Times, 19 February 1971, 30. 30. Walter Kerr, “Musicals That Were Playful, Irresponsible and Blissfully Irrelevant,” New York Times, 11 April 1971, SM14.

31. Clive Barnes, “Dance: Spring Gala Day: ‘Mooche’ and ‘Pheobe’ Open Ailey Season,” New York Times, 17 April 1975, 47. 32. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 225-249 379 33. Walter Kerr, “Stage: ‘Sugar Babies,’ Burlesque Is Back,” New York Times, 9 October 1979, C5.

34. Sally Sommer, undated interview with Gregory Hines. 35. Maurice Hines, interview by Bruce Goldstein, 1991, Picture Music International. 36. Donald McKayle, Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 253. 37. Barbara Crossete, “Eubie’s Hot Tap-Dance Team,” New York Times, 24 November 1978, Cio. 38. Betty Russell, “New Reveille In the Taps World,” New York Times, 12 March 1978, WC13. 39. “It’s Shuffle-Shuffle-Bam-Bam to Macys,” New York Times, 2'7 August 1979, Bal. 40. Jane Goldberg, conversation with author, 10 November 2007, New York City. 41. Katherine Kramer, The Resurgence of Tap Dance (master’s thesis, liberal studies, Wesleyan University, 1984), 22.

42. Dianne Walker, interview with the author, 8 November 2007. 43. Ibid.

44. Dorothy Anderson (Wasserman), telephone conversation with the author, 9 December 2007. 45. Kramer, The Resurgence of Tap Dance, 30.

46. Singing, Swinging, and Winging, videotaped performance by Johannes Holub at the Delacorte Theater, New York, 11 September 1978, as part of the New York Dance Festival. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; live performance of premiere attended by the author. 47. Brenda Bufalino, Tapping the Source: Tap Dance Stories, Theory and Practice (New Paltz, N.Y.: Codhill,

2004), 38-40. 48. lbid. 49. Ibid., 25-26. 50. Brenda Bufalino, interview with the author, 4 February 2007, Las Vegas. 51. Jennifer Dunning, “Brenda Bufalino Choreographs Jazz and Tap Works at Pilgrim,” New York Times, 4 June 1978, 61. 52. Ibid. 53. Richard M. Sudhalter, “Old Tap Found at the Pilgrim,” New York Post, 3 June 1978, 36. 54. Brenda Bufalino, “Memories of “The Great Feats of Feet’ of Leslie ‘Bubba’ Gaines,” International Tap Association Newsletter 8, 4 (November—December 1997): 23. 55. Jane Goldberg, Shoot Me while I’m Happy: Memories from the Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side

(New York: Woodshed Productions, 2008), iii. 56. Jane Goldberg, “It’s All in the Feet,” Boston Patriot Ledger, 24 April 1974, 48.

57. Jane Goldberg, e-mail message to the author, 14 March 2002. 58. Jennifer Dunning, “Jane Goldberg Taps With Hoofers,” New York Times, 26 February 1978. 59. Constance Valis Hill, KITE, 2 August 1978, 11. Go. Sally Sommer, “Tap Roots: Fast Dancing in the Big City,” Village Voice, 19 March 1979, 74. 61. Paula Span, “Tapping the Art of the Old-Time Hoofers,” Wall Street Journal, 20 March 1984. 62. Susan Reiter, “Steps in Time: A Tap Dance Festival,” Dance News, March 1980, Io. 63. Barry Laine, “They’re Tapping Today in Brooklyn,” New York Times, 30 December 1979, D16. 64. Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Tap Festival With Copasetics,” New York Times, 31 December 1979. 65. Laine, “They’re Tapping Today in Brooklyn,” D16.

66. Ibid. 67. Barbara Newman, “Carol Hess; Kathy Kramer; Andrea Levine; Gail Conrad; Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble; Steps in Time: A Tap Dance Festival,” Dance Magazine, April 1980, 22-25, 28-29. 68. Viola Hegyi Swisher, “Southern California,” Dance Magazine, July 1979, 12. 69. Derk Richardson, “Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble,” Down Beat, 12 July 1979, 43-44.

CHAPTER 10: BLACK AND BLUE (EIGHTIES) 1. Walter Kerr, “Stage: Scrooge Struts in ‘Comin’ Uptown,’” New York Times, 21 December 1979, C5. 2. Frank Rich, “Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Ladies,” New York Times, 2 March 1981, C13. 3. Vincent Canby, “Screen: Coppola’s ‘Cotton Club,” New York Times, 14 December 1984, C4. 4. Barbara Graustark, “Tapped for Stardom,” American Film, December 1984, 34.

380 NOTES TO PAGES 249-266 5. Whitney Balliett, “Jazz,” New Yorker, 21 July 1980, 92-93. G6. John S. Wilson, “ ‘Swinging Taps’ Combines Some Jazz and Tap Dancing,” New York Times, 5 July 1980, I. 7. Sally R. Sommer, “The Rhythm Method,” Village Voice, 29 October—4 November 1980, 82.

Subsequent quotations from Sommer in this section are taken from the same article. 8. “Letters: Tap Claptrap,” Village Voice, 12-18 November 1980.

g. Congress on Research in Dance: A Bicentennial Celebration (22-28 July 1981) University of California Los Angeles: “Dance as a Social and Popular Entertainment,” manuscript of public interview dated 13 November 1981, 36-37. 10. “Honi Coles and the Copasetics, Top of the Gate, September 3-4,” calendar listing, New York Times, 3 September 1982, C11. u1. Brenda Bufalino, Tapping the Source: Tap Dance Stories, Theory and Practice (New Paltz, N.Y.: Codhill,

2004), 69-75. 12. Ann Gavere Kilkelly, “Brenda Bufalino’s Too Small Blues,” Women and Performance 3.2, 6

(1987-1988): 67-77. 13; 1bid.°76. 14. Ibid., 75.

i§, Ibid; 73. 16, Cheryl Willis, Memories and Issues: African American Women Tap Dancers Who Performed between

1930-1950 (PhD diss., Temple University, 1991), 192-193. 17. All subsequent quotations from dancers within this section are from “But Can She Tape” Videotaped panel discussion, 3 December 1982, Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 18. Jennifer Dunning, “A Tap Extravaganza in Brooklyn,” New York Times, 19 February 1982, C1. 19. Frank Rich, “My One and Only,” New York Times, 2 May 1983, C13. 20. David Hinckley, “A Honey of a Hoofer,” New York Daily News Magazine, 7 August 1983, 63. 21. Ibid.

22. Sally R. Sommer, “Million Dollar Feet,” Village Voice, 3 April 1984. All subsequent references in this section to Sommer’s review of the performance are from this article. 23. Jane Goldberg, handwritten note to the author, 3 April 1984; Jane Goldberg, Shoot Me while I’m Happy (NewYork: Woodshed Productions, 2008), 133. 24. Sally R. Sommer, “A Big Hand for the Little Ladies,” Village Voice, 11 November 1986, 84. 25. Constance Valis Hill, “What’s New in Tap... or Should I Ask?” International Tap Association Journal 3, I (Spring-Summer 1991): 3-9. 26. Elaine Hedges and Ingrid Wendt, In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1980), 76. 27. www. lapsAreTalking.Ninbeads/tapsaretalking/storytellers.html#. 28. Hedges and Wendt, In Her Own Image, 75. 29. Tapestry, videotaped performance at Schmidt Gallery, New York City, 1980, courtesy of Brenda Bufalino. 30. Cantata and the Blues, videotaped in performance at the Ballroom, New York City, October 1985, with Amy Duncan on piano; courtesy of Brenda Bufalino. 31. Alan M. Kriegsman, “Brenda Bufalino,” Washington Post, 28 January 1985. 32. Constance Valis Hill, “Tap Toes: American Tap Dance Orchestra Finds Music on the Soles of Their Feet” Albany Times Union, 28 May 1992, 2. 33. American Tap Dance Orchestra, videotaped performance, 4 July 1986, Statue of Liberty Festival, Battery Park, New York City, courtesy of American Tap Dance Foundation. 34. Lynn Dally, interview with the author, 4 August 2006, Chicago. 35. Lewis Segal, “Dance/LA, Newman, Jazz Tap at UCLA,” Los Angeles Times, 23 March 1981, GO. 36. Lewis Segal, “Jazz Tap Ensemble,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1985, H4. 37. Shelley Baumstein, “Jazz Tap Ensemble Showcases Style,” Los Angeles Times, 17 October 1983, G4. 38. Julie McLeod, “Jazz Tap Ensemble Back, Better Than Ever,” Santa Barbara News-Press, 19 April 1984.

NOTES TO PAGES 266-282 381 39. Eileen Sondak, “Many New Faces,” Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1984, D1. 40. Llewellyn Crain, “Revamped Jazz Tap Ensemble Hits the Mark with Flair,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 15 October 1984.

41. Iwo Takes On Tap, video documentary produced and directed by Sharon Arslanian (Northampton, Mass.: Images, 1993). 42. Linda Sohl-Donnell Ellison, interview with the author, 10 July 2006, New York City. 43. Kirk Silsbee, “Foster’s Blues: A Nearly Forgotten Tap dancer’s Influence Is Still Felt,” Los Angeles

CityBeat, 21 December 2006, http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/foster_s_blues/4778/ 44. Ibid. 45. Janice-Laureen Arkoaov, “Taps for Veteran Tap-Dancer,” Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1982, L64; Kirk Silsbee, “Interview with Foster Johnson,” Rhapsody in Taps Newsletter 5, October 1991, 6-7. 46. Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 21; R. J. Smith, The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance (Los Angeles: Public Affairs Books, 2006), 143. 47. Silsbee, “Foster’s Blues.” 48. Lewis Segal, "LTD/Unlimited at the Pilot Theatre,” Los Angeles Times, 23 January 1984, H3. 49. Sasha Anawalt, “Tapping Away at Success,” Los Angeles Herald, 16 November 1987, Bs. 50. Lewis Segal, “ ‘Essence of Rhythm’ at Royce Hall,” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1986, G1.

51. All subsequent quotations from Sohl-Donnell within this section are from Linda Sohl-Donnell Ellison, interview with the author, 10 July 2006, New York City. 52. Taps Are Talking. Ninbeads/tapsaretalking/storytellers.html# 53. Katherine Kramer, The Resurgence of Tap Dance (master’s thesis, liberal studies, Wesleyan University, 1984), 34.

54. TapsAreTalking. Ninbeads/storytellers.html# 55. Peggy Spina, interview with author, 28 January 2008. 56. Jack Anderson, “Dance: Spina Tap Troupe in ‘Swing,’” New York Times, 4 April 1984, Cas. 57. Jack Anderson, “Dance: Peggy Spina Troupe in ‘Fascinating Rhythms,” New York Times, 11 November 1985, C16. 58. Jack Anderson, “Spina Company: Determined Tap Dancers,” New York Times, 18 April 1988, C16. 59. Peggy Spina, telephone conversation with the author, 16 June 2009. Go. Jane Goldberg, “Jimmy Payne: A Profile,” Foot Print 1, 2-3 (Fall 1984): 8. 61. Anita Feldman, Inside Tap: Technique and Improvisation for Today’s Dancer (Pennington, N.,J.: Princeton Book Co., 1996), 9, 1. 62. Dorothy Wasserman, “Passing It On: A Short History of Jazz Tap Festivals,” Attitude: A Dancer’s Magazine, Fall-Winter 1990, 21-25. 63. Eddie Brown, Scientific Rhythm, video documentary produced and directed by Sharon Arslanian (Northampton, Mass.: Images, 1990). 64. Bufalino, Tapping the Source, 94-95. 65. Ibid., 92. 66. Michael J. Bandler, “Tapping into Stardom,” American Way, 10 December 1985, 21-26. 67. Thomas DeFrantz, “Being Savion Glover: Black Masculinity, Translocation, and Tap Dance,” Discourses in Dance 1, 1 (Fall 2002): 17-28. 68. Sally Sommer, “Gregory Hines: From Time Step to Timeless,” New York Times, 14 August 2003, E3. 6g. Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: Jazz Tap and Gregory Hines,” New York Times, 1 October 1986, C24. 70. Sommer, “Gregory Hines,” E3. 71. Ibid.

72. Jennifer Dunning, “Tap Dance: Changing Times,” New York Times, 2 July 1985, Co. 73. Itabari Njeri, “Shadowed Feats: The Forgotten Mothers of Tap and Their New Crop of Daughters,” Village Voice, 28 July 1998, 39.

74. All subsequent quotations from Walker within this section are from Dianne Walker, interview with author, 9 November 2007, New York City. 75. Derick Grant, interview with author, 6 August 2006, Chicago.

382 NOTES TO PAGES 282-304 76. Songs Unwritten: A Tap Dancer Remembered, video documentary written, produced, and directed by David Wadsworth (1 September 1989). 77. Dianne Walker, interview with author, 9 November 2007, New York City. 78. Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, interview with the author, 21 March 2007, New York City. 79. Savion Glover and Bruce Weber, Savion! My Life in Tap (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 43. 80. Dianne Walker, interview with author, 9 November 2007, New York City. 81. Glover and Weber, Savion! 58. 82. Dianne Walker, interview with author, 9 November 2007, New York City.

CHAPTER 11: NOISE AND FUNK (NINETIES) 1. The 39th Annual Grammy Awards, videotape of performance, 27 February 1997, CBS-TV. 2. Constance Valis Hill, “What’s New in Tap... or Should I Ask?” International Tap Association Journal 3, I (Spring-Summer 1991): 3-9. 3. James Buster Brown, interview with the author, 28 May 1990, Boston. 4. Savion Glover, interview with the author, 1 June 1990, Boston. 5. Lynn Dally, interview with the author, 6 June 1991, Los Angeles. 6. Ibid. 7. Tobi Tobias, “Step Lively,” Village Voice, 12 May 1992.

8. Ibid. 9. Kevin Giordano, “Jazz Tap Ensemble,” Dance Magazine, March 1999, 105. 10. Sally Sommer, telephone interview with the author, 5 March 1994. 11. Constance Valis Hill, “Troupe Strikes Anything to Become a Rhythmic Hit,” Albany Times Union, 17 March 1994, 22. 12. Peter Marks, “Pecs First, Feet Last,” New York Times, 18 March 1997, C15. 13. Steve Condos, “The Way | See It,” International Tap Association Newsletter 2, 1 (Fall 1989): 19. 14. Fred Strickler, quoted in Valis Hill, “What’s New in Tap,” 3-9. 15. Brenda Bufalino, quoted in ibid. 16. Brenda Bufalino, Tapping the Source: Tap Stories, Theory and Practice (New Paltz, N.Y.: Codhill Press, 2004), 127. 17. Program notes to American Landscape. 18. Bufalino, Tapping the Source, 122. 19. Bruce Weber, “Onstage and Off, Hoofers Step Out,” New York Times, 29 December 1997, E1.

20. Lane Alexander, interview with author, 4 August 2006, Chicago; telephone conversation with the author, 30 June 2009. 21. Melba Huber, “Robert Reed Jr. Brings Tap to Mid-America,” Dance and the Arts, September—October

1996, I. 22. Matt Snyder, “Jazz/Tap Opera in New York,” 5/4 Magazine, August 1996. 23. Carl Schlesinger, letter to the author, 31 July 2006. 24. Max Pollak, “The Real Jimmy Slyde,” International Tap Association Newsletter 8, 1 (May-June 1997): 3. 25. Hank Smith, conversation with the author, 15 April 2006, New York City. 26. Roxane “Butterfly” Semadini, telephone conversation with the author, 12 December 2005. 27. Max Pollak, “The Real Jimmy Slyde,” International Tap Association Newsletter 8, 1 (May-June 1997): 6. 28. Robert Johnson, “A Conversation with Roxane Butterfly,” Ballet Review, Winter 2002, 22. 29. Jack Anderson, “Musicians and Tap Dancers Enchanted by the Beat,” New York Times, 18 May 2003. 30. Max Pollak, “Closing the Gap: A Conversation Guided by Max Pollak with Buster Brown and Roxane Semadini,” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, 1 (May-June 1999): 22-30. 31. Program, New York City Tap Extravaganza, 26 May 2002. 32. Michela Marino Lerman, comments in accepting Tradition in Tap Award for James Buster Brown, 10 November 2007, New York City. 33. Bruce Weber, “Onstage and Off, Hoofers Step Out,” New York Times, 29 December 1997, E2. 34. Andrew M. Greeley, The Irish Americans: The Rise to Money and Power (New York: Times Books, 1981).

NOTES TO PAGES 305-319 383 35. Anna Kisselgoff, “Irish Steps and Their Kin,” New York Times, 15 March 1996, Cs. 36. Official Program, act 2, scene 2, “Trading Taps,” performed by Robert Reed, Toby Harris, and Donnell Russell in Riverdance the Show at Radio City Music Hall. 37. Roxane Butterfly, “Tappin’ Time News: A Retrospective,” unpublished newsletter, ca. 1995, 19.

38. Gregory Hines, telephone conversation with the author, 8 April 1994. 39. Savion Glover and Bruce Weber, Savion! My Life in Tap! (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 60-61. 40. Frank Rich, “The Energy and Pain inside a Man Who Helped Give Birth to Jazz,” New York Times, 27 April 1992, C11. 41. Ben Brantley, “The Story of Tap as the Story of Blacks,” New York Times, 16 November 1995, C15. 42. Constance Valis Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 83. 43. Thomas DeFrantz, “Being Savion Glover: Black Masculinity, Translocation, and Tap Dance,” Discourses in Dance 1, 1 (Fall 2002): 17-28.

44. \bid. 45. Patrick Pacheco, “Savion Glover: The Young Godfather of Tap,” Playbill News, 16 August 1996. 46. “My style is rough, raw, and ragged. My trademark is rough funkiness,” quoted in Playbill for Savion Glover Downtown/Live Communication, Variety Arts Theatre, 20 April 1999, 32. 47. Savion Glover, remarks at dinner celebrating National Tap Dance Day, 25 May 2006, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark. 48. Brantley, “Story of Tap.” 49. Bruce Weber, “Onstage and Off, Hoofers Step Out,” New York Times, 29 December 1992, EI. 50. Baakari Wilder, interview with the author, 9 July 2007, New York City. 51. Baakari Wilder, telephone conversation with the author, 13 April 2008. 52. Melba Huber, “The Public Theatre Offers Scholarships for the New York Shakespeare Theatre’s Tap Institute,” Dance and the Arts, July-August 1997. 53. Jennifer Dunning, “Footwork That Digs to the Heart of the Music,” New York Times, 26 April 1999, E5. 54. Lbid.

55. Melba Huber, “Savion’s NYOTS Are Extraordinary,” Dancer, August 1998, 42. 56. Jennifer Dunning, “Footwork That Digs to the Heart of the Music,” New York Times, 26 April 1999, E5. 57. Ayodele Casel, interview with the author, 10 July 2007, New York City. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. Go. Jenai Cutcher, “Dancing Like a Girl: The New Tap Women Are Putting Femininity Back on the Boards,” Dance Magazine, May 2006, 48-51, 61. Ayodele Casel, telephone interview with the author, 15 September 2007. 62. Melba Huber, “Ayodele Casel Advises Girls: ‘Stay Focused to Succeed,” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, 5 (January-February 2000): 3-4. 63. Jane Goldberg, “Fast Feet,” Dance Magazine, January 2004. 64. Huber, “Savion’s NYOTs,” 42. 65. Lola Finkelstein, “Action at Jo Jos,” New Yorker, 6 November 1978, 37-39. G66. Ibid.

67. Sue Samuels, telephone conversation with the author, 15 September 2007. 68. Melba Huber, “Who Is Filling Savion’s Shoes?” Dancer, March 1998. 6g. Eri Misaki, “Jason Samuels Smith, Tap Dancer,” New York Dance Fax, April 2002, 8. 70. Jane Goldberg, “Fast Feet,” Dance Magazine, January 2004. 71. New York City Tap Festival, 10 July 2003.

72. Misaki, “Jason Samuels Smith,” 8. 73. Huber, “Savion’s NYOTS,” 42.

74. All subsequent quotes from Edwards within this section, unless otherwise specified, are from Omar Edwards, interview with the author, 29 May 2008.

384 NOTES TO PAGES 320-333 75. Melba Huber, “Toe Jam: Danny Wooten and Omar Edwards,” Dance Pages, Spring 1994. 76, Karen Hildebrand, “Broadway Babies,” Dance Magazine, February 2005.

CHAPTER 12: HOOFING IN HEELS (MILLEN NIUM) 1. Charlie’s Angels premiered at the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s Global Rhythms 2, 24-25 November 2006 at the Harris Theatre for Music and Dance, Chicago. Choreography by Jason Samuels Smith, with solos created and performed by Chloe Arnold, Ayodele Casel, and Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, to music played by Charlie Parker, though not all of the tunes are his compositions. “Star Eyes,” recorded in New York City, early April 1950, music composed by Charlie Parker, played by Charlie Parker (alto sax), Hank Jones (piano), Ray Brown (bass), Buddy Rich (drums). “Mango Mangue,” recorded New York City, 20 December 1948, composed by Charlie Parker, arranged by Machito, played by Machito and His Orchestra: Mario Bauza, Frank “Paquita” Davilla, Bob Woodlen (trumpet), Gene Johnson, Fred Skeritt (alto sax), Charlie Parker (alto sax), Jose Madera (tenor sax), Rene Hernandez (bass), Luis Miranda (bongo), Ubaldo Nieto (timbales). “Moose the Mooche,” composed by Charlie Parker, recorded 28 March 1946, played by the Charlie Parker Septet: Charlie Parker (alto sax), Miles Davis (trumpet), Lucky Thompson (tenor sax), Dodo Mamarosa (piano), Vic McMillan (bass), Roy Porter (drums). “Round Midnight,” composed by Thelonious Monk, recorded between 1950 and 1954: Charlie Parker (also sax), Fats Navarro (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano). “Salt Peanuts,” composed by Dizzy Gillespie, recorded 11 May 1945, with Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet, vocals), Charlie Parker (alto sax), Al Haig (piano), Curly Russel (bass), Sid Catlett (drums). 2. Jason Samuels Smith, conversation with the author, 24 November 2007, Albany, N-Y. 3. Divine Rhythm Productions, e-mail message, 18 August 2006, www.divine rhythms.org. 4. Jane Goldberg, e-mail message to the author, 19 August 2006; Jenai Cutcher, “Dancing Like a Girl: The New Tap Women are Putting Femininity Back on the Boards,” Dance Magazine, May 2006, 48-51. 5. Claudia La Rocco, “Bring in Da Tap, and Make It Last,” New York Times, 18 December 2005, AR36. 6. Ayodele Casel, interview with the author, 10 July 2007, New York City. 7. Chloe Arnold, interview with the author, 10 July 2007, New York City. 8. Chloe Arnold, “Challenges Facing Women in Tap,” panel remarks, Women in Tap Conference, 9 February 2008, University of California-Los Angeles. 9. Chloe Arnold, interview with the author, 14 July 2007, New York City. Lo. Ibid. 11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

14. Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, interview with the author, 25 March 2007, New York City. 15. lbid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Joan Acocella, “Taking Steps,” New Yorker, 12 January 2004, 76. 19. Ben Brantley, “Roaring Twenties Speakeasies with Tubs Full of Ginger Ale Fizz,” New York Times,

10 May 2008, Bz. 20. John Rockwell, “Penguin, Shmenguin! Those are Savion Glover's Happy Feet!” New York Times,

28 December 2006, EI. 21. La Rocco, “Bring in Da Tap,” AR36. 22. Ibid. 23. Joan Acocella, “Taking Steps,” New Yorker, 12 January 2004, 77.

24. Margaret Morrison, unpublished paper, “Savion Glover and the Authenticity Wars: Improvisational Soloist vs. Ensemble Choreographer,” 16 December 2004. 25. Jack Anderson, “Feet with a Lot to Say, and Words to Say It,” New York Times, 18 December 2004, E3. 26. Brian Siebert, “In the Music,” Village Voice, g December 2003.

NOTES TO PAGES 333-352 385 27. Acocella, “Taking Steps.”

28. “Curtains for Semi-Nude Justice Statue,” BBC News, 29 January 2002. 29. “Tap Choreography,” New York City Tap Festival, videotaped performance, to July 2002, Duke Theatre, for American Tap Dance Foundation. 30. “Tap All-Stars,” New York City Tap Festival, videotaped performance, 11 July 2002, Duke Theatre, for American Tap Dance Foundation. 31. Jane Goldberg, “Mr. Glover Hits Again,” Dance Magazine, May 2004, 35. 32. Sid Smith, “Shortcomings, Flaws Can’t Keep Imagine Tap! From Taking Off,” Chicago Tribune, 14 July 2006. 33. Constance Valis Hill, “Imagine Tap!” Dance Magazine, October 2006, 102-103. 34. La Rocco, “Bring in Da Tap,” AR 36.

35. Derick Grant, interview with the author, 6 August 2006, Chicago. 36. Lawrence Gelder, “A Fusion of Rock and Tap with the Requisite Energy,” New York Times, 25 August 2001, BI5.

37. Derick Grant, interview with the author, 6 August 2006, Chicago,. 38. “Tribute to Gregory Hines,” videotaped compilation directed by Lynn Dally. 39. Jason Samuels Smith, observation notes by the author, 10 July 2003, New York City. 40. Ayodele Casel, observation notes by the author, 4 August 2005, Chicago. 41. Brenda Bufalino, observation notes by the author, 17 February 2007, New York City. 42. Dianne Walker, observation notes by the author, 9 November 2007, New York City. 43. “Cookie and Bubba Keep Steppin’ Out in Style,” Fort Collins Coloradoan, 9 June 1977, 13. 44. All subsequent quotes by Waag within this section are from Tony Waag, interview with the author, 6 February 2007, airflight from Las Vegas to New York City. 45. Terry Monaghan, program, Afroceltic Connection/Flying Home, 29 August 1997, Damrosch Park Bandshell Lincoln Center, New York City.

46. Kathakali Jana, “Sounds Pure and Complex,” IJS Kolkata, India, 1 February 2007. 47. Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith, interview with the author, 25 November 2007, Albany, N.Y. 48. Steven Harper, “Sarah Petronio: Dancing from Her Soul,” On Tap! 16, 1 (July-August 2005): 22-23. 49. Seosamh O Neactain, interview with the author, 15 June 2006, Galway, Ireland. 50. Simonetta Dixon, “Turned On Tap,” Ballet Magazine, June-July 2005. 51. Seosamh O Neactain interview with the author, 23 March 2007. 52. Jason Samuels Smith and Seosamh O Neactain, remarks to the author, 3 April 2007. 53. Jane Goldberg, “Top 25 Dancers to Watch in 2008,” Dance Mazazine, January 2008, 34-60. 54. Michela Marino Lerman, interview with the author, 14 May 2008, New York City. 55- Max Pollak, “Closing the Gap: A Conversation Guided by Max Pollak with Buster Brown and Roxane Semadini,” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, 1 (May—June 1999), 22-30. 56. Michela Marino Lerman, interview with the author, 14 May 2008, New York City. 57. Joseph Wiggan, telephone interview with the author, 26 November 2007. 58. Jennifer Dunning, “Tap-Tap-Tapping Out a Message of Style, Not Just Skill,” New York Times, 17 July 2007. 59. Laura De Silva, “Tough Breaks,” Dance Spirit 10, 5 (May-June 2006): 69. 6o. Emily Macel, “Tap Out Loud: the Multitalented, Multifaceted Michelle Dorrance Is Stompin’ up a Storm,” Dance Magazine, May 2008. Gr. Ibid.

62. “Mr. B Talks about Ballet,” Life, 11 June 1965, in Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 354. 63. Clive Barnes, “Dance: Curtain Rises on the City Ballet’s 42nd Season,” New York Times, 30 March 1966, 36. 64. Winifred Wandersee, On the Move: American Women in the 1970s (Boston: Twayne, 1988), xii. 65. Brenda Bufalino, “Brenda Bufalino Talks with Acia Gray and Debbie Mitchell,” On Tap! 11, 4 (November—December 2000): 13. 66. Ibid.

386 NOTES TO PAGES 353-360 67. Lbid.

68. Ibid. 69. Jennifer Dunning, “Tap-Tap-Tapping Out a Message of Style, Not Just Skill,” New York Times, 17 July 2007. 70. Laura Molzahn, “Chicago on Tap,” Dance Magazine, November 1994. 71. Karen Callaway (Williams), interview with the author, 13 July 2007, New York City. 72. Brenda Bufalino, “Brenda Bufalino Talks with Acia Gray and Debbie Mitchell,” On Tap! 11, 4 (November—December 2000): 13. 73. Ibid.

74. Acia Gray, conversation with the author, 8 February 2008, Los Angeles. 75. Jennifer Dunning, “The Patter and Patterns of Wittily Tapping Feet,” New York Times, 3 December 1990, C14. 76. Barbara Duffy, telephone interview with the author, 4 February 2008. 77. Nadine Meisner, “New York on Tap, Queen Elizabeth Hall,” London Independent, 18 June 2002. 78. Women in Tap Conference, 9 February 2008, University of California-Los Angeles. 79. Jennifer Dunning, “Tap-Tap-Tapping,” New York Times, 17 July 2007. 8o. Jennifer Dunning, “The Patter and Patterns,” New York Times, 3 December 1990. 81. Margaret Morison, interview with the author, 9 July 2007, New York City. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid.

84. lbid. 85. Taps Art Talking. Ninbeads/tapsaretalking/storytellers.html# 86. Lewis Segal, “Certain Women in Tap Raise the Bar High,” Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2008, E3.

GLOSSARY

ACCENT the stress or emphasis on a beat or sound BAR the unit of music contained between two bar lines, also referred to as a measure BARREL TURN a complete turn of the body, with torso and legs leaning into a forward diagonal position BEAT the regular, recurring, and periodically accented pulse which constitutes the unit of measurement in all measured music BELLS the clicking together of the toes or heels BOOGIE-WOOGIE a percussive style of piano blues characterized by the use of blue chordal progressions combined with steady, repetitive, left-hand bass figures BREAK in tap dance, a two-measure movement following a six-measure movement that ends or punctuates the eight-measure phrase; in music, a brief solo passage usually lasting one or two bars, frequently

appearing at the ends of phrases, particularly the last phrase in a structural unit. Clog routines frequently employ more than one break in a given routine. The term “break” was used at least as early as 1864 in Clifford’s Jig and Clog without a Master. Clifford identified the break as the defining characteristic that distinguished the jig from the clog (he considered the steps otherwise suitable to both)

BREAKAWAY a move in Lindy Hopping in which dancers spin away from each other to improvise a dance break BREAKDOWN a jigging competition performed by slaves on the plantation, which developed into fast-stomping competitive solos of riverboat crews on the frontier BRIDGE normally the third eight measures of a thirty-two-measure chorus; the formal transition in a passage of music that provides a contrast with the opening section BRUSH the striking of the ball of the foot in any one direction BUCK DANCING an early, flat-footed time step from the black vernacular; the general designation for tap dancing at the turn of the century BUCK-AND-WING anearly style of clog dancing that combines the buck, a simple time step, with a wing, a simple hop, with one foot flung out to the side

CHALLENGE DANCE any competition, contest, breakdown, or showdown in which tap dancers compete against each other before an audience of spectators or judges; the rhythmically expressive “engine” and driving force in tap CHARLESTON the most popular social dance of the Jazz Age twenties, which was said to have originated in Charleston, South Carolina; one of its many steps consisted of flinging the leg forward and circling it in the air around the body CHUG atap step accenting the forced forward movement of the ball of the foot sliding along the floor,

followed by the drop of the heel. In clog dancing, also referred to as “shunt,” a quick slide forward of 387

388 GLOSSARY the weight-bearing foot, usually starting or raising up a bit onto the ball of the foot and then dropping the heel down to make the “chug” move to finish flat-footed

CLICK HEELS the varied use of the clog sole in making sounds typical of clog dancing. The wooden edge of the sole affords the dancer the opportunity to make beats using the sides and ends of the sole, in addition to the bottom surface of the sole

CLOG DANCE from the English, originally meaning “clock” dance; a style of wooden-shoe dancing that originated in the Lakeland regions of England COOCH asinuous dance, performed by a woman, comprising eccentric moves, gyrations, and shakes of the body

CRAMP arippling tap step in which toes and heels are dropped in a specific rhythmic rolling pattern; in clog dance, called “crunch”: a sequence in which the dancer springs into the air and the lands by dropping onto toes and heels separately, making four distinct sounds in quick succession on a single beats

CROSS in clog dancing, a “heel-and-toe” type of step in which the active foot crosses in front of the other and the toe of the foot that is behind hits against the heel of the foot in front CROSSOVER crossing one foot over, or in front of, the other CUBANOLA a Latin-tinged tap rhythm (that can be danced to the accompaniment of a 3/2 clave rhythm) consisting of a side-traveling shuffle, hops, and ball-change DIG the forced striking of the heel into the floor in any direction DOUBLE SHUFFLE in clog dance, a motif that consists of shuffles off one side only, alternating with hops on the other weight-bearing foot; the motif used as a building block for stepping sequences DOUBLE TIME doubling the tempo that is first established in the routine DRAW the drawing in of the free foot on the floor with a sliding motion ECCENTRIC highly individual and inventive moves that follow no set pattern ESSENCE a basic movement associated with soft-shoe dancing, performed in medium 4/4 tempo FALLING-OFF—THE-LOG a twisting movement consisting of shuffles and the alternate crossing and recrossing of one foot over the other, with the body leaning sideways FILL a short harmonic or rhythmic or melodic figure played at points of inactivity or stasis FLAP a forward brush and step motion made with the ball of the foot in tap dancing; may be executed in any direction, but normally forward or backward FLAT-FOOT striking, rubbing, or sliding of the entire foot on the floor FOUR-SQUARE in music, when all four main beats of a bar in 4/4 time are evenly accented FOXTROT a ballroom dance made popular in the teens, based on the two-step, but danced in 4/4 time to a broken rhythm of “Slow, Slow, quick-quick (two quick counts equaling one slow count)”

GRAPEVINE a side-traveling ballroom dance step, adapted to tap and musical theater dancing, in which the trailing foot crosses behind and in front of the leading foot HALF-TIME halving the tempo first established in a routine HEEL-DROP the forced dropping of the heel into the floor with the weight placed on the ball of the foot

HOOFER a tap dancer who emphasizes movements from the waist down, and concentrates on the flat-footed percussive intricacies of the feet

HOOFING aword for tap dancing prevalent in the 1920s HOP aspring into the air from one foot, landing on the same foot with no transfer of weight JAZZ TAP the most rhythmically complex form of jazz dancing, setting itself apart from all earlier forms of tap dance by matching its speed to that of jazz music; demanded that the dancer’s center be lifted, weight balanced between the balls and heels of both feet, with dancer’s alignment upright and vertical; characterized by marked angularity

J'G Irish musical and step-dance form performed in 6/8 time JUMP aleap from one foot to the other foot in any direction KAZOTSKY KICK a Russian folk-styled flash step in which the dancer kicks the legs in rapid sequence from a squatting position

GLOSSARY 389 LANCASHIRE CLOG HORNPIPE dance in 4/4 time with a plethora of triplet or “dotted hornpipe” eighth notes (“diddely, diddely, diddely, diddely”)

LEGOMANIA highly individual and unusual invention of leg movements in jazz dancing, such as rubberlegging LINDY HOP a syncopated two-step with the accent on the off-beat MAXIE FORD a leaping sideways step consisting of a shuffle, pullback, and toe-tip MEASURE the group of beats made by the regular recurrence of the primary, or heavy, accents, the position of which is marked on the staff by bars MOTIF asmall rhythmic and choreographic sequence that can be identified as a discrete unit and is used repeatedly or in combination with other motifs to make a step NERVE TAPPING a rapid and uncontrollable series of toe taps achieved by releasing the groin muscle OFFBEAT a unaccented beat of a measure ONE-STEP aragtime ballroom dance in 2/4 time, introduced in the teens by Vernon and Irene Castle, with a step executed simply on the beat OVER-THE-TOP avirtuosic tap step, usually in the finale of a combination, that consists of bending forward, springing up, and bringing each leg, in turn, around from the back and across the front of the other leg PADDLE a heel-ball-toe-ball motif PADDLE-AND-ROLL a close-to-the-floor style of tap dancing alternating the heel and toe in a rhythm that duplicates the rhythm of a drum paradiddle (which combines single and double strokes)

PICKANINNY from the Spanish pequeno, meaning small and young, a term used commonly to denote all small colored children and, specifically, a child performer on the white-and-black vaudeville circuit; the name given to talented male black juvenile dancers (who could also sing) who provided both a backup and a socko finish to a vaudeville act

PICKUP in tap, a back-brushing or side-brushing hopping step that produces two sounds PIGEON WING a scraping movement from one foot to another, sometimes accompanied by the fluttering arm and hand motions of a bird PULLBACK in tap, a back-brushing or side-brushing hopping step that produces two sounds REEL 4/4 time; four strong beats to the measure, making for a jaunty, relaxed tempo REPEATS in jig and clog dancing, a step or motif danced first starting with one foot and then repeated starting with the other foot RHYTHM the pattern of regular or irregular pulses caused in music by the duration and stress of the beat

RIFF in tap dance, a rippling step in tap dance that combines a brush on the ball of the foot with a scuff of the heel; in music, a short, melodic ostinato, usually two or four bars long, which may either be repeated intact or varied in rhythm to accommodate the underlying pattern RIFF WALK a step making four sounds on the toe-ball-heel, with a final accent on the ball of the foot

ROLL aseries of rapid consecutive taps ROND DE JAMBE astep in ballet that describes the circular movement of the leg, performed a terre (on the floor), or en l’air (in the air)

ROUTINE acomplete dance, consisting of two or more choruses of music RUB pressing the foot into the floor in a continuous motion that sustains or retards the beat SCISSORS sliding the legs together scissorlike from second to first position SHIM SHAM SHIMMY aone-chorus routine to a thirty-two-bar tune, with eight bars each of the double shuffle, crossover, Tack Annie, and falling-offthe-log SHUFFLE a front brush followed by a back brush executed to the front, side, and back SHUFFLE OFF described in an 1898 English contest for women clog dancers as “Iwelve steps and a Shuffle-Off,” the term used to refer to double shuffle steps required at the end of a routine.

390 GLOSSARY In contemporary usage for clog dancing, the term refers to the break at the end of any given eight-bar phrase

SLIDE pushing the foot along the floor in any direction, making for a smooth and continuous connection SLIP a swift but smooth-flowing movement that has the exciting effect of looking barely in control

SOFT-SHOE a dance performed in a slow 4/4 time; originally danced with sand on the floor but since replaced with taps

STEP-DANCE a dance that emphasizes rhythmic movements and gestures of the feet and legs for a display dance (as opposed to a social dance). As a category of dance, step-dance is broader than and inclusive of percussive dance STOMP astriking of the floor with the entire foot STOP TIME the suspension of the normal flow of notes when musicians instead repeat, in rhythmic unison, a chord every four or eight counts to keep the rhythm going; during this time, the tap dancer can be featured without having to compete with the music STRIDE asolo piano style associated with ragtime and the stride Harlem piano school, marked by fast tempos, the full use of piano’s range, and a wide array of pianistic devices, including those from the classical repertory

STRUT acocky stride created by plantation slaves, presumably to imitate and exaggerate the authoritative gait of the white master

SYNCOPATION atemporary displacing or shifting of the regular metrical accent TACK ANNIE an up-and-back shuffle comprising one part of the shim sham shimmy TAP DANCE apercussive American dance form distinguished by the interplay of rhythms and amplification of sound by the feet TEMPO the rate of speed at which the dance is executed, sometimes referred to as the metronome beat TEXAS TOMMY akicking and hopping couple dance; forerunner of the Lindy Hop TIME STEP Aneight-measure movement placed at the beginning of a routine, used on the vaudeville stage and in tap dance as a means of setting the tempo of the routine TOE BACK from clog dance, a gesture of the active foot in which the foot is swung back, and the tip of the toe (rather than the ball of the foot) is tapped against the floor TRICK HEELS tap shoes with heels that are hollowed out with tin-lined boxes placed inside and holding two bullets; utilized by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dancers to give the illusion of an increase in tempo TWO-STEP a ragtime dance in 2/4 time which formed the basis of the foxtrot and consisting of the even rhythm of quick-quick, slow (two quick counts equal one slow count) TRENCHES a virtuosic step in tap dance that consists of long backward slides, alternating each leg while the body is bent forward at the waist, arms swinging 180 degrees. Also called “windmills” VAMP ashort passage, simple in rhythm, normally played in preparation for the entry of the soloist and repeated until the soloist is ready to perform VARIATION the creative, improvised reformation of a step or rhythmic phrase, mirroring, referencing, or departing from it to create something that is entirely new WALKAROUND the grand finale in the minstrel show in which performers promenade, prance, and strut in a circle, improvising on variations of the walking step while showing off their own specialties

WALK-OFF an exiting step from the vaudeville stage in which two or more dancers, one behind the other and pressed together, stride step-for-step off the stage WALTZ CLOG clog dance in 3/4 time WINDMILLS See Trenches. WING a virtuosic step in tap dance in which one foot executes a step rhythm on the floor while the other creates a circular movement in the air, the two opposing impulses in balance achieving the illusion of flying

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS, ARTICLES, AND REVIEWS Abrahams, Roger. Singing the Master. New York: Penguin, 1993. Acocella, Joan. “Taking Steps.” New Yorker, 12 January 2004, 76-77. Adamezyk, Alicia J. Black Dance: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1989. Anderson, Jervis. This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981. Armstead-Johnson, Helen. “Blacks in Vaudeville: Broadway and Beyond.” In American Popular Entertainment: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on American Popular Entertainment, ed.

Myron Matlaw, 77-86. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979. Astaire, Fred. Steps in Time. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959. Atkins, Cholly, and Jacqui Malone, Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins. New York:

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Billman, Larry. Film Choreographers and Stage Directors: An Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia, 1893-1955. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997. Black, Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple Black: An Autobiography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. Blake, Eubie, and Lawrence Carter. Keys of Memory. Detroit: Balamp, 1979. Bogle, Donald. Blacks in American Film and Television: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. New York: Garland,

392 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ———. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Viking, 1973.

Bone, Robert A. “The Background of the Harlem Renaissance.” In Black History: A Reappraisal, ed. Melvin Drummer, 408-421. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Bordman, Gerald M. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh, eds. The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946—Present. New York: Ballantine, 1979.

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Croce, Arlene. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book. New York: Vintage, 1977. ———. “Flash Act.” New Yorker, 15 February 1988, 25-27.

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Duncan, Donald. “The Dance with the Noise.” Dance Magazine, August 1961, 42-44. Dunn, Don. The Making of No, No, Nannette. New York: Citadel, 1972. Durante, Jimmy, and Jack Kofoed. Night Clubs. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931. Ellington, Duke. “The Duke Steps Out.” Rhythm, March 1931, 20-22. Ellington, Edward Kennedy. Music Is My Mistress. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Emery, Lynne Fauley. Black Dance from 1619 to Today. and rev.ed, with a foreword by Katherine

Dunham. Princeton, N.J.: Dance Horizons, 1972. Englebrecht, Barbara. “Swinging at the Savoy.” Dance Research Journal 15, no. 2 (1983): 3-10. Erenbery, Lewis A. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture 1590-1930. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1944. Feldman, Anita. Inside Tap: Technique and Improvisation for Today’s Tap Dancer. Pennington, N.J.:

Princeton Book Co., 1996. Finkelstein, Lola. “Action at Jo Jos.” New Yorker, 6 November 1978, 37-39. Fletcher, Tom. 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business. New York: Burge, 1954. Floyd, Samuel A. Jr., ed. Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays. Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood, 1990. Fox, Ted. Showtime at the Apollo. New York: DaCapo, 1983. Frank, Rusty E. Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955. New York: William

Morrow, 1990. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1988. George-Graves, Nadine. The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters. New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 2000. Gilbert, Douglas. American Vaudeville. New York: Dover, 1940. Gillespie, Dizzy, with Al Fraser. To Be, or Not... to Bop. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Giordano, Gus, ed. Anthology of American Jazz Dance. Evanston, IIl.: Orion, 1975. Gitler, Ira. Swing To Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Glover, Savion, and Bruce Weber. Savion! My Life in Tap. New York: William Morrow, 2000. Goldberg, Jane. “A Drum Is a Tapdancer.” Village Voice, jazz supplement, 30 August 1988, 12. ———. “Fast Feet.” Dance Magazine, January 2004. ———. “An Interview with Danny Daniels.” Foot Print 1, nos. 2-3 (Fall 1984): 2-3. —_——. “It’s All in the Feet.” Boston Patriot Ledger, 24 April 1974. ———. “Jimmy Payne: A Profile.” Foot Print 1, nos. 2-3 (Fall 1984): 8. ———. “John Bubbles: A Hoofer’s Homage.” Village Voice, 4 December 1978. —_——., “Mr. Glover Hits Again.” Dance Magazine, May 2004, 35. ———. Shoot Me while I’m Happy: Memories from the Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side. New York:

Woodshed Productions, 2008. ———. “Top 25 Dancers to Watch in 2008.” Dance Magazine, January 2008, 34—-G6o. Goodman, Benny, and Ted Shane. “Now Take the Jitterbug.” Colliers 103 (25 February 1939): 11-13, Go. Gottfried, Martin. All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse. New York: Bantam, 1990. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. ———. Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. New York:

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394 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Gray, Acia. “Closing the Gap: Jeni LeGon and Ernie Smith.” On Tap! 11, no. 6 (March-April 2001): 15. Graziano, John. “Black Musical Theatre and the Harlem Renaissance Movement.” In Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel Floyd Jr., 87-110. Westport, Conn..: Greenwood, 1990. Green, Blake. “Tapping Into a Rich Legacy.” Newsday, 30 December 1989. Haines, Aubry B. “Where the Tap Dance Came From.” Dance Digest, March 1958, 92-95. Hall, Ben M. The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace. New York:

Bramhall House, 1957. Hall, Roger Allen. “Black America: Nate Salsbury’s ‘Afro-American Exhibition.” Educational Theatre Journal 29, no. 1 (1977): 49-60. Hammond, Bryan, and Patrick O’Connor. Josephine Baker. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. Hammond, John. “The King of Swing.” Crisis 44 (April 1937): 110-111, 123-124. Hammontree, Patsy Guy. Shirley Temple Black: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood, 1998. Handy, W. C. Father of the Blues. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

Harper, Steven. “Sarah Petronio: Dancing from Her Soul.” On Tap! 16, no. 1 (July-August 2005): 22-23. Harrison, Max, Eric Thacker, and Stuart Nicholson. Essential Jazz Records. Vol. 2: Modernism to Postmodernism. Los Altos Hills, Calif.: Mansell, 2000. Haskins, Jim. The Cotton Club. New York: Random House, 1977. Haskins, Jim, and N. R. Mitgang. Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson. New York: William Morrow, 1988. Hedges, Elaine, and Ingrid Wendt. In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts. Old Westbury, N.Y.:

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Hill, Constance Valis. “Black and Blue ...” Attitude: The Dancers’ Magazine 5, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 4-5. ———. Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. New York: Oxford

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Illinois Press, 2008. ———. “Gregory Hines.” In Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas, ed. Colin A. Palmer. 2nd ed. Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference

USA, 2006. ———. “Harold Nicholas, 1921-2000.” On Tap! 11, no.3 (September—October 2000): 10-12. ———. “Harriet ‘Quicksand’ Browne, an Interview with Constance Valis Hill.” Pts. 1 and 2. On Tap! 11, no. 5 (January-February 2001): 16-22; 11, no. 6 (March-April 2001): 17-22. ———. “Imagine Tap!” Dance Magazine, October 2006, 102. ———. “Jazz Modernism.” In Moving Words: Re- Writing Dance, ed. Gay Morris, 227-242. London: Routledge, 1996.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 395 ———. “Keeper of the Bebop Flame: An Interview with Barry Harris.” International Tap Association Journal 9, no. 3 (September—October 1998): 3-5. ———. “Nicholas Brothers”; “Whitman Sisters.” International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jean Cohan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. “Nicholas Brothers.” In International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jean Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Peg Leg Bates”; “Buddy Bradley”; “Bunny Briggs”; “John Bubbles”; “Honi Coles”; “Leon Collins”; “Charles Cook”; “The Copasetics”; “Willie Covan”; “Four Step Brothers”; “Chuck Green”; “Gregory Hines”; “Henry LeTang”; “William Henry Lane”; “Baby Laurence”; “Milton Myers”; “Pete Nugent”; “Eddie Rector”; “Bill Robinson”; “LeVaughn Robinson”; “Sandman Sims”; “Jimmy Slyde”; “Diane Walker”; “Whitman Sisters.” In Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, ed. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996. ———. “Quintessential Jazz Dancer: Brenda Bufalino.” In International Tap Association Journal (November—December 1999): 1-3. ———. “Remembering Harold Nicholas.” On Tap! (September—October 2000): 20. ———. “The Revival’s Over, but Are We Past the Renaissance Yet?” International Tap Association Newsletter 5, no. 2 (July-August 1994): 1-4. ———. “Showstopper: Jared Grimes Brings Down the House.” Dance Magazine, May 2007, 34-30. ———. “Stepping, Stealing, Sharing, and Daring: Improvisation and the Tap Dance Challenge.” In Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere. Hanover, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. ———. “Tap Dance in America: A Short History.” In Southwestern Dance History: Essays on Dance and Culture, ed. Judith Bennahum. Dubuque, lowa: Kendall/Hunt, 2003. ———. “What’s New in Tap ... Or Should | Ask?” International Tap Association Journal 3, no. 1

(Spring-Summer 1991): 3-9. Hill, Constance Valis, and Sally Sommer. “Tap Dance.” In Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, ed. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, 2605-2610. New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996. Hine, Darlene Clark, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Vols. 1 and 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Horricks, Raymond. Dizzy Gillespie and the Be-Bop Revolution. New York: Hippodrome, 1984. “House Reviews: Apollo Theatre, N.Y.” Variety, 9 December 1953, 67-68. Huber, Melba. “Ayodele Casel Advises Girls: ‘Stay Focused to Succeed.’” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, no. 5 (January-February 2000): 3-4. ———. “Danny Daniels and the Tap Dance Concerto.” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, no. 6

(March-April 2000): 3-5. ———. “Robert Reed Jr. Brings Tap to Mid-America.” Dance and the Arts, September—October 1996, I. ———. “Savion’s NYOTS Are Extraordinary.” Dancer, August 1998, 42. ———. “Toe Jam: Danny Wooten and Omar Edwards.” Dance Pages, Spring 1994. ———. “Who Is Filling Savion’s Shoes? Dancer, March 1998. Hudovernik, Robert. Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Chenen Johnston.

New York: Universe, 2006. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. ———. ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1940. Hughes, Langston, and Milton Meltzer. Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the African-American in the Performing Arts. With a foreword by Ossie Davis. New York: Da Capo, 1967. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Islan, Richard. Hoofing on Broadway. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987. Jablonski, Edward. Harold Arlen: Happy with the Blues. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Jackson, Harriet. “American Dancer, Negro.” Dance Magazine, September 1966, 35-42.

396 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Janheinz, Jahn. Muntu: An Outline of New African Culture. New York: Grove, 1961. Jay, Leticia. “The Wonderful Old-Time Hoofers at Newport.” Dance Magazine, September 1963, 18-19. Jefferson, Margo. “An Era for Movement.” Dance Ink, September 1993, 18-24. Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. New York: Viking, 1933. ———. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 1930. Johnson, Robert. “A Conversation with Roxane Butterfly.” Ballet Review, Winter 2002, 22. Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It. New York: William Morrow, 1963. Kenney, William Howard. “The Influence of Black Vaudeville on Early Jazz.” The Black Perspective in Music 14, no. 3 (September 1986): 232-248. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow, England: Longman, 2000. Kernfeld, Barry. New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Kilkelly, Ann Gavere. “Brenda Bufalino’s Too Small Blues.” Women and Performance 3.2, no. 6

(1987-1988): 67-77. Kimble, Robert, and William Bolcolm. Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake. New York: Viking, 1973. Knowles, Mark. Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. Kobal, John. Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals. London: Hamlyn, 1971. Korall, Burt. Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz, The Swing Years. New York: Schirmer, 1990. Kramer, Katherine. The Resurgence of Tap Dance. Master’s thesis, liberal studies. Wesleyan University, 1984. Krasner, David. “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking.” Theatre Survey 37, no. 2 (November 1996): 66-92. Krause, Rhett. “Step Dancing on the Boston Stage: 1841-1869.” Country Dance and Song 2, no. 2 (1992): 4. Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lewis, David Levery. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981. Locke, Alan. The Negro and His Music. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. ———. The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940. Loney, Glenn. “The Legacy of Jack Cole: Rebel with a Cause.” Dance Magazine, February 1983, 42. Macel, Emily. “Tap Out Loud: The Multitalented, Multifaceted Michelle Dorrance Is Stompin’ Up a Storm.” Dance Magazine, May 2008. Mahoney, Billie. “Did Tap Ever Really Die?” International Tap Association Newsletter 4 (November—December 1996): 3-7, 18-20. ———. “What We Tap Dancers Were Doing in the 1950s.” International Tap Association Newsletter 6 (March-April 1995): 3-7. Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 1996. Marcus, Elise. “More Low-Down Dancing: Buddy Bradley Shows Additional Real Negro Steps.” Dance Magazine, January 1928, 41-42. Matlaw, Myron, ed. American Popular Entertainment. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979. McCabe, John. George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway. New York: Doubleday, 1973. McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928. McKayle, Donald. Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life. London: Routledge, 2002. Meade, Don. “Kitty O’Neil and Her ‘Champion Jig’: An Irish Dancer on the New York Stage.” New Hibernian Review 6, no. 3 (2002): 9-22. Messenger, John C. “Montseurrat: The Most Distinctively Irish Settlement in the New World.” Ethnicity 2 (1975): 295-300. Meuller, John. Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films. New York: Knopf, 1985.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 397 Meyer, Moe. “Dance and the Politics of Orality: A Study of the Irish Scoil Rince.” Dance Research Journal 27, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 25-37. Moore, Lilian. Echoes of American Ballet. Edited by Ivor Guest. New York: Dance Horizons, 1976. Morehouse, Ward. George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theatre. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1943. Morrison, Margaret. “Savion Glover and the Authenticity Wars: Improvisational Soloist vs. Ensemble Choreographer.” Unpublished paper, 16 December 2004. Mueller, John. Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films. New York: Knopf, 1985. Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1976. Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography. Washington, D.C.:

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Newman, Barbara. “Carol Hess; Kathy Kramer; Andrea Levine; Gail Conrad; Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble; Steps in Time: A Tap Dance Festival.” Dance Magazine, April 1980: 22-25, 28-29. Njeri, Itabari. “Shadowed Feats: The Forgotten Mothers of Tap.” Village Voice, 28 July 1998, 40. Noble, Peter. The Negro in Films. London: British Yearbooks, 1949. Null, Gary. Black Hollywood: The Black Performer in Motion Pictures. New York: Citadel, 1975.

O’Connor, Patrick. “Tap Happening.” Dance Magazine, August 1969, 40-42. Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1989. O’Neil, William L. Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s. Chicago: Quadrangle, IQ7I.

Phillips, Caryl. Dancing in the Dark. New York: Knopf, 2005. Pollak, Max. “Closing the Gap: A Conversation Guided by Max Pollak with Buster Brown and Roxane Semadini.” International Tap Association Newsletter 10, no. 1 (May—June 1999): 22-30. ———. “Interview with Tina Pratt.” Pts. 1 and 2. International Tap Association Newsletter 9, no. 6 (March-April 1999): 3-7; 10, no.1 (May-June 1999): 32-39. ———. “The Real Jimmy Slyde.” International Tap Association Newsletter (May-June 1997): 3-10. Pomerance, Alan. Repeal of the Blues: How Black Entertainers Influenced Civil Rights. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1988. Reiter, Susan. “Steps in Time: A Tap Dance Festival.” Dance News, March 1980, 1o. Rice, Edward LeRoy. Monarchs of Minstrelsy. New York: Kenny, r9g1t.

Richardson, Derk. “Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble.” Down Beat, 12 July 1979, 43-44. Richardson, James E. “Blame It on Jazz: King Fox Trot Joins the Immortals.” Dance, March 1927, 30-31, 51.

Riis, Thomas Lawrence. Black Musical Theatre in New York: 1890-1915. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1981. ———. Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theatre in New York, 1890 to 1915. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 1989. ———. More Than Just a Minstrel Show: The Rise of Black Musical Theatre at the Turn-of-the-Century.

Brooklyn: Institute of Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, 1992. Rose, Al. Eubie Blake. New York: Schirmer, 1979. Rose, Phyllis. Jazz Cleopatra. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Rourke, Constance. Troupers of the Gold Coast, or The Rise of Lotta Crabtree. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Rowland, Mabel. Bert Williams: Son of Laughter. New York: Negro University Press, 1923. Russell, Tom. “Bippidy-Boom-Shaga-Daga.” Connoisseur, November 1983, 57-59. Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1980. ———. The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1988. ———. Swingin’ on the Ether Waves: A Chronological History of African Americans in Radio and Television Broadcasting, 1925-1955. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2005. Schiffman, Jack. Uptown: The Story of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre. New York: Cowles, 1971.

398 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Schultz, Margie. Eleanor Powell: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Sennett, Ted. Hollywood Musicals. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Smith, Cecil A. Musical Comedy in America. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950. Smith, Eric Ledell. “Aida Overton Walker: Pioneer African American Dancer and Choreographer.” Sage 8, no. 2 (Fall 1914): 36-40. Smith, Kathryn Kari Anne. The Lancashire Clog Hornpipe Dance on the American Stage 1884-1940. PhD

diss., Boston University, 1996. Snyder, Matt. “Jazz/Tap Opera in New York.” 5/4 Magazine, August 1996. Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sommer, Sally. “A Big Hand for the Little Ladies.” Village Voice, 11 November 1986, ———. “Hearing Dance, Watching Film.” Dancescope 14, no. 3 (1980): 52-62. ———. “Million Dollar Feet.” Village Voice, 3 April 1984. ———. “Tap Roots: Fast Dancing in the Big City.” Village Voice, 19 March 1979. Southern, Ann. “Conversation with Eubie Blake: A Legend in His Own Lifetime.” Black Perspectives in Music 1 (1973): 50-59. Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. New York: Norton, 1971. Stearns, Marshall. “Is Jazz Dance Hopelessly Square?” Dance Magazine, June 1959, 30, 35. ———. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. “Frontiers of Humor: American Vernacular Dance.” Southern Folklore Quarterly (September 1966): 227-235. ———. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan, 1968. ———. “Vernacular Dance in Musical Comedy.” New York Folklore Quarterly 22, no. 4 (December 1966): 251-261. Stowe, David W. Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Stratemann, Dr. Klaus. Duke Ellington: Day by Day, Film by Film. Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1992. Stratyner, Barbara. “Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine, From Vaudeville to the Ziegfeld Follies.” Society of Dance History Scholars: Studies in Dance History 13 (1996): 1-13. Swisher, Viola Hegyi. “Southern California.” Dance Magazine, July 1979, 12. Szwed, John F., and Roger D. Abraham. Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography of Materials From North, Central, and South America and the West Indies. Pts. 1 and 2. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978. This Fabulous Century. Vol. 4: 1930-1940. New York: Time-Life, 1969. Thomas, Tony. That’s Dancing! New York: Harry Abrams, 1984. Thompson, Robert Farris. “An Aesthetic of the Cool.” African Arts 7, no. 1 (September 1983): 41-42,

64-67, 89-92. ———. African Art in Motion: Icon and Act. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. ———. “Dance and Culture, an Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance.” African Arts, September 1989, 41-67. Tobias, Tobi. “Dance.” New York Magazine, 30 March 1987. ———. “Dance.” New York Magazine, 22 February 1988. Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. ———. On With the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Van Dam, Theodore. “The Influence of the West African Song of Derision in the New World.” African Music 1 (1954): 53-50. Van Vechten, Carl. The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten. New York: Dance Horizons, 1974. ———. The Letters of Carl Van Vechten. Edited by Bruce Kellner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 399 ———. “The Negro Theatre.” In the Garrett. New York: Knopf, 1920. Wadsworth, David. “Bebop Hoofer Leon Collins Sang Melodies with His Feet.” International Tap Association Newsletter 8, no. 4 (November—December 1997): 3-5. Walker, Ada Overton. “Colored Men and Women on the American Stage.” Colored American Magazine, October 1905, 573. Wallace, Michelle. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Before and after the Jim Crow Era.” Drama Review 44, no. I (2000): 137-156. Wandersee, Winifred. On the Move: American Women in the 1970s. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Wasserman, Dorothy. “A Short History of Jazz Tap Festivals.” Attitude: The Dancers’ Magazine 7, no. 1 (September 1990): 21-25. Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. ———. Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Watrous, Peter. “The Man Who Defined Modern Jazz.” New York Times, 13 November 1988. Williams, Joseph J. Whence the Black Irish in Jamaica? New York: Dial, 1932. Williams, Martin. Jazz Heritage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. The Jazz Tradition. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Willis, Cheryl M. Tap Dance: Memories and Issues of African-American Women Who Performed between

1930-1950. PhD diss., Temple University, 1991. Witchell, Alex. “Black and Blues Brothers.” New York Magazine, 2 January 1989, 10. Woll, Allen. Black Musical Theatre: From ‘Coontown’ to ‘Dreamgirls.’” New York: DaCapo, 1989. Wood, Peter. “ ‘Gimme de Kneebone Bent’: African Body Language and the Evolution of American Dance Forms.” In The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, ed. Gerald E. Myers, 7-9.

American Dance Festival Program, 1988.

TAP DANCE ON FILM, TELEVISION, AND VIDEO Collections American Tap Dance Foundation, New York City. Black Film Center Archive at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. Ernie Smith Jazz Film Collection, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Museum of Television and Radio, New York City. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City.

Works About Tap. Television broadcast. Directed by George T. Nierenberg. New York. WNET, 9 February 1985. Introduced by Gregory Hines; with Steve Condos, Chuck Green, Jimmy Slyde. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. After Seben. Musical short. Directed by S. Jay Kaufman. Paramount Pictures, 27 May 1929. James Barton. The All-Colored Variety Show. Short subject musical film. Directed by Roy Mack. Vitaphone/Warner Brothers, 1935. In Great Hoofers and Flash Acts. A Cinema Apart: African-American Film Memorabilia 1920-1999. Nicholas Brothers, Adelaide Hall. American Landscape. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Brenda Bufalino, 1997. American Tap Dance Orchestra: Neil Applebaum, Brenda Bufalino, Sherry Eyster, Barbara Duffy, Andrea Goodman, Herve Le Goff, Margaret Morrison, Olivia Rosenkrantz, Tony Waag. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. American Musical Theatre. Television broadcasts. WCBS-TV, 25 January 1964 and 19 July 1964. John Bubbles. American Tap Dance Orchestra. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Brenda Bufalino, 4 July 1986. Statue of Liberty Festival, Battery Park, New York City. American Tap Dance Foundation.

400 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Neil Applebaum, Sharon Brophy, Barbara Duffy, Rod Ferrone, Russell Halley, Lynne Jassem, Margaret Morrison, Joe Orach, Tony Waag; vocalists Mimi Moyers, Pat Tortorici; guest artists Charles “Cookie” Cook, James Buster Brown, Tina Pratt. An American in Paris. Motion picture. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, choreographed by Gene Kelly. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1950. Gene Kelly. Anchors Aweigh. Motion picture. Directed by George Sidney, choreographed by George Sidney. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1945. Gene Kelly. Astaire Time. Television broadcast. NBC, 28 September 196o. Fred Astaire. Bamboozled. Motion picture. Directed by Spike Lee. New Line Cinema, 2000. Savion Glover, Dormeshia Sumbry, Cartier Williams, Baakari Wilder, Tyheeshia Collins, Jason Bernard. The Bandwagon. Motion picture. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1953. Fred Astaire, Matt Mattox. Been Rich All My Life. Videorecording. Directed by Heather MacDonald. New York: Toots Crackin Productions, 2005. Marion Coles, Bertye Lou Wood, Cleo Hayes, Elaine Ellis, Fay Ray. Belle of 14th Street. Television broadcast. CBS, 11 October 1967. John Bubbles. The Belle of New York. Motion picture. Directed by Charles Water. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952. Fred Astaire, Vera-Ellen.

Bell Telephone Hour. “The Song and Dance Man.” Television broadcast. NBC, 16 January 1966. Donald O’Connor, Nicholas Brothers. Big Broadcast of 1936. Motion picture. Directed by Michael Taurog. Paramount, 1935. Nicholas Brothers. Black and Blue. Videorecording. Directed by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli. Choreographed by Cholly Atkins, Henry LeTang, Frankie Manning, Fayard Nicholas. ABC Eyewitness News at the Minskoff Theatre, New York City, 10 May 1989. Savion Glover, Cyd Glover, Dormeshia Sumbry, Jimmy Slyde, Ralph Brown, Lon Chaney, Angela Hall, Eugene Fleming, and others. Black and Tan. Short subject musical film. Directed by Dudley Murphy, 1929. Duke Ellington and His Band. In Hollywood Rhythm: The Best of Jazz and Blues. KinoVideo, 2001.Cotton Club Girls; Five Dancing Blazers/Five Hot Shots; Fredi Washington. Boardinghouse Blues. Short subject musical film. Directed by Josh Binney. All-American News, 1948. In Great Hoofers and Flash Acts. A Cinema Apart, African-American Film Memorabilia 1920-1999. Stump and Stumpy (James “Stump” Cross and Harold “Stumpy” Cromer); Berry Brothers (Warren and Nyas). Bob Hope Christmas Special. Television broadcast. WNBC, 15 January 1965. John Bubbles. Born to Dance. Motion picture. Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936. Buddy Ebsen, Eleanor Powell, James Stuart. Broadway Melody of 1936. Motion picture. Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1935. Buddy Ebsen, Vilma Ebsen, Eleanor Powell. Broadway Melody of 1938. Motion picture. Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1937. Buddy Ebsen, George Murphy, Eleanor Powell. Broadway Melody of 1940. Motion picture. Directed by Norman Taurog. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1940. Fred Astaire, George Murphy, Eleanor Powell. By Word of Foot. Videorecording. Produced by Jane Goldberg and directed by Brenda Bufalino. Village Gate, New York City, 13-18 October 1980. Peg Leg Bates, Bunny Briggs, Buster Brown, Ernest “Brownie” Brown, John W. Bubbles, Honi Coles, Marion Coles, Leon Collins, Charles “Cookie” Cook, Leslie “Bubba” Gaines, Albert “Gip” Gibson, Alfredo Gustar, George Hillman, Gregory Hines, Fred Kelly, Mable Lee, and Sandman Sims. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. By Word of Foot II. Videorecording. Steve Condos and Panel: “But Can She Tap?” Produced by Changing Times Tap Dance Company. New York University, 3-4 December 1982. Jane Goldberg, Mable Lee,

Marion Coles, Bertye Lou Wood, Andrea Levine, Pamela Sommers, Clara Phoebe Hetherington, Dorothy Anderson, Brenda Bufalino, Amy Duncan, Sally Banes, Tina Pratt. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cabin in the Sky. Motion picture. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1943. Bill Bailey, John (William Sublett) Bubbles, Henry Phace Roberts.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 401 Café Metropole. Motion picture. Directed by Edward H. Griffith. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1937. Bill Robinson, Geneva Sawyer. Cakewalk: Historical Films. Five short films from the Historical Paper Print Collection in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress: Ballyhoo Cakewalk (1903), Cakewalk (1903), A Cakewalk on the Beach at Coney Island (1904), Comedy Cakewalk (1903), and Ragtime Cakewalk (1902). New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cantata and the Blues. Videorecording. Directed by Louise Tiranoff and choreographed by Brenda Bufalino, October 1985. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Celtic Feet. Video documentary. Directed and choreographed by Colin Dunne. Weinerworld Limited, 1996. Colin Dunne. Charlie’s Angels. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Jason Samuels Smith., music played by Charlie Parker. Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s Global Rhythms, 24 November 2007, Harris Theater, Chicago. Chloe Arnold, Ayodele Casel, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards. Charlie’s Angels. Videorecording. Choreographed by Jason Samuels Smith. In Tap Forward. Produced by Tap City, the New York City Tap Festival, presented by American Tap Dance Foundation. Performance at Duke on Forty-second Street Theatre, 13 July 2007. Chloe Arnold, Michelle Dorrance, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, Jason Samuels Smith. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Chasing a Rainbow: The Life of Josephine Baker. Television documentary. Directed by Christopher Ralling. United Kingdom: Channel Four Films, 1986. Josephine Baker, Dixie Steppers. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Chicken Shack Shuffle (1943) and The Cat Can’t Dance (1945). Soundie videorecording. In Great Hoofers and Flash Acts. A Cinema Apart, African-American Film Memorabilia 1920-1999. Mable Lee. Colleen. Motion picture. Directed by Alfred E. Green. Warner Brothers, 1936. Paul Draper, Ruby Keeler. A Concert of Sacred Music (“David Danced before the Lord”). Film recording of premier performance of Duke Ellington’s Concert of Sacred Music at Grace Cathedral Church, San Francisco, 16 September 1965. In Duke Ellington: Love You Madly. DVD. Jazz Casual Productions, 2005. Bunny Briggs. Concerto for Tap Dancer and Orchestra, Television broadcast. Music by Morton Gould (Morton Gould Tap Concerto). Recorded in performance at Symphony Hall, Boston. WNET, 17 September 1978. Noel Parenti. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Cookie’s Scrapbook. Video documentary. Produced and directed by Susan Goldbetter. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Circuit Productions, 1986. Charles Cookie Cook, James Buster Brown. The Cotton Club. Motion picture. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Zoetrope Studios, 1984. Gregory Hines, Maurice Hines; Charles Honi Coles, James Buster Brown, Ralph Brown, Harold Cromer, Bubba Gaines, George Hillman, Bernard Manners; Deborah Mitchell, Henry Phace Roberts, Sandman Sims, Jimmy Slyde, Henry LeTang, Charles Young, Skip Cunningham, Luther Fontaine, Jan Mickens. Cover Girl. Motion picture. Directed by Charles Vidor. Columbia, 1944. Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth. Crazy Feet. Video compilation. Edited and compiled by Ernie Smith, 1990. Ernie Smith Jazz Film Collection 1990. Dancing Darky Boy. Documentary kinetoscope. Produced by the Edison Manufacturing Co., August 1897. Black Film Center Archive. Dancing Is a Man’s Game. Television broadcast. Directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly. Omnibus, NBC, 21 December 1958. Gene Kelly. Museum of Television and Radio. Dancing Man: Peg Leg Bates. Film documentary. Directed by Dave Davidson. Hudson West Productions and South Carolina Television, distributed by PBS video, Alexandria, Virginia, 1992. Peg Leg Bates, Gregory Hines, Honi Coles, James Buster Brown, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green, Van Porter, Ted Levy. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Dean Martin Show. Television broadcast. WNBC, 30 September 1965. John Bubbles. Deep in My Heart. Motion picture. Directed by Stanley Donen. Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, 1954. Gene Kelly, Fred Kelly.

402 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Dimples. Motion picture. Directed by William A. Seiter, choreographed by Bill Robinson. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1936. Shirley Temple. Dixiana. Motion picture. Directed by Luther Reed, choreography by Pearl Easton and Bill Robinson. 1930.

Down Argentine Way. Motion picture. Directed by Irving Cummings, musical numbers staged by Nick Castle and Geneva Sawyer. Twentieth Century-Fox, 11 October 1940. Betty Grable, Nicholas Brothers. Easter Parade. Motion picture. Directed by Charles Waters, musical numbers staged by Robert Alton. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1948. Fred Astaire, Ann Miller, Jeni LeGon. Eddie Brown’s Scientific Rhythm. Video documentary. Produced and directed by Sharon Arslanian. Northampton, Mass., 1990. The Ed Sullivan Show. Television broadcast. CBS, 13 March 1955. Peg Leg Bates, Hal Leroy. Museum of Television and Radio.

Fascinatin’ Rhythms. Video compilation. Edited and compiled by Ernie Smith. New York: Ernie Smith Black Dance Films, 1986. Flying Down to Rio. Motion picture. Directed by Thornton Freeland. RKO, 1933. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. Follow the Fleet. Motion picture. Directed by Mark Sandrich. RKO, 1936. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. Footlight Parade. Motion picture. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Warner Brothers, 1933. James Cagney, Ruby Keeler. For Me and My Gal. Motion picture. Directed by Busby Berkeley. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1943. Judy Garland, Gene Kelly. Forty-second Street. Motion picture. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, choreography by Busby Berkeley. Warner Brothers, 1933. Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers. The Fred Astaire Show. Television broadcast. NBC, '7 February 1968. Museum of Television and Radio. Fred Astaire. Funny Face. Motion picture. Directed by Stanley Donen with choreography by Eugene Loring and Fred Astaire. Paramount Pictures, 1957. Fred Astaire. Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer. Video documentary, American Masters. WNET, 3 March 2002. Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Fred Kelly, Fred Astaire, Fayard Nicholas, Ann Miller. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Gertrude’s Nose. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Brenda Bufalino. Performance by the American Tap DanceOrchestra at Dance Theater Workshop’s Bessie Schénberg Theater, New York, June 1996. Guillem Alonso, Sherry Eyster, Andrea Goodman, Margaret Morrison, Olivia Rosenkrantz, Declan Winstanley, Tony Waag; Anke Frohlich, Ayodele Casel, Susan Hebach, Artis Mooney, Isabel Moros. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Gold Diggers of 1935. Motion picture. Directed by Busby Berkeley. Warner Brothers, 1935. King, King and King.

Grammy Awards (39th Annual). Television broadcast. CBS, 27 February 1997. Colin Dunn, Savion Glover; casts of Bring In ’Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk and Riverdance. Great Feats of Feet. Videotape. Directed, written, and narrated by Brenda Bufalino. Produced by Brenda Bufalino and the Dancing Theatre. New Paltz, N.Y., 1977. The Copasetics. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Great Performances: Tap Dance in America. Television broadcast. PBS, March 1989. Gregory Hines, Hinton Battle, Gregg Burge, American Tap Dance Orchestra, Manhattan Tap, LaVaughan Robinson, Savion Glover, Sandman Sims, Tommy Tune, Dianne Walker, Jenny Lane, Camden Richman, and others.

Happy Feet. Motion picture. Directed by George Miller and Warren Coleman. Warner Brothers, 2006. Savion Glover.

Harlem Is Heaven. Motion picture. Directed by Irwin Franklyn. Herald Pictures, 1932. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Hearts in Dixie. Motion picture. Directed by Paul Soane. Fox Film Corporation, 1929. Stepin Fetchit.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 403 Hi De Ho. Musical short film. Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. Directed by Josh Binney. All American, 1947. Miller Brothers and Lois; Jeni LeGon. Hooray for Love. Motion picture. Directed by Walter Lang. RKO, 1935. Jeni LeGon, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. It’s Always Fair Weather. Motion picture. Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955. Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey. Jackie Gleason American Scene, 1962. Video compilation. Directed by Seymour Robbie. Goodtimes Home Video, 1986. The Jackie Gleason Show. Television broadcast. CBS, 20 September 1952. Jackie Gleason, June Taylor Dancers. Jazz Tap Ensemble U.S.A. Videotape. Directed by Lynn Dally. Dance Horizons Video, 1998. Jazz Tap Percussion Ensemble. Videorecording. Choreography by Lynn Dally, Camden Richman, and Fred Strickler. Videotaped at the American Theatre Laboratory, New York City, 7 December 1979 by Dennis Diamond. Dancers Lynn Dally, Camden Richman, and Fred Strickler; musicians Paul Arslanian, Tom Dannenberg, and Keith Terry. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Jelly’s Last Jam. Videorecording. Directed by George C. Wolfe, tap choreography by Gregory Hines and Ted L. Levy; music by Jelly Roll Morton. Videotaped by the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the Virginia Theatre, New York City, 28 April 1993. Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, Stanley Wayne Mathis, Cee Cee Harshaw, Ted L. Levy, and others. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Jeni LeGon: Living in a Great Big Way. Video documentary. Directed by Grant Greschuk. National Film Board of Canada, 2005. Jeni LeGon. Jerry Ames Tap Dance Company. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Ames. Videotaped in performance by Johannes Holub at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre, New York City, 8 September 1976 and 12 September 1976. Jerry Ames Tap Dance Company: Jerry Ames, Kathy Burke, Gary McKay, Cinda Mast, David Finch, and Sunny Summers. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Jerry Lewis Show. Television broadcast. NBC, 16 November 1963. John Bubbles. Museum of Television and Radio. Johnny Carson Show. Television broadcasts. NBC, 31 December 1962; 30 August 1965; 11 September 1965; 12 February 1966. John Bubbles. Museum of Television and Radio. Just around the Corner. Motion picture. Directed by Irving Cummings. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1938. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Shirley Temple. Kid Millions. Motion picture. Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Samuel Goldwyn, 1934. George Murphy, Nicholas Brothers. King for a Day. Short subject musical film. Directed by Roy Mack. Warner Brothers, 30 June 1934. In Great Hoofers and Flash Acts. A Cinema Apart: African-American Film Memorabilia 1920-1999. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Kiss Me Kate. Motion picture. Directed by George Sidney, choreographed by Hermes Pan and Bob Fosse. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1953. Ann Miller, Bob Fosse. Lady Be Good. Motion picture. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod, choreography by Eleanor Powell. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1941. Eleanor Powell. Leonard Reed’s Shim Sham Shimmy. Video documentary. Directed by Rusty E. Frank. Los Angeles: On Tap! Productions, 2004. Let’s Scuffle (1934). Short subject musical film. In Great Hoofers and Flash Acts. A Cinema Apart: African-American Film Memorabilia 1920-1999. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The Little Colonel. Motion picture. Directed by David Butler. Fox Films, 1935. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Shirley Temple. Little Miss Broadway. Motion picture. Directed by Irving Cummings. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1938. George Murphy, Shirley Temple. The Littlest Rebel. 1935. Motion picture. Directed by David Butler. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1935. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Shirley Temple.

404 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Look for the Silver Lining. Motion picture. Directed by David Butler. Warner Brothers, 1949. Ray Bolger. Masters of Tap. Television broadcast. Directed by Jolyon Wimhurst. Filmed at London’s Riverside

Studios. BBC, 1983. Honi Coles, Chuck Green, and Will Gaines. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Milt and Honi. Video documentary. Directed by Louis Tiranoff. Filmed in rehearsal by Louise Tiranoff Productions for the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Dance Collection, 18 June 1985, Pace University, New York City. Brenda Bufalino, Honi Coles. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The Milton Berle Show. Television broadcast. NBC, 18 November 1955. Sammy Davis Jr. and Will Mastin Trio. Museum of Television and Radio.

Moon over Miami. Motion picture. Directed by Walter Lang. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1941. Condos Brothers, Betty Grable. My Sister Eileen. Motion picture. Directed by Richard Quine, choreographed by Robert Fosse. Columbia Pictures, 1955. Bob Fosse, Tommy Raal. New Faces of 1937. Motion picture. Directed by Leigh Jason. Edward Small Productions, 1937. Ann Miller, Three Chocolateers. Nicholas Brothers: We Sing and We Dance. Film documentary. Directed by Chris Baker. New York: Picture

Musical International, 1992. No Maps on My Taps. Film documentary. Produced and directed by George T. Nierenberg. Direct Cinema Limited, 1979. Bunny Briggs, Chuck Green, Sandman Sims. On Your Toes. Motion picture. Directed by Ray Enright, dance direction by George Balanchine. Warner Brothers, 1939. Donald O’Connor. Orchestra Wives. Motion picture. Directed by Archie Mayo. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1942. Nicholas Brothers. Over the Top to Bebop. Television broadcast. WCBS, 3 January 1965. Directed by Nick Havinga. Hosted

by James Mcandrew with commentary by Marshall Stearns. Cholly Atkins, Honi Coles. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Over the Top with Bebop. Television broadcast. WCBS, 1964. Narrated by Marshall Stearns, with Charles Honi Coles, Charles Cholly Atkins. Pardon My Sarong. Motion picture. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal, 1942. Tip, Tap and Toe. Paul Draper on Tap. Videorecording. WGBH, 1979. Produced and directed by Roger Englander. Paul Draper. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Pickaninny Dance from The Passing Show, or The Pickaninnies. Kinetoscope. Directed by Thomas Edison and shot by William Heise, Black Maria Studio, West Orange, New Jersey, 6 October 1894. Black Film Center/Archive of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Pie, Pie, Blackbird. Short subject musical film. Eubie Blake and His Band. Vitaphone/Warner Brothers, 1932. In Great Hoofers and Flash Acts. A Cinema Apart, African-American Film Memorabilia 1920-1999. Nicholas Brothers, Adelaide Hall. Pin-Up Girl. Motion picture. Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1944. Condos Brothers, Betty Grable. Plenty of Good Woman Dancers: African American Women Hoofers from Philadelphia. Video documentary. Directed by Germaine Ingram, Deborah Kodish, and Barry Dornfeld. Philadelphia Folklore Project, 1997/2004. Edith “Baby” Edwards Hunt, Libby Spencer, and Hortense Allen Jordan, with LaVaughan Robinson, Germaine Ingram, Delores and Dave McHaris, KittyDeChavis, Isabelle Fambro, and the cast of “Stepping in Time”; with historic footage of Jeni Legon, Cora LaRedd, Dottie Saulters, Juanita Pitts, the Millers Brothers and Lois, Four Covans. PM East, PM West. Television broadcast. ABC, 1 March 1962. John Bubbles. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Motion picture. Directed by Allan Dwan. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1938. Dixie Dunbar, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Shirley Temple. Reveille With Beverly. Motion picture. Directed by Charles Barton. Columbia, 1943. Ann Miller. Riverdance—The New Show. Motion picture. Directed by John McColgan. Columbia TriStar, 1996. Colin Dunne, Jean Butler, Tarik Winston, Daniel B. Wooten.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 405 Roberta. Motion picture. Directed by William Seiter. Warner Brothers, 1935. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. Robin and the Seven Hoods. Motion picture. Directed by Gordon Douglas. Warner Brothers, 1964. Sammy Davis Jr. Royal Wedding. Motion picture. Directed by Stanley Donen. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1951. Fred Astaire. Rufus Jones for President. Vitaphone. Directed by Roy Mack, 1933. Sammy Davis Jr. Savion Glover’s Nu York. Television broadcast. Directed by Jim Gable. ABC, 3 January 1998. Savion Glover, Ayodele Casel, Omar Edwards, Ted Levy, and Not Your Ordinary Tappers. The Seven Little Foys. Motion picture. Directed by Melville Shavelson. Paramount, 1955. James Cagney, Bob Hope. Ship Ahoy. Motion picture. Directed by Edmond Buzzell. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1942. Eleanor Powell, Stump and Stumpy. Silk Stockings. Motion picture. Directed by Reuben Mamoulian. Arthur Freed Productions, 1957. Fred Astaire. Singin’ in the Rain. Motion picture. Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952. Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly. Singing, Swinging, and Winging. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Brenda Bufalino. Videotaped performance by Johannes Holub at the Delacorte Theater, New York, 11 September 1978, as part of the New York Dance Festival. Brenda Bufalino, Honi Coles, Ging Kroner, Pat Giordano. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Six Hits and a Miss. Motion picture. Directed by Jean Negulesco. Warner Brothers, 1942. Paul Draper, Ruby Keeler.

Sole Sisters. Videorecording. Produced by Jane Goldberg’s Changing Times Tap Dancing Company, directed by Constance Valis Hill. Recorded at Greenwich House, New York City, June 1985. Jane Goldberg, Sarah Safford, Beverly Wasser, Brenda Bufalino, Harriet Browne, Marion Coles, Mable Lee, Josephine McNamara. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Songs Unwritten: A Tap Dancer Remembered. Video documentary. Written, produced, and directed by David Wadsworth. Boston, 1989. Leon Collins; Clara “CB” Hetherington, Pamela Raff, Dianne Walker, Jane Goldberg, Brenda Bufalino. St. Louis Blues. Short subject musical. Directed by Dudley Murphy. 1929. In Hollywood Rhythm: The Best of Jazz and Blues. Kino Video, 2001. Jimmy Mordecai. Stage Door Canteen. Motion picture. Directed by Frank Borzage. Sol Lesser Productions, 1944. Ray Bolger.

Stand Up and Cheer. Motion picture. Directed by Hamilton McFadden. Fox Films, 1934. James Dunn, Shirley Temple. Steve Allen Variety Show. Television broadcast. WPIX, 12 October 1964. John Bubbles. Museum of Television and Radio.

Steve Condos Tap Dance Workout. Videotape. Produced by the Performers Workshop, 1989. Stomp Out Loud. Television broadcast. Directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNichols. WAMO, 1997. Stormy Weather. Motion picture. Directed by Andrew Stone, musical numbers staged by Nick Castle. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1943. Nicholas Brothers, Taps Miller, Henry Phace Roberts, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Summer Stock. Motion picture. Directed by Charles Walters. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1950. Judy Garland, Gene Kelly.

Sun Valley Serenade. Motion picture. Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1941. Nicholas Brothers. Swing Time. Motion picture. Directed by George Stevens. RKO, 1936. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. Short subject musical. Directed by Fred Waller, music by Duke Ellington. Paramount Pictures, 1935. Berry Brothers, Bessie Dudley. Tap. Motion picture. Directed by Nick Castle Jr., choreographed by Henry LeTang. Hoofer Films/ Tri-Star, 1988. Bunny Briggs, Steve Condos, Sammy Davis Jr., Arthur Duncan, Savion Glover, Jane Goldberg, Gregory Hines, Frances Nealy, Nicholas Brothers, Sandman Sims, Jimmy Slyde, Dianne Walker, Dorothy Wasserman.

406 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY The Tap Dance Kid. Videorecording. Directed by Vivian Matalon, choreography and musical staging by Danny Daniels. Videotaped at the Minskoff Theatre, New York City, 1985. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Tapdancin’. Documentary film. Directed by Christian Blackwood. Blackwood Films, 1980. Phil Black; Copasetics; Third Generation Step; Maceo Anderson, John Bubbles, Buck and Bubbles, Nicholas Brothers; Four Step Brothers; Camden Richman; Honi Coles, Cholly Atkins; Tap Jazz Percussion Ensemble, Tommy Tune, Jerry Ames, Lon Chaney. Ernie Smith Jazz Film Collection. Tap Dogs. Videorecording. Designed and directed by Nigel Trifitt, choreographed by Dein Perry. Back Row Productions, 1997. Tapestry. Videorecording. Performance at Schmidt Gallery, New York City, 1980, of the American Tap Dance Foundation. Brenda Bufalino.

Tap Happening. Videorecording. Excerpts from a performance at the Bert Wheeler Theatre in the Hotel Dixie, 12 May 1969. Filmed for the Lena Robbins Film Archive under the supervision of Leticia Jay. Chuck Green, Raymond Kaalund, Sandman Sims, Derby Wilson, Lon Chaney, Jerry Ames, Jimmy Slyde, and Bert Gibson. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. Tap Heat. Short subject musical film. Written and directed by Dean Hargrove, choreographed by Danny Daniels. Tap Heat Productions, 2003. Arthur Duncan, Jason Samuels Smith; Chloe Arnold, Chantall Heath, John Kloss, Jason Rodgers, Melinda Sullivan, Joseph Wiggan, Mike Wittmers. Tap-In: One Fabulous Night of Tap Choreography. Videorecording. Produced by Town Hall and the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day, 19 March 1979. Peggy Spina, Deborah

Mitchell, Gloria Jean Cuming, Anita Feldman, Harold Nicholas, Brenda Bufalino, Gene Medler, Omar Edwards. Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance. That’s Dancing! Motion picture. Directed by Jack Haley Jr. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists, 1985. That’s Entertainment. Motion picture. Directed by Jack Haley Jr. Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer, 1974. That’s Entertainment, Part II. Motion picture. Directed by Gene Kelly. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976. That’s Entertainment III. Motion picture. Directed by Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1994. That’s the Spirit. Musical short. Directed by Roy Mack. Warner Brothers, 1933. Cora LaRedd. This Is the Army. Motion picture. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Brothers, 1943. Harold Cromer, George Murphy. Thousands Cheer. Motion picture. Directed by George Sidney. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1944. Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eleanor Powell. Top Hat. Motion picture. Directed by Mark Sandrick. RKO, 1935. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers. Touch, Turn, Return. Videorecording. Directed and choreographed by Brenda Bufalino. American Tap Dance Orchestra, 4 May 1989. American Tap Dance Foundation. Two Takes on Tap: Choreographers Brenda Bufalino and Lynn Dally. Video documentary. Produced and directed by Sharon Arslanian, 1993. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Silent film. Directed by Edwin S. Porter. Edison Manufacturing Co., 1903. Varsity Show. Motion picture. Directed by William Keighly. Warner Brothers, 1937. Buck and Bubbles. Wake Up and Live. Motion picture. Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Twentieth Century-Fox, 1937. Condos Brothers. West Point Story. Motion picture. Directed by Roy Del Ruth. Warner Brothers, 1950. James Cagney Gene Nelson. White Nights. Motion picture. Directed by Taylor Hackford, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. Columbia Pictures, 1985. Gregory Hines. Words and Music. Motion picture. Directed by Norman Taurog. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1948. Vera-Ellen, Gene Kelly.

World Irish Dancing Championships. Oireachtas Rince Na Cruinne. Videorecording. Written and directed by Olive Hardy. Dublin, Ireland: Trend Studios, 1994. Yankee Doodle Dandy. Motion picture. Directed by Michael Curtiz, with James Cagney’s dances choreographed by Johnny Boyle. Warner Brothers, 1942. James Cagney.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 407 Ziegfeld Follies. Motion picture. Directed by Lemuel Ayers, Roy Del Ruth. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936. Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly.

INTERVIEWS Alexander, Lane. Interview by author, 4 August 2006, Chicago; telephone conversation with author, 30 June 2009. Arnold, Chloe. Interviews by author, 10 July 2007, 14 July 2007, New York City. Bates, Clayton Peg Leg. Interview by author, 22 May 1992, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Briggs, Bunny. Interviews by author, 4-6 February 2007, Las Vegas. Browne, Harriet. Interviews by author, 3 February 1996, 12 February 1996, New York City. Brown, James Buster. Interview by author, 28 May 1990, Boston. Bufalino, Brenda. Interview by author, 4-6 February 2007, Las Vegas. Butterfly, Roxane Semadini. Telephone conversation with author, 12 December 2005. Callaway (Williams), Karen. Interview by author, 13 July 2007, New York City. Casel, Ayodele. Interview by author, 10 July 2007, New York City; telephone interview with author, 15 September 2007.

Coles, Charles Honi. Telephone interview by author, 29 March 1991. Coles, Marion. Telephone interview by author, 13 June 1996. Cromer, Harold. Interviews by author, 15 November 2000; 8 January 2007, New York City. Cullinane, John. Interview by author, 30 June 2003, Cork, Ireland. Dally, Lynn. Interviews by author, 6 June 1991, Los Angeles; 4 August 2006, Chicago. Das, Chitresh. Interview by author, 25 November 2007, Albany, N.Y. Dorrance, Michelle. Telephone interview with author, 1 June 2008. Duffy, Barbara. Interview by author, 4 February 2008. Edwards, Omar. Telephone interview with author, 29 May 2008. Ellington, Mercedes. Telephone interview by author, 15 April 2007. Glover, Savion. Interview by author, 1 June 1990, Boston. Goldberg, Jane. Interview by author, 1o November 2007, New York City. Grant, Derick K. Interview by author, 6 August 2006, Chicago. Green, Chuck. Interview by author, 25 May 1991, New York City. Hines, Gregory. Telephone interview by author, 15 June 1991; interview by author, 8 April 1994, Los Angeles. Hines, Gregory. Interview by Bruce Goldstein, produced by Rigmor Newman, New York, 15 April 1991;

transcript, Picture Musical International, New York. Lerman, Michela Marino. Interview by author, 14 May 2008, New York City. Levy, Ted L. Interview by author, 23 June 2009, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Morrison, Margaret. Interview by author, 9 July 2007, New York City. Nicholas, Fayard. Telephone interviews by author, 4 April 1993, 8 April 1993, 8 April 1995, 17 April 1995, 8 July 1995, 22 October 1995, 20 January 1996, 2 July 1996, 24 March 1997, 18 May 1997, 7 June 1997, 14 June 1997, 14 September 1997. Nicholas, Fayard, and Harold Nicholas. Public interview by author. “An Evening with the Nicholas Brothers.” 16 April 1996, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Videorecording. Nicholas, Harold. Public interview by author, 19 April 1993, “Rethinking the Balanchine Legacy: Balanchine, Jazz and Popular Dance.” Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, New York. Videorecording, Dance Collection, Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Nicholas, Harold. Interviews by author, 1 December 1995, 30 June 1996, 21 May 1997, New York City. Nicholas, Rigmor Newman. Telephone interview by author, 9 April 2007. O Neactain, Seosamh. Interviews by author, 15 June 2006, Galway, Ireland; 23 March 2007, New York City.

Raff, Pamela. Telephone interview by author, April 2007; interview by author, 11 July 2008. Reed, Leonard. Interview by Bruce Goldstein and Rigmor Newman, 1991. Transcript, Picture Musical International, New York.

408 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Robinson, LaVaughan. Interview by author, 27 June 2002, Philadelphia. Rosenkrantz, Olivia. Telephone interview by author, 15 May 2008. Rowe, Norman. Interview by author, 6 June 1991, Albany, N.Y. Safford, Sarah. Interviews by author, 26 July 2004; 15 August 2005, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Samuels, Sue. Telephone conversation with author, 19 May 2008. Slyde, Jimmy. Interviews by author, 4-6 February 2007, Las Vegas. Smith, Ernie. Interview by author, 15 August 1995, Bolton Landing, N.Y. Smith, Hank. Conversation with author, 15 April 2006, New York City. Smith, Jason Samuels. Interviews by author, 1 July 2004, Durham, N.C.; 24 November 2007, Albany, N.Y.; 7 June 2009, New York City. Sohl-Donnell Ellison, Linda. Interview by author, 10 July 2006, New York City. Sommer, Sally. Telephone interview by author, 5 March 1994; interview by author, 7 February 1997, New York City.

Sumbry Edwards, Dormeshia. Interview by author, 21 March 2007, New York City. Spina, Peggy. Telephone interviews by author, 28 January 2008, 16 June 2009. Waag, Tony. Interview by author, 6 February 2007; telephone conversation with author, 8 May 2008; conversation with author, 18 April 2008, New York City. Walker, Dianne. Interviews by author, 8-9 November 2007, New York City. Walker, Dianne, Deborah Mitchell, and Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards. Public interview by author, 9 February 2008, Los Angeles. Wasserman, Dorothy Anderson. Telephone conversation with author, 9 December 2007. Wiggan, Joseph. Telephone interview by author, 26 November 2007. Wilder, Baakari. Interview by author, 9 July 2007, New York City; telephone interview by author, 13 April 2008.

Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations.

A William Lapinadoat: Abrahams, Roger, 16-17

accelerando, 81 Bill Robi ee aee ACGI (Anybody Can Get It), 330 Depa igee emar

minstrels, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16

Acocella, Joan, 329, 332-333 Adams’ Alley, The (TV), 179

satire, 13-19

sean-nos, IO-II, 49, 149,

Adamson, Monie, 269 : 345-340 After the Dance (film), 151

ae Ailey, Alvin, 225 Adler, Larry, 190 , African Americans wee

air steps, 48, 134

Airthirne the Importunate, 14

renin and, 25 Albie, Edward F., 55, 57

siti rE Onay, Alchire, Helen, 265

pores 183-184 (see also Afro-Irish Aldredge, Charon, 303

oe) Alexander, Lane, 298-299

modernist) and, 88-90 Alexandra (queen), 38

in New York, 25 Alfred Desio Zapped 1920s performances, 89 Taps, 289

performers, 47, 48-49 All Blues (Dally), 267

white theater and, 47 Allen, Debbie, 327

women activists, 39 Allen, Sarita, 225

women dance teams, 104-105 Alliger, Jeremy, 292, 298

women soloists, 58, 60 Alter, Stewart, 239

See also blacks “Alter Ego” (dance), 154 Africans, 5-6, 13-19 Alton, Robert, 142, 153

Afro-lrish fusions Alvarez, Anita, 170

clog and hornpipe, 6-7 Alvienne, Claude, 113 Ethiopian delineators, 8-10 amazons, 50-52 gioube, 5-6, 12, 15-16, AM+Bu$h+ED, 348

221, 3A Amendologine, Ann, 262

history, 5 American Bandstand (TV), 209

Irish dancing masters, 8-10 American Dance Festival jigging, 6 (Duke University), 239 409

410 INDEX American Dance Machine, The (revue), 247 Asanga, Swami Deva, 269

American in Paris, An (film), 184 Ashcroft, John, 333 American Landscape, 297, 339 Astaire, Adele, 113 American Minstrels of 1947 (TV), 179 Astaire, Fred American Musical Theatre (TV), 207-208 in The Belle of New York, 194 American Musical Theatre Revue (TV), 207 birth and early years, 113

American Notes (Dickens), 17 in blackface, 129 American Tap Dance Orchestra, 264, 265, 278, in Broadway Melody of 1940, 129-131, 151-152

288, 296-297, 358 Cyd Charisse and, 194

Ames, Jerry as drummer, 216

awards, 301 in Easter Parade, 125, 142 The Book of Tap, 4 in Funny Face, 194 early years, 222 in Girl Crazy, 139

Tap Dance Company, 222 on “Jumpin’ Jive,” 137

Tap Happening: The Hoofers and, 222 Gene Kelly and, 154-155 Tap Happenings and, 212, 213, 213, 214 George Murphy and, 151-152

Anawalt, Sasha, 270 musicals, 113 Anchor’s Aweigh (film), 154 Pan and, 116

Anderson, Dorothy. See Wasserman, Dorothy partners of, 116

Anderson Eleanor Powell and, 130

Anderson, Eddie “Rochester,” 200 Jane Powell and, 194

Anderson, Jack, 272, 303, 333 Ginger Rogers and, 113-116, 114, 117, 155-156

Anderson, Jervis, 53 in Royal Wedding, 193 Anderson, Maceo, 97, 135, 299, 300 in Top Hat, 112, 115

Anderson, Marian, 166 in Ziegfeld Follies, 154-155 Andrea Levine Jazz Tap, 288 At Home Abroad (musical), 125

Angel Face (musical), 56 “At the Ball” (dance), 45, 47

Angelou, Maya, 360 Atkins, Charles “Cholly”

Animal Crackers (musical), 116 at Apollo Theater, 103

Anita Feldman Tap, 288 awards and acknowledgments, 300, 330

Anuna (choral group), 304 birth and early years, 210

Anybody Can Get It (ACGI), 330 on Broadway, 170 Anything Goes (film), 180 choreography, 163, 210-211, 247, 285, 286 Anything Goes (musical), 151, 247 Class Act, 99

apo (festival), 15 Honi Coles and, 161-163, 162 108, 145 at Newport Jazz Festival, 201, 202, 203, 220 Apollo Theater, 102-104 Saulters and, 178-179 Aponte, Wilson, 315 soft-shoe and, 162 Apollo “Number One” Chorus Line, 107-110, Copasetics and, 167, 168

Appalachian Clog Dancing, 7, 22 style of, 161

Appalachian Spring (Graham), 153 television performances, 179 Applebaum, Neil, 262, 264, 278, 297 See also Coles and Atkins

Aquashow, 171 Atkinson, Brooks, 89 Arlen, Harold, 136 Audy, Bob, 301

Armstrong, Louis, 182, 188 Austin, Mary, 89

Arnette, Mai, 281 Austin on Tap, 289, 355 Arnold, Chloe, 318, 322-324, 323, 326-327, 360 Avedon, Richard, 194, 329 Arnold, Maud, 329 Ayo! (concert), 315-316 Arroyo, Devin, 348

Arslanian, Paul, 242, 242, 243, 244, 265 B Art of Stage Dancing, The (Wayburn), 81-82, 83 “Baby” Laurence/Dance Master (LP), 201, 202

Artists and Models (musical), 143 Bach, Jean, 301

INDEX All

“Bach Dances” (Hess), 242 speed of, 81

back tap, 82 Basil, Toni, 209

Bacon, Lloyd, 117 Bassing, Judy, 317

Bailey, Bill, 98, 175, 179 Bates, Clayton “Peg Leg”

Bailey, Buster, 93 awards, 300

Bailey, Pearl, 203 birth and early years, 186-187 Baker, Chris, 326 By Word of Foot and, 250 Baker, Josephine, 72, 73-74 challenge dances, 187 Balanchine, George, 4-5, 14.9, 153, 156, 351 Chaney and, 187

Baldwin, A. E., 74 Copasetics and, 167, 168 Balletap USA, 288 Hal LeRoy and, 164-165 Balliett, Whitney Peg Leg Country Club, 187 on Briggs, 205-206 photograph of, 187 on Concert of Sacred Music, 205 in Tappin’ Uptown, 256

on Chuck Green, 220, 249 television appearances, 179, 187, 207

on Hoofers’ Challenges, 218 tributes to, 361 on jazz tap dance, 201 Battle, Hinton, 247, 258, 278 on Laurence, 200, 219 Baxter, Warner, 118 on Newport Jazz Festival, 199, 201-202 Bay Mo Dilo (Tamango), 342, 346

ballin’ the jack, 47 Bayes, Nora, 50, 56

“ball-room bijou and art of dancing,... with rules | Beaman, Irving “Peaches,” 101, 112. See also Pete,

for polite behaviour, The” (pocket guide), 7 Peaches, and Duke

Bambalina (dance), 80 Beardon, Romare, 170 Band Wagon, The (film), 194 Beatty, Talley, 233

Band Wagon, The (musical), 113 Beauteez ’n the Beat, 303 “Bandanna Days” (song-and-dance), 70, 83 bebop, 158-159, 160, 173-174

Bandanna Land (musical), 39-40 Becker, Belinda, 342

Bander, Maurice, 344 Bedford, John, 301

Banerjee, Abhijit, 342 Been Rich All My Life (film), 107 Banerjee, Swapnamoy, 342 “Begin the Beguine” (song-and-dance), 130-131,

Banes, Sally, 254-256 T75s 177

Banks, Ristina, 107, 109 Behind the China Dogs (ballet), 324-325

Bantam Twist (dance), 79 Belfer, Hal, 209

Barbara Duffy and Company, 357 Bell Telephone Hour (TV), 208 “Barbary Coast, The” (dance), 40 Belle of New York, The (film), 194

Bardu, Jean-Claude, 342 Bennet, Pop, 56

Barkleys of Broadway (film), 113 Bennett, Frank, 26 Barnes, Clive, 222, 223, 225, 351 Bergamo, John, 271

Barnes, Johnny, 178 Berkeley, Busby

Barnes, Mae, 74 choreography, 86, 118, 119-120, 145-146, Barrasso, F. A., 57 225 Barrett, Brill, 335 Forty-second Street director, 117, 247

Barrymore, Lionel, 122 Keeler and, 119 Barton, Earl, 207 No, No Nanette director, 223

Barton, James, 18, 55, 66, 67, 76-77 Berle, Milton, 179

Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 275 Berlin, Irving, 142

Basie, Catherine, Go Berlin Jazz Festival, 178 Basie, Count, 141, 171 Bernstein, Ira, 278, 289 Basie, Earl “Groundhog” Bernstein, Leonard, 168 in Caldonia Revue, 217 Berres, Mark, 270-271 as chorus dancer, 60 Berry, Ananias, 91, 92 Chuck Green and, 1, 14, 198-199, 220 Berry, Jimmy, 91, 92

412 INDEX

Berry, Warren, 91, 92 as pickaninnies, 56-57 Berry Brothers, 91, 92, 111 stereotypes, 41, 71, 73, 98-99, 138, 311

Best, Willie, 122 vaudeville and, 57, 62-63

Best Foot Forward (musical), 153, 192 See also African Americans Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The (musical),225 | Blackwood, Christian, 220-221

big bands, 163, 169 Blake, James Herbert “Eubie,” 20-21, 69, 70-71, “Big Hand for the Little Ladies, A” (Sommer), 260 75; 100; 225

Biggest Show of 1951, 170-171 Blakey, Art, 212

Bijou Theater, 49 Bloch dancewear, 330 Billion Dollar Baby (musical), 192, 193 Blue, Jack, 117 Billman, Larry, 139 Blue Note (club), 262 Billy Pierce Dance Studio, 85-86 Blues That Ain’t, The (TV), 225

Bingham, Vincent, 309, 310, 320 Bogle, Donald, 99, 122

Birdwell, Clara, 141 Bolger, Ray, 66, 149-150, 150, 156, 207 Black, Paul, 167, 168, 256 Book of Tap, The (Ames & Siegelman), 4

Black, Phil, 300 Booker, Calvin, 348 Black and Blue (musical), 247, 285-288, 307, 313, Boom, 357

320, 328 Boothe, Frederick J., 286

Black and Blue (revue), 284-285 bop, 158-159, 160, 173-174

Black and Tan (film), 94 Bordman, Gerald, 33, 83 “Black, Black Bottom of the Swanee River, The” Born to Dance (film), 128-129

(Caspary), 77-78 Borne, Hal, 116

Black Bottom (dance), 77-78 Boston Dance Umbrella’s Jazz Tap Festival

Black Broadway (revue), 247 (1990), 298

Black Manhattan (J. W. Johnson), 49 Boyd, Julianne, 225

black musicals, 69 Boyle, Johnny, 127, 148, 151 Black Patti Foundation, 299-300 Boysson, Jean de “Naj,” 342

Blackberries Revue of 1929, 92 Bradford, Perry, 92

Blackbirds (revue), 107 Bradley, Alexandria, 332 Blackbirds of 1928 (musical), 64-65, 88-89, 91, Bradley, Ali, 329

207, 208 Bradley, Clarence “Buddy,” 77-78, 80, 86, 86, 226 Blackbirds of 1929 and 1930 (musical), 91 Bradley, Jimmy, 54

blackface Braff, Ruby, 212

Fred Astaire and, 129 Branker, Roy, 167, 168 James Barton and, 76 Brantley, Ben, 311

blacks and, 47 Braud, Wellman, 95 Ethiopian delineators and, 8 Braun, Chris, 239 Grable and, 139 Bray, Debra, 289

Kersands and, 18 “Break the Floor,” 336 Aubrey Lyles and, 72 breakaway, 134 Flournoy Miller and, 72 breakdown dances, 6

minstrels, 9, 11, 12 Brecher, Leo, 102 Octoroons and, 35 Bremer, Lucille, 116 Eleanor Powell and, 129 Briggs, Bunny

Primrose and, 61 at Apollo Theater, 102-103 Geneva Sawyer and, 126 awards and acknowledgments, 301, 312, 330

in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 24 Balliett on, 205-206

Blackouts (revue), 187 birth and early years, 204

blacks in Black and Blue, 284, 286 blackface and, 47 as chorus dancer, 60

in movies, 98-99 Concert of Sacred Music soloist, 204-206

as musical artists, 49, 57, 139 Teddy Hale and, 175, 176

INDEX 413 “In a Sentimental Mood” interpretation, 287 at Swing, 46, 303

on LaRedd, 93, 109 in Swinging Taps, 249 on Las Vegas, 188 on tap, changes in, 293

in The Majesty of Tap, 354 on Tap Dance America, 2'78 at Newport Jazz Festival, 199, 201-202 in The Tapping Talk Show, 257

in No Maps on My Taps, 220, 282 at Village Gate, 252 photographs of, 205, 287 Brown, “King” Rastus, 25, 63-64, 87

on M. Stearns, 203 Brown, Lawrence, 204

in lap, 245 Brown, Lewis, 167

television appearances, 178, 179, 278 Brown, Lula, 62

at Village Gate, 252 Brown, Ralph, 170, 212, 284, 285, 286, 288

Bright, Lois, 104 Brown, Romaine, 178

Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk (musical), Brown, Ruth, 284, 286

308-311, 310, 313, 314, 318, 320 Brown, Sonny, 219

Broadway Dance Center, 316 Brown, Stanley, 233, 238, 281 Broadway I Love You (TV), 207 Brown Bothers, 103 Broadway Melody (film), 118 “Brown Sugar” (revue), 93 Broadway Melody of 1936 (film), 124-125, 126, 128 Browne, Harriet, 171-172, 259, 259-260

Broadway Melody of 1938 (film), 129, 151 Brownskin Beauties, 1o1 Broadway Melody of 1940 (film), 129-131 Brownskin Models (revue), 103

Brock, Terry, 267, 274, 359 Brubeck, Dave, 244

Brockway, Florence, 26 Bruce, Evelyn, 171

Brooks, Bernice, 303, 356 Bruce, Mary, 87, 171

Brooks, Diana, 353 Bruce, Sadie, 171 broom jump, & Bruce, Spider, 145 Brophy, Sharon, 264 Bruce Sisters, 171 Brothers of the Knight (musical), 32.7 Bryant, Marie, 225

Brower, Frank, 18 Bryant, William, 60, 80, 99, 104

Brown, Ada, 136 Bubbles, John

Brown, Cosmo, 180 birth and early years, 87-88 Brown, Eddie, 270, 273-274, 289 in Black Broadway, 247

Brown, Ernest “Brownie” By Word of Foot and, 250 By Word of Foot and, 250 LeTang and, 226 in Copasetics, 167, 168 Eleanor Powell and, 127 in It’s About Time, 239 Eddie Rector and, 87 at Newport Jazz Festival, 203, 220 style of, 88 in Shoot Me while I’m Happy, 239, 240 tap battles of, 3

in Tappin’ Uptown, 256 television appearances, 179, 207-208 See also Cook and Brown See also Buck and Bubbles

Brown, James, 212 Bubbling Brown Sugar (musical), 225

Brown, James “Buster” buck, 22

American Tap Dance Orchestra and, 264 Buck and Bubbles, 100-102, 102, 178

at Apollo Theater, 103, 104 Buck and Wing Dance (film), 23 awards and acknowledgments, 300, 301, 330 “Buck Dancer’s Lament” (song), 25, 87

at Berlin Jazz Festival, 178 buck dancing By Word of Foot and, 250 contests, 20, 21, 25, 34, 87

at Café Forty-One, 305 on film, 23, 24 Hoofers and, 212, 221 Wayburn and, 82 Hoofers’ Challenges and, 218 buck-and-wing

Michela Lerman and, 349 African Americans and, 25

Andrea Levine and, 241 cakewalk and, 33, 34 life and career, 103-104, 349 Katie Carter and, 23

414 INDEX

buck-and-wing (continued) Burdulis, Robin, 358 George Cohan and, 30-31 Burge, Gregg, 3, 247, 258, 278

contests, 57-58, 87 Burgess, Bobby, 208

description, 103 Burke, Dane, 64 evolution, 22-23, 33, 54 Burke, Kathy, 222 on film, 23-25 Burnham, Charles, 297

Irish and, 25-26 Burroughs, Rashaan, 282, 283

jigging and, 22-23 Burton, Gary, 212

Bill Robinson and, 20 Burton, Sandra, 311

at the turn-of-the-century, 103 Bush, George H. W., 289

women and, 26-27 “But Can She Tap?” (panel), 254-256 Buckner, Conrad “Little Buck,” 172, 187 Butler, Jean, 304, 305

Buckner, Milt, 178, 200, 219 By the Sad Sea Waves (musical), 32

Bufalino, Brenda By Word of Foot (tap festival), 250

American Landscape and, 297 By Word of Foot II (tap festival), 254-256 American Tap Dance Orchestra and, Bye Bye Bonnie (musical), 117

264-265, 265, 288 Byron, Lord, 28 birth and early years, 233 C awards, 301

on Eddie Brown, 274 Cabin in the Sky (musical), 4-5, 153, 208 By Word of Foot I] and, 254-255 Café Forty-One, 303, 305 Cantata and the Blues, 262-264 Cafe Metropole (film), 125-126 Honi Coles and, 234, 237, 237, 263 Cage, The (ballet), 351

costumes and, 252-254 Cagney, James, 147-149, 149, I51, 153

in Fascinatin’ Rhythms, 274 Cain, Bill, 86 Gertrude’s Nose, a Tap Opera, 301 Cake Walk (film), 23 Great Feats of Feet and, 234-236 cakewalk, 33-36, 38, 45, 47, 134

on Acia Gray, 355 Cakewalk Jubilee, 34 “Meditation on Integration” choreography, Caldonia Revue, 217

o37 Callaway, Karen, 344, 353-354, 354, 356

Deborah Mitchell and, 249-250 Calloway, Cab, 99, 103, 110, III, 136, 300

Morrison and, 358 Calloway, David, 283

in New Sole Sisters, 260 calypso minstrels, 16 Robert Reed and, 299 Camden Richman Quartet, 243 in Singing, Swinging, and Winging, 231-233, Camel Walk, 78

232, 236-237 Campbell, Sam, 103

in Sole Sisters, 259 Canby, Vincent, 249

in Sounds in Motion, 262 Cantata and the Blues, 262-264 in Swinging Taps, 249-250 Cantor, Eddie, 151, 225 on Tap Dance America, 278 Cap and Gown Revue, The (film), 152

Tap Extravaganza and, 300 Capers, Evans, I

on tap issues, 4, 261, 296 Cappy, Ted, 222

in Tapestry, 261-262 Capra, Frank, 141

Tapping the Source, 253 Caravan (dance performance), 345 in Touch, Turn, Return, 297 Carefree (film), 113 at Village Gate, 252-253 Carmichael, Hoagy, 111, 297, 357, 358 on women in tap, 253-254, 2'71 Carney, Art, 182, 184 at Women in Tap Conference, 359 Caron, Leslie, 116, 184

Bufalino and Company, 262 Carpenter, Darlene, 269, 270 “Bugle Call Rag” (song-and-dance), Carpenter, Louis Simms, 300

100, III Carroll, Joe, 241

Bunchuk, Yasha, 128 Carter, Benny, 249

INDEX 415

Carter, Jack, 179 Tap Happening: The Hoofers and, 222 Carter, Katie, 23 Change Your Luck (musical), 92

Casel, Ayodele Changing Times Tap Dance Company, 239, 259,

acknowledgments, 330 288

birth and early years, 314-315, 324, 326 Chaplin, Frank, 1

at La Cave, 302 Charisse, Cyd, 116, 155, 194, 194 in Charlie’s Angels, 322-324 Charles, Grace, 87 Savion Glover and, 315-316 Charleston (dance), 74, 75, 134

in Imagine Tap!, 335 Charlie’s Angels, 322-324, 323, 327 in NYOT, 313-315 “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” (song-and-dance), Jason Samuels Smith and, 317 134-135, 138

style of, 337 Cheatham, Doc, 219, 249 in “Summertime,” 353 Checkers, Kid “Mose,” 58

Tandem Act Productions, 330 Chestnut, Maurice, 353

on tap dancing, 332 Chicago Human Rhythm Project, 298-299

Casel, Tayari, 314 Chicago on Tap (festival), 34.4 Caspary, Vera, 77-78 Chieftains (musical group), 305

Castle, Irene, 52, 53 Chino (dancer), 233

Castle, Nick, 135-136, 148, 178, 207 Chisholm, Mary, 255

Castle, Vernon, 52, 53-54 Chocolate Dandies (musical), 74, 75-76 Cat Can’t Dance, The (soundie), 145 Chocolate Drops, 76

Catlett, Sid, 323 Chocolate Steppers, 210 Cavalcade of Stars (TV), 181, 182 chorus dancers, 50-52

Cave, La, 301-302, 303 Christensen, Linda, 289 Cavendish, Charles, 113 Christian, Charlie, 160

challenge dances Chuck and Chuckles, 104 Baryshnikov and G. Hines, 275 Churty, George, 9

Bates and Buckner, 187 circle dance, 47

Bates and LeRoy, 164-165 “Circuit Breaker Switch” (dance), 244

Fosse and Grass, 195 Cisco, Goldie, 74 Fosse and Raal, 196 Claire, Natalia, 358 Green and Basie, 3, 4, 17, 198-199, 222 Clark, Dick, 209

Hoofers’ Challenges, 218-219 Clark, Marietta, 329

Laurence and James, 97-98 Clark Brothers, 81 Nicholas Brothers and O’Connor, 208-209 class act, 41-43

in Riverdance, 306, 354 Class Act (Atkins & Malone), 99 Robinson and Swinton, 66, 87 Classical Savion, 339-341, 340

tap challenges, 2-3, 87 Clayton, Jay, 301 Three Little Words and, 103 Clef Club, 53

at Village Vanguard, 215-217 Clemente, Deena “Snapshot,” 303

women and, 3, 255 Clemente, Frankie, 348

See also contests, dance Cliff Walk Manor, 199, 211-212

Chamecki, Cintia, 357 Clinton, Bill, 357

Champion, Gower, 207, 224, 225, 247 clog, 6-7, 22-23, 28, 29, 65

Chaney, Lon clog shoes, split-soled, 64, 65

Bates and, 187 Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk (musical), 18

birth, 221 Clouden, LeRoy, 309 in Black and Blue, 284, 286 Cochran, C. B., 125

at Chicago on Tap festival, 344 Coffey, Michael, 185-186 in Hoofers, 212, 220-221, 288 Cohan, George M., 19, 30, 30-31, 61, 117, 148-149

in The Majesty of Tap, 354 Cohan, Helen Francis “Nellie” Costigan,

style of, 213, 221 29-30, 30

416 INDEX Cohan, John “Jerry” (was Cohane), 29-30, 30 in Shoot Me while I’m Happy, 239, 240

Cohan, Josephine, 30, 30 in Sole Sisters, 259, 259 Cohan, Steven, 155 in The Tapping Talk Show, 257 Cohan Mirth Makers, 30 Coles and Atkins

Cole, Bob, 40, 42 as class act, 162, 162

Cole, Cozy, 182, 219 comedy and, 162-163

Cole, Jack, 158-160 creation and break up, 161, 163, 170, 203

Cole, Nat King, 188 at Newport Jazz Festival, 201

Colella, Jeffrey, 266 soft-shoe and, 161-162

Coles, Charles “Honi” television appearances, 178-179, 207 on Apollo Chorus Line, 107 Colgate Comedy Hour (TV), 180

Atkins and, 161-163, 162 Collins, Chink, 75, 167, 168

awards, 257, 300, 301 Collins, Leon

in Black Broadway, 247 Bufalino and Company and, 262 Bufalino and, 234, 237, 237, 263 By Word of Foot and, 250

By Word of Foot and, 250 Collins and Company, 282, 288 challenge dances, 87 in Depression’s Back and So Is Tap, 240

Copasetics and, 167, 168 53, 350

Dance Craft studio, 163, 170, 203 Jane Goldberg and, 238

as drummer, 216-217 Leon Collins Dance Company, 281 in The Essence of Rhythm, 270 Leon Collins Dance Studio, 282

Jane Goldberg and, 238 life and career, 176-177, 280-281, 282

Chuck Green and, 220 photographs, 177, 281, 352

Acia Gray and, 355 in Steps in Time, 241

later career, 256-257 style of, 281

in My One and Only, 256-257 Three Dukes and, 352

at Newport Jazz Festival, 201, 202, 219, 220 Dianne Walker and, 230-231, 280, 281, 337-338

Saulters and, 178-179 Collins and Company, 282, 288 in Shoot Me while I’m Happy, 239, 240 Colorado Dance Festival (1986), 274-275 Singing, Swinging, and Winging and, 232, Colored Museum, The, 308

232-233, 236 Combo, Rashmalla, 284

Sohl-Donnell and, 271 “Come Sunday,” 361

in Sounds in Motion, 262 comedy, musical, 48, 82

speed of, 81, 100 comedy dance teams, 104

as stage manager, 168 Comin’ Uptown (musical), 248

style of, 233 Compas, A, 345

in Swinging Taps, 249 Comstock, Laura, 56 tap plates of, 84 Concert of Sacred Music (D. Ellington), 204-205 in The Tapping Talk Show, 257 Concerto for Tap Dancer and Orchestra (M. Gould),

television performances, 179 193 tributes to, 361-362 Condos, Frank, 79, 143

at Village Gate, 252-253 Condos, Nick, 139-140, 140, 143, 144

women and, 251, 256 Condos, Steve

See also Coles and Atkins By Word of Foot II and, 254 Coles, Marion Evelyn Edwards in The Essence of Rhythm, 270

in Apollo Chorus, 108, 109 life and career, 143 awards and acknowledgments, 330 in Moon over Miami, 144

By Word of Foot and, 250 speed of, 81

By Word of Foot II and, 254, 255-256 in Sugar, 224 in Depression’s Back, and So Is Tap, 240 in Tap, 246

life and career, 107-108, 171 on tap, changes in, 292-293, 296 in New Sole Sisters, 259, 260 in Tappin’ Uptown, 256

INDEX 417

as teacher, 273 Cotton Club Girls, 94, 95, 111, 300 Wasserman on, 273 Cotton Club Parade (musical), 111 Condos Brothers, 81, 139-140, 140, 143-144 Covan, Ethel, 279

“Congo, The” (Lindsay), 22 Covan, Willie, 25, 57-58, 76, 79, 161, 179

Conley, Dustin, 348 Covan and Ruffin, 57

Connie’s Inn, 77 Cover Girl (film), 154

Conrad, Gail, 241 Crabtree, Lotta Mignon, 27-28, 28

contests, dance Craft, Warren, 361

buck dancing, 20, 21, 25, 34, 87 Crain, Llewellyn, 266

buck-and wing, 57-58, 87 Cranshaw, Bob, 219

cakewalk, 34, 35-36 Crawford, Aline, 108

ragtime, 52 Crawford, Jared, 309, 310 Bill Robinson and, 65 Crawford, Joan, 93, 113 See also challenge dances Creole Follies Revue, 81

Conyers, John, 289 Creole Show, The, 34 Cook, Charles “Cookie” Cresswell, Luke, 295

American Tap Dance Orchestra and, 264 Croce, Arlene, 112, 113, 115, 116, 140, 157

awards, 300 Cromer, Harold “Stumpy,” 109, 247, 257, 301, By Word of Foot and, 250 346. See also Stump and Stumpy

in Copasetics, 167, 168 Cromwell, Oliver, 5 Jane Goldberg and, 238-239, 240 Crosby, Bing, 180 at Newport Jazz Festival, 203, 220 Crosby, Bob, 141

in Swinging Taps, 249 Cross, James “Stump,” 103, 104, 104, 109

in Tappin’ Uptown, 256 Crossroads, 270

in The Tapping Talk Show, 257 Cullinane, John, 65

at Village Gate, 252 Cumbo, Rashamella, 286 See also Cook and Brown Cunneen, Jamie, 278

Cook, Joe, 21 Curran, Harriet, 152 Cook and Brown, 104 Curson, Ted, 199

Cooper, George W., 62-63, 64 Curtis, Hyacinth, 95 Cooper and Robinson, 62-63, 64 Cutcher, Jenai, 315, 325

awards, 300 D in Black Broadway, 247 Dafora, Asadata, 159

Copasetics

creation and membership, 166, 167, 168 Dahomey (musical), 38

in Great Feats of Feet, 234, 235 Dale, Virginia, 116

in 1980s, 288 Dally, Lynn Rawlins

in Steps in Time, 241 All Blues, 267

in Swinging Taps, 249, 250 choreography, 265-267 television appearances, 207 in Fascinatin’ Rhythms, 274

tributes to, 361-362 Jazz Tap Ensemble and, 242, 242, 243,

at Village Gate, 252 265-266, 289, 293, 295 Coppola, Francis Ford, 249 life and career, 243, 265 Corea, Chick, 345 Lynn Dally and Dancers, 243, 265

Cornell, Heather, 267, 278, 288 at Pillow Dance Festival (1993), 295

Corsaro, Frank, 225 Richman and, 265

Cory, John, 5 studio portrait of, 267 Costigan, Helen Francis “Nellie” (later Cohan), on tap, changes in, 293

29-30, 30 at Women in Tap Conference, 359

Cotton Club, 42,77, 91-93, 94, 110-112 Daly, Lucy, 23, 56

Cotton Club, The (film), 249 D’Amato, Alfonse, 289 Cotton Club Boys, 210 Dance Craft studio, 163, 170, 203, 233

418 INDEX Dance Magazine, 77-78, 329, 351 Del Valle, Danny, 315 Dance of the Haymakers (Mount), 2 Delahunty and Hengler, 55

Dance Spirit, 330 Delroy, Irene, 86

Dance Teacher, 330 DeMille, Agnes, 163, 168, 170, 226

DancEllington, 288 Denby, Edwin, 190

“Dancemania” (song), 91 deNeergaard, Bill, 236 Dancing Darky Boy (film), 24 Depression’s Back and So Is Tap, The (tap show), 240

Dancing Dolans, 180 derision, songs of, 16

Dancing Fools (revue), 81 Desires of 1930 (musical), 81 Dancing in the Streets, 241 “Destruction of Sennacherib, The” (Byron), 28 Dancing is a Man’s Game (TV), 3 Devil’s Frolic, The (musical), 81

Dancing Lady (film), 113 Dew Drop Inn (revue), 18, 76-77 “Dancing Like a Girl” (Cutcher), 325 Diamond, Irene, 324 “Dancing of Salome, The” (dance), 39-40, 41 Diamond, John, 12, 13

Dancing Redcaps, 75 Dickens, Charles, 17

Dancing with the Stars (TV), 330 Dietz, Howard, 113, 194 “Dancing—A Man’s Game” (TV), 158 Dimples (film), 124

Dandridge, Dorothy, 134-135, 138 Diomande, Vado, 342 “Dandy Dan’s Return” (dance), 62 Divine Rhythm Productions, 330 Daniels, Danny, 84, 153, 247, 284 Dixiana (film), 121

Daniels, Harold, 104 Dixie Steppers, 73

Daniels, LeRoy, 194 Dixie to Broadway (musical), 76, 80 Dannenberg, Tom, 242, 242, 243, 244, Dixon, Charles, 92

265,266, 2909 Dixon, Harland, 28-29, 55, 61, 88, 151

Danquin, Eric, 342 Dixon, Mildred, 111 Danseland, 52 Dixon, Simonetta, 346 DaPron, Louis, 180 Dixon, Tina, 176 Darktown Follies, 44-48, 46, 49 Dixon and Doyle, 88

Das, Chitresh, 342 djouba, 5—G, 12, 15-16, 321, 345

Daval, Nicola, 289 Doherty, Moya, 304

Dave Brubeck trio, 212 Dolgenas, Hillel, 241 “David Danced before the Lord” (Ellington), Dolphy, Eric, 199

205-206 Donahue, Jack, 55-56, 61, 86, 127, 151, 161 Davis, Charlie, 74, '76 Donahue and Stewart, 56 Davis, Katherine, 210 Donald O’Connor Show (TV), 181 Davis, Marshall, Jr., 273, 312, 330, 332 Donen, Kelly, 184

Davis, Miles, 212, 267 Donen, Stanley, 154, 184, 185, 194, 301 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 188-190, 189, 207, 225, Donnat, Marilyn, 243

245, 246 Donnell, Cecil, 269

Davis, Toots, 45, 48, 56, 74, 88 Dorame, Sylvia, 344

Day, Canta, 56 Dorrance, Michelle Day in Hollywood, A (musical), 247 in 53, 356

Dazey, Charles T., 20 acknowledgments, 329, 350 De Veau, Nellie, 26 in Barbara Duffy and Company, 357 Dean, Dora Babbige, 34, 42, 42 in Charlie’s Angels, 323

Deanna’s (club), 302 in Evening Stars, 357

Deas, Lawrence, 73, 92 Savion Glover and, 350 Deep in My Heart (film), 185 life and career, 350-351 DeFrantz, Thomas, 174, 277, 310 at Tap and Song, 329

Dejallah Groove, 341 in Ti Dii, 332

Dejohnette, Jack, 212 at Women in Tap Conference, 360 Del Conte, Andrea, 345 D’Orsay, Andre, 178

INDEX 419 Dotson, Clarence “Dancing,” 77 Easton, Stanley, 22

double roll, 66 Ebony Follies, 81

Douglass, Frederick, 15 Ebony Magazine, 145

Dove, Johnny, 51 Ebony Steppers, 93 Down Argentine Way (film), 132-133, 136, 139 Ebsen, Buddy, 129

Doyle, James, 55, 88 Eckstine, Billy, 167, 203

Draper, Murial, 190 Ed Sullivan Show, 180, 182, 187, 207 Draper, Paul, 86, 190-192, 191, 238, 300 Eddie Condon’s Floor Show (TV), 178, 200

Draper, Ruth, 191 Edison, Thomas, 23

Drayton, Thaddeus, 42-43 Edward VII (king), 38 Dresdon, Daniell, 289 Edwards, Anthony William, 319

Dresser, Louise, 56 Edwards, Balee, 319 Drums, The (LP), 216 acknowledgments, 330

drummers and drumming, 216-217 Edwards, Dormeshia Sumbry

Du Barry Was a Lady (film), 153 in All Blues, 267

Du Barry Was a Lady (musical), 139 in Black and Blue, 286

Du Bois, W. E. B., 39, 89 in Charlie’s Angels, 322-324, 323

Dudley, Sherman, 57 Harlem Tap Studio and, 330, 349

Duffy, Barbara life and career, 320, 323, 327-328

in 53, 356 “Mastering Femininity in Tap,” 325-326, 328

in American Tap Dance Orchestra, 265, 278 at Pillow Dance Festival, 295

Barbara Duffy and Company, 357 at Tip Tap Festival, 283

in A Compas, 345 at Women in Tap Conference, 360 in Evening Stars, 357 Edwards, Eboni, 330 423-4323, 357 Edwards, Edith “Baby Spic,” 106, 106 Gregory Hines and, 357 Edwards, Gus, 127

life and career, 264, 356-357 Edwards, Harry, 106

in Soldier’s Hymn, 357 Edwards, Jeremiah, 330

style of, 356 Edwards, Louise, 105

in Touch, Turn, Return, 297 Edwards, Marion Evelyn. See Coles, Marion Evelyn

at Women in Tap Conference, 359 Edwards Dumas, Martin Tré, III, 335 Edwards, Omar, 313, 319-321, 330, 334,

Dunbar, Dixie, 123, 179 346, 349

Duncan, Amy, 254, 262-264 Edwards, Ruth, 105 Duncan, Arthur, 208, 245, 246, 299, 301 Edwards, Susie, 59

Duncan, Isadora, 40 Edwards, Yvonne, 289, 312

Duncan, Sandy, 331 Edwards Sisters, 105

Dunham, Katherine, 4-5, 41, 136, 153 Eggleston, Sammy “Eggie,” 20, 65

Dunn, Colin, 3, 13, 291-292, 292 Eldridge, Roy, 178, 201, 212 Dunn, Hannah Leah, 330, 348, 349 Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke”

Dunn, James, 123 in Black and Tan, 94-96

Dunne, Colin, 304, 306 Concert of Sacred Music, 204-205 Dunning, Jennifer, 236, 239, 256, 279, 314 Cotton Club and, 110-111

Duquesnay, Ann, 309 “David Danced before the Lord,” 205-206

Durang, Charles, 7 “In a Sentimental Mood,” 287-288 Durang, John, 7, 149, 161 Lafayette Theatre and, 99

Durante, Jimmy, 110 life and career, 90-92, I71 Dyer, Sammy, 75 See also Ellington orchestra

E awards, 301 Eagan, Frank, 26 Balletap USA and, 288 Ellington, Mercedes

Easter Parade (film), 125, 142 in Black Broadway, 247

420 INDEX Ellington, Mercedes (continued) Finch, David, 222

choreography, 247 Fine and Dandy (musical), 128 DancEllington and, 288 Finian’s Rainbow (film), 116

life and career, 223 Finkelstein, Lola, 316, 317 in Sophisticated Ladies, 247 Fisher, Snow, 76 The Tapping Talk Show and, 257 Five Blazers, 94, 95, 96 Ellington orchestra, 91-93, 94, 141, 170 Five Hot Shots, 95, 96

Ellison, Monte, 359 Fives and Sixes, 358 Ellison, Ralph, 170 Flatley, Michael, 304, 305 Emmett, Dan, 9, 18 Fleming, Eugene, 286, 287

Ericson, Raymond, 193 Fletcher, Dan, 247 “Eronel” (T. Monk), 358 Fletcher, Tom

Ervin, Booker, 199 on Katie Carter, 23

Esher sisters, 26 on Gala Jubilee and Cake Walk (1897), 34 “Essence of Old Virginia” (dance), 12, 161 on minstrel shows, 24

Essence of Rhythm, The, 269, 270 on Ada Overton, 38

Esu, 15, 18 on Bill Robinson, 21

Ethiopian delineators, 8-10 on Williams and Walker, 35 Eubie! (musical), 225, 227, 248 Fletcher Henderson band, 92 Europe, James Reese, 52-53, 85 Flo-Bert Lifetime Achievement Award, 300

Eurovision Song Contest, 304 Flora Dora Girls, 50

Evans, Albert, 324 Flying Down to Rio (film), 113, 116

Evans, Emory, 167, 168 Flying Feet, 326

Evans and Whiter, 26 Foch, Nina, 153 Evelyn, Edwina “Salt,” 105, 105 Follies Girls, 50 Evening Stars, 357 Follies of 1907, 50 “Every Move a Picture” (Covan and Ruffin), 57 Follies of 1908, 50

Every Sailor (musical), 147 Follies of 1913, 51 Evolution of the Blues (revue), 269, 274 Follies of 1914, 50, 51

Eyes Wide Open, 243 Follow the Fleet (film), 113, 115-116 Follow the Girls (musical), 181

F Follow Thru (musical), 12'7

Fadiman, Clifton, 179 Fonda, Joe, 356

Fagan, Barney, 27, 28-29, 55 Footlight Parade (film), 147

Fanchon (dancer), 141 “For Dancers Only” (music and dance), 109

Farlow, Tal, 212 For Me and My Gal (film), 153

Farrell, Tommy, 178 Forbes, Frank, 21

Fascinatin’ Rhythms (festival), 273, 274 Ford, Eddie “Schoolboy,” 177

Fascinating Rhythm (concert), 272 Ford Star Revue (TV), 179 “Fascinating Rhythm” (song-and-dance), 131, Forkins, Mary, 63

145-146 Forsyne, Ida, 79

Feldman, Anita, 262 Forsythe, William, 324

feminist modernists, 271 Forte, Sevilla, 233 Fergeson and Mack, 54 Forti, Simone, 238

Ferrone, Rod, 264, 303 Forty-second Street (film), 117-119, 247 festivals, tap, 272-275, 298. See also specific Forty-second Street (musical), 331

festivals Fosse, Bob, 160, 195, 195-197

Fianna narratives (MacCool), 14 Foster, Stephen Collins, 29, 31, 64

Fields, Dorothy, 136, 207 Fountain, Eli, 297, 313 Fifty-three “53” (Collins), 356 Four Buds, 97, 200

films, musical, 93-96, 193 Four Cohans, 30, 31

Finale Club, 268-269 Four Covans, 79

INDEX 421

Four Mortons, 64 Gay Divorce, The (musical), 113 Four Step Brothers, 99, 134, 135, 188, 207-209, Gay Divorcee, The (film), 113, 139

299 Gaynor, Mitzi, 180

423-4323 (Duffy), 357 Gee, Lottie, 41

Four/Four on the Swing Shift, 269 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (musical), 163, 170

Fowler, Steve, 269 George White’s Music Hall (revue), 128

Fox, Ted, 102 George White’s Scandals (film), 123

foxtrot, 78-79, 134 George White’s Scandals (revue), 74,78, 86, 141,

Foxworth, Julius, 60 149

Foy, Eddie, 61, 148 “Georgia on My Mind” (song), 111

Frances, Gussie, 56 Gere, Richard, 249 Francis, Arlene, 179 Gershwin, George, 100, 113, 194, 208, 353 Frank, Rusty, 299 Gershwin, Ira, 113, 154

Frazier, George, 202 Gertrude’s Nose, a Tap Opera (Bufalino), 301

Frazier, Raymond, 103 Gerue, Mame, 26

Fredo, John, 283 Geva, Tamara, 156

Freed, Arthur, 154-155 ghettos, black Irish, 10 Freeman, Walter “Sundance,” 306 ghungroo, 343 From Central to Vine (TV), 179 Gibson, Albert Gip, 241, 250, 256 “From This Moment On” (song-and-dance), 160 Gibson, Bert, 212, 213, 213, 214, 238

front tap (step), 82 Gibson, Carl “Busboy,” 274

Fujibayashi, Mari, 341 Gibson, Sandra, 212, 213, 241, 349

Fuller, Curtis, 249 Gibson, Tanya, 286

Fuller, Loie, 40 Gillespie, Dizzy, 171, 176, 219, 241, 323 Funk University, 313 Gilmore, David, 303, 346 Funny Face (film), 194 Giordano, Kevin, 295 Funny Face (musical), 113 Giordano, Pat, 231, 232, 261-262

fusion, 341, 344 gioube, 5-6, 12, 15-16, 321, 345 Girl Crazy (musical), 131

G Girl in Pink Tights, The (musical), 226 Gaiety Girls, 50 Girls of 1904 (musical), 32, 83

Gail Conrad Dance Theatre, 288 Gleason, Jackie, 181-182, 183, 184

Gaines, Leslie Bubba Gleason, John Herbert, 181 American Dance Festival and, 239 Gleason, Mae Kelly, 181

awards, 300 Glenn, Willie, 25

By Word of Foot and, 250 Glover, Abron, 312 Jane Goldberg and, 238 Glover, Cyd, 283, 286, 328, 357

jump-roping, 352 Glover, Savion

Deborah Mitchell and, 352 awards and acknowledgments, 301, 329

in Shoot Me while I’m Happy, 240 in Black and Blue, 286

in Swinging Taps, 249 in Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,

Three Dukes and, 352 308-309, 310, 310 at Village Gate, 252 Ayodele Casel and, 315-316 Gaines, Reg. E., 308, 309 at La Cave, 303 Gala for the President, 357 challenge dances, 3, 13

Gala Jubilee and Cake Walk (1897), 34 at Chicago on Tap festival, 344

Gallagher, Helen, 223 Classical Savion, 339-341, 340 Galvez, Sammy, 315 in Dancing with the Stars, 330 Garland, Judy, 142, 153, 178, 252 Michelle Dorrance and, 350

Garrett, Alice, 87 drumming and, 216

Garrett, Betty, 185 Dunn challenge and, 291-292, 292 Gasman, Josephine, 56 Omar Edwards and, 319

422 INDEX

Glover, Savion (continued) Gordon, Ella, 87

in Happy Feet, 331 Gordon, Sheldon, 348 Gregory Hines and, 307 Gould, Dave, 116

influence of, 311 Gould, Morton, 192, 193 in Jelly’s Last Jam, 307-308, 308 Governor’s Son, The (musical), 31, 32

LeTang and, 283-284 Grable, Betty, 139-141, 140, 143, 144

life and career, 283 Grace Cathedral Choir, 205 New Tap Generations, 294 Graham, Martha, 153

NYOT and, 313-314 Granlund, Nils Thor, 117 Robert Reed and, 299 Grant, Cootie, 56 Savion Glover Productions and, 330 Grant, Darrell, 297, 345

as savior of tap, 307 Grant, Derick K.

Jason Samuels Smith and, 318 in All Blues, 267

style of, 310-311 Imagine Tap! and, 334, 335-336

on tap, changes in, 293 life and career, 282, 283, 295

at Tap All-Stars, 334 studio portrait, 335 in Tap Dance in America, 278 Grant, Lackaye, 41

at Tip Tap Festival, 283 Grass, Charles, 195 Dianne Walker and, 284-285 Grauer, Rhoda, 238 Glover, Yvette, 283, 299, 301, 319 Graves, Nadine George, 60 Godbolt, James Titus. See Slyde, Jimmy Gray, Acia, 289, 344, 355, 359-360

Goddard, Paulette, 116 Grayson, Anna, 316 Goddertz, Charles, 314 Graziano, John, 89 Gold, Belle, 26 Great Feats of Feet (film), 234-236, 235 Gold Bug, The (musical), 35 Great Potato Famine, 9, 29 Gold Diggers of 1933 and 1935 (films), 119-120 Greaves-Ali, Miriam, 259, 260

Goldberg, Francis, 167 Greeley, Andrew M., 304 Goldberg, Frank, 167, 168 Green, Charles “Chuck”

Goldberg, Jane awards, 300

awards and acknowledgments, 301, 330 Balliett on, 220, 249

By Word of Foot and, 250 Groundhog Basie and, 3, 4, 17, 198-199,

By Word of Foot II and, 254-256 220;222

Honi Coles and, 238 Honi Coles and, 220 Charles Cook and, 238-239, 240 dance challenges, 14, 218

in Fascinatin’ Rhythms, 274 description, 220

Bubba Gaines and, 238 festival performances, 178, 203, 220, 344

Chuck Green and, 238 films, 220, 221, 221

“It’s All in the Feet,” 238 Jane Goldberg and, 238

life and career, 237-241 in Hoofers, 288

New Sole Sisters, 259-260 life and career, 170, 219, 220 in Shoot Me while I’m Happy, 239, 240 in The Majesty of Tap, 354

Sandman Sims and, 238 in No Maps on My Taps, 282 on Jason Samuels Smith, 318 at Storyville, 219-220 Sole Sisters, 109, 258-259, 259 style of, 220, 221

in tap calendar, 354 in Swinging Taps, 249 Tap Extravaganza and, 300 Tap Happening: The Hoofers and, 222 The Tapping Talk Show, 240, 257-258 Tap Happenings and, 212-213, 213, 214

Goldberg, Thelma, 356 in Tappin’ Uptown, 256 Goodman, Andrea, 297 at Village Gate, 252

Goodman, Larraine, 302 See also Chuck and Chuckles

Goodman, Mark, 297 Green, Sammy, 103

Goodson, Germaine, 284, 286, 354 Greenlee, Rufus, 42-43

INDEX 423 Greenwich Village Follies of 1928, 86 Harper, Leonard, 86, 92

Greer, Sonny, 91 Harrigan and Hart, 34 Gregory, Jon, 173 Harris, Barry, 301 Grey, Gilda, 75, 86 Harris, Lafayette, 309 Grice, Brian, 332 Harris, Taps, 179 Griffith, Karida, 329, 356, 357 Harrison, Mya, 330 Grillo, Francisco Ratil Gutiérrez, 322 Harrison, Zeta, 85

Grimes, Chinky, 257 Hart, John, 106

Grimes, Jared, 329, 334, 348 Hart, Lorenz, 156

Groove, 295 Hart, Margaret, 108

Grundy, James, 23 Hart, Robert, 25

Grundy and Frint (film), 23 Hartman, Eddie “Stumpy,” 109, 247, 257, 301,

Guevarez, James, 315 346. See also Stump and Stumpy

Guild, Ralph, 301 Haungs, Meghan, 303, 330 Gustar, Alfredo, 250 Haven, Carter de, 52

Guy, Freddie, 95 Haver, June, 150

H Hawkins, Tommy, 60 Haas, Alice, 85 Hayes, Cleo, 108

Hawkins, Coleman, 199, 212

Hacker, Idis, 85 Hayes, Paddy, 346

Hacker, Marge, 85 Hayes and Healy, 26

Hagino, Pauline, 270 “Hayride” (song-and-dance), 144

Hailey, Russell, 265 Hayward, Claudia, 108

Haines, Aubrey, 33, 83 Hayworth, Rita, 116

Hairspray (musical), 331 Heads Up (musical), 149

Hale, Nadine, 142 Healy, Dan, 91, 111, 151 Hale, Teddy, 81, 97, 174-176, 178, 200 Healy, Patsy, 228

Haley, Dinny, 149 Heaney and Walsh, 26 Hall, Adelaide, 88, 89, 89 Hearn, Lafcadio, 10 Hall, Angela, 286 Hearts in Dixie (film), 99

Hall Johnson Blackbird Choir, 88-89, 94, 95 Heath, Thomas K., 23, 61

Halley, Russell, 264, 297 Hedges, Elaine, 261

Halliday, Grace, 36 heebie jeebies (dance), 78

Ham, Larry, 355 heel tap, 82

Hamilton, Bob, 233 Hegamin, Lucille, 74 Hamilton, Georgette, 56 Heise, William, 23

Hammerstein, Oscar, 45 Held, Anna, 50

Hammontree, Patsy, 123-124 Heller, Hanya, 332 Hampton, Lionel, 220, 300 Henderson, Fletcher, 99

Handy, W. C., 93, 111 Henderson, Ray, 78 Haney Carol, 160 Hendricks, Jon, 205, 206, 269, 274 Hanna, Roland, 200, 286 Henie, Sonja, 134 Happy Feet (film), 331 Henry, Haywood, 286 Happy Girls (dance group), 40-41 Henry, Vince, 309

Happy Honeysuckle, 72 Hentoff, Nat, 201 Hardwich, Otto, 91 Hepburn, Audrey, 116, 194 Hardy, LaQuietta, 289 Herman McCoy Choir, 204 Harlem Jubilee (TV), 179 Hess, Carol, 241-242

Harlem Renaissance, 70, 89, 99 Hesselink, Ray, 335, 336 Harlem Stompers (revue), 107 Hetherington, Clara C. B., 254, 262, 280, 281,

Harlem studios, 86-87 282, 288

Harlem Tap Studio, 330, 349-350 Heywood, Al, 339

424 INDEX Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 39 in Eubie!, 225, 228 Higgins, Patience, 313-314, 332 life and career, 226-228, 248 High Speed (musical), 60 See also Hines Brothers; Hines Kids Hilberman, Josh, 302, 333-334, 351 Hines, Maurice, Sr., 226, 227

Hildebrand, Karen, 320 Hines, Ora, 226

Hilder, J. Chapman, 46 Hines Brothers, 227 Hill, Constance Valis, 259, 330, 346 Hines Kids, 225, 227, 248

Hill, Dule, 309, 320 Hinton, Milt, 219, 300 Hill, J. Leubrie, 44-45, 46, 47, 48, 49 hip-hop, 310

Hill, Joan, 176, 281, 282 His Honor the Barber (musical), 40

Hill, Theo, 343, 345 Hitchy-Koo (musical), 56

Hill, Thomas, 17 Hodges, Johnny, 91, 204 Hillman, George, 250, 284, 288, 300 Hogan, Ernest, 18

Hinckley, David, 257 Holiday, Billie, 274

Hines, Alice, 187 Holiday in Dixieland (revue), 188

Hines, Alma, 226 Holly, Edna Mae, tor

Hines, Daria, 22'7 Hollywood Palace, 207 Hines, Earl, 99 Hollywood Revue (film), 93

Hines, Gregory Holmes, Bernice, 153

awards and acknowledgments, 248, 301,330 | Holmes, Channing Cook, 306, 330, 343

Baryshnikov and, 2:75 Homer-Smith, Liz, 303 in Black Broadway, 247 Honeymooners, The (TV), 184 By Word of Foot and, 250 Honi’s Suite (song and dance), 236

choreography, 295, 357 Honolulu (film), 129 in Comin’ Uptown, 248 Hoofers, 212, 220-221, 288, 300, 348 in The Cotton Club, 249 Hoofers’ Challenges, 218-219

dance challenges, 3 Hoofers Club, 87, 100 as drummer, 216 hoofing and hoofers, 55-56 Duffy and, 357 Hooray for Love (film), 124

in Eubie!, 225, 228 Hope, Bertha, 259

in Fascinatin’ Rhythms, 274 Hope, Bob, 148, 149

Savion Glover and, 307 Hopkins, Linda, 284, 286 Jazz Tap Ensemble and, 277 Hopper, Luico, 309 Jelly’s Last Jam and, 307-308, 308 Horan, Eddie, 55

Michela Lerman and, 349 Horne, Lena, 125, 136, 188 life and career, 226-228, 247-248, 336, 349 hornpipe, 6-7. See also Lancashire clog hornpipe

on Jason Samuels Smith, 316 Hot Chocolate Revue, 92 in Sophisticated Ladies, 247, 248 Hot Cross Buns, 289

style of, 277-278 Hot Mikado (musical), 65, 210 in Tap, 245-246, 246 Hot-Cha! (musical), 128

on tap, changes in, 306-307 How Come (musical), '75 Tap Dance America host, 2'78 “How Could You Believe Me When | Said | Love

in The Tapping Talk Show, 258 You” (dance), 194 as teacher, 312, 336 “How Little We Know” (Carmichael), 357, 358 in White Nights, 275-277, 276 How the Irish Become White (Ignatiev), 183 See also Hines Brothers; Hines Kids Howard Anthenaeum, 55 Hines, Hines, and Dad, 216, 227, 248 Howitt, Reva, 84-85, 85

Hines, Maurice, Jr. Hubbard, Marjorie, 89

awards, 301 Huber, Melba, 300, 314, 316, 319, 330 Balletap USA and, 288 Hudson, Lee, 355

choreography, 247 Huffman, J. C., 52

in The Cotton Club, 249 Huggins, Nathan, 89

INDEX 425 Hughes, Howard, 188 ITA (International Tap Association), 2°75, 298 Hughes, Langston, 70, 89, 90 It’s About Time (concert), 238-239, 344 Humberstone, Bruce, 140 “It’s All in the Feet” (J. Goldberg), 238

Hurston, Zora Neale, 308 It’s Always Fair Weather (film), 185 “It’s Getting Dark on Old Broadway” (song), 75

| Ivashkevich, Alexander, 356

“I Concentrate on You” (song), 130 Iwahori, Chikako, 344-345, 356, 357 “I Like Myself” (song-and-dance), 185 Izzic (dance), 344 “I Want to Be Happy” (song-and-dance), 223

Iglesias, Edward, 315 J

Ignatiev, Noel, 183 Jack, Sam T., 34 “Vll Take Tallulah” (song-and-dance), 146 Jack Cole Dancers, 158

“I’m Pinning My Hopes on You” Jackie Gleason Show (TV), 181-182

(song-and-dance), 144 Jackson, Andrew, 94, 95 Imagine Tap! (musical), 334-336 Jackson, Delilah, 300, 301, 330

Imel, Jack, 208 Jackson, Freda, 86

Improvography, 332 Jackson, Laurence Donald. See Laurence, Baby “In a Sentimental Mood” (D. Ellington), 287-288 Jackson, Mahalia, 225

In Dahomey (musical), 38, 39 Jackson, Oliver, 249 In Gotham (musical), 36 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, 239 In Old Kentucky (revue), 20-21, 57-58 Jacquet, Illinois, 178 In Performance at the White House (TV), 315 James, Freddie, 97-98, 135

“In Walked Bud” (T. Monk), 353 James, Tommy, 313, 332 “Inauguration Day” (dance), 52 James P. Rosamond Choir, 93

India Jazz Suite, 342-343 Jamison, Judith, 247, 248 Ingram, Germaine, 278, 289 Janas, Jason, 334 integration, 48-49, 75, 190 Jassem, Lynn, 241, 262, 264, 278, 289 International Tap Association (ITA), 275, 298 Jay, Letitia, 203-204, 212, 213

in-the-trenches (air step), 48 Jazz at Cliff Walk Manor, 199, 211-212

Irene (musical), 225 jazz dance

Irish in America, The (Coffey), 185-186 evolution, 77, 78-79

Irish jig, 6, 65, 66, 345 Lindy Hop, 134 Irish people and culture in 1920s, 80-81

African Americans and, 183-184 1950s new style, 168

American resurgence, 304 postwar transformation, 158-159

black Irish ghettos, 10 Shuffle Along and, 69, 71

buck-and-wing and, 26 See also jazz tap

in entertainment industry, 179, 183-184 Jazz Dance (M. Stearns), 351

immigrants, 6-7, 9, 29, 183-184, 345 Jazz Interactions, 219

lying songs, 16 Jazz Jasmines, 72, 74

in New York, 25 jazz music

oral traditions, 13-16 Duke Ellington on, 91

poets, 13-14 evolution, 77

satiric traditions, 13-19 as low art form, 89-90 step and clog dances, 29, 65, 148-149, in 1920s, 80-81

192-193, 345 Shuffle Along and, 69-71

vaudeville and, 147 social dance counterparts, 134

women, 9 tap dance and, 12 See also Afro-lrish fusions Jazz Singer, The (film), 93, 185 Irvin, Leslie, 104 jazz tap Isham, John W., 26 Balliett on, 201

It Ain’t Hay (film), 134 description, 79, 90

426 INDEX

jazz tap (continued) Jones, Sarah, 303

Jane Goldberg and, 250 Jones, Sisseretta, 300 Lindy Hop comparisons, 134 Jones, Vanessa, 334

in movies, 93-96, 193-196 Jones Family Band, 73 Shuffle Along and, 70 Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, 280

steps, 79-80 Jonson, Ben, 14, 17-18 See also jazz dance Joplin, Scott, 53, 242

Jazz Tap Ensemble Joseph, Mark, 224

Dally and, 242, 242, 243, 265-266, 289, 293, Joseph, Willie “Span,” 106, 106

295 Joyce Theatre, 295 Gregory Hines and, 277 juba, 5—G, 12, 15-16, 321, 345

members, 242, 267 Jubali, 321

Richman and, 266 “Jukebox dance” (song), 130

“Jazzmania” (song), 91 “Jump Jim Crow” (song-and-dance), 98 Jealousy (film), 151 “Jumpin’ Jive” (song-and-dance), 136-137 Jean-Baptise, “Bonga” Gaston, 342 jump-roping, 352 Jelly’s Last Jam (musical), 307-308 June Taylor Dancers, 181, 182, 183

Jenkins, Freddie, 91 Juniper, Johnny, 62

Jenkins, Margie, 265 Just Around the Corner (film), 124 Jenkins, Maya, 356, 357 Just before Jazz (Riis), 47

jig-and-clog, 61 Just for Lovers (LP), 189 jigging, 1, 6, 22-23

“Jim Crow” (song and dance), 8 K

Jim Crow laws, 98, 137 Kaalund, Raymond, 212, 213, 213, 352

jitterbug, 158 Kalaf, Jerry, 266, 295 Jo Jo’s Dance Factory, 316 Kameda, Yuka, 329

Johnson, Aaron, 305 Kapilow, Rob, 332

Johnson, Bernard, 74 “Kara Kara” (dance), 40

Johnson, Bud, 249 kazotsky kicks, 47,'79

Johnson, Charles, 42, 42, 92 Keane, Lou, 56, 75, '76

Johnson, Eric, 297 Keeler, Ruby

Johnson, Foster, 268-269 accolades, 125

Johnson, J. C., 92 films, 117-119, 118, 147, 190, 225, 247

Johnson, Jack, 110 in No, No Nanette, 223, 223

Johnson, James P., 92, 93, 136 “Keep a Song in Your Soul” (song), 121 Johnson, James Weldon, 38, 49, 70, 89, 138 Keep off the Grass (musical), 149

Johnson, John, 166 Keith, B. F., 55

Johnson, John Rosamonde, 40, 42 Keith and Albie circuit, 57

Johnson, Juliet, 151 Kelly, Dominique, 305, 312 Johnson, Ruth, 89 Kelly, Elizabeth “Red,” 111 Jolson, Al, 147, 185 Kelly, Fred, 83-84, 152, 185, 250

Jones, Bill T., 358 Kelly, Gene

Jones, Byron, 76 Fred Astaire and, 154-155

Jones, Doris, 280 awards, 300

Jones, Dwayne, 282, 283 choreography, 192

Jones, Gregory, 313 films, 180, 184, 185

Jones, Jo, 199, 201 as lrish American performer, 184

Jones, Joe, Go life and career, 152-158 Jones, Kendrick, 349-350 D. O’Connor and, 185

Jones, Ludie, 87 in “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” 157 Jones, Papa Jo, 178, 216 Kelly, James, 152

Jones, Philly Jo, 215-216, 219 Kelly, James Patrick, 152

INDEX 427

Kelly, Patsy, 223, 224, 225 Laine, Barry, 241, 242

Kemp, Emma, 87 Lake, Sylvester, 103 Kendell, Monica, 329 Lamb, John, 204

Kennedy, Arlene, 280 Lambs Club, 151

Kennedy, Mildred, 279-280 Lancashire clog hornpipe, 27, 28, 88, 192

Kennedy, Paul, 280 Lane, Jennifer, 278, 279

Kentucky Club, 77 Lane, William Henry, 12-13, 17, 65, 77 Keohane, Jane Scott, 29, 148 LaRedd, Cora, 92-93, 109

Keohane, Michael, 29 Larkin, Milton, 167, 168

Kern, Jerome, 154 LaRue, Grace, 56 Kerr, Bob, 278 Las Vegas, Nev., 188, I90 Kerr, Walter, 223, 224, 248 Last Minstrel Show, The (musical), 227

Kersands, Billy, 12, 18-19, 161 Laurence, Baby

Kesselgoff, Anna, 241 Balliett on, 200, 219

Kid Millions (film), 151 at Berlin Jazz Festival, 178

Kidd, Michael, 194 bop and, 174

Kiddie Hour (radio show), 106 challenge dances, 87, 97-98, 218-219

Kilkelly, Ann, 253, 337, 338 at Cliff Walk Manor, 212

Kimbrough, Frank, 356 Philly Jo Jones and, 215-216 “Kindergarten Congo, The” (song-and-dance), 140 life and career, 103, 170, 199-200, 220

King, Harry, 173 at Newport Jazz Festival, 219, 220 King, Raymond, 309, 310 tap jams and, 302 King and King, 79, 143 Lawford, Peter, 142

Kinney, Troy and Margaret, 17 Lawrence Welk Show, 208

Kirn, Marda, 272, 275 Leach, Al, 64

Kiss Me Kate (film), 160 LeClair, Gertie, 56 Kiss Me Kate (musical), 192 Lee, Johnny, 136

Kisselgoff, Anna, 277, 305-306 Lee, Karol, 269, 270, 270

Kleps, Dale, 297 Lee, Mable Knight, Arthur, 168 awards, 301

Knowles, Mark, 11 By Word of Foot and, 250

Kobayashi, Takahiro, 345 By Word of Foot II and, 254

Koehler, Arlen, 111 in “Seosamh’s New York,” 346

Koehler, Harold, 111 in Sole Sisters, 259, 259 Koehler, Ted, 111, 136 soundies and, 144-145, 145 Koslow, Pamela, 257 in Tap and Song, 329 Kramer, Katherine, 229, 230, 231, 241, 262, 271 Lee, Robert, 74

Kraus, Emma, 56 LeGon, Jeni, 58, 60, 124-125, 125, 301, 330

Kreithen, Renee, 312 Leigh, Janet, 196

Kriegsman, Alan M., 263 Leon Collins Dance Company, 281 Kriegsman, Sali Ann, 272, 301, 330 Leon Collins Dance Studio, 282

Kroll, Jack, 257 Leonard, Eddie, 61-62, 65, 161

Ktenas, Pete, 326, 330 Lerman, Michela Marino, 303, 305, 329, 330,

Kumagai, Kazu, 345, 349 348-349, 353 Kyme (dancer), 286 Lerner, Alan Jay, 193

L. Leslie, Joan, 116 La Rocco, Claudia, 331 Leslie, Lew, 88

LeRoy, Hal, 84, 164-165, 179, 207

LaBelle, Patti, 327 LeTang, Henry

Lady Be Good (film), 131, 145 awards and acknowledgments,

Lady Be Good (musical), 113 300, 330

Lafayette Theatre, 99 Bubbles and, 226

428 INDEX LeTang, Henry (continued) LTD/Unlimited, 269, 270 choreography, 225-226, 247, 248, 249, 284, Lucas, Sam, 41

285, 286 Lucky Day (film), 116

Omar Edwards and, 320 Lucky Seven Trio, 100 Savion Glover and, 283-284 Lunceford, Jimmie, 104, 109

Jane Goldberg and, 238 LuPone, Patti, 247

Hines Kids and, 248 lying songs, 16

in Tap, 246 Lyles, Aubrey, 68-69, 72-73

Let’s Go Places (musical), 139 Lyles, Fe; 72

Let’s Rock (film), 168 Lynch, Bill, 21, 26 Lett, Tandu, 358 Lynn Dally and Dancers, 243, 265 Levine, Andrea, 229, 238, 239, 241, 254 Lyric Theatre, 98 Levine, Lawrence, 90

Levine, Wendy, 346, 349 M Levitt, Al, 344 Mablin, Harold, 97, 200

Levinson, Ross, 241 Mabern, Harold, 219 Levy, Ted, 286, 287, 307, 313, 344 MacCool, Finn, 14

Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (musical), 186 MacDonald, Heather, 107

Lewis, Belle, 26 Macel, Emily, 351

Lewis, Brent, 269 Machito Orchestra, 322 Lewis, Jerry, 188, 300 Mack, Eddie, 64 Lewis, Ted, 174, 207 Mack, Lavinia, 75

Lewis, Theophilus, 49, 50 Macklin, Valerie, 286 Lewis, Wilbert, 319 MacLeod, Bonnye, 231, 232, 236 Libby Spencer’s Dancing Girls, 256 Macy’s Day Tap Parade, 229

Life Begins at 8:40 (musical), 149 Mad Cat of Rhythm, 274

Life of Riley (TV), 181 Madden, Owney, 110

Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 6 Madison, Louise, 107

“Lighten Up” (dance), 244 Madison Square Garden, 34 Likes, Lance, 348 “Magic Hours in the Theatre” (Theo. Lewis), 50

Lindsay, Vachel, 22 Mahones, Gildo, 203

Lindy Hop, 134 Mahoney, Billie, 172-173, 179, 206

Litt, Jacob, 20 Mahoney, Will, 55, 66, 223 Little Colonel, The (film), 121, 123, 124 Majeski, Amanda, 353

Little Johnny Jones (musical), 31 Majestic Magnolias, 74 Little Miss Broadway (film), 151 Majesty of Tap, The, 354 Little Show, The (musical), 86 Majors, Andrea Herbert, 335 Littlest Rebel, The (film), 122-123, 124 Make Mine Manhattan (musical), 192

Live Wire, 269 Malone, Jaqui, 99, 209, 210 Liza (musical), 75 “Mamie is Mimi” (song-and-dance), 163, 170, 179 Locke, Alain, 24 Manhattan Tap, 288

“Lollipop” (stage name), 84 Mann, Parris, 353

Lombre, Toni, 326-327 Mann, Traci, 329, 348

Long, Avon, 225 Manners, Bernard, 286, 288 Loos, Anita, 170 Manning, Lainie, 267, 295 Loring, Eugene, 194 Man-of-Words in the West Indies, The (Abrahams), Los Angeles Tap Festival, 318 16-17

Look for a Silver Lining (film), 149 Manning, Frankie, 247, 285, 286, 301

Louisiana mess-around (dance), 78 Mantle, Burns, 77 “Love Me or Leave Me” (song), 353 Marango ... Almost Tango, 341-342

Love You Madly (film), 205 March, Frederic, 98

Lowe, “Uncle” Jim, 12 Marcus, Elise, 78

INDEX 429

Mark, Zane, 309, 334 Medina, Joe, 315 Markham, Pigmeat, 22, 145 “Meditation on Integration” (Mingus), 337

Marks, Peter, 296 Melody for Two (musical), 180 Marrow, Esther, 205 Mendonca, Mark, 267, 357

Marsh, Reginald, 98 Merman, Ethel, 151 Martial, Ellen, 192 Merrill, Robert, 166

Martin, Benny, 55-56 Merry World, The (musical), 149

Martin, Dean, 188 Messin’ Around (musical), 92 Martin, John, 75, 160, 191 Meyer, Moe, 17

Marvin, the Tap-Dancing Horse (TV), 330 Michaels, Kelly, 298

Marx Brothers, 56 Michelot, Pierre, 344 “Mary’s Gone with a Coon” (song), 19 Mikado, The (musical), 121 Mason, Jack, 52 Mildred and Henri, 91 Mason, Pat, 85 Miller, Ann Mason, Snippy, 74 as Fred Astaire partner, 116

Mast, Cinda, 222 awards, 300

“Mastering Femininity in Tap” (class), 325-326, 328 in Easter Parade, 125, 142-143

Masterson, Peter, 225 LeGon and, 125 Mastin, Will, 188, 189, 189 life and career, 141-142 Matalon, Vivian, 247 publicity photo, 143 Matthews, Emmett, 178 in Sugar Babies, 225, 247 Mattox, Matt, 233 television appearances, 207

Matura, Mustapha, 16 Miller, Danny, 84. See also Pete, Peaches, Max, Trina, 262 and Duke

Maxwell, Jimmy, 249 Miller, Duke, ror, 112

Mayer, Louis B., 128 Miller, Flournoy E., 68-69, 72-73, 93, 136

Mayo Brothers, 182 Miller, George, 84 Mayor of Dixie, The (musical), 72 Miller, Glenn, 134

McCleary, Theresa, 354 Miller, I., 224

McCloud, Andy, 321, 332 Miller, Irving C., 72 McClure, Emmet, 103 Miller, Marilyn, 52, 86, 149

McColgan, John, 304 Miller, Theodore, 20, 62

McCourt, Frank, 304 Miller Brothers, 84

McCree, Maxie, 60, 75,79 Miller Brothers and Lois, 104

McDaniel, Hattie, 122 Miller Eye (shop), 224

McDonald, Freda Josephine, 73-74 Mills, Florence, 73, '77, 225, 300

McDowell, Minnie, 95 Mills, Irving, 136 McGatchie, Dan, 55-56 Mills, Maude, 73

McGibbon, Al, 286 Mills, Olivia, 73

McHugh, Jimmy, 91, 136, 207 Mills Brothers, 142

McIntyre, James, 23, 61 Mills Sisters, 73

McIntyre and Heath, 61 Milton Berle Show (TV), 189 McKay, Claude, 79 Mingus, Charlie, 199, 200, 202-203, 211-212,

McKay, Gary, 222 337, 359

McKayle, Donald, 227, 248 Minnelli, Liza, 155 McKee, Lonette, 249 Minnelli, Vincente, 153, 154, 184, 194

McKernan, Ralph, 127 Minns, Al, 65

McNamara, Josephine, 259, 259, 260 minstrel shows, 24, 41, 138

McNichols, Steve, 296 minstrels, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16 McPhail, Jimmy, 205 Minton’s (jazz club), 321

McPhee, John T., 218, 219 “Minuet in G” (Pederdwski), 42

Meadows, Henry, 81 Mishra, Ramesh, 342

430 INDEX

Mitchell, Billy, Go Morton Gould Tap Concerto, 237

Mitchell, Deborah Mothers of Invention, 212 awards and acknowledgment, 301, 330 Motown Records, 211

birth and early years, 352-353 Mount, William Sidney, 2 in Black and Blue, 284, 286 Moyers, Mimi, 264, 265, 278

Bufalino and, 249-250 Mr. Wonderful (musical), 189

choreography, 353 Mueller, John, 155 Gaines and, 352 Mullaney, Jimmy, 21 New Jersey Tap Ensemble and, 352, 353 Mulligan, Gerry, 212

on tap as art form, 4 Mulvey, Laura, 155 in tap calendar, 354 Munshin, Jules, 185 at Women in Tap Conference, 359 Murphy, Carson, 329, 353, 356, 357

Mitchell, Jerry, 331 Murphy, Dudley, 93 Mithess, Helen, 74 Murphy, Elliot, r71 modernism, 88-90 Murphy, George, 55, 129, 150-152, 153 Mogami, Molusi, 344 Murray, Ken, 187 Monaghan, Terry, 341 Murray, Mai, 50 Monk, Meredith, 238 musical comedy, 48, 82

Monk, Thelonious, 323, 353, 358 musical films, 93-96, 139, 193

mooche, 47 musicals, black, 69

Mooche, The (TV), 225 My Chocolate Girl (musical), 81 Moon over Miami (film), 139-140, 143-144 My Friend from Kentucky (musical), 48

Moon Suite, 353 My Funny Valentine (song-and-dance), 355 Moonlight and Pretzels (film), 98 My Maryland (musical), 116

Moore, Beverly, 329 My One and Only (musical), 247 Moore, Carman, 297 My Sister Eileen (film), 196 Moore, Tim, 88 Myers, LeRoy, 167, 168, 239, 240, 300, 301, 349

Moran, Willie, 26

Morant, Joey, 347 N

Mordecai, Jimmy, 93-94 Nance, Ray, 175

Moreland, Mantan, 93 Nanton, Sam, 91

Morgan, Lee, 211 Narita, Cobi, 330

Morgan tap, 84 Nathan, Hans, 8-9

Moritel, Fred, 299 National Tap Dance Day, 289-290, 298 “Morning Glories Grew” (dance), 61 NAWJA, 289

Morrison, Margaret Nealy, Frances, 255, 259, 260, 270 American Tap Dance Orchestra and, 264, Ned Wayburn Dance Studios, 83

265, 278 Ned Wayburn’s Minstrel Misses (musical), 32, 83 birth and early years, 358 “Neighbor, The” (Alter), 239

Bufalino and, 358 Neises, Pia, 357

in Evening Stars, 357 Nelson, Carolyn, 147

in 53, 356 Nelson, Gene, 148

in Fives and Sixes, 358 Nelson, Miriam, 359

on form, 359 Nemr, Andrew, 305, 332 in “How Little We Know,” 297, 357, 358 New Faces of 1937 (film), 141

New Orleans solo, 358 New Jersey Tap Ensemble, 352, 353 in “Round Midnight,” 358 New Sole Sisters (J. Goldberg), 259-260 in Solo Tap Adventure, 358 New Tap Generations (S. Glover), 294

on tap, 333 New York City Tap Festival, 344, 353

Tribble duet, 357-358 New York Jazz Museum, 218-219 Morske, Jim, 207 New York Shakespeare Festival Institute of Tap, 313 Morton, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll,” 307 Newcomb, William W., 161

INDEX 431 Newly, Anthony, 208-209 Not Your Ordinary Tappers (NYOT), 313-315, 326

Newman, Joe, 219 Nugent, Pete

Newman, Rigmor (later Nicholas), 218 Copasetics and, 167, 168

Newport All-Stars, 212 at the Cotton Club, 112

Newport Jazz Festival (1960), 199 Dance Craft studio, 163, 170, 203 Newport Jazz Festival (1962), 201-203 on Teddy Hale, 174-175 Newport Jazz Festival (1963), 203-204, 220 at Newport Jazz Festival, 201, 202, 203, 220

Newport Jazz Festival (1969), 211-212 in Runnin’ Wild, 75 Newport Jazz Festival (1973), 219 See also Pete, Peaches, and Duke

Nice, Fred, Jr., 52 Nuyorican Poets Café, 315

Nicholas, Fayard NYOT (Not Your Ordinary Tappers), 313-315, 326 on audiences, 309

awards and acknowledgments, 330 O challenge dances, 132-133, 133, 209 O Neactain, Seosamh, 345, 346-348, 347

choreography, 247, 285, 286 O’Connor, Billy, 180

as drummer, 216 O’Connor, Donald, 180-181, 181, 185, 185,

life and career, 100 208-209, 300 See also Nicholas Brothers; Nicholas Kids O’Connor, Jack, 180

Nicholas, Harold O’Connor, Patrick, 212, 214 challenge dances, 132-133, 133, 209 Octoroons (medicine show), 26, 35

relocation overseas, 170 O’Dwyer, William, 166

in Tap, 245, 246 Of Thee I Sing (musical), 151 in Tappin’ Uptown, 256 O’Keefe, Cormack, 164

See also Nicholas Brothers; Nicholas Kids Oklahoma (musical), 153

Nicholas, Rigmor Newman, 218 “Old Aunt Jemima” (Kersands), 19

Nicholas, Ulysses, 100, 110 “Old Kentucky Home” (Foster), 64

Nicholas, Viola, 100, 110 old style step dancing, 10-11

Nicholas Brothers Old Time Hoofers, 220 audiences of, 309 Oliver, Cy, 109

awards, 300 Oliver, Shelly, 278

challenge dances, 132-133, 208-209 Olvera, Mattie, 79, 143

at Cotton Club, 110, 111-112 Omiya, Daisuke, 345

film contracts, 138 On Tap! 303

in It Ain’t Hay, 134-135 On the Town (film), 184-185

in Sammy, 225 On Your Toes (film), 180 speed of, 81 On Your Toes (musical), 149, 156 in Stormy Weather, 136-137 “Once in Love with Amy” (song-and-dance), 149

television appearances, 207 One for the Money (revue), 153

Nicholas Kids, 100, 111 O’Neal, Jessica, 353 Nierenberg, George T., 220 O’Neil, Kitty, 54

Night Club Revue, 178 Orach, Joe, 264 Niles, Mary-Ann, 222 oral traditions, 13-16

Nip, Tommy, 190 orality, 17-19

Niremberg, George, 282 Orange, John, 103 Nit, Johnny, '75, 76 Orchestra Wives (film), 136

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 189 Orezzoli, Hector, 284, 286

Nix, Walter, 233 Orisha Suite, 345

No, No Nanette (1925 musical), 84, 224 Ornowski, Eddie, 355 No, No Nanette (1971 musical), 222-224 Osterwald, Bibi, 207 No, No Nanette (2008 musical), 331 Over the Top With Bebop (TV), 207 No Maps on My Taps (film), 220, 282 over-the-top (air step), 48, 74

Norvo, Red, 212 Overton, Ada (later Walker), 36-41, 37, 40

432 INDEX

Overton, Moses, 36 Pickaninny Dance, 23, 24

Owens, Frank, 301, 330 Pie, Pie, Blackbird (film), 100

Oxley, Leonard, 286 Pierce, Billy, 85-86, 86

Pp pimp’s walk, 168 Pa’ Los Rumberos, 345 Pin-up Girl (film), 140-141, 143, 144 Pillow Dance Festival (1993), 295

paddle-and-roll, 16, 25, 213 Piru-Bole, 270-271

Paddywock, 332 Pitter Patter (musical), 147

“Padukah Blues” (song), 242 Pitts, Jaunita, 255 Pal Joey (musical), 152 Plantation Revue (musical), 75 Palace Theater (New York), 56, Go, 63 Plantation Steppers, 76

Palmer, Aaron, 60, '75, 79 Play Mas Festival skeletons, 16

Palmer, Kelly, 75 Playboy of the West Indies (Matura), 16 Pan, Hermes, 116, 140 Playboy of the Western World (Synge), 16

Panama Hattie (film), 125 Plessy v. Ferguson, 98 Panoramas (projection machines), 144 Poetaster (Jonson), 14 Parker, Charlie, 170, 176, 322-323 Policy Players, The (musical), 36 “Pas de Matelot, A Sailor’s Hornpipe-Old Style,” 7 Pollak, Max, 302, 341, 344, 356

Passing Show, The (film), 23, 24 ponies, 51 Passing Show of (1912, 1913, 1914), 51-52 Pops and Louis, 103

Pastor, Antonio “Tony,” 54-55 Porgy and Bess (musical), 100, 208

Patillo, Dave, 178 Porter, Cole, 113, 128, 195

Patricola, Tom, 86 Porter, Edward S., 24

Payne, Cliff, 103 Porter, Jake, 286 Payne, Jimmy, 168, 2'73 Porter, Van, 286, 302, 306, 344 Payne, John, 134 Porter, William, 210 Paz, Leonardo Suarez, 321 Porto Rico Girls (dance group), 40-41

Peckett, Donna, 289 potato famines, 9, 29

Pederewski, Ignacy Jan, 42 Powell, Adam Clayton, 166 Peg Leg Bates Country Club, 187 Powell, Bud, 323 Peggy Spina Tap Company, 272, 288-289 Powell, Dick, 120

Pelham, Dick, 18 Powell, Eleanor Pennington, Ann, 51, 78, 86 as Fred Astaire partner, 116, 130 Perrin, Gilles, 344 blackface and, 129 Perry, Dein, 296 Bubbles and, 127 Perry, Lincoln, 99 costumes and, 253 Perry Como Show, 207 films, 124-131, 145-146

Pete, Peaches, and Duke, tor, 112 life and career, I'71, 206-207

Peters, Johnnie, 45 George Murphy and, 151-152 Peters, Michael, 248 photographs, 128, 146 Petronio, Ezra, 344 Bill Robinson and, 127, 129 Petronio, Leela, 343, 344, 354, 355-356 television appearances, 207 Petronio, Peter, 344 Powell, Jane, 116, 194 Petronio, Sarah, 342, 343, 343-344, 354, 356 Powolny, Frank, 140

Phenomenal Woman (Angelou), 360 Pratt, Tina, 172, 254, 255, 264, 303, 354

Philadelphia Tap, 289 Preece, Jean, 224

Philco Television Playhouse, 178 Preston, Luther, 167, 168

Phillips, Sondra Reeves, 284 Prima, Louis, 159 Phina & Her Picks, 56 Primrose, George Delaney, 12, 14, 55, 61-62, 88,

“Piano Dance” (dance), 193 101

pickaninnies, 22, 23, 56-57 Primus, Pearl, 41 Pickaninnies, The (film), 23 Prince, Joe, 117

INDEX 433 Prince, Louise Olive, 108 Reed, Leonard, 60, 79, 2:70, 2'71, 301, 330

Prinz, LeRoy, 116 Reed, Robert, Jr., 299 Public Menace, The (film), 151 Reed, Robert L., 299 Puig, Christian, 345 Reed, Robin, 299 Pull It (tap step), 80 Reed, Samuel, 60

Put and Take (musical), 75 Reed-Davis, Idella, 271, 359 Relin, Toni, 269

Q Remington, Mayme, 20, 56

Queen High (film), 128 Reveille with Beverly (film), 141-142 Reynolds, Debbie, 180, 185, 225

R Rhapsody In Taps (company), 269, 270, 270, 274,

Raal, Tommy, 196 289

radio broadcasts, 106, I11 Rhumba Tap, 341 Radio City Music Hall, 91 Rhythm and Schmooze (show), 239 Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, 300, 330 Rhythm Iss, 271, 353 Raff, Pamela, 262, 280, 281, 282, 288 Rhythm ’n Shoes, 355-356

ragtime, 12, 52-54, 71, 134 Rhythm Pals, 210 “Ragtime Regiment, The” (dance), 51 Rhythm Queens, 284, 354 Rahardjanoto, Claudia, 329, 356, 357 Rhythmic Influences, 355

Rahn, Rich, 206 rhythm-tap dancing, 262 railroads, 9-10 Ribeiro, Alphonse, 247, 283

Rainey, Ma, 79 Rice, Charlie, 81

“Rainy Saturday, A” (song-and-dance), 113 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy,” 8-9, 98, 149

rallentando, 81 Rich, Buddy, 146, 169, 178, 200, 212, 216 Ramsay, Kevin, 286, 287 Rich, Frank, 248, 307 Randolph, A. Philip, 137 Richardson, Derk, 244

rapparee, 14, 18 Richardson, James E., 77, 78-79 Rastus, Joe, 23, 24 Richardson, Jazz, 238, 250 Raven, Jackie, 262 Richardson, Jerome, 286, 287 Rawlins, Jimmy, 243 Richman, Camden

Rawlins, Lynn. See Dally, Lynn Rawlins Camden Richman Quartet, 243

Ray, Tiny, 56 Dally and, 265

Razaf, Andy, 136, 353 Jazz Tap Ensemble and, 242, 242, 244, 266 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (film), 124 in Riffs concert, 243

Rector, Eddie on Tap Dance America, 278, 279 Bubbles and, 87 Richmond, Danny, 199, 200, 216, 217 challenge dances and, 87 Ridley, Larry, 212 Cotton Club and, 77 Riffs (concert), 243-244 in Darktown Follies, 45, 48 Rifkin, Babs, 229

in Liza, 75 Riis, Thomas, 47

Messin’ Around and, 92 Rise of Rosie O’Reilly (musical), 117

as pick, 56 Riverdance, 304-3006, 345, 354

stage dancing and, 80 Riverside Dance Festival (1982), 262

Rector, Grace, 75 Roach, Max, 168, 199, 211-212, 217 Rector, Henry, 76 Robbins, Jerome, 168, 192, 351

Red, Detroit, 87 Roberson, Ken, 286

Red, Rhythm, 212, 213, 214, 222 Roberta (film), 113

Red and Struggy, 104 Roberta (musical), 151 Red Moon, The (musical), 40 Roberts, Henry “Phace,” 95, 167, 168, 239, 240, 300

Redman, Don, 200 Roberts, Luckey, 45, 56, 204

Reed, David, 161 Robertson, Debbie, 262

Reed, Jerry, 274 Robin and the Seven Hoods (film), 189-190

434 INDEX Robinson, Bill “Bojangles” Runft, Courtney, 329 Afro-Irish fusions and, 65-67 Runnin’ Wild (musical), 75

buck-and-wing and, 20 Russell, Betty, 228 challenge dances, 3, 20-21, 65, 66, 87 Russell, Curly, 323

Cotton Club and, 77 Ryan, Hannah, 305 Sammy Davis Jr. and, 188 Ryan, Peggy, 180

death and funeral, 165-166, 179

description, 120-121 S

double roll demonstration, 66 Sadler, Donald, 222 films, 121, 122-124, 136 Safford, Sarah, 239, 240, 257, 258, 259, 259, 260

T. Fletcher on, 21 “Sailor’s Hornpipe—Old Style” (dance), 7, 161

N. Hughes on, 89 St. Denis, Ruth, 39, 40

“Keep a Song in Your Soul,” tap routine to, St. Louis Blues (film), 93-94, 96

121 St. Louis hop (dance), 78

LeGon and, 124-125, 125 St. Louis Tap Festival, 299 musicals, 88, 121, 121, 122, 210 St. Patrick’s Day Rebellion (1741), 5

as pick, 56 Salsbury, Lou, 41

Eleanor Powell and, 127, 129 Salt and Pepper, 105, 105 Sawyer and, 125-126, 126 “Salt Peanuts” (Gillespie), 323 stair dance, 63-65, 66, 67, 89 Sammy (musical), 225

style of, 13, 88 Sammy Lewis Revue, 210

television appearances, 179 Samuels, Elka (Smith), 317, 330

Temple and, 121-124, 123 Samuels, Sue, 316, 317

tributes to, 361-362 San Francisco Beauties, 84, 85 vaudeville and, 62-65 San Juan, Olga, 116 See also Cooper and Robinson Sanchez, Elvera “Baby,” 188

Robinson, Clarence, 92, 136 Sand Jig, 54 Robinson, LaVaughan, 81, 107, 278, 289, 301 Sands, Dick, 29

Robinson, Willie, Go Sarkar, Debashish, 343 Rockette Spectacular, A, 247 Saroyan, William, 153

Rodgers, Richard, 156 satire, 13-19

Rogers, Ginger Saulters, Dorothy, 161, 178-179, 210 Fred Astaire and, 113-116, 114, 117, 155-156 Saunders, Gertrude, 73

films, 139, 140, 141 Savelli, Sarah, 303, 330, 353 in Forty-second Street, 118 Savion Glover Productions, 330 in A Rockette Spectacular, 247 Savoy Ballroom, 159

Rooney, Mickey, 225, 247 Savoy Sultans, 200 Rooney, Pat, 29, 55 Sawyer, Geneva, 125-126, 126

the rope, 352 Saxon, Josephine, 56 Rosalie (film), 129 Say When (musical), 92 Rose, Al, 74 Scariano, Laura, 305

Rosendaal, Ruth, 356 Schlesinger, Carl, 300, 330 Rosenkrantz, Olivia, 297, 341 Schoenberg, Arnold, 201

Rossellini, Isabella, 275 Schott, Carrie, 56 Rothstein, Selma, 229 Schotte, John LeRoy, 164 “Round Midnight” (T. Monk), 323, 358 Schwab, Lynn, 356, 357

Rowan, Jo, 301 Schwartz, Arthur, 113, 194 Roy, Melinda, 324 Scopino, Tony, 278, 288 Royal Wedding (film), 193-194 Scotch-Irish immigrants, 6-7

rubato, 81 Scott, Beverly, 269, 270, 270 Ruffin, Leonard, 57 Scott, Hazel, 166 Rufus Jones for President (film), 188 Scott, Jimmy, 217

INDEX 435 sean-nos, 10-11, 49, 149, 345-346 Rhapsody In Taps and, 2'70 Secret Talents of the Stars (TV), 330 in Swinging Taps, 249

Seeley, Blossom, 56 in Tap, 245, 246, 246

Segal, Lewis, 269, 2'70, 360 on Tap Dance America, 2'78 Segovia, Claudio, 284, 285 Tap Happenings and, 212, 213, 213, 214 segregation, 48-49, 76, 98, 110, 137, 188 television appearances, 179

Selva tap, 84 Sinatra, Frank, 142, 185, 189

Semadini, Roxane “Butterfly,” 295, 302-303, 303, “Sing, Sing, Sing” (dance act), 158, 159

305, 300, 330, 341 Singin’ in the Rain (film), 180, 185 Senchen (poet), 14 Singing, Swinging, and Winging (concert), 231-233,

Sensations of 1932 (revue), 190 232, 236

“Seosamh’s New York” (TV), 346 Siretta, Dan, 225

Seven Little Foys, 148 “Sis” (dancer), 108 Shall We Dance (film), 113 Sislen, Myrna, 289

Shawn, Ted, 239 Sissle, Noble, 53, 69, 74, 75, 93, 103 Shepard, Evelyn, 95 Six Hits and a Miss (film), 190

Shevelove, Burt, 222 Skelton, Red, 146

Shiffman, Frank, 102 Skinner, Randy, 331 Shim Sham (club), 80 Slap and Happy, 104 shim sham shimmy, 80 “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” (ballet), 156, 160 Shim Sham Shimmy Champions (stage show), 80 Slave Laws, 5

shimmy, 53 Sloan, Leni, 5

Ship Ahoy (film), 146 Sly and the Family Stone, 212 shoes Slyde, Jimmy

clog shoes, 64, 65, 83-84, 88 awards and acknowledgments, 301, 330

high-heeled tap, 325, 326 at Berlin Jazz Festival, 178 for Ned Wayburn’s Minstrel Misses, 83 in Black and Blue, 284, 286, 287

for soft-shoe, 161 at La Cave, 301-302, 303

for tap and stepping, 82-83, 83-85, 127, 224 at Chicago on Tap festival, 344

“Shoo Fly” (song-and-dance), 161 in Hoofers, 288 Shoot Me while I’m Happy (revue), 239, 240 life and career, 170, 177-178

Shoot the Works (musical), 151 in The Majesty of Tap, 354

Shout, Ring, 17 Sarah Petronio and, 344 Showman’s (club), 346 Sommer on, 177 Shubert brothers, 51-52 in Tap, 245-246

shuffle, 7, 8 in Tap Dance America, 278, 307 Shuffle Along (1921 musical), 41, 68-75, 72, 83 in Tap Happenings, 212, 213, 214, 222

Shuffle Along (1952 musical), 225 tap jams and, 304 Shufflin’ Sam from Alabam (musical), 81 Smart Set (theatrical company), 40

Siegelman, Jim, 4 Smith, Alma, 86

Silk Stockings (film), 195 Smith, Benjamin, 316

Silsbee, Kirk, 268 Smith, Bessie, 81, 93-94, 96, 225 Silver Belles, 289, 300 Smith, Carrie, 284, 286, 287

Simmons, Phil, 87 Smith, Clara, 73

Simms, Louis, 239, 240, 252 Smith, Elka (later Samuels), 317, 330

Simone, Nina, 353 Smith, Ernie, 299-300 Simpson-Serven, Ida, 32 Smith, Hank, 305, 330 Sims, Howard “Sandman” Smith, James W., 6

By Word of Foot and, 250 Smith, Jason Samuels in The Essence of Rhythm, 270 Anybody Can Get It company, 330

Jane Goldberg and, 238 awards and acknowledgments, 330 in No Maps on My Taps, 220, 282 Bloch dancewear and, 330

436 INDEX Smith, Jason Samuels (continued) Sothern, Ann, 151

Casel and, 317 Soto, Colleen “Miss Twist,” 303

challenge dances, 347, 347-348 soubrettes, 106

Charlie’s Angels, 322-324 Soul (TV), 227 choreography, 327 Soul Possessed (musical), 32:7 in “Come Sunday,” 361 Soulos, Daniel, 342

Savion Glover and, 318 soundies, 144-145 Jane Goldberg on, 318 Sounds in Motion, 262 Mya Harrison and, 330 Sounds of Music, 237

Gregory Hines on, 316 South before the War, The (revue), 20, 23

in Imagine Tap! 335 “Spain” (Corea), 345

India Jazz Suite and, 342 Span, Paula, 240-241

Michela Lerman and, 348-349 “Sparkplug,” George, 59

life and career, 316-319 Speed Kings, 103

NYOT and, 313 Speed Kings 2, 103-104

in “Seosamh’s New York,” 346 Speer, Bernice, 78

on tap dancing, 331 Spencer, Amy, 95

as teacher, 336-337 Spencer, Libby, 105, 109 in 21 Below! 348 Spencer, Prince, 301, 330 J. Wiggan on, 350 Spencer, Willie, 230-231, 280

Smith, Jo Jo, 316-317 Spender, Edith, 74 Smith, Speedy, 92 Spic and Span, 106, 106

Smith, Valerie E., 286 Spina, Peggy, 229, 272, 301, 354 Smuin, Michael, 247, 248 “Sping” (song-and-dance), 125 Smuylian-Jenkins, Maya, 332 Springs, Jimmy, 178

Snelson, Floyd, 86 Spunk, 308

Snyder, Matt, 301 stage dancing, 80 soft-shoe, 43, 47, 55, 61, 88, 161-162 Stage Door (film), 141

Sohl-Donnell, Linda Stage Door Canteen (film), 150

in All Blues, 267 Stages, 357

Honi Coles and, 271 stair dance, 63-65, 66, 67, 89

in 1980s, 269-271 “Stair Dance,” 67

Rhapsody In Taps, 267-268, 270, 289 Stand Up and Cheer (film), 123

at Women in Tap Conference, 359 Star is Born, A (film), 178

Soldier’s Hymn, 357 Star Steps Studio, 281

Sole Sisters (J. Goldberg), 109, 258-259, 259 Starring Sammy Davis, Jr. (LP), 189

Solo Tap Adventure, 358 Stearns, Marshall, 168, 201, 202-203, 207, 351

solo/duo form, 261 Step, Anna, 98 soloists, 261 step dancing, 7, 10-12, 17, 65

Sommer, Sally Steps in Time (program), 241 awards and acknowledgments, 330 Steve Gibson and the Red Caps, 178 “A Big Hand for the Little Ladies,” 260 Steve Gibson’s Talent Showcase (TV), 178

on By Word of Foot, 250-251 Stewart, Alice, 56

on Slyde, 177 Stickato, 269 on The Tapping Talk Show, 257-258 Stomp! 350

Sommers, Pamela, 254 STOMP (musical), 295-296

Son and Sonny, 103 Stone, Andrew, 136 “Song and Dance Map, The” (TV), 208-209 Stone, Eddie, 55

songs of marvel, 16 “Stop Time Rag” (Joplin), 242 Sons of Ham, The (musical), 35, 36 Stormy Weather (film), 136-13'7, 138 Sophisticated Ladies (musical), 247, 248 Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, The (film), 113

Sorgen, Harvey, 236 Storyville (club), 219-220

INDEX 437

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 24 T straight tap, 82 “Taking a Chance on Love” (song-and-dance), 162 Strand, Deidre, 289, 355 Talley, Thomas, 17 Strayhorn, Billy, 167, 168 Tamango (Herbin Van Cayseele)

Street Scene (musical), 192 Bay Mo Dilo, 342, 346

Strickland Sisters, 233 at La Cave, 302, 303

Strickler, Fred fusion and, 341

in Jazz Tap Ensemble, 242, 242, 243, 244, in Riverdance, 306

205, 266 tap jams, 349

on Foster Johnson, 268 Tammany Hall, 54, 65, 87 on tap, changes in, 296 Tandem Act Productions, 330 on Tap Dance America, 278 “Tangle-Footed Monkey Wrench” (dance), 52

Stroman, Gil, 336 tango, 47

Struck, Leslie, 325 Tango Twist (dance), 80

strut, 33-36, 38, 45, 47, 134 Tanguay, Eva, 56

Strut Mill Lizzie (musical), 75 Taniguchi, Shoko, 329, 345 Stump and Stumpy, 103, 104, 104 Tap (film), 245-246, 246, 248, 277, 293

Styne, Jule, 170 Tap All-Stars, 321, 334

Suarez, Gil, 315 Tap and Song, 329

Sublett, John “Bubbles.” See Bubbles, John Tap Choreography, 333

Sudhalter, Richard, 236-237 Tap City Youth Ensemble, 344, 360, 361

Sugar (musical), 224-225 tap dance

Sugar Babies (musical), 225, 247 as American art form, 288

sugar foot strut, 78 as an oral language, 17

Sugar Hill Times (TV), 179 black-rhythm, 249-250

Sullivan, Alice, 85, 141 challenges, 2-3, 17

Sullivan, Ed, 178, 180. See also Ed Sullivan Show decline, 168-170, 174

Sullivan, Melinda, 330, 349 evolution, 2-4, 83

Sumbry parentage, 2

Sumbry, Dormeshia. See Edwards, Dormeshia festivals, 2772-275

Summer Stock (film), 185 resurgence, 218, 222, 228-231, 246-247, 256

Summers, Elaine, 238 rhythm-tap, 262

Summers, Sunny, 222 styles, 61

“Summertime” (Gershwin), 353 term for, 33

Sun Valley Serenade (film), 138 transition in form, 174

“Swanee River” (Foster), 64 Tap Dance America (TV), 278-279, 307 Swell Miss Fizwell, The (musical), 32 Tap Dance Kid, The (musical), 193, 24.7, 283-284

SWiNg, 133-134, 169 Tap Dances, Rhythm, and Rags, 241-242

Swing 46 (club), 303 Tap Dancin’ (film), 220-221

Swing It, 354 Tap Dancing is Music (LP), 321

Swing Time (film), 113, 129 Tap Dogs (revue), 296 Swinging Taps, 249, 250 Tap Extravaganza, 299-301, 300, 313

Swinton, Harry, 3, 20-21 Tap Forward, 353

Swisher, Viola, 243-244 Tap Happening: The Hoofers, 222

Swiveller, Dick, 28 Tap Happenings, 212-214, 213, 220, 222 Symphony in Swing (film), 105 Tap International, 344-345

Syncopate and Swing, 272 tap jams, 302, 304, 327, 349-350 Syncopating Sunflowers, 74 Tap Rhapsody/Part I, 269

syncopation, 52 Tap Roots (Knowles), 11

Syncopation (revue), 81 Tapage (dance company), 341-342 Synge, John Millington, 16 Tapestry, 289, 355

Szablewski, Jackie, 298 Tapestry (duet), 261-262

438 INDEX

TAPIT, 289 Three Ebony Steppers, 92 Tap-o-mania, 229 Three Eddies, 56 Tappin’ Uptown (musical), 256 Three for All (revue), 191

tapping and talking, 239 Three Gobs, 200

Tapping and Talking Dirty (revue), 239 Three Little Dots, 103 Tapping Talk Show, The (J. Goldberg), 240, Three Little Words, 103

257-258 Three Millers, 99-100

Tapping the Source (Bufalino), 253 369th Infantry Band, 85

taps, 83-85 Thumbs Up (musical), 190 Taps and Baby, 106 Ti Dii (company), 332-333 Tate, Grady, 286 Tiller, John, 50 Tate, Jimmy, 283, 309, 310, 320 Tiller Girls, 50, 76

Tayir, Andre, 209 Time of Your Life (musical), 153

Taylor, Clarence, 60 time steps, 47

Taylor, Dianne. See Walker, Dianne Taylor Tin Pan Alley (film), 136

Taylor, Dwight, 113 Tip, Tap, and Toe, 103 Taylor, Eva, 56, 74 Tip Tap Festival, 283, 328 Taylor, Jumaane, 330 Tippet, Clark, 239

Taylor, June, 182 Tirado, Aida, 314

television, 178-179, 207-209 Tizol, Juan, 91, 95

Temple, Shirley, 121-124, 123 Toast of the Town (TV), 178, 182

tempo, 81 Toastettes, 182

Tempo Club, 53 TOBA (Theater Owner's Booking Association), 57 Ten Toe Percussion, 289 Tobias, Tobi, 293, 295

Tennessee Ten, 73 Toe Jam, 320 Terry, Clark, 203 Toll, Robert, 41 Terry, Keith Tolliver, Denny, 23, 24 awards, 330 Tolson, Aaron, 334, 336 Jazz Tap Ensemble and, 242, 242, 243, 244, Tomlinson, Peter, 236

265, 266 Tonight (TV), 207

Texaco Star Theater (TV), 179 Toosweet, Willie, 59

Texas Tommy, 45, 47-48 Top Hat (club), 145 That Rhythm Man, 353 Top Hat (film), 112, 113, 155 That’s Entertainment! (film), 228 Top Speed (musical), 116 That’s Entertainment, Part 2 (film), 228 Torbert, Shakir, 348

That’s the Spirit (musical), 93 Tortorici, Pat, 264, 265, 297 Theater Owner’s Booking Association (TOBA),57 = Touch, Turn, Return (musical abstraction), 297

Theodore, Lee, 247 Tough, Dave, 274

Third Birthday Revue, 128 Townsend, Bross, 300 This Is Broadway (TV), 187 Travelers (Conrad), 241 This Is Show Business (TV), 179 Tribble, Robin, 357-358

Thomas, Ivan, 306 Triffitt, Nigel, 296

Thomas, John, 94, 95 Tucker, Earl “Snake Hips,” 86, 91, 103, 111, 111

Thomas, John E., 167, 168 Tucker, Sophie, 56 Thompson, Kay, 116, 195 Tune, Tommy, 225, 247, 256-257, 278, 301 Thompson, Robert Farris, 66 Turned on Tap (revue), 345-346 Thompson, Ulysses “Slow Kid,” 22, 62, 73, '75, 76 Turner, Joe, 274.

Thoroughly Modern Millie, 331 Twain, Mark, 6 Thorpe, Mildred “Candi,” 105, 107 “Twenty Cent Picture” (Marsh painting), 98

Thousands Cheer (film), 153 21 Below!, 348

Three Aces, 103 Twitchell, Becky, 295

Three Dukes, 352 Two Gentlemen from the South (play), 67

U in tap calendar, 354

INDEX 439

Ulster Scots, 6-7 on Tap Dance America, 278, 279 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (film), 24-25 tap jams and, 304

“Unsquare Dance” (Brubeck), 244 Tip Tap Festival and, 283 Uptown .. . It’s Hot! (revue), 247 at Women in Tap Conference, 359, 360

V Walker, Happy, 135 Valdes, Chucho, 329 Walker, James, 104, 168

Walker, George, 34-40, 37, 76

Van, Bobby, 223, 224 Walker, Jerry Jeff, 189

Van Cayseele, Herbin. See Tamango (Herbin Van Walker, Rodney, 280

Cayseele) Waller, Fats, 99, 124, 136, 353

Van Hamel, Martine, 239 Walsh, Jimmy, 56 Van Vechten, Carl, 38 Walsh, Thommie, 247 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 35 Walters, Charles, 142 Vanderbilt, William Kissam, 35-36 “Waltz” (dance), 244

variety theater, 54 Ward, Aida, 88, 111 vaudeville, 54-56, 57, 60-63, 146-147 Ware, Archie, 56 Vaughn, Carol, 289 Ware, Wilbur, 199 Ventura, Michael, 16 Warfield Girls, 34

Vera-Ellen, 116, 156-157, 157, 185, 194 Warrior, The, 333-334

Vernon, Willard “Billie,” 147 Washington, Dewey, 87

Vick, Harold, 219 Washington, Ford Lee “Buck,” 100-102, 102,

Village Gate, 252 207-208

Village Vanguard, 215-217 Washington, Fredi, 74, 94-96, 96 Virginia essence (dance), 19, 78 Washington, Melvin, 286

Virginia Minstrels, 9, 18 Washington, Vernon, 225 vocal choreography, 209-211 Washington Johnny (dance), 78

Von Essen, Eric, 266 Wasser, Beverly, 240, 257, 258, 259, 259, 260 Wasserman, Dorothy Anderson

W By Word of Foot and, 254, 255 Waag, Tony, 264, 265, 278, 333, 334, 338-339 on Steve Condos, 273 “Waiting for the Sunday Boat” (postcard), 26 in Fascinatin’ Rhythms, 274

Wake Up and Live (film), 143 in New Sole Sisters, 259 walkabout, 33-36, 38, 45, 47, 134 poster designed by, 232 Walker, Ada Overton, 36-41, 37, 40 in Sole Sisters, 259

Walker, Dianne Taylor Waters, Elmer, 167, 168

awards, 301 Waters, Ethel, 60, 125, 162, 188 in Black and Blue, 284, 286 Watson, Robyn, 348

on black rhythm, 230 Watson, Susan, 223, 224 Leon Collins and, 230-231, 262, 280, 281, Watts, Richard, 119

337-338 Wayburn, Ned, 32-33, 51, 81-83, 82, 113

Collins and Company and, 282, 288 Webb, Clifton, 86

Dunning on, 279 Webb, Elida, 41

“Emily” and, 338 Weber, Bruce, 304 in Fascinatin’ Rhythms, 274 Weber, Sam, 266, 267, 293, 295

in 53, 356 Webster, George, 57 Savion Glover and, 284-285 Weeks, Alan, 247

in Leon Collins Dance Company, 281 Wein, George, 199, 212, 301

Levy and, 313 Weinglas, Dewey, 56

life and career, 230-231, 279-280 Welch, Jewel “Pepper,” 105, 105

Robert Reed and, 299 Wells, Dickie, 87, 97, 200

style of, 338 Wells, Mordecai, and Taylor, 92, 93

440 INDEX

Wendt, Ingrid, 261 Williams, Henry “Rubberlegs,” 59, 75

Wesley, Clarence, 56 Williams, Joseph, 5

Wessells, Henry, 111 Williams, Karen Callaway, 306, 344, 353-354, 354,

West, Eddie, 167, 168 356

West, John W., 26 Williams, Louis, 103

West, Mai, 86 Williams, Mack, 64 West Side Story (musical), 168 Williams, Miles, 74

Weyburn, Edward Claudius, 32-33, 51, 81-83, 82 Williams, Ruth, 87, 300 Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica? (J. Williams), 5 Williams and Walker, 34-36, 38, 39 “Where the Tap Dance Came From” (Haines), 83 Willis, Lorraine, 108

Where’s Charley (musical), 149 Wilson, Ben, 26

Whetsol, Arthur, 91, 94 Wilson, Billy, 225 Whirligig (dance step), 7 Wilson, Derby, 75, 103, I'71-172, 212, 214, 222

White, Dora, 95 Wilson, Edith, 91

White, Tony, 213, 272 Wilson, John, 249 White Nights (film), 275-277 Winfield, Raymond, 103

Whiteside, Ethel, 56 wing, 22

Whitfield, Pauline, 36 Winston, Tarik, 306

Whitlock, Billy, 18 Winters, David, 209 Whitman, Albert Allson, 58-59 Wolfe, George C., 307, 308, 309, 310, 313

Whitman, Albert “Pops,” Go, 103 women Whitman, Alberta, 58, 60, 253 African American activists, 39 Whitman, Alice, 58-61, 60, 107 African American dance teams, 104-105

Whitman, Caddie, 58 African American soloists, 58, 60

Whitman, Essie, 58 amazons, 50-52

Whitman, Mabel, 56, 58 beauty and, 50-51 Whitman Sisters, 59-60, 75, 80, 81, 107, 124 buck-and-wing dancers, 26-27

Whitney Brothers, 64 challenge dances and, 3, 255

150 Irish, 9

“Who Stole My Heart Away” (song-and-dance), Honi Coles and, 251, 256

Whoopee! (1928 musical), 225 ponies, 51 Whoopee! (1930 film), 139, 225 resurgence of tap and, 228-231, 250, 256

Whoopee! (1979 musical), 225 tap dance act and, 261 Widespread Depression Orchestra, 249 tap festivals and, 274 Wiggan, Joseph, 330, 334, 346, 350 tap movement, 351-352

Wiggan, Josette, 360 twentieth-century tap dancing and, 3-4 Wiggins, “Ginger” Jack, 77, 79-80 white women in tap, 253-254

Wild West Show, 22 Women Haters, The (musical), 56 Wilder, Baakari, 302, 309, 310, 312, 314-315, 320 Women in Tap Conference, 359-360

Wilkie, Andrew, 296 Wood, Bertye Lou, 101, 107, 109, 254, 255

Wilkins, Walter, 24 Wooding, Sam, 99

Will Mastin Trio, 188, 189 Woodman, Britt, 286 Will Mastin’s Gang, 188 Woodpeckers Tap Dance Center, 297, 301

Willett, Chappy, 162 Woods, Tommy, 74

Williams, Al, 97, 135, 353 Woodson, Arthur, 74

Williams, Bob, 74 Woody, Jimmy, 178

Williams, Cartier Anthony, 332, 348 Woodyard, Sam, 203

Williams, Claude, 286 Wooten, Daniel B., Jr., 306, 320 Williams, Cootie, 91 Words and Music (film), 156, 160 Williams, Egbert “Bert,” 34-36, 38, 39, 41,76,300 Worell, Irene, 27

Williams, Ethel, 45 Worell, Jennie, 27 Williams, Frances, 86 Worell, Sophie, 27

Y Zebulon, Karen, 303, 354 Yama-Yama Girls, 50 Zee, Steve, 295

Yankee Doodle Dandy (film), 148, 153 ZEN (dance company), 345

Yes | Can (S. Davis, Jr.), 189 Ziegfeld, Florenz, Jr., 44-45, 50-51 You Can’t Take It With You (film), 141 Ziegfeld Follies (film), 154-156

Young, Estella, 217 Ziegfeld Follies of 1912 (film), 142 Young, Trummy, 182 Ziegfeld Follies of 1914, 45, 47 Young Hoofers, 346, 348 Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, '75 Your Guess Is as Good as Mine, 345 Ziegfeld Follies of 1932, 84

Z Ziegfeld Girls, 45, 51 Zane, Arnie, 358 “Ziegfeld Walk,” 50-51 Ziegfeld Frolics, 51

Zanuck, Daryl E., 117, 143 Zinn, Howard, 238

INDEX 441

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