When memorializing the passing of Maurice Hines, who died on Dec. 29, I commented that “he made music with his tap shoes.” Though often associated with jazz, modern tap is also linked to hip-hop and other musical forms.
Over the years, since its birth here in the United States, its popularity has peaked, then waned, only to regain its popularity thanks to both the film industry and the Broadway stage. Tap fans across the nation applauded Dr. Jill Biden’s choice of a tap and jazz version of The Nutcracker Suite from Dorrance Dance, though it predictably also led to a furor of right-wing, clearly racist backlash aimed at the first lady.
Tap dance has a long history here in the country of its birth, and a symbiotic relationship to Black music, especially to jazz. Join us for this and next week’s “Black Music Sunday” as we explore it.
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music with over 190 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
In 1930, Cab Calloway sang:
Happy feet! I’ve got those hap-hap-happy feet!
Give them a low-down beat
And they begin dancing!
I’ve got those ten little tip-tap-tapping toes,
When they hear a tune
I can’t control the dancing, dear,
To save my soul!
Those weary blues can’t get into my shoes,
Because my shoes refuse
To ever grow weary.
I keep cheerful on an earful
Of music sweet;
Just got those hap-hap-happy feet!
Though “Happy Feet” is often attributed to Calloway, the song was actually written by Milton Ager, with lyrics by Jack Yellen for the 1930 movie King of Jazz.
A new generation of young people were introduced to “Happy Feet” in 1977, when the Muppets paid tribute to tap on “The Muppet Show.”
Tap dance emerged as an American genre much earlier than the 1930s. The Library of Congress is home to “Tap Dance in America: A Short History,” a detailed (and not short) history, written by tap dancer, choreographer, and jazz-tap historian Constance Valis Hill.
Tap dance is an indigenous American dance genre that evolved over a period of some three hundred years. Initially a fusion of British and West African musical and step-dance traditions in America, tap emerged in the southern United States in the 1700s. The Irish jig (a musical and dance form) and West African gioube (sacred and secular stepping dances) mutated into the American jig and juba. These in turn became juxtaposed and fused into a form of dancing called “jigging” which, in the 1800s, was taken up by white and black minstrel-show dancers who developed tap into a popular nineteenth-century stage entertainment. Early styles of tapping utilized hard-soled shoes, clogs, or hobnailed boots. It was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that metal plates (or taps) appeared on shoes of dancers on the Broadway musical stage. It was around that time that jazz tap dance developed as a musical form parallel to jazz music, sharing rhythmic motifs, polyrhythm, multiple meters, elements of swing, and structured improvisation. In the late twentieth century, tap dance evolved into a concertized performance on the musical and concert hall stage. Its absorption of Latin American and Afro- Caribbean rhythms in the forties has furthered its rhythmic complexity. In the eighties and nineties, tap’s absorption of hip-hop rhythms has attracted a fierce and multi-ethnic new breed of male and female dancers who continue to challenge and evolve the dance form, making tap the most cutting-edge dance expression in America today.
Dance historians point to Master Juba’s early rise to fame as foundational for American tap dance.
Master Juba (born 1825?, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.—died 1852, London, England) known as the “father of tap dance” and the first African American to get top billing over a white performer in a minstrel show. He invented new techniques of creating rhythm by combining elements of African American vernacular dance, Irish jigs, and clogging.
William Henry Lane was first taught to dance by “Uncle” Jim Lowe, a prominent African American jig and reel dancer. In about 1840, when African Americans were rarely permitted to appear onstage alongside white performers, Lane was hired by P.T. Barnum to put on dance performances at Barnum’s American Museum. By the 1840s Lane also had established himself in the dance houses of the Five Points district of New York City, an area inhabited by Irish immigrants and free African Americans. In that melting-pot environment, Lane began to experiment with the mixture of the Irish jig and African American vernacular dance. Throughout his adolescence he entered dance competitions, eventually emerging triumphant over John Diamond, who was the best white minstrel dancer of the early 19th century. As a result of his new celebrity, Lane was given the moniker “Master Juba: King of All Dancers”—after the juba style of African American step dance that incorporated variations of the jig.
This short video from the New Black Knowledge YouTube channel covers the Black history of the dance form in less than 8 minutes:
Though white tappers like Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Ann Miller, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly achieved fame and fortune by dancing on the silver screen, it’s important to pay tribute to the Black inventors and innovators of the tap dance medium.
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who was born in 1878 in Richmond, Virginia and who died November 25, 1949, in New York City, was one of the greatest of them all. This 45-minute 1997 PBS documentary tells his story.
As a child Robinson worked in racing stables, nursing a desire to become a jockey. He danced for fun and for the entertainment of others, first appearing on stage at the age of eight. Three years later he decided that dancing was likely to prove a more lucrative career than horseback riding. He became popular on the black vaudeville circuit and also appeared in white vaudeville as a “pick,” from pickaninny, where his dancing skills gave a patina of quality to sometimes second-rate white acts. As his reputation grew, so did his prominence in show business. In 1921 while working at the Palace in New York, he danced up and down the stairs leading from the stage to the orchestra pit and out of this developed his famous “stair dance.” Although Robinson was not the first to dance on stairs, he refined the routine until it was one of the most spectacular events in the world of vernacular dance.
[…]He danced in a string of popular films, including some with Shirley Temple. By 1937 Robinson was earning $6,600 a week for his films, a strikingly high sum for a black entertainer in Hollywood at the time. In 1943 he played his first leading role in STORMY WEATHER, an all-black musical in which he starred opposite Lena Horne. Despite being in his early seventies when he made the film, he performed his stair dance and even if he was outclassed by the Nicholas Brothers, his was a remarkable performance. In addition to dancing, Robinson also sang in a light, ingratiating manner, memorably recording “Doin’ the New Low-Down” in 1932 with Don Redman and His Orchestra. Although his high salary meant that he was estimated to have earned more than $2 million during his career, Robinson’s generosity was such that when he died in November 1949 he was broke. Half a million people lined the funeral route of the man who was known with some justification as the Mayor of Harlem.
Watch:
Amid the rise of Robinson, the tap duo of Buck and Bubbles also rose to fame.
John Bubbles, jazz tap dancer, singer and pianist, the undisputed father of rhythm tap, which dropped the heels on the offbeat, used the toes to accent, and extended rhythmic patterns beyond the usual eight bars of music, was born John Sublett (his nickname Bubber) in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Indianapolis. At the age of ten, he teamed with six-year-old Ford Lee “Buck” Washington (1903-1955) in an act billed as “Buck and Bubbles.” Bubbles sang while Buck played accompaniment while standing at the piano. They won a series of amateur-night shows and in short time were playing engagements in Louisville, Detroit and New York City. When his voice changed at age eighteen, Bubbles focused on dancing. He walked cockily into the Hoofer’s 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.
Here they perform in a 1944 performance from the film “Atlantic City”:
Charles “Honi” Coles was born in 1911 and died in 1992. I remember going to the Apollo Theater in Harlem as a young adult, when he was the master of ceremonies, introducing the acts. He was a handsomely elegant gentleman, and I was not yet aware of his dance history and fame.
From his Library of Congress bio:
Coles was a tap dancer of extraordinary elegance whose personal style and technical precision epitomized the class-act dancer. “Honi makes butterflies look clumsy. He was my Fred Astaire,” the singer Lena Horne said of Coles. The historian Sally Sommer wrote that Coles was “a supreme illusionist . . . he appeared to float and do nothing at all while his feet chattered complex rhythms below.” He was also a master teacher who preached, “If you can walk, you can tap.” As an untiring advocate of tap dance, Coles often claimed that tap dance was the only dance art form that America could claim as its own. He was awarded the Dance Magazine award in 1985, the Capezio Award for lifetime achievement in dance in 1988, and the National Medal of the Arts in 1991. Coles last appeared as master of ceremonies at the Colorado Tap Festival with former partner Atkins, performing up to the end of a long and rhythmically brilliant career. He died in New York City.
Here he is with partner Cholly Atkins, performing “Swing is Really The Thing.”
When discussing tap dance duos, the Nicolas Brothers are often at the top of the many lists compiled of “the greatest.”
Their website has a detailed history and biography.
The two greatest tap dancers that ever lived-certainly the most beloved dance team in the history of entertainment are Fayard (born 1914) and Harold (born 1921-2000), the famous Nicholas Brothers. The Nicholas Brothers grew up in Philadelphia, the sons of musicians who played in their own band at the old Standard Theater, their mother at the piano and father on drums. At the age of three, Fayard was always seated in the front row while his parents worked, and by the time he was ten, he had seen most of the great black Vaudeville acts, particularly the dancers, including such notables of the time as Alice Whitman, Willie Bryant and Bill Robinson. He was completely fascinated by them and imitated their acrobatics and clowning for the kids in his neighborhood. Harold watched and imitated Fayard until he was able to dance too, then apparently, he worked his own ideas into mimicry.
[…]The Broadway debut of the Nicholas Brothers was in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, in which such stars as Fannie Brice, Bob Hope, Eve Arden and Josephine Baker appeared. The Nicholas Brothers act at the Follies, stopped the show so consistently that Fannie Brice, who followed in a skit with Judy Canova, was always forced to fall back regularly on a line at her first opportunity: “Do you think we can talk now?”, which made the audience laugh, and then become quiet.
And as Constance Valis Hill wrote, in their Library of Congress bio:
On Broadway, in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 and Babes in Arms (1937), they worked with choreographer George Balanchine, and during the same period performed at the newly opened downtown Cotton Club and starred in the London West End production of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1936, in which they worked with Buddy Bradley. At the Apollo, Harlem Opera House, Palace and Paramount theaters in the thirties and forties, the brothers danced with the big bands of Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, Count Basie and Glen Miller. Collaboration with Hollywood dance director Nick Castle on seven musical films for 20th Century-Fox added embellished the brothers’ modern style of jazz dancing. They tapped on suitcases in The Great American Broadcast (1941), jumped off walls into back flips and splits in Orchestra Wives (1942) and jumped over each other down a flight of stairs, landing into a split on each step, in Stormy Weather (1943). These dazzling feats were always delivered with a smooth effortlessness.
Here is one of their most iconic performances, from “Stormy Weather,” introduced by Cab Calloway:
“We Sing, We Dance,” is a wonderful 1992 documentary about the brothers’ lives and dance careers.
At the end of the film, world-renowned tap dancer, actor, and choreographer Gregory Hines simply says to them “Thank you.”
As I mentioned in the introduction, we lost Hines’ brother Maurice last month.
“PBS NewsHour” covered his passing with this concise segment:
In Dance Magazine posted advice from Maurice, as “as told to Tracey E. Hopkins.”
Maurice Hines on Why Black Tap Dancers Deserve More Credit
As youngsters, my brother, Gregory, and I went to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to watch tap greats like Teddy Hale, Bunny Briggs, the Step Brothers and Coles & Atkins. Most of those guys would come on the stage and just tap. They were making it up as they went along, and that’s what made them so exciting to watch. Later in our career, we paid homage to those legendary hoofers in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club.
Greg was my younger brother, and we started tapping together as the Hines Kids when I was 7 and he was 5. We learned from the older tap dancers to take a step they did and make it ours by changing the time or by making it faster or slower. Greg and I were gifted that way. We also looked up to the Nicholas Brothers (Harold and Fayard Nicholas), and our teacher Henry LeTang wanted us to be like them. I loved the way the older brother, Fayard, moved his hands, like a magician. But when we saw those jumping splits the Nicholas Brothers did down the stairs in Stormy Weather, we told Henry he was crazy!
Most fans of tap dance hear about how fantastic Fred Astaire was and I agree there was no one like him. Paul Draper was another great tap dancer, and he choreographed to classical music, which I think changed the game. But Black tap dance pioneers like the ones I’ve mentioned were like jazz musicians. They were always improvising, and they don’t get enough credit for taking the art form of tap to another level.
Gregory Hines passed in August 2003.
From Gregory’s Library of Congress bio:
Gregory Hines, jazz tap dancer, singer, actor, musician, and creator of improvised tap choreography, was born in the Washington Heights section of New York City, the son of Maurice Hines Sr. and Alma Hines. He began dancing around the age of three, turned professional at age five, and for fifteen years performed with his older brother Maurice as The Hines Kids, making nightclub appearances across the country. While Broadway teacher and choreographer Henry LeTang created the team’s first tap dance routines, the brothers’ absorption of technique came from watching and working with the great black tap masters, whenever and wherever they performed at the same theaters. They practically grew up backstage at the Apollo Theater, where they witnessed the performances and the advice of such tap dance legends as Charles “Honi” Coles, Howard “Sandman” Sims, the Nicholas Brothers, and Teddy Hale, who was Gregory’s personal source of inspiration.
Gregory and Maurice then grew into the Hines Brothers. When Gregory was eighteen, he and Maurice were joined by their father, Maurice Sr., on drums, becoming Hines, Hines and Dad. They toured internationally and appeared frequently on The Tonight Show, but the younger Hines was restless to get away from the non-stop years on the road, so he left the group in his early twenties and “retired” (so he said) to Venice, California. For a time he left dancing behind, exploring alternatives that included his forming a jazz-rock band called Severence. He released an album of original songs in 1973.
Biography picks up Gregory’s story:
In 1973, he left Hines, Hines, and Dad to form a jazz-rock group called Severance. But the smooth-as-silk tap dancer soon returned to New York where he launched a distinguished Broadway career that won him a Tony award in 1992 for the headlining role in George C. Wolfe’s musical tribute Jelly’s Last Jam.
In 1981, Hines landed his first film role, as a Roman slave in Mel Brooks’ History of the World-Part 1, as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Richard Pryor. That role proved a stepping stone in Hines’ film career, and he went on to star in a range of movies, including 1984’s The Cotton Club and White Nights opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov the following year. He also exhibited his comedic timing in such films as Renaissance Man in 1994. That same year, he made his directorial debut with Bleeding Hearts.
I have quite a few “favorite” videos of Gregory dancing saved for the comments, but I absolutely love his interaction with Sammy Davis, Jr. and other older tap dancers in this challenge scene from the 1989 movie “Tap.”
Davis, Jr. was of course renowned not only as a suave tap dancer but also as a singer, actor, and member of the Rat Pack.
As the Library of Congress notes, Davis, Jr. was born in 1925 and died in 1990.
His mother, the Puerto-Rican-born Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, was a tap dancer; his father, Sammy Davis, Sr., was an African-American vaudevillian who was the lead dancer with Will Mastin’s Holiday in Dixieland. As an infant, he was raised by his paternal grandmother, Rosa B. (“Mama”) Davis, in an apartment on 140th Street and Eighth Avenue in New York City. 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, who led the dance troupe his father worked for. In 1929 at the age of four, Davis joined the act, which was renamed the Will Mastin Trio, and toured the vaudeville circuit, accompanying his elders with flash tap dance routines.
[…]In the 1960s Davis became an official member of the so-called Rat Pack, a loose confederation of actors, comedians, and singers that included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford. They appeared together in several movies, including Robin and the Seven Hoods and the original Ocean’s Eleven. After achieving success by refusing to work at venues that upheld racial segregation, his demands expanded and eventually led to the integration of Miami Beach nightclubs and Las Vegas casinos, though he continued to press the racial buttons. In 1960, when he married the Swedish-born actress May Britt, interracial marriages were forbidden by law in 31 US states out of 50 (it was not until 1967 that those laws were abolished by the US Supreme Court). The couple had one daughter and adopted two sons. In 1966, he was given the role of a television series host in The Sammy Davis, Jr. Show. After divorcing in 1968, Davis began dating Altovise Gore, a young and talented dancer in one of his shows. They were wed in 1970 by the Reverend Jesse Jackson and remained married until Davis’ death.
While he remained a multi talented performer, Davis was revered as a proponent and popularizer of tap dance, performing in his own shows, such as Sammy and Company (1975) and Sammy Davis, Jr. the Golden Years (1980). In 1988, he co-starred with Gregory Hines as the patriarchal master of tap dance in the movie Tap! Hines, who worshiped Davis, paid homage to him in the television special Sammy Davis Jr. 60th Anniversary Show (1990), in a tap solo after which he called onto the stage to dance and trade steps, and in the end, bent down and kissed Davis’s feet.
Here’s a dazzling dance sequence from 1962.
And here’s that aforementioned United Negro College Fund 60th anniversary special—it’s 2 hours and 20 minutes of star-studded fun.
From the Reel Black One video notes:
Emmy Winning special was broadcast on February 4, 1990, just 3 months before Sammy’s transition. Hosted by Eddie Murphy, this all star tribute features appearances by Debbie Allen, Anita Baker, Diahann Carrol, Neil Carter, Bill Cosby, Tony Danza, Clint Eastwood, Lola Falana, Ella Fitzgerald, Goldie Hawn, Gregory Hines, Bob Hope, Whitney Houston, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Shirley MacLaine, Dean Martin. Eddie Murphy, Gregory Peck, Richard Pryor, Frank Sinatra, Mike Tyson, Dionne Warwick and Steve Wonder
I’ve barely scratched the surface. There is so much more about tap to cover, including the historical and contemporary women of tap—and no more space to write about them—so I hope you’ll join me next Sunday, for the second part.
I’ll close with one more artist, who was mentored by Gregory Hines: Savion Glover.
Glover was born in 1973 in Newark, New Jersey.
From his Library of Congress bio:
In 1985, Glover performed, as a member of the young generation of tap dancers, in the Paris production of Black and Blue, and in 1989, the Broadway production of Black and Blue. The musical revue, conceived by Hector Orezzoli and Claudio Segovia to celebrate the black culture of dance and music between World War I and World War II, included such black veteran masters as Bunny Briggs, Ralph Brown, Lon Chaney, Jimmy Slyde, and Dianne Walker who came to regard Glover (who was affectionately nicknamed “the sponge,” the ultimate copier and absorber of tradition) as the artistic grandson of the most revered figures in jazz tap dance, and the heir to the younger generation of dancers led by Gregory Hines.
While Black and Blue sanctified Glover’s apprenticeship with the elder generation of rhythm tap dancers, his liaison with Gregory Hines in the Broadway musical Jelly’s Last Jam (1992) brought him to the threshold of his own artistry. Written and directed by George C. Wolfe, with tap choreography by 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 who some call the first true composer of jazz music. Hines played Jelly Roll Morton and Glover played Young Jelly, and in one show-stopping scene 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, onstage and before an audience, each and every night, to engage with the then most brilliant tap dancer of his time.
[…]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 of the rhythm-tap tradition. In 1998, after the phenomenal success of Noise/Funk which had garnered six Tony Awards, the twenty-five-year-old Glover formed his own company– Not Your Ordinary Tappers (NYOT) which included the twenty-three-year-old Omar Edwards, seventeen-year-old Jason Samuels Smith, Glover’s twenty-six-year-old brother Abron Glover, and the company’s only female dancer, the twenty-three-year-old Ayodele Casel. NYOT made its New York City debut at the Variety Arts Theater with Savion Glover/Downtown with a program that listed some thirty numbers (solos, duets, and group numbers choreographed by Glover) 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.
Glover talks about how he got started with tap dancing in this 6-minute video from THNKR.
He demonstrates polyrhythms with his feet in this 2013 performance at The Greene Space in New York City:
As this snowy season traps so many of us inside, I do hope the magical sound of tapping feet has lifted you up out of your seats and brought you some joy. Join me in the comments for even more—and we’ll be back with more tap next Sunday!
Denise Oliver Velez
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