About the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame

The International Tap Dance Hall of Fame is the only tap dance hall of fame exclusively focused on tap dancers. It features founding and innovative 20th and 21st century professional tap dancers.With a collection of photographs, biographies, and videos, the Hall of Fame is becoming a colorful and diverse retrospective of America's seminal tap dance personalities.

The ATDF created the first International Tap Dance Hall of Fame in July of 2002, and its purpose is:
- To honor the contributions of legendary tap dance artists by preserving their legacy for future generations to enjoy.
- To increase public awareness of the diversity inherent in the form.
- To provide an educational experience available to local, national, and international professionals, students, and the general population.

Biographies

2002 - Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (c.1878 -1949), who claimed he could run backward faster than most men could go forward, was the most famous of all African American tap dancers in the twentieth century. Dancing upright and swinging, his light and exacting footwork brought tap “up on its toes” from an earlier flat-footed shuffling style, and developed the art of tap dancing to a delicate perfection. Born Luther Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, his parents, Maria and Maxwell Robinson, died in 1885. Young Bill was reared by his grandmother, Bedilia Robinson, who had been a slave. In Richmond, he got the nickname "Bojangles" from "jangler," meaning contentious, and invented the phrase "Everything's Copasetic," meaning tip-top. He got his first professional job in 1892, performing as a member of the pickaninny chorus for Mayme Remington with The South Before the War. When Robinson arrived in New York in 1900, he challenged the In Old Kentucky star tap dancer Harry Swinton to a Buck-dancing contest and won. From 1902-1914, he teamed with George W. Cooper. Bound by the "two-colored" rule in vaudeville, which restricted blacks to performing in pairs, they performed together on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, but did not wear blackface makeup that performers customarily used.

Robinson was a staunch professional, but he was also a gambler who possessed a quick temper and carried a gold-plated revolver. An assault charge in 1915 split the act. After the split, Robinson launched his solo career, becoming one of the few African-Americans to headline at New York's prestigious Palace Theatre. Robinson's Stair Dance, introduced in 1918, was distinguished by its showmanship and sound, each step emitting a different pitch and rhythm.

Onstage, his open face, twinkling eyes and infectious smile were irresistible, as was his tapping, which was delicate and clear. Buck or Time Steps were inserted with skating steps or crossover steps on the balls of the feet that looked like a jig, all while he chatted and joked with the audience. Robinson danced in split clog shoes, ordinary shoes with a wooden half-sole and raised wooden heel. The wooden sole was attached from the toe to the ball of the foot and left loose, which allowed for greater flexibility and tonality. In 1922, he married Fannie Clay who became his business manager, secretary, and partner in efforts to fight the barriers of racial prejudice. A founding member of the Negro Actors Guild of America, Robinson was also named "Mayor of Harlem" in 1933. Hailed as "The Dark Cloud of Joy" on the Orpheum Circuit, he performed in vaudeville from 1914-1927 without a single season's layoff. Broadway fame came with the all-black revue, Blackbirds of 1928, in which he sang and danced "Doin' the New Low Down." Success was instantaneous. He was hailed as the greatest of all dancers by at least seven New York newspapers. Brown Buddies (1930), Blackbirds of 1933, All in Fun (1940) and Memphis Bound (1945) followed. The Hot Mikado (1939) marked Robinson's sixty-first birthday, which he celebrated by dancing down Broadway, one block for each year. Robinson turned to Hollywood films in the thirties, a venue hitherto restricted to blacks. His first film, Dixiana (1930) had a predominantly white cast; Harlem is Heaven (1933) was the first all-black film ever made. Other films include Hooray For Love (1935), In Old Kentucky (1935), The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935), One Mile From Heaven (1937), By An Old Southern River (1941), and Let's Shuffle (1941). Stormy Weather (1943) featured Robinson, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway and Katherine Dunham and her dance troupe. Robinson and Shirley Temple teamed up in The Little Colonel (1935), The Littlest Rebel (1935), Just Around the Corner (1938) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), in which he taught the child superstar to tap dance. Claiming to have taught tap dance to Eleanor Powell, Florence Mills, and Fred Astaire, Robinson profoundly influenced the younger tap dancers at the Hoofers Club in Harlem, where he also could be found gambling and shooting pool. Throughout his lifetime, he was a member of many clubs and civic organizations and an honorary member of police departments in cities across the United States. His participation in benefits is legendary and it is estimated that he gave away well over one million dollars in loans and charities. "To his own people, Robinson became a modern John Henry, who instead of driving steel, laid down iron taps," wrote Marshall Stearns. When Robinson died in 1949, newspapers claimed that almost one hundred thousand people turned out to witness the passing of the funeral procession. The founding of the Copasetics Club insured that his excellence would not be forgotten. Constance Valis Hill

2002 - Eleanor Powell (1912-1982), who had the long legs of a thoroughbred dancer and speed and agility of an acrobat, is considered the ”Queen of Tap Dancing” on the silver screen. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the shy eleven year old was sent to dancing school to learn acrobatics and ballet (but no tap dancing!) in an effort to make her more sociable. At the age of twelve, while visiting relatives in Atlantic City, she was spotted by Gus Edwards, a famous producer of children’s shows, which led to her stage debut in the Vaudeville Kiddie Review. After performing in the New York nightclub of the bandleader Ben Bernie, she made her Broadway debut in The Optimists in 1928; the show’s short run sent the young dancer to audition for more work on Broadway stage. Because she was asked if she could tap at every audition she went to, she enrolled in the dancing school of Jack Donohue, who taught her to tap dance by hanging sand bags onto a belt that weighed her down and riveted her to the floor, thus forcing her to tap close to the floor. She later became Donohue’s dance assistant.

In January 1929, Powell became a star on Broadway in Follow Thru, tapping to the acclaimed “Button Up Your Overcoat.” She also performed at Carnegie Hall with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra and in 1932 Florenz Ziegfeld production of Hot-Cha! In 1935, she took Hollywood by storm, first dancing in George White’s 1935 Scandals and subsequently in Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), Born to Dance (1936), Rosalie (1937), Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), Honolulu (1939), Ship Ahoy (1942), Thousands Cheer (1943), Sensations of 1945 (1944), and Duchess of Idaho (1950). In Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), she danced with Fred Astaire in the “Begin the Beguine” finale, matching the great dancer in height, grace, and footwork. In Lady Be Good (1941), she danced the “Fascinating Rhythm” number in top hat and short tails, choreography for the chorus Busby Berkeley; the number that opened on an extended close up of her tapping feet ended with her being tossed head over heel over and over again down a corridor of men.

In 1943, after twenty years of performing, she married the actor Glenn Ford and retired from the stage, devoting herself to charitable organizations and religious work, including a brief Sunday morning television series for children. In 1950, she was persuaded to appear in a musical number with Esther Williams and Van Johnson entitled “Dutchess of Idaho.” After her divorce from Ford in 1959, she continued a short but highly regarded night club career. An extended engagement at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas represented a remarkable comeback for a woman in her late forties as a dancer. She continued to dance in top nightclubs across the country. In 1981, she received an award in her name and her honor, the Ellie Award, from the National Film Ceremony, for her outstanding contribution to the film musical. Constance Valis Hill

2002 - John Bubbles (1902-1986) revolutionized tap dancing by dropping heels on the offbeat, accenting rhythms with the toes, extending rhythmic patterns beyond the usual eight bars of music, and loading the bar with a complex slew of beats. No wonder why he is heralded as the Father of Rhythm Tap. There is no dancer today who has not been influenced by his inventions. Born John Sublett in Louisville and raised in Indianapolis, at the age of ten he teamed up with the six-year-old Ford Lee "Buck" Washington (1903-1955) in an act in which Buck stood and played piano and Bubbles sang. After winning a series of amateur-night shows around town, “Buck and Bubbles" began playing engagements in Louisville, Detroit and New York City. Around the age of eighteen, Bubbles’ voice started changing and he switched his focus to dancing. Smarting at the embarrassment of being laughed out of the Hoofer's Club for being a novice tap dancer, Bubbles retreated to the privacy of the shed, determined to develop his technique. He returned to the Club with his new style of rhythm tapping that was laced with double Over-the-Tops and triple Back Slides, blowing everyone away.

By 1922, Buck and Bubbles reached the pinnacle in vaudeville by playing at New York's Palace Theatre. Bypassing the black T.O.B.A. circuit, their singing-dancing-comedy act headlined the vaudeville circuit from coast to coast. Buck's stop-time piano, played in a cool and laid back manner, contrasted with Bubbles' witty explosion of taps in counterpoint. They played the London Palladium, the Cotton Club, the Apollo, were the first blacks to perform at Radio City Music Hall, and continued to break the color barriers theatres across the country.

Their motion pictures include Varsity Show (1937), Atlantic City (1944), Cabin in the Sky (1943), and A Song is Born (1948). On his own, Bubbles appeared in Broadway Frolics of 1922, Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1930, and The Ziegfield Follies of 1931, and secured his place in Broadway history by originating the role of Sportin' Life in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935). The role of Mingo in that production was played by Buck. He also appeared with Judy Garland at the Palace and Bob Hope in Vietnam, and recorded Harlem Comes to London, Selections from Porgy and Bess, and Bubbles, John W. That Is.

Before Bubbles, dancers tapped up on their toes, capitalized on flash steps and danced to neat two-to-a-bar phrases. Bubbles loaded his bar, dropped his heels and hit unusual accents and syncopations, opening the door of modern jazz percussion. "I wanted to make it more complicated so I put more taps in and changed the rhythm," said Bubbles about his style, which prepared for the new sound of bebop in the 1950s and anticipated the prolonged melodic lines of "Cool" jazz in the 1950s. Constance Valis Hill

2002 "Baby Laurence" Jackson (1921-1974) has been hailed as a jazz dancer of the rarest of rhythmic phenomena whose fluid beats, melodic phrasings, and instrumentalized conceptions moved him in the category of jazz musician. Born Laurence Donald Jackson in Baltimore, Maryland, he was a boy soprano at age twelve singing with McKinney's Cotton Pickers when the bandleader Don Redman came to town. He heard Jackson and asked his mother if he could take the boy on the road. She agreed, provided that her son was supplied with a tutor. While touring on the Loew's circuit, Jackson's first visit to New York was marked by a visit to the Hoofers Club in Harlem, where he saw the tap dancing of Honi Coles, Raymond Winfield, Roland Holder and Harold Mablin. Several years later, he returned to New York to perform with his brother in a vocal group they formed called "The Four Buds". While working in the Harlem nightclub owned by Dickie Wells, the retired dancer from the group of Wells, Mordecai and Taylor encouraged his dancing and nicknamed him Baby. He continued to frequent the Hoofers Club, absorbing ideas and picking up steps from Eddie Rector, Pete Nugent, Toots Davis, Jack Wiggins and Teddy Hale, who became his chief dancing rival. "I saw a fellow dance and his feet never touched the floor," remembers tap dancer Bunny Briggs when he first saw Laurence dance in the thirties, when he was participating in after-hours jam sessions in Harlem and playing such theatres as the Apollo.

He also performed with group called the "The Six Merry Scotchmen" (in some billings, the "Harlem Highlanders"), who dressed in kilts, danced, and sang Jimmie Lunceford arrangements in five-part harmony. Around 1940, Baby focused on tap dancing and became a soloist. Through the forties, he danced with the big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Herman, and in the fifties, he danced in small Harlem jazz clubs. It was under the influence of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker and other bebop musicians that he expanded tap technique into jazz dancing. Listening to the jazz pianist Art Tatum, Baby duplicated in his feet what Tatum played with his fingers. Listening to Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell as well as the jazz drummer Max Roach, Baby developed a way of improvising solo lines and variations as much like a horn man as a percussionist. "He was more a drummer than a dancer," writes Whitney Balliett in New York Notes (1976), "he did little with the top half of his torso. But his legs and feet were speed and thunder and surprise... a succession of explosions, machine-gun rattles and jarring thumps."

Like musicians in a jazz combo, Laurence was also a fluent improviser who took solos, traded breaks and built upon motifs that were suggested by previous horn men. He was a master of dynamics who would start a thirty-two-bar chorus with light heel-and-toe figures, then drop in heavy off-beat accents and sprays of rapid toe beats that gave way to double-time bursts of rhythm. Constance Valis Hill

2002 - Steve Condos (1918-1990) was acclaimed for lightning-speed and a phenomenal precision style tap dancing that perfectly suited the tempos and rhythms of swing and bebop. As the only Greek-American to be a member of the Copasetics, the famous tap fraternity named in honor of Bill Robinson, Condos' routines were melodies in themselves that led audiences through an explosive journey of steel-tipped percussion.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he spent his childhood years in South Philadelphia where he absorbed sounds of the streets and alleys behind his father's restaurant that was located across the street from the Standard Theatre, the largest black vaudeville house in town. As a child, his father sent him with sandwiches for the comics and dancers who worked there, and sometimes the dancers would bring him onstage. By the time his family moved to New York City, he was a veteran street dancer steeped in the tradition of speed, rhythm, and precision that he had gotten in South Philly. As the youngest of three brothers, Steve's dancing style was conceived by his elder brother Frank, who he paired with at age fourteen and perfected with his middle brother Nick in an act billed as the Condos Brothers. During the thirties and forties, they spent most of their time in vaudeville, and then began to work with top swing bands. While brother Nick was expert at flash work (he is credited with inventing the five-tap wing), Steve concentrated on rhythm and surpassed nearly all his contemporaries with his phenomenal precision style of rhythm dance. As a lover of jazz, especially the music of Louis Armstrong but also Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, Condos insisted that his tap routines be melodious as well as rhythmic.

Dancing with big bands of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, the routines that the Condos Brothers danced together were set but they insisted on improvising their solos so that every show was different and every show was a challenge. As the favorite dance team of Hollywood producer Daryl Zanuck, the Condos Brothers (Nick and Steve) became one of the most sought-after dance teams for films in the thirties and forties and always insisted on dubbing their own taps in such films as Wake Up and Live (1937), Happy Landing (1938), In the Navy (1941), Pin-Up Girl (1944), The Time, the Place and the Girl (1946), She’s Back on Broadway (1953). They were also a sensation abroad, holding the longest record at London’s famous Palladium with the Crazy Gang by playing for an entire year.

As a soloist, Steve danced with Woody Herman’s big band, as well as with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Buddy Rich at the Apollo Theatre. His Broadway appearances include Heaven on Earth, Say Darling, and in 1972, Sugar, where he created the role of Spats Palazzo, the tap dancing gangster; in that show, Gower Champion gave him the unheard of liberty of improvising his steps nightly in his solo spot. Featured in the movie, Tap! (1988), starring Gregory Hines, Steve also appeared with Hines and Sammy Davis, Jr. on the Tonight Show, competing in a coast-to-coast tap challenge dance. In 1989, he performed in an historic performance at Carnegie Hall with Hines, Arthur Duncan, Savion Glover, Jimmy Slyde, Brenda Bufalino, Lynn Dally and members of Jazz Tap Ensemble. A stellar performer, Steve was also a superb teacher, and had the unique ability to break down and teach what he had improvised. Unknown Writer & Tony Waag

2002 - Fred Astaire (1899-1987) was the American tap dancer extraordinaire; Frederick Austerlitz was born May 10, 1899 in Omaha, Nebraska. Astaire and his older sister, Adele, were brought to New York as children to receive dance training and perform on vaudeville stages.

They studied with Claude Alvienne and Ned Wayburn, but could not perform in New York because of the Gerry Society restrictions on child performers. They toured on the Keith-Orpheum circuit, then returned to New York as finished specialty dancers to enter Over the Top (1917). They worked together on Broadway in The Passing Show of 1918, For Goodness Sake (1922), the Gershwins’ Lady, Be Good (1925) and Funny Face (1927), Smiles (1930), and The Band Wagon (1931) and many others. The pair was extremely popular in New York, but their London reputations were even greater. Adele retired following the close of The Band Wagon, and Fred performed with Claire Luce in the 1932 film The Gay Divorcee.

For much of his film career, his search for a perfect partner was a frequent publicity theme. The partnership with Ginger Rogers is film and dance history, of course. The work with the great tap dancer Eleanor Powell, is legendary among tap professionals. A stunning choreographer himself, Astaire was also able to perform brilliantly in dances staged by many others. He danced the choreography of Dave Gould, who wont he first dance director Oscar for “the Carioca,” Harry Losse, a concert dancer with Denishawn lineage, Bobby Connolly, Charles Walters, and ballet choreographers Eugene Loring and Michael Kidd.

Astaire’s dance numbers can be divided roughly into four categories – exhibition ballroom romances, tap competitions, solos, and solos with props. The most frequently performed was the first type, danced with each of his female partners; the dances were based on conventional exhibition ballroom styles, in turn based on social dance work. They involved a single format, with the meeting, duet work, breaks apart and pulls together, and a final symmetrical or tandem series of movements. Among Astaire’s examples in this style are the famous love duets with Ginger Rogers, such as “Cheek to Cheek” and “Night and Day,” which are exquisitely beautiful from their openings, in which one touch from Astaire spins her into his arms, to the finales in which they simply sit. Tap challenge numbers were danced with Rogers, as well as with his other partners. With Rogers and Powell especially, these numbers, based on minstrel formats, presented an alternating series of tap flurries, each dancer trying to best the other. In the “Let Yourself Go” number from Follow the Fleet, the Astaire-Rogers competition is set in a dance hall with “real” inter-couple competitions. The solos occasionally had a “schtik,” such as the “fireworks dance” in Holiday Inn, but more frequently were danced alone before a camera.

The solos with props are among his greatest accomplishments. He could not only dance with anyone, but with anything – the coat tree in Royal Wedding, the wall in that underrated film, or the drum set in Easter Parade. It would be difficult to overestimate Astaire’s influence. He represents tap, theater, and ballroom dance too much of the world, and perfection in performance to everyone. Unknown Writer & Tony Waag

2002 - The Nicholas Brothers Fayard (1914-2006) and Harold (1921-2000) created an exuberant style of American theatrical dance melding jazz rhythm with tap, acrobatics, ballet and black vernacular dance. Their rhythmic brilliance, musicality, eloquent footwork and full-bodied expressiveness are unsurpassed, and their dancing represents the most sophisticated refinement of jazz as a percussive dance form.

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. The "Nicholas Kids" made their professional debut in Philadelphia in 1930-31, and in New York, at the Lafayette Theatre one year later as the "Nicholas Brothers.” In 1932 they opened at the uptown Cotton Club, which became their home base for next few years. Dancing with the orchestras of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, the brothers evolved a classy and swinging musical performance in which comic quips and eccentric dance combined with precision-timed moves and virtuosic rhythm tapping.

Alternating between the stage and screen throughout their career, they made their first film, the Vitaphone short, Pie, Pie, Blackbird, with Eubie Blake in 1932 and their first Hollywood movie, Kid Millions, for Samuel Goldwyn in 1934. 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 theatres 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 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. In Down Argentine Way (1940), they moved in perfect synchrony: arms and wrists circling, they slipped and slid along the floor, dipping into splits and whipping into one-legged wings.
By the late forties, their high-speed and rhythm-driven style was fast and fluent enough to endure the radical musical shift in jazz to Bebop. The Brothers headlined "The Hepsations of 1945" on a southern tour with Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and worked with bop composer/arranger Tad Dameron, but they were irresistibly drawn to the steady and danceable rhythms of Swing and continued to work in that musical tradition.
Working as solo artists in the late 1950s and early 60s, Harold in Europe and Fayard in America, the brothers were reunited for three Hollywood Palace television specials in 1964 and continued to perform as a team. Constance Valis Hill

2002 - Jeni LeGon (1916 - ) is one of the first African American women in tap dance to develop a career as a soloist. Not a high-heeled dancer in pretty skirts, she was a low-heeled dancer performing toe-stand in pants, and her rigorous combination of flash, acrobatics, and rhythm dancing proved you didn’t have to be a man to dance like a hoofer. Born in 1916 and raised near the south side of Chicago, her musical talents were developed on the street in neighborhood bands and musical groups. At the age of thirteen, buoyed by her brother who got a job touring as a singer and exhibition ballroom dancer, she landed her first job in musical theatre, dancing as a soubrette in pants, not pretty skirts. By the age of sixteen, she was dancing in a chorus line backed by Count Basie Orchestra, and soon after touring as a chorus line dancer with Whitman Sisters, the highest paid act on the TOBA circuit. This all black, woman-managed company was successful in booking themselves continually in leading southern houses, and had the reputation for giving hundreds of dancers their first performing break. The Whitman Sisters’ chorus line, LeGon remembers, “they had all the colors that our race is known for. All the pretty shading from the darkest, to the palest of the pale. Each one of us was a distinct-looking kid. It was a rainbow of beautiful girls.” It was while working in Los Angeles, where she was stopping the show for her flips, double spins, knee drips, toe stands, that LeGon got a part in the 1935 MGM musical, Hooray for Love, as dance partner to Bill Robinson, who she says was a patient teacher and a perfectionist.

It was while working on that movie that she met Fats Waller, whom she continued to work for much of her career. In 1936, LeGon performed in the London production of C.B. Cochran’s At Home Abroad. She was hailed as one of the brightest spirits, the new Florence Mills, and the “sepia Cinderella girl who set London agog with her clever dancing.” In New York, she was one of the few women ever to be invited back to the Hoofer’s Club. LeGon played leading roles in a number of black films, where she claims, “sometimes I even got to be myself,” not a maid or any number of stereotypical roles. She toured widely with US Army shows, and she did club and theater performances nationally and internationally.

In a 1999 documentary by Grant Greshuck, LeGon’s extraordinary devotion to passing on tap dancing is as much a feature of the film as her stardom. Living in a Great Big Way, named for one of her famous numbers with Bill Robinson, is narrated by Fayard Nicholas, who reveres LeGon as a star performer and a gifted teacher who could “do it all.” LeGon says that sees teaching as a natural extension of her performing – “I’ve had a dance school all my life.” One envies those students for whom she clearly and still labors for the love of the form. Constance Valis Hill & Tony Waag

2003 - Charles “Honi” Coles (2 April 1911-12 November 1992), tap dancer, raconteur, and veteran performer of the stage, vaudeville, television, and the concert world, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of George and Isabel Coles. He learned to tap dance on the streets of Philadelphia, where dancers challenged each other in time step "cutting" contests, and made his New York City debut at the Lafayette Theatre in 1931 as one of the Three Millers, a group that performed over-the-tops, barrel turns, and wings on six-foot-high pedestals. After discovering that his partners had hired another dancer to replace him, Coles retreated to Philadelphia, determined to perfect his technique. He returned to New York City in 1934, confident and skilled in his ability to cram several steps into a bar of music. Performing at the Harlem Opera House and Apollo Theatre, he was reputed to have the fastest feet in show business. And at the Hoofer's Club, where only the most serious tap dancers gathered to compete, he was hailed as one of the most graceful dancers ever seen. From 1936 to 1939 Coles performed with the Lucky Seven Trio, who tapped on large cubes that looked like dice; the group went through ten costume changes in the course of their act. Touring with the big swing bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the 6’2” Coles polished his style, melding high-speed tapping with an elegant yet close-to-the-floor style where the legs and feet did the work. In 1940, as a soloist with Cab Calloway's orchestra, Coles met Charles "Cholly" Atkins, a jazz tap dancer who would later choreograph for the best rhythm-and-blues singing groups of the 1960s. Atkins was an expert wing dancer, while Coles's specialty was precision. They combined their talents after the War by forming the class act of Coles & Atkins. Wearing handsomely tailored suits, the duo opened with a fast-paced song-and-tap number, then moved into a precision swing dance and soft-shoe, finishing with a tap challenge in which each showcased his specialty. Their classic soft-shoe, danced to "Taking a Chance on Love" and played at an extremely slow tempo, was a nonchalant tossing off of smooth slides and gliding turns in crystal-cut precision. Coles performed speedy, swinging and rhythmically complex combinations in his solos, which anticipated the prolonged cadences of bebop that extended the duration of steps past the usual eight-bar phrase. In 1944 Coles married Marion Evelyn Edwards, a dancer in the Number One chorus at the Apollo Theatre; they had two children. Through the 1940s, Coles & Atkins appeared with the big bands of Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Billy Eckstine, and Count Basie. In 1949, at the 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 De Mille had added a ballet dancer. By the time the show closed in 1952 the big-band era was drawing to a close and a new style of ballet Broadway dance that integrated choreography into the musical plot became the popular form over tap dance. Though Coles in 1954-1955 opened the Dance Craft studio on fifty-second Street in New York City with tap dancer Pete Nugent, there was a steady decrease in the interest of tap dance in the 1950s. "No work, no money. Tap had dropped dead," Coles remembered of that decade. Coles and Atkins broke up in 1960; and for the next sixteen years, Coles worked as production stage manager for the Apollo Theatre with duties that included introducing other acts. He served as president of the Negro Actors Guild and continued his association with the Copasetics, a tapping fraternity named in honor of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, which he had helped to found in 1949. At the Newport Jazz Festival in 1962 Coles was in the forefront of the tap revival that brought veteran members of the Copasetics back to the stage. In the early 1970s, he joined Brenda Bufalino in their duet concert of the Morton Gould Tap Concerto and toured the United States and England in their collaboration concert of Singin’ Swingin’ and Wingin’ where each contributed original musical compositions, monologs, and choreography. He joined the touring company of Bubblin' Brown Sugar performing the role of John Sage in 1976, and regained his stride as a soloist, performing at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. After receiving a standing ovation for his performance in the Joffrey Ballet production of Agnes De Mille's "Conversations on the Dance", in 1978, Coles firmly placed tap dance in the world of concert dance. In 1983 at age seventy-two, he received the Tony Award, Fred Astaire Award, and Drama Desk Award for best featured actor and dancer in a musical for the Broadway hit, My One and Only, starring Tommy Tune. Jack Kroll in Newsweek called Coles "Brilliant!" in that musical, adding that his feet had "the delicacy and power of a master pianist's hands.” 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. Coles has appeared in the films The Cotton Club and Dirty Dancing and the documentaries Great Feats of Feet, Charles “Honi” Coles - The Class Act of Tap, and Milt and Honi. Television shows include "The Tap Dance Kid," "Mr. Griffin and Me," "Conversations in Dance," "Charleston," "Archives of a Master" and Dance in America's "Tap Dance in America" for PBS. Coles & Atkins' classic Soft Shoe can be seen in the 1963 Camera Three television program, "Over the Top with Bebop," narrated by jazz historian Marshall Stearns. The most descriptive material on Coles & Atkins includes Marshall and Jean Stearns' Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968); and Jaqui Malone, "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime: The Vocal Choreography of Cholly Atkins" in Steppin' On The Blues (University of Illinois Press, 1996). Constance Valis Hill

2003 - Chuck Green (6 November 1919-7 March 1997), jazz tap dancer, was born Charles Green in Fitzgerald, Georgia. As a young boy, he stuck bottle caps to the bottom of his bare feet and danced on the sidewalk for coins. At the age of six, he won third place in an amateur dance contest in which Noble Sissle was the bandleader, and soon thereafter toured the South as a child tap dancer. At the age of nine, he was spotted by a talent agent and taken to New York to study tap dance. Nat Nazzaro, known as the “monster agent” by those who knew of his practice of signing vulnerable young performers to ironclad contracts, signed Green to his own contract when he was twelve years old. A few years later, Green formed the team of Shorty and Slim with childhood friend James Walker, a talented comic dancer. They studied the great comedians of the day, picking up lines of patter from such shows on the black vaudeville circuit as Pigmeat Crack Shot and Hunter Pete and Repeate. “Their act was hilarious. Chuck was a natural-- so cute,” tap dancer Leonard Reed remembered, adding that Walker at the time was tall and skinny and Green was small as a chair. They did what was called “dumb talk comedy,” a rapid rhythmic banter that was interspersed between the songs and dances. As Walker played a broken-down vibraphone that looked as if it were falling apart, Green sang, “Some people was born to be doctors . . . some people were born to be kings . . . I fortunately was born to swing.” Then they tap danced, with Green making graceful turns and Walker excelling in leg-o-mania. Nazarro at the time also managed Buck and Bubbles (Ford Lee “Buck” Washington and John Sublett Bubbles). He suggested that Green and Walker study the singing-dancing-comedy team that had bypassed the black vaudeville Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOB.A) circuit to become headliners on the white vaudeville circuit; by 1922 they had played New York’s prestigious Palace Theatre. Changing the name of their act to Chuck and Chuckles, Green and Walker were groomed as a “juvenile act” to Buck and Bubbles. Bubbles soon took Green under his wing, calling him “the son I never had,” and offered to teach him what he knew, though it came in the form of a challenge. “Bubbles would do a step just once,” Green explained, “and then say, ‘you got one chance.’ He was a creator. They called him the ‘father of rhythm.’” Bubbles’ style of rhythm tapping--in which he loaded the bar (put many extra beats into a bar of music) and dropped his heels, hitting unusual accents and syncopations-- was revolutionary. He prepared for the new sound of bebop in the 1940s, and anticipated the prolonged melodic lines of Cool jazz in the 1950s. “If you dropped your heels, you could get a more floating quality, like a leaf coming off top of a tree,” said Green, who became a protege of Bubbles. “It changed the quality of the sound, gave it tonation.” Through the 1930s and early 1940s, Chuck and Chuckles toured Europe, Australia, and the United States, performing in such venues as Radio City Music Hall, the Paramount, Apollo, and Capital theatres. Jobs were plentiful and their manager had the team doubling up on performances. They averaged five stage shows a day, played nightclubs until early morning, and toured nonstop with big bands across the country and abroad. By 1944, the strain and wear of performing had taken its toll. The team of Chuck and Chuckles broke up, and Green was committed to a mental institution. When he was released 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 the bop musicians, Green created his own bop-influenced style of rhythm tapping that was ad-libbed, up-tempo, and ultra cool. In the sixties, Green began again to perform on stage and television. He appeared with the Copasetics (a tap fraternity dedicated to the memory of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson) on the popular educational channel W.N.E. T. in a show hosted by Dick Cavett. On 6 July 1963 he performed at the Newport Jazz Festival as a member of the “Old Time Hoofers” with Honi Coles, Charles “Cookie” Cook, Ernest Brown, Pete Nugent, Cholly Atkins, and Baby Laurence. The show was introduced by jazz historian Marshall Stearns and marked the resurgence of tap dance in popular culture. At the New York’s Village Vanguard in 1964, the legendary tap dancer Groundhog faced Green in a tap challenge. “I’ve been waiting to battle Chuck Green for twenty years,” Groundhog told Stearns. “Dancing is like gang war and tonight I’m up against one of the best.” Groundhog’s rapid and syncopated staccato tapping was foiled by Green’s relaxed and fluid style of jazz tapping and almost dreamlike grace. In 1969 Green appeared with members of Harlem’s Hoofer’s Club for a series of “Tap Happenings” that were produced in New York City by Letitia Jay. Through seventies and eighties, Green continued to perform with the Copasetics. Host Honi Coles introduced him as, “Chuck Green, the greatest tap dancer in the world.” When asked why Green was bestowed that special title, Coles answered, “His slow dance is genius. Most dancers would fall on their face. His timing is like a musician’s.” In the late eighties, Green toured Europe with The Original Hoofers, appeared as a guest soloist at the Kennedy Center Honors, and was awarded an honorary professorship at Washington University. In New York in 1987, he began teaching a weekly two-hour tap class to a dedicated cross-section of New York’s top professional jazz dancers. With great clarity and precision, he led his students into the complexity of his material with warmth and ease, allowing the dancer to hear and feel the weight of the rhythm and movement. In the late eighties and early nineties, Green was twice honored with a New York Dance and Performance Award (the Bessies) for his innovative achievements and technical skill in dance, and for his work in Black and Blue (1989) on Broadway. Tall and big-footed, Green was a surprisingly light, graceful, and melodious rhythm dancer who was known for his specialty “strut” when he came on stage and for his tick-tock tap sounds. Whether dancing to such favorite tunes as “A Train” or “Caravan,” Green’s smooth and graceful rhythm tapping was uncluttered, even, and beautifully phrased. He has been called the “Poet of Tap.” In the “Green, Chaney, Buster, Slyde” number from the 1996 Broadway musical, Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk, Savion Glover celebrates Green as a master teacher who “was educatin’ people, not entertainin.’” “Chuck’s dancin’,” rapped Glover as he danced before a multi-paneled mirror, “was like, kind of slow. Every tap was clean, you know what I’m sayin’. You hear every tap. He was, just like, on the slow type, smooth type.” Chuck Green died in Oakland, California. The fluency of Green’s tap dancing is captured in George Niremberg’s documentary film, No Maps On My Taps (1980) with “Sandman” Sims and Bunny Briggs. His free-association poetry of speech is beautifully rendered in the film, About Tap (1987). His gentleness of spirit is immortalized in Masters of Tap (1983), a documentary film that also includes Honi Coles and Will Gaines. The sheer musicality of Green’s solo dancing is seen in the film Dance Black America (1984). Constance Valis Hill

2004 - Gregory Hines (14 February 1946 - 9 August 2003), jazz tap dancer, singer, actor, musicians, and creator of improvised tap choreography, was born in New York City, the son of Maurice Hines Sr. and Alma Hines. He began dancing at the age of not-quite-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 Theatre, where they were witness to the performances and the advice of such tap dance legends as Charles "Honi" Coles, Howard "Sandman" Sims, the Nicholas Brothers, and Teddy Hale (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. When Hines moved back to New York City in the late 1970s, he immediately landed a role in The Last Minstrel Show. The show closed in Philadelphia, but launched him back into the performing arts, and just a month later came Eubie (1978) a certified Broadway hit, which earned him the first of four Tony nominations. Comin' Uptown (1980), though not a success, led to another nomination and Sophisticated Ladies (1981) to a third. In 1992, Hines received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his riveting portrayal of the jazz man Jelly Roll Morton in George C. Wolfe's production of Jelly's Last Jam, sharing a Tony nomination for choreography for that show with Hope Clark and Ted Levy. Hines made his initial transition from dancer/singer to film actor in Mel Brooks' hilarious The History of the World, Part I (1981), playing the role of a Roman Slave, that in one scene sees him sand-dancing in the desert. He followed that in quick succession with Wolfen, an allegorical mystery directed by Michael Wadleigh that is now a cult hit; in it, Hines played the role of a coroner. In 1984, he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Cotton Club (1984). Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote about Hines' rare screen presence in the film: "He doesn't sneak up on you. He's so laid back, so self assured and so graceful, whether acting as an ambitious hoofer or tap dancing, alone or in tandem with his brother, Maurice, that he forces YOU to sneak up on HIM. The vitality and comic intelligence that have made him a New York favorite in Eubie and Sophisticated Ladies translate easily to the screen." The film was a seamless blend of dance into the framework of the narrative. The fierce virtuosity of Hines' dancing is seen in the White Nights (1985), in which he played an American defector to the Soviet Union opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov, playing Russian defector to the United States. "I haven't had a terribly traumatic experience as a black person in this world, but I've had experiences," Hines told Michael J. Bandler about the film. "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 1988, Hines starred in a film that combined his penchant for both dance and drama, Tap. With full-scale production numbers filmed on location in New York City and Hollywood, and with an original soundtrack created especially for the look and style of the film, Tap became the first dance musical to merge tap dancing with contemporary rock and funk musical styles. It also featured a host of tap legends, including Sandman Sims, Bunny Briggs, Steve Condos, Harold Nicholas and Hines' co-star and show business mentor, Sammy Davis, Jr. Hines' extensive and varied film resume includes teaming with Billy Crystal in director Peter Hyam's hit comedy, Running Scared, and the next year with Willem Dafoe, in Southeast Asia, in the military thriller Off Limits. He starred in William Friedkin's dark comedy, Deal of the Century, with Sigourney Weaver and Chevy Chase; Penny Marshall's military comedy, Renaissance Man, co-starring Danny DeVito; The Preacher's Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston, once again with director Penny Marshall; Waiting to Exhale, with Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston for director Forest Whittaker, and Good Luck, with co-star Vincent D'Onofrio. He also appeared in the offbeat ensemble comedy, Mad Dog Time, with Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Dreyfuss. In 1994, Hines expanded his talents to include the role of film director. His directorial debut was the independent feature, Bleedings Hearts, shot on location in New York. A contemporary romantic drama, it explored the precarious relationship between a thirty-year-old, white, male radical and a black, female high school student. Hines work in television is equally diverse. In 1989, he created and hosted Gregory Hines Tap Dance in America, a PBS television special that featured veteran tap dancers, established tap dance companies, and next generation of tap dancers. The film was nominated for an Emmy award, as was his performance on Motown Returns to the Apollo. On the USA Network, Hines starred with Annette O'Toole in the critically acclaimed original film, White Lies, based on the novel Louisiana Black by Samuel Charters. He also starred on TNT with Christopher Lloyd in Lewis Teague's T-Bone and Weazel; with Sinbad, James Coburn and Burt Reynolds in the comedy western, The Cherokee Kid; with Judd Hirsch and F. Murray Abraham in Showtime's urban drama, The Color of Justice; on CBS-TV with Jean Smart in the thriller, A Stranger in Town; on the USA Network in the psychological thriller, Dead Air, and in Subway Series, the anthology-style film series for HBO directed by Ted Demme. Hines made his television series debut in 1998, playing Ben Stevenson, a loving single father hesitantly re-entering the dating world on CBS-TV series, The Gregory Hines Show. As Ben Doucette, he made up part of the gifted ensemble that won NBC an Emmy Award for Best Comedy Series in 2000 for Will and Grace. He also earned an Emmy Nomination as Outstanding Lead in a Miniseries or Movie for his portrayal on Showtime of the legendary and groundbreaking dancer/film star Bill Robinson in Bojangles, and also starred in the ABC/Touchstone mid season television series, Lost At Home. For three years, Hines was the voice of "Big Bill" on Bill Cosby's animated series for Nickelodeon, Little Bill. He voiced and sang one of the key characters (alongside Eartha Kitt, Patti LaBelle and Vanessa Williams) in the Fox TV/Coca Cola animated musical special, Santa Baby. He made his television directorial debut with The Red Sneakers, for Showtime, and also appeared in the film, which centers on a 17 year-old high school student--more mathematician than athlete--who becomes a basketball sensation through the gift of a magical pair of sneakers. Throughout an amazingly varied career, Hines continued to be a tireless advocate for tap in America. In 1988, he lobbied successfully for the creation of National Tap Dance Day, now celebrated in 40 cities in the United States and in eight other nations. He was on the Board of Directors of Manhattan Tap, the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and the American Tap Foundation (formerly the American Tap Dance Orchestra). He was a generous artist and teacher, conscious of his role as a model for such tap dance artists as Savion Glover, Dianne Walker, Ted Levy, and Jane Goldberg, creating such tap choreographies as Groove (1998) for the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and Boom for the 1997 Gala for President and Mrs. Bill Clinton, filmed for (ABC) at the Ford Theater in Washington D.C. 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 being the inheritor of the tradition of black rhythm tap, he was also a proponent of the new. "He purposely obliterated the tempos," wrote tap historian Sally Sommer, "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 and postmodern dance." The New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff described Hines' performance in 1995: "Visual elegance, as always, yields to aural power. The complexity of sound grows in intensity and range.” In addition to his work on the dance and theatre stage, in film and on television, Hines' wide-ranging career also included making a 1987 album called Gregory Hines, and writing introductions for books Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers by Constance Valis Hill, and Savion! My Life in Tap, a biography by Mr. Glover for children. Everything Hines did was influenced by his dancing, as he told Stephen Holden in a 1988 interview with The New York Times: "Everything I do," he said, including "my singing, my acting, my lovemaking, my being a parent." He died in Los Angeles at the age of fifty-seven. Constance Valis Hill

2004 - Donald David Dixon Ronald O’Connor (1925-2003), the comedic song-and-dance man who inherited and perpetuated a classic tradition of vaudeville tap dancing, was born in Chicago, Illinois into an Irish theatrical family. His father, John Edward “Chuck” O’Connor, was an acrobat with Ringling-Barnum and Bailey Circus; and his mother, Effie, was a circus bareback rider and dancer. When they graduated from circus into vaudeville, all their children (seven were born, three died in infancy) were initiated into “The O’Connor Family,” billed as “The Royal Family of Vaudeville.” O’Connor made his first stage appearance at 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 thirteen months old, 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 1937 Warner Brothers musical, Melody for Two. Like most child performers who grew up in show business, he learned to dance by watching the hundreds of musical acts on 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 “un-teachable.” Unabashed, O’Connor developed his own style of tap dancing drawn from experience in vaudeville. He also developed as an actor, played a number of juvenile and super- polite boy roles such as Bing Crosby’s kid brother in Sing, You Sinners (1938), Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer, Detective (1938), and Beau (Gary Cooper) at age twelve in the dashing Foreign Legion action adventure film, Beau Geste (1939). O’Connor is also seen briefly dancing a vaudeville-styled tap routine as one of the three Dancing Dolans in the 1939 Warner Brother’s musical On Your Toes, choreographed by George Balanchine. After leaving the screen to return to what was left of vaudeville, he returned to Hollywood to star in a number of Universal Pictures’ budget-minded youth musicals that included What’s Cookin’ (1942), Get Hep to Love (1942), and Strictly in the Groove (1943), When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1942), It Comes Up Love (1943), Mr. Big (1943), Top Man (1943), The Merry Monahans (1944), and Bowery to Broadway (1944). He was often cast as a brash and energetic young man during World War II, and paired with the equally energetic actress and tap dancer, Peggy Ryan. O’Connor’s postwar musicals include Are You With It? (1948), Feudin’, Fussin’ and A-Fightin’ (1948), and Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby (1949); and these led to Francis (1949), a potboiler about an Army private who finds he is the only person who can carry on a conversation with an otherwise taciturn mule; the film proved to be a big hit with the kids and led to five sequels. In the 1950s, O’Connor reestablished himself as a comedic actor and tap dancer. As Cosmo Brown, the sidekick chum of Gene Kelly in the classic musical (which spoofed the dawn of talking pictures), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), O’Connor’s gravity-defying, largely improvised rendition of “Make ‘Em Laugh” is considered one of the funniest in the history of the movies. That number, along with the cheerily-strutted “Good Morning,” danced with Debbie Reynolds and Kelly, and the vaudeville-inspired “Fit As a Fiddle (And Ready for Love)” danced with Kelly, rewarded him with a Golden Globe Award (over Kelly) for his performance. After the success of Singin’ in the Rain, MGM fashioned a starring vehicle for O’Connor in I Love Melvin (1953), in which he danced on roller skates. In the Twentieth Century-Fox film, Call Me Madam (1953), O’Connor dances a lyrical duet (one of his all time favorites) with Vera Ellen; and in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), there is the infamous scene in which he kisses co-star Marilyn Monroe. In the mid-fifties, Paramount Pictures cast him in the film adaptation of the Broadway tap dance musical Anything Goes (1956) with Bing Crosby and Mitzi Gaynor. With the decline of the studio system by 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 and starred in three different incarnations of The Donald O’Connor Show for NBC in 1951 and 1954-55, for which he was nominated for an Emmy (1952) and received the Emmy Award for Outstanding Personality (1953). One of O’Connor’s most memorable moments tap dancing on television is The Bell Telephone Hour’s “Song and Dance Man.” Broadcast on NBC-TV (January 16, 1966), this mini-musical history of tap dance in America opened with O’Connor as host dancing an Irish jig, Scottish reel, Spanish zapateada, and German spatlasse, followed by a softshoe dance and some sand dancing. And culminated with a challenge dance with O’Connor and the Nicholas Brothers (Fayard and Harold) trading and one-upping on tap steps. In some of the best dance television camera work to date, O’Connor joined the brothers in “Cute,” a medium tempo swing tune by Neal Hefti in which he tapped out feather-light shuffles and heel-clicks. The vaudeville-inspired routine finished with the three dancers sitting on pedestals to fake Russian-styled kazotsky kicks, twirling through sets of barrel turns, and performing in-the-trenches, and double and triple turns; in the typical decelerated ending, they strode upstage, turned around, and sat back down on their pedestals with folded arms. In 1971, after suffering a heart attack, O’Connor devoted considerably energy to composing music for the concert hall. He also performed a number of cameo roles on film, among them as the vaudevillian and dance instructor in the film Ragtime (1981 and the dreamy-eyed toy manufacturer in Robin Williams’ film, Toys (1992). In 1993, O’Connor released his own exercise-oriented video, Let’s Tap. In 1998, O’Connor signed on for The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies, headlining a revue featuring 54-year-old-plus performers, and signing and dancing his way through eight performances a week. Through the end of his career, he lived, true to his word: “I was born and raised to entertain other people. I’ve heard laughter and applause and known a lot of sorrow. Everything about me is based on show business. I think is will bring me happiness. I hope so.” O’Connor will be remembered as “The Last Song and Dance Man.” The title, once proposed for an autobiographical stage play he was preparing, is apropos for a man who so knew how to create magic and delight as an entertainer. “I’m an illusionist—a trickster who quick chances before your eyes,” he admitted in 1992. “I capture your attention without giving you time to think about it. I move fast, I keep changing my hats. And the more pleased an audience is, the more energy I give back to the audience.” He died in Calabasas, California on September 27, 2003. Constance Valis Hill & Tony Waag

2004 - Ann Miller (1923-2004) The raven-haired, long-legged dancer whose athleticism and machine-gun taps won her stardom during the golden age of movie musicals, was born Johnnie Lucille Collier in Chireno, Texas on April 12, 1923. Her father, John Alfred Collier, who named her, was a well-known criminal lawyer who defended such infamous gangsters as Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow; her mother, Clara Birdwell, was a Cherokee. When the Colliers moved to Houston, her mother saw to it that she studied piano and violin, but mostly tap dancing, partly to build up legs that had been affected by rickets, a condition caused by a vitamin D deficiency that can lead to softening of the bones and deformity. When her parents divorced at the age of nine, she moved to California with her mother, calling herself Annie and soon after adopting the stage name, Ann Miller. There she developed a dance routine she performed at meetings of local civic organizations, earning five dollars a night plus tips, and was able to support her mother. After watching Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), starring the brilliant tap dancer Eleanor Powell, Miller turned her attention to sharpening her tap dance skills on the suggestion of her mother, who told her that if she practiced a bit more, she could be a dancer of the same quality. A few years later, she was spotted by the talent scout Benny Rubin, who had been escorting Lucille Ball. They arranged a movie audition, which led to her first film, a non-speaking part in New Faces of 1937 for RKO. With her vibrant personality, great legs and dazzling style of tap dancing, RKO awarded Miller a seven-year contract at the age of thirteen (she claimed to be eighteen), and would later insure her legs for $1,000,000. She was such a remarkable young talent that at age fourteen she played Ginger Rogers’ dancing partner in the film Stage Door (1937), which also featured Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball and Eve Arden. A year later, she was borrowed by Columbia Pictures to appear with James Stewart and Jean Arthur as Essie Carmichael, the fudge-making, ballet-dancing daughter in Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1938. Back at R.K.O., she played the role of Hilda in the Marx Brothers’ film Room Service (1938), and in 1939 made her smashing Broadway debut in George White’s Scandals, which she played for two years. In the late forties and fifties, Miller was signed by MGM to star in its most memorable musical films. In Easter Parade (1948), she danced most gracefully with Fred Astaire (she was considerably taller than he and had to wear ballet slippers) as she tried to woo him away from Judy Garland; but it was her singing and tap dancing solo, “Chasing the Blues Away,” that she claims as one of the best song and tap dances on musical film. In On the Town (1949), she was paired with Jules Munshin, the sidekick of Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, all three sailors desperately looking for girls on their 24-hour leave in New York. In Kiss Me Kate (MGM 1953) she portrayed Lois Lane, the nightclub hoofer who becomes Bianca in Cole Porter’s version of William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew; belting out the “I’m A Maiden” number in the film, she struts and sashays around the male chorus (which includes Bob Fosse) with flirtatious brazen, interspersing a machine-gun rattle of taps to punctuate the lyrics. Other MGM musical films of note included Texas Carnival (1951), Lovely to Look At (1952), a remake of Jerome Kern’s Roberta, Small Town Girl (1953), Deep in My Heart (1954), Hit the Deck (1955), and the role of Gloria Dell in The Opposite Sex (1956). By the late 1950s, Miller moved from movies to nightclubs and also appeared frequently on such television programs as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, and Laugh-In. In 1969, she scored a Broadway triumph when she took on the title role in Mame, renewed energy to the role originated by Angela Lansbury. Miller continued to work even while jobs were scarce. In the early 1970s on television, she was seen dancing atop an eight-foot soup can in the Busby Berkeley-inspired TV ads for Heinz’s Great American Soups, which were choreographed by Danny Daniels. She also went on the road with touring companies of Can-Can, Panama Hattie, Hello Dolly! and Blithe Spirit. Miller’s greatest Broadway triumph came in 1979 when she wowed audiences with her tap dancing while starring with Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies, a musical salute to vaudeville. The show ran for nearly three years on Broadway and several years on tour and abroad, and earned her a Tony Award nomination, the George M. Cohen Award for Best Female Entertainer (1980), the Sarah Siddons Award for Best Performer of the Year (1984), and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination in (1989). In 1992, Miller was honored with a Life Time Achievement Award by the University of Southern California; in 1993, the Gypsy Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Dance Society of America; and in 1994 the Flo-Bert Award from the New York Committee to Celebrate Tap Dance. Her tap shoes, which she called Moe and Joe, are exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. She has also written two books, Miller’s Highlife, an autobiography, and Tapping Into the Force, about her psychic abilities. Her performance in David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive in 2001 marked nearly seventy years in the movies. She died on January 22, 2004 in Los Angeles, California. In her heyday, Miller was America’s leading female tap dance star, inheriting the mantle from Eleanor Powell. She preferred a vigorous approach to dancing that was athletic and speedy, and claimed to be able to dance at 500 taps per minute, which no one disputed. While she will be remembered in the popular imagination as a raven-haired, long legged tap dancer with the lacquered raven hair and Nefertiti eye makeup, the tap world will forever celebrate her dazzling and gutsy style of tap dancing that was as brassy and good-hearted as the showgirl roles she played in her films. Melding glamour and razzmatazz with speedy precision, Miller came as close to hoofing in high-heels as any female dancer in the history of the movie musical. Constance Valis Hill

2005 - Sammy Davis, Jr. (8 December 1925-16 May 1990), singer, dancer, actor, and musician (who played vibraphone trumpet, and drums), was born on December 8, 1925 to the Puerto-Rican-born tap dancer Elvera "Baby" Sanchez, and Sammy Davis, Sr., an African-American vaudevillian who was the lead dancer in 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 re-named the Will Mastin Trio, and toured the vaudeville circuit, accompanying his elders with flash tap dance routines. Called "Poppa" by his father and "Mose Gastin" by Uncle Will, he traveled and performed with the Mastin troupe, taking time off to make his motion picture debut in Rufus Jones for President (1933), a black short subject two-reeler filmed at Brooklyn's Warner studios, 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; and still later, The Will Mastin Trio, Featuring Sammy Davis Jr." In 1942 at the age of eighteen Davis was drafted into the Army where he encountered, he says for the first time, blatant 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 they were wrong. It was as if I'd walked through a swinging door for eighteen years, a door which they had always secretly held open." He was subsequently transferred to Special Services where he performed in army camps across the country, "gorging" himself on "the joy of being liked," as he wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can. He writes 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-styled tap dancing and impressions of popular screen stars and singers, playing trumpet and drums, and singing to the accompaniment of Sammy, Sr. and Uncle Will's soft-shoe and tap as background. He also recorded some songs for Capitol Records and one of them, a rendition of "The Way You Look Tonight," was chosen the 1946 Record of the year by Metronome magazine, which also named him the year's "Most Outstanding New Personality." The addition of comedy and tap dancing brought new life to the group, so by the beginning of the next decade they were headlining venues including New York's Capitol club and Ciro's in Hollywood. It was in this period that Davis met Frank Sinatra, who was then 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' act. By 1952, at the invitation of Frank Sinatra, the group played the newly-integrated Copacabana 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 including "Something's Gotta Give," "Love Me or Leave Me," and "That Old Black Magic," and "Too Close for Comfort." After a succession of successful club appearances, Davis he made his Broadway debut in 1956, with Sam Sr. and Will, in Mr. Wonderful, a musical comedy that was created just for him. He made his solo debut on television on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and did some serious acting in episodes of the "General Electric Theatre" and "The Dick Powell Show." In 1965 on the "Patty Duke Show" he played himself in "Will the Real Sammy Davis Please Stand Up?" Meanwhile, his recordings were making records--"Hey There," "Birth of the Blues," The Lady Is a Tramp," "Candy Man," "Gonna Build a Mountain," and "Who Can I Turn To?" In 1958 he played the role of a jive-talking sailor in the film Anna Lucasta; and in 1959 played the mischievous Sportin' Life in the screen version of Porgy and Bess. 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. But he continued to press 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 worshipped 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. Davis died soon after in Beverly Hills, California from complications due to throat cancer, a result of his many years of smoking. Davis will be remembered throughout his career as one of the world's greatest entertainers, as a remarkably popular and versatile performer equally adept at acting, singing, dancing and impersonations -- in short, a variety artist in the classic tradition. He is among the very first African-American performers to find favor with audiences on both sides of the color barrier, and remains a perennial icon of cool, which could also be said of his tap dancing -- quick-fired with crystal clarity and rhythmically swinging flourishes of flash. Constance Valis Hill

2005 - Peg Leg Bates (October 11, 1907-December 8, 1998) was born Clayton Bates in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, the son of Rufus Bates, a laborer, and Emma Steward Bates, a sharecropper and housecleaner. He began dancing when he was five. At twelve, while working in a cotton-seed gin mill, he caught and mangled his left leg in a conveyor belt. The leg was amputated on his kitchen table at his home. Though he was left with only one leg and a wooden peg leg his uncle carved for him, Bates resolved to continue dancing. "It somehow grew in my mind that I wanted to be as good a dancer as any two-legged dancer," he called. "It hurt me that the boys pitied me. I was pretty popular before, and I still wanted to be popular. I told them not to feel sorry for me." He meant it. He began imitating the latest rhythm steps he saw dancers of metal-tap shoe dancers, adding his own novelty and acrobatic steps into the taps. He worked his way from minstrel shows and carnivals to the vaudeville circuits. Relearning how to dance with his wooden peg leg, Bates worked his way upward from minstrel shows and carnivals to the vaudeville circuits. At fifteen, after having become the undisputed king of one-legged dancers, able to execute acrobatic, graceful soft shoe, and powerful rhythm-tapping all with one leg and a peg, he established a professional career as a tap dancer. In 1930, after dancing in the Paris version of Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1929, Bates returned to New York to perform as a featured tap dancer at such famous Harlem nightclubs as the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, and the Club Zanzibar. On Broadway in the 1930s, he reinvented such popular tap steps as the Shim Sham Shimmy, Susie-Q, and Truckin' by enhancing them with the rhythmic combination of his deep-toned left-leg peg and the high-pitched metallic right-foot tap. As one of the black tap dancers able to cross the color barrier, Bates joined performers on the white vaudeville circuit of Keith & Lowe and performed on the same bill as Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly. In 1949 Bates sang and danced the role of the swashbuckling pirate, Long John Silver in the musical review Blackouts. "Don't give 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 Ken Murray musical that played for three years at the Hollywood and Vine Theatre in Hollywood, California. Wearing a white suit and looking as debonair as Astaire, Bates made his first television appearance in 1948 on This Is Show Business (a show hosted by Clifford Fatiman and Arlene Francis), performing high-speed paddle-and-roll tapping and balancing on his rubber-tipped peg as if it were a ballet pointe shoe. On the Ed Sullivan Show in 1955, Bates strutted his stuff as he competed in a tap challenge dance, countering Hal LeRoy's wiggly steps with airy wing-steps. "You're not making it easy," Bates chided, as he tossed off heel clicks and soared into a flash finish with Trenches (his body leaning forward on the diagonal and the legs kicking high to the back). Bates made over twenty appearances on the Ed Sullivan Television Show, last appearing in a tap challenge dance with "Little Buck" on August 22, 1965. While television gave him greater notoriety than ever before, Bates continued to pursue a variety of performance venues. In1951 he invested his earnings and with his wife, Alice, purchased a large turkey farm in New York's Catskill Mountains and converted it into a resort. The date of his marriage to Alice is not known; it lasted until her death in 1987. They had one child.) 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. "During the prejudice years, country clubs were not integrated," said Bates, "and I started thinking how blacks might like to have a country resort just like any other race of people." After selling the property in 1989, Bates continued to perform and teach. He appeared before youth groups, senior citizens, and handicapped groups, spreading his philosophy of being involved no matter what life's adversities and encouraging youngsters to be drug-free and to pursue an education. "Life means, do the best you can with what you've got, with all your mind and heart. You can do anything in this world if you want to do it bad enough," he often said. Bates' tap dancing was melodically and rhythmically enhanced by the combination of his deep-toned peg, made of leather and rubber-tipped, and the higher-pitched metallic tap shoe. He was also accomplished in acrobatics, flash (executing spectacularly difficult steps involving virtuosic aerial maneuvers) and novelty dancing. He consistently proved himself beyond his peg-legged specialty, surpassing other two-legged dancers to become one of the finest rhythm dancers in the history of tap dancing. In 1992, Bates was Master of Ceremonies at the National Tap Dance Day Celebration in Albany, New York, where he received a Distinguished Leadership in the Arts Award. In 1991, Bates was honored with the Flo-Bert Award by the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day. He died in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, just a mile and a half from the place where he lost his leg. Constance Valis Hill

2006 - Bunny Briggs (February 26, 1922-  ) Dubbed by Duke Ellington as "the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically-syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist,” Bunny Briggs says he was born dancing: “When I finally faced  the world my legs were kickin’. They let me loose, and I just started dancin’. Just started right out dancin’. And been dancing ever since.”  He was born on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street in Harlem, New York. At the age of three his mother took him to the Lincoln Theatre to see his aunt Gladys, who was a chorus girl. After seeing the dapper Bill Robinson perform at the Lincoln he rushed home to say, “Mamma, I want to be a tap dancer,” and proceeded to show her the steps from the routine that Robinson performed. Absorbing tap dance on the streets of his neighborhood, he was soon organized into Porkchops, Navy, Rice, and Beans, a kiddie dance group that performed in ballrooms around the city to such tunes as “Bugle Call Blues.”  In the early 1930s, after being discovered by pianist and orchestra leader Luckey Roberts, he joined Roberts’ Society Entertainers and by the age of eight began performing in the homes and mansions of some of America’s wealthiest people, performing for New York's Four Hundred: the Astors, Wanamakers and Vanderbilts. When he was twenty in the early forties he began touring with the big swing bands of Earl Hines, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Charley Barnet and Count Basie, able migrate from band to band because he was musically versatile and could improvise. With the influence and help of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Briggs adapted his style to bebop. He also created his own style of paddle-and-roll tapping that combined pantomime. “I was always an improvisation dancer,” he told Rusty Frank. “ I never danced to the same tune more than two or three times. My style is carefree. It’s carefree and hard, but I try to make it look easy.” Writes Brenda Bufalino about Briggs, “There was never any problem keeping Bunny on stage. He kept dancing his riff- walks and quick turns, flipping his head, and whipping his hair. He stopped short to give the audience a chance to applaud in the middle of his solo, and finally, when he brought the whole house to its feet, he would walk over to the microphone and tell them how much he loved them.”  After appearing at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1960 with the Duke Ellington band, Briggs became known as "Duke's dancer" was the chosen soloist in Ellington’s Concert of Sacred Dance, in “David Danced Before the Lord,” which premiered at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco (September 16, 1965); he was also the soloist for the East Coast premiere of Concert of Sacred Music at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (December 26, 1966) in New York. Briggs also took part, along with along with Baby Laurence, Honi Coles, Pete Nugent, and Cholly Atkins, in the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival in a landmark concert which marked the ascendancy of tap dance in popularity. Jazz critic Whitney Balliett described Briggs in that concert as an “airborne dancer whose steps and motions are an exquisite balance of comic exaggeration and almost fussy precision. In the paddle-and-roll, he began with a long sequence of abrupt, irregular heel beats, punctuated by silences and quick, stiff head-and-arm motions, broke into a barrage of military-type flam strokes, and settled into soft, dizzying heel-and-toe beats (his torso and head now motionless) that carried him smoothly all over the seemingly ice-coated stage.” On television in the 1950s Briggs appeared on Cavalcade of Bands; in 1960s he performed on the Ed Sullivan Show; and in the 1970s Johnny Carson shows, as well as such TV specials as Apollo Uptown and Monk's Time. During the 1970s and 1980s he danced aboard tour ships; and toured Europe in the 1980s with The Hoofers (which included Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Sandman Sims, Chuck Green) In 1989 he was one of he featured dancers in PBS/Great Performance’s Tap Dance in America, and was one of three hoofers (Briggs, Howard “Sandman” Sims and Chuck Green) whose biographies are documented in the film No Maps On My Taps (1979). He also appeared with such tap veterans as Sammy Davis, Jr., Harold Nicholas, Arthur Duncan, Jimmy Slyde, and Sandman Sims, presented in the 1989 film, Tap, starring Gregory Hines. In the last half of the 1980s, Briggs performed in Europe with Sweet Saturday Night, and on Broadway in My One and Only (1983) and Black and Blue (1989), also appearing in the 1992 television documentary about Black and Blue, directed by Robert Altman. “Some people ask me about my sound,” Briggs explained to Rusty Frank. “And I’ve been blessed in so many ways, because I danced in the streets, I danced in hallways, I danced in hot-dog stands, and I danced for society. When I would work for the society people, they would have a good time, but soft. . . they’d have a beautiful time.” One of Briggs’ most significant moments of accomplishment was in a small nightclub in Staten Island called the Moulin Rouge, when he asked couples in the audience to put their arms around each other as he tap-danced. Dimming the lights in the club, he said to the audience, “This is the first and last time I’ll ask for this. I don’t want no applause. Just stay like that.” He danced two choruses of a soft-shoe to “I’ll Be Loving You, Always,” and when he finished he just walked off the stage, leaving the lights low as the men continued kissin’ and hugging their partners. “And that to me was the greatest compliment I’ve ever had. It was just beautiful.” In 2002, Briggs received an honorary doctorate of Performing Arts in American Dance by the Oklahoma City University (2002). Constance Valis Hill

2007 - Eddie Brown (July 27, 1915 - Dec 28, 1992) Superlative rhythm tap dancer known for clarity of taps, complexity of phrasing, and rippling musicality, was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He learned to dance at an early age from his uncle who was 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; with 37 contestants, when he was called to the stage and asked him what music he wanted, Brown requested Robinson’s signature tune, “Doin’ the New Lowdown,” and proceeded to duplicate the steps that he had heard Robinson perform on record and in performance. Upon winning first prize in the contest, Robinson spoke to Brown’s parents and asked to take the boy to New York, but Brown’s mother refused. Two weeks later, Brown and two friends hopped a freight train and within two weeks made their way to New York where he supported himself by dancing in bars where people threw money on the floor. Because he was a minor, he could not be hired where liquor was sold; but when the management saw that people liked them, and would start buying beer, they let them stay. At age eighteen, Brown joined the Bill Robinson Revue at New York’s Apollo Theatre; and remained with the show from 1933 to 1939 because he was able to withstand the strict demands of Robinson who was 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. When he approached these dancers for work he was turned down, because they felt Brown did not understand what they were doing. “So I woodshedded for three weeks,” he recounted, “and found out that rhythm dancing was flash dancing cut in half.” He returned to Small’s and delivered two choruses of rhythm tapping to asking the musicians for slower tempo, and performing two tasty choruses of rhythm tap to slow swing tempo. “By me being a flash dancer, I found out that I could do the same steps, and it worked out beautifully. I went on from there creating, creating, creating.”  When a show he was touring with arrived in San Francisco, Brown says he was no longer doing flash. “Everything was rhythm, down to earth rhythm.” Falling in love with San Francisco, Brown decided to stay. He formed the trio of Brown, Gibson and Reed (Carl “Busboy” Gibson and Jerry Reed); the group later split off into Brown and Reed, as the Mad Cats of Rhythm. He also pursued work as a soloist, preferring to experiment on his own as a rhythm tap improviser. He teamed up with drummer Dave Tough in an act in which they would play off and answer each other in a drums-and-tap dialogue.  Through the 1940s he appeared with Billie Holiday and Joe Turner at the Savoy in Art Tatum’s show, and with Dizzy Gillespie, Cal Tjader, George Shearing and the Jimmie Lunceford band as he pursued a career as a soloist. In the 1970s, Brown was a featured artist in Jon Hendrick’s San Francisco production of Evolution of the Blues, which ran for five years at the Broadway Theatre. In the early 80s Babs Rifkin and Camden Richman were instrumental in bringing Brown out of “retirement” and getting him to tap again in San Francisco; and in 1982 helped his move from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Through the 1980s, Brown appeared in many tap festivals that began to be organized in San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Boulder, Houston, and New York. “Eddie Brown always opened our shows,” Brenda Bufalino recalls of the Colorado Tap Festivals. Dressed in his white tuxedo and white broad-brimmed hat, she says that Brown 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.” In 1987 Brown performed at the San Francisco Tap Festival with Steve Condos, Jane Goldberg, Nicholas Brothers, and Lynn Dally; and in 1989 at the Outrageous Rhythms Festival performance in Houston, Texas with Bufalino, Condos, Honi Coles, Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. From 1983-1992 Brown was a soloist and company member of Rhapsody In Taps (RIT), directed by Linda Sohl-Ellison, who says that more than a guest artist, Brown rehearsed with the company and was featured in company repertoire as well as performing in every annual Rhapsody in Taps’ Los Angeles season at the Japan America Theatre, UCLS’s Royce Hall, and Wadsworth Theatre. He especially loved working with drummer Tootie Heath, and the two of them had a great rapport on stage. Brown also taught for RIT’s National Tap Dance Day’s events and was the honored Tap Master for the company’s first National Tap Day Outdoor Potluck Picnic at Occidental College, an event that became an annual Los Angeles event due to public demand. Brown choreographed several works for the company, as well as solos for Sohl Ellison. He also taught a popular and successful Saturday tap class at the Embassy Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, and many private lessons to Los Angeles tap dancers and others who sought him out, such as Pam Thompson and Heather Cornell. He also frequently appeared as a Guest Artist with Lynn Dally’s Los Angeles-based Jazz Tap Ensemble, and for them he choreographed Doxy, to the tune Sonny Rollins, which became a signature work of the company, as well as the well-known Eddie Brown B.S. Chorus. “Eddie Brown was one of America’s great tap treasures and we promoted Eddie’s visibility in every way possible way,” says Sohl-Ellison. Brown likens his tap dancing to “scientific rhythm” because, he says, “You heard all this music/rhythm but couldn't see where it was coming from.”  His style is rhythmically intricate with steps that are close to the floor with equally intricate and sophisticated jazz phrasings. “One of the distinctive qualities is the way he accents steps within a phrase, where he places the strong punctuation,” says Linda Sohl Ellison. And when Brown was asked how to go about achieving that, he answered, “Make every tap count; don’t miss any.” Constance Valis Hill

2007 - Leon Collins (February 7, 1922 - April 16, 1985), tap virtuoso who inspired a new blend of jazz and classical music, placing an innovative focus on melody rather than rhythm alone, and who believed that “Dancing is the poetry of the body as music is the poetry of the soul,” was born Leandre Kollins in Chicago, Illinois (2 February 1922), his father of West Indian descent. He learned to tap dance on the street corners and in pool halls, where young dancers gathered to copy and challenge each other,  wanted to be a prizefighter, and played guitar with The Three Dukes, but in short time became a popular dancer in clubs around town. By the age of seventeen he left Chicago for Detroit, where he married up-and-coming blues singer Tina Dixon. The pair moved to New York City where Dixon, who was signed to perform with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, opened the door for Collins’ big break when she recommended her husband perform with the orchestra after the opening act called in sick one night. Billed as “Gangs of Dancing,” Collins was offered a five-year contract with the Lunceford band and in the late 1930s also worked with the Count Basie orchestra in Chicago and New York, and with the bands of Erskine Hawkins, Earl “Father” Hines, Glen Gray and Tito Puente. Collins’ dancing in these early years included the usual steps that all hoofers had to know, such as wings, nerve taps, over-the-tops, and shuffle-flaps, as well as the requisite acrobatic splits and flips. But his style also embodied a clean, clear tapping with an emphasis on melodic line, which set him apart from other dancers. Where 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 instead flowed along with the melody, behaving more like a trumpet or a saxophone than a snare drum or tom-tom.  “He wasn’t dancing like the other guys,” said his wife Tina. “He was different, dancing tap-for-tap, note-for-note.”  This preference followed the style of Baby Laurence Jackson, who Collins always accorded much respect, and of the dancer Teddy Hale, a friend with whom Collins always traded steps. These dancers were all intimately involved with the new developments taking place in jazz during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Their fast and free-form improvising was well-suited to the bebop that was being created by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who Collins jammed informally with on numerous occasions, expressing in his feet what they played on their horns, and developing a melodic style of tapping that grew from his own musicality. “Tap is music,” said Collins. “We use our feet to get the same sound as an instrument.” He, along with Laurence and Hale, were among the pioneers of the high speed, packed tempos of bebop-style tap dancing. Dancing to such jazz standards as Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunesia,” Collins also interpreted Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in C Minor,” dancing with disarming ease and shimmering speed. Dressed immaculately in a white or black tuxedo and bow tie, his sounds were soft and delicate at first, gracefully embellishing the pianist’s rendition of Bach’s “Prelude.” But little by little, his movements grew more intense, his feet splashing the stage floor like summer rain pelting a roof, feet moving nimbly while the upper body remained still, as if allowing the feet to shoot the breeze with the piano. The cruelest irony of Collins’ 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. While the emergence of bebop and the simultaneous decline of swing are cited as one reason for tap’s demise in the late forties and fifties, traditional dancers who were not inspired by bop’s intricate rhythms and unpredictable harmonic changes were duly reluctant to make innovations on their own style and move it forward with the new music. At any rate, as big bands died out, rock and roll became popular music, television became the country’s premier entertainment medium, and ballrooms no longer were the social meeting places, tap dancers had found less and less work. 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 to play the guitar, and attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston. By the early 1960s, he was forced to give up dance entirely and for the next fourteen years, he worked as a polisher and reupholsterer of used cars. Gradually drifting away from show business circles entirely, he became an avid golfer and played cards with a small social group, the Salt and Pepper Club. In the mid-seventies, as the tap revival gained its impetus, Collins’ dance career began to defrost. In 1976, his performance with a number of other formerly retired dancers in a tap revival show at Boston’s New England Life Hall led to a new and unexpected line of work -- teaching for the revered tap instructor, Stanley Brown. For Collins, one night of teaching a week turned quickly into three or four, and when Brown died in 1978, Collins took over his studio, where his patience and kind, supportive demeanor became legendary. He was soon teaching for the Radcliffe Dance Program and the Harvard Summer Dance Center; and his own school, renamed the Leon Collins Dance Studio, in Brookline, MA, became home to dozens of students, young and old, who wanted to learn the art. Among them were such important tap artists as Dianne Walker, Pamela Raff, and C.B. Hetherington (later Clara Brosnaham Wirth) who became his protégés, and after his death, continued to manage his school.  Collins’ studio also became a catalyst for his powers of invention. By the end of his career he had created nearly a dozen routines, extended a cappella dances that covered virtually the entire range of his own tap vocabulary. These routines, with names like Routine 1, “The Waltz,” and “Tapapella” are still taught at the studio by Pamela Raff; and further preserved in written form by pianist Joan Hill using a system of tap notation she devised. In his performances with Hill, Collins created a new blend of classical music and jazz that is unique in the history of tap dance. The “Bach Prelude and Fugue in C minor,” for example, comprised of jazz rhythms married to Baroque harmonies and counterpoint. Collin’s signature work was Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” which segued into Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.” Collins’s not only taught his students well but also launched their careers on the stage. As whenever he was asked to perform, he insisted they perform with him. Says Dianne Walker: “Leon gave me my foundation. He talked about being on time, he talked about money, he talked about clothes and about expression. He taught me everything that I know.”  The air is free, and so is my tap,” said Collins, who approached his compositions with a clear and understandable phrasing of crisp straight eighth notes accented and syncopated by clapping sections, quick turns, and sharp angular movements, dutifully executing on the left and right sides to giving his performance a certain predictability and satisfying comprehensibility. “All I’m really trying to do is put a smile on your face.” Constance Valis Hill

2008 - Mable Lee, the sassy chanteuse and jazz dancer with the million-dollar legs who was regaled in the 1940s as “Queen of the Soundies,” was born in Atlanta, Georgia (August 2, 1921) to Rosella Moore and Alton Lee. She was a child prodigy who began performing at the age of four; and all through elementary, middle, and high school, was known for her singing and dancing talents. By the age of nine, she was performing with a big band in popular clubs around town; at the age twelve, she was performing in the first black-owned nightclub in Georgia, The Top Hat. She arrived in New York City with her mother on August 18, 1940 and auditioned at the Apollo Theatre --   singing, dancing with a chair in her mouth, doing flips and splits-- but because she did not have an agent, she could not be booked as a soloist. On the advice that she seek work as a chorus liner, she went to a mass “call” for an audition and was chosen out of 300 girls to dance in the chorus at Harlem’s West End Theatre (on 125th Street). The chorus at the West End was so good (they were choreographed by Charlie Davis and Leonard Reed) that Frank Schiffman would not let any of those women work at his Apollo Theatre. It was only after the show closed (in August of 1940) that dance director Leonard Harper brought her to the Apollo, where she joined the “Number One” chorus. She worked six shows a day, and sometimes around the clock, when having to rehearse with a new band.  “I got my training and start in the chorus,” said Mable about her training in the “School of Doing” at the Apollo. When the Apollo “Number One” chorus dissolved in 1941, Mable was given a spot as a soubrette, singing and dancing as a soloist with a line of women behind her. She had realized her dream: “I came here to be, what my teachers from kindergarten and up always said, to be a star; I’ve been in show business all my life.” She was also in comedy skits, playing straight woman to such comics as Pigmeat Markham and Spider Bruce. After the Apollo, she worked at such Harlem’s nightclubs as Small’s, Ubangie Club, and Club Sudan. And then went to London for eighteen months, where she performed at the Palladium where she says, “I represented America in the nightclub scene, and represented Africa in the jungle scenes.” The London critics called her “the second Florence Mills.” During World War II, Mable performed in the first all-black USO unit; conducted by Eubie Blake and his sixteen-piece orchestra. With over 45 performers (including Butter Beans and Susie, Cook & Brown), doing five shows a day, the troupe played every army, navy, and marine camp. In the 1950s, Mabel would perform in the USO with her own show, with two comedians and an all-woman chorus and band. She often crossing paths with Leslie “Bubba” Gaines. “Bubba,” she says, “took USO shows all over the world-- he was another Bob Hope.” From 1940 to 1946, Mabel made over 100 soundies such as Half Past Jump Time (c. 1945), Baby, Don’t Go Way From Me (1946), Ebony Parade (194-) with the Cab Calloway and Count Basie bands, and Everybody’s Jumpin’ Now (c. 1946) with Noble Sissle and orchestra. Chicken Shack Shuffle (1943) is a virtual dance instruction song in which Mable sang, “You jump to the left and you cross your leg, and tip along like you’re walking on eggs/ you do anything but a pigeon wing, you strut like a rooster but you gotta swing.” She then performed her own free interpretations of the dance with truckin’, boogie shuffles, and cross-back steps, and legomania. In The Cat Can’t Dance (c. 1945), she sang about the guys who sent her diamonds rings and took her to the swankiest clubs, bemoaning, “but these cats just can’t dance.” Adored by Harlem audiences, Mable appeared on the March 1947 cover of Ebony Magazine. After touring France, Belgium, Ireland, and Scotland, Mable returned to New York to do booking auditions, raise $350,000 for, and star in the Broadway revival of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s all-black jazz-age musical Shuffle Along (1952); in which she sang  “Craving for That Kind of Love” and “You Ain’t Been Vamped ‘til You’ve Been Vamped by a Brownskin.” She also sang with Eubie Blake on his album Eubie Blake and His Girls (1960) making popular again the hit song “You Got to Git the Gittin,’ While the Getting is Good.” The year 1960 was also another blessed year for Mable, who gave birth to a son, Michael, who was born in Georgia (on April 13, 1960) would grow up to write music, form a band, write plays, and sings in the choir of the church Mable had belonged to. But while Michael was growing up, Mable continued to work. In 1969, she was the only woman to perform with Chuck Green, Lon Chaney, and James Buster Brown in The Hoofers, which opened at the Mercury Theatre to rave reviews. She performed in the leading role of Irene in the national touring production of the Broadway musical hit Bubbling’ Brown Sugar (1976); with Honi Coles, who went out as a “time man,” changed scenes while tapping and was understudy to the lead Vernon Washington (in the role of Sage). After getting standing ovations for her soft shoe dancing in the AMAS Repertory Theatre’s production of Suddenly the Music Starts, Mable was nominated for an Audelco Award for Outstanding Musical Performance. In 1985, Mable received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to make master dance videos on teaching vintage chorus line routines and other fundamentals of chorus line work.  Since 1999, Mable has performed regularly in National Tap Dance Day’s Tap Extravaganza, where she was honored with a Flo-Bert Award for lifetime contribution to tap dance. From the first New York City Tap Festival in 2001, Mable has been a star attraction; the special Toe-Knee Award she received from Tony Waag in 2004 was but a preface to her induction in 2008 into ATDF’s International Hall of Fame. After her performance at Tap Extravaganza in 2000, master of ceremonies Ted Levy was left speechless and had to take a few minutes before he could introduce the next act. Mable, at age of seventy-nine, was THAT HOT! As she says, I love doing what I’m doing, what God made me do. I love being apart of people, teaching and performing. I’m an expression of show business, not just dancing -- open yourself up, give them love. I love being feminine, being a woman. I do not like vulgarity -- I will give you a bump, but not to be nasty, but a lady.”  Like many performers from her generation, Mable has achieved that rare level of “entertainment” that identifies a true performer-- but she has one-upped on it. She can dot it all and looks good doing it, in those wonderful costumes and with her great pair of legs. Constance Valis Hill

2008 - Two-Man Comedy Tap Team - Stump & Stumpy The most swinging two-man comedy team to play the Apollo was Stump and Stumpy (James “Stump” Cross and Eddie “Stumpy” Hartman, later Harold “Stumpy” Cromer). When they first played the Apollo in 1938, they capitalized on their contrasting heights and personalities, combining comic banter, scat singing, and a swinging style of tap. “Here’s a very fine team,” the Master of Ceremonies, Willie Bryant,  would announce from the Apollo stage, “a little different, because one’s about down here and one’s about up here, but you put them together and you really got something.” They opened with a swinging up-tempo song. “If your rhythm’s all too romping, and you like it nice and jumping, how ’do-you-do, I’m Stump,” sang Cross, and “I’m Stumpy,” sang Cromer, “and we’ve got rhythm for sale.” They  followed with a swing dance in tandem, and a series of solo specialties in which one out-did the other in close-to-the-floor, heel-dropping steps. And ended with a lindy-hop tap dance in which the taller Stump, bopping in place, partnered the smaller Stumpy, doing all the hard-working turns and air moves. Stump and Stumpy appeared in leading theaters and night clubs with Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Count Basie. They toured with singers Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and the Ink Spots, and with Stan Kenton, and Sophie Tucker. But time and time again, they returned to the Apollo Theatre’s most discerning audiences. Tap dancer Bunny Briggs remembered performing at the Apollo on a bad day, on the same bill as the renowned team of Stump and Stumpy:  “I opened the show and when I finished, no applause. Other acts went on -- no applause. Here comes Stump and Stumpy to close the show. They were the best. And they bombed! We’re all in the dressing room, and hearing nothing from the audience. Then they came off the stage and Big Stump (James Cross) said, ‘Lord knows I tried!’” Constance Valis Hill

2008 - Two-Man Comedy Tap Team - Cook & Brown The greatest of all vaudeville theatres stood behind a gaudy neon sign at 253 West 125th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Harlem. You bought your ticket at a sidewalk booth -- from fifteen cents, morning, to a fifty-cent top on Wednesday and Saturday nights- and entered through a narrow lobby, lined with bathroom tiles, glistening mirrors, and photographs of Harlem idols Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong. The house seated 1,750 people in the parterre and two balconies. The stage was edged with applied pilasters of imitation marble; the curtain was a startling crimson. Doors opened at ten in the morning and closed past midnight. The bill, based on a tried-and-true vaudeville variety format, began with a short film or cartoon, then a newsreel, followed by a feature film. And then the master of ceremonies would announce, to the rising applause and screams from the audience: “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s show time at the Apollo!” Ba-ba-boom! The band broke into the Apollo theme song and the show was off and rolling. First up, the band did a number with the Apollo “Number One” chorus; followed by a sight act-- a tap dancer, acrobat, or animal act; followed by a singer; followed by another fabulous number by the “Number One” girls. And then to further brighten the procedures and prepare for the featured attraction came the two man-comedy teams -- the funny men of tap who turned classical ballet’s pas de deux into the hilarious odd-coupling: the high-strutting dandy and the low-shuffling fool, the straight-man and the clown; the pompous loudmouth and the stuttering buffoon. Tall and short, stout and thin; flashily clothed and tatterly-dressed, their pratfalls, somersaults, and rubber-legging moves accompanied the witty rhythms in their feet. The “husband-and-wife” teams of Slap and Happy and Red and Struggy burlesqued courtship with acrobatic moves and eccentric hoofing.  The Two Zephyrs played a couple of rap shooters performing ultra-slow hoofing. The team of Chuck and Chuckles (Charles “Chuck” Green and James Walker) played rubber-legging Stepin’ Fetchit-like characters, gaining laughs with their molasses-like locomotion. But the greatest of all knockabout comedy teams ever to grace the Apollo stage was Cook and Brown (Charles “Cookie” Cook and Ernest “Brownie” Brown), who first played the Apollo in 1935. Charles Cook was born in Chicago (February 11, 1917) and raised in Detroit. His mother ran a theatrical boarding house next to the Copeaum Theatre for African-American entertainers who at the time were denied accommodations in the white-owned establishments. Cook carried hot peach cobbler to Ethel Waters in her dressing room, and watched from backstage such acts as Butterbeans and Susie and the all-black touring shows, like Runnin’ Wild, Brown Skin Models, Lucky Sambo, and Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along. Around 1929, at the age of twelve, Cook performed with “Garbage and His Two Cans” and toured with Sarah Venable’s “Mammy and Her Picks” with his childhood friend and future dance partner, Ernest “Brownie” Brown, who was born in Chicago (April 25, 1916).  In 1930, the two formed Cook & Brown. Their act combined acrobatic stunts and grass-roots humor with eccentric dancing. The short-tempered, six-foot tall Cook, known for his Russian floor dancing, played foil to the diminutive five-foot tall Brownie who, when knocked down, slid the full length of the stage and bounced up in a reverse split, thumbing his nose and ready for more abuse. In 1931, they played the Lafayette Theatre in New York, and stayed, quickly becoming highly popular comedic performers, despite the Great Depression. In 1934 they played the Cotton Club and skyrocketed to popularity, playing the Palace, Palladium and Apollo with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lena Horne and Bill Robinson. On Broadway in Kiss Me Kate (1948), choreographed by modern dancer Hanya Holm, they stopped the show with their routines in “Too Darn Hot” and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” But they always returned to the Apollo -- the first and last jump-off for the large caravan of Harlem entertainers.  Constance Valis Hill

2008 - Jimmy Slyde (October 27, 1927-May 15, 2008), the supreme jazz hoofer known for his musicality, impeccable timing, and ability to glide effortlessly across the stage, was born James Titus Godbolt in Atlanta, Georgia, October 27, 1927.  Around the age of three his family moved to Boston, where he received his early musical training at the Music Conservatory.  The training gave him a good conception of music, but standing in one place for a couple of hours and bowing was tedious, and he needed to move. Encouraged by his mother -- who wanted him to do something other than baseball, basketball, hockey, and football to contain all that physical energy -- he decided on dance, especially after seeing many tap dancers perform in Boston theatres and burlesque houses. He was enrolled at age twelve in Stanley Brown’s dance studio in Boston, where he watched Bill Robinson, Charles Honi Coles, and Derby Wilson practice their moves; and where from his instructor Eddie “Schoolboy” Ford he first learned to slide. “It’s pure magic, and I don’t know how he does it,” dance critic Sally Sommer later wrote about the move that became Slyde’s signature inscription over a bebop line: “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 and ends the phrase by pulling up high and flashing off a triple turn.” Also at Stanley Brown’s studio, he met Jimmy Mitchell, who went by the name “Sir Slyde” The two developed an act called the Slyde Brothers -- Godbolt taking the name of Slyde -- and began appearing on the club and burlesque circuit in New England. As their reputation grew, they received invitations to perform in the shows the big bands were developing and taking on the road. The Slyde Brothers worked with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and other great bandleaders of the era: “When I was dancing with the bands, people loved it,” Slyde recalled:   During a song, I would tap about three choruses. And then the band would come back in, and I’d do another two and a half, three choruses. Then I’d close it up and whip it out. I tried not to get too mired in routines. I’m not a routine man. ‘Cause dancing is a translating thing, especially if you’re tapping. You’re making sounds yourself . . . different dancers have different sounds. Some dance heavy, some dance light. I’m strictly sound-oriented. Tap dancing fits with the music -- it’s like a summation there. As Slyde came into his own, opportunities for hoofers were drying up in America. In 1966 at the Berlin Jazz Festival, Slyde, Baby Laurence, James Buster Brown, and Chuck Green were 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 seemed the only remaining host for opportunities in jazz. In the late sixties, Slyde returned to Europe, and in the seventies, he expatriated to France and settled in Paris where, with the help of jazz pioneer Sarah Petronio, he helped to introduce rhythm tap. He returned to the states after performing in the Paris production of Black and Blue (1985) and was immediately absorbed into the tap revival. He was a much-in-demand guest artist on the national and international tap festival circuit; and with master tap dancer and teacher Dianne Walker was a strong presence in the Boston and regional Massachusetts tap scene.  He also served as a mentor to new artists by hosting weekly sessions at the club LaCave in New York City where he attracted an international array of dancers, including Herbin Van Cayseele (Tamango), Max Pollak, Karen Calloway, Roxane Semadini -- who he nicknamed “Butterfly” -- and Savion Glover, who called his teacher “the Godfather of tap” and “one of the true masters of the art form.” The decade of the eighties was glorious. Slyde was featured dancer in such films as The Cotton Club (1984), Motown Returns to the Apollo (1985), ‘Round Midnight (1986), and Tap (1989), starring Gregory Hines, and in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Black and Blue (1989). In his solo to “Stompin’ at the Savoy” in that musical he improvised with rhythms, coming down the backside of the off-beat, playing those edges, scraping his shoes against the floor, and sounding out the brushes of the snare drums. “His timing was impeccable,” Jane Goldberg remarked about Slyde’s ability to make the audience hear every sound in a phrase. “He was a real purist.” Slyde’s numerous honors include a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1999), a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (2003) and the Dance Magazine Award (2005). Even as his health waned in his later years, and he was increasingly absent from the tap festival circuit, Slyde managed to mentor a new generation of dancers, among them “Rocky” Mendez (b. 1980), who received a Massachusetts Folk Heritage Award to apprentice with the master. He urged Rocky not only to go back to the basics—the time steps, shuffles, riffs, and brushes -- but to become immersed in rich depths of the jazz tradition. When Jimmy Slyde died on May 16, 2008, in his home in Hanson, Massachusetts, dancers around the world mourned him as the last great tap dancer of the big-band and bebop eras who experimented with rhythm and tonality, and who regarded tap improvisation and the ability to swing as a spiritually-enlightened conversation. Constance Valis Hill

2008 - Brenda Bufalino (ATDF Artistic Mentor/Teacher) is a mixed genre artist; choreographer and tap dancer, a dancer who sings, tells stories, writes books, works clay into shapes that dance, and paints pictures. She has performed her one person shows Internationally and has appeared as a guest soloist at Town Hall,  Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center among other major venues. In February 2009, she premiered her latest show “Primordial Memories” at the Judson Church in NYC as part of Tony Waag’s “Sound Check Series.” She mentors, lectures and teaches master classes internationally and teaches many workshop series for the American Tap Dance Foundation in New York City throughout the year. As artistic director/choreographer of The American Tap Dance Orchestra she toured America and Europe with her company, and appeared at The Joyce Theatre, and on PBS “Great Performances…Tap Dance in America with Gregory Hines.” For many years Ms. Bufalino collaborated and toured extensively with her mentor Charles “Honi” Coles. She has received consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a NYFA fellow. Her critically acclaimed book “Tapping the Source…. tap dance stories, theory and practice” is published by Cod Hill Press. She has created numerous DVD’s and CD’s… tapping, singing, teaching and telling stories, which are available from her web-site. She is the recipient of the Flo-bert Award, The Tapestry Award, and The Tap City Hoofers Award, all for outstanding achievement and contributions to the field of tap dance.  www.brendabufalino.com
Photo by Lois Greenfield

2009 - The Class Act: Cream of Tap Dancing At the turn of the twentieth century, concurrent with the musical comedy dance teams working in the blackface tradition, there was an elite group of African-American performers who rejected the minstrel-show stereotypes of the grinning-and-dancing clowns, the Fool and the Dandy. Clean-faced and well-dressed, these performance artists insisted on the absolute perfection of sound, step, and manner. They aspired to a purely artistic expression that was driven by their desire for respectability and equality on the American concert stage.  The pioneering class act of Charles Johnson and Dora Babbige Dean billed themselves as "Johnson and Dean, The King and Queen of Colored Aristocracy," and established the roles of the genteel Negro couple on the American stage. Dean “talked” her songs and “posed” in fancy dresses; Johnson, who always presented himself in full evening dress--top hat, tailcoat, monocle, gloves, and a cane -- “strutted” in the cakewalk tradition. Together, they appealed to audiences through well-dressed elegance and impressive personalities. In 1914, after touring Europe, Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton returned to New York and formed an act that matched formal dress with an elegant style of dancing, thus combining strutting, ballroom dance, and cakewalking with percussive stepping. In 1923, at the height of their career, Greenlee and Drayton opened at uptown Harlem’s Cotton Club. Their graceful act was described as “Picture Dancing,” every move making a beautiful picture. Strolling onstage, they sang "You Great Big Beautiful Doll," doffing their hats and making sweeping bows. In “Virginia Essence,” a soft-shoe danced to stop-time, they filled in the musical breaks with conversation in various foreign languages. Johnson and Dean, Greenlee and Drayton, and the spectacular cakewalking couple George Walker and Ada Overton Walker, were the forerunners of what in tap dance has been called the “class act.” Graceful and impeccably dressed, moving together across the stage to make every move a beautiful picture, these dancers insisted on absolute perfection in sound and step. “You’re probably talking about straight up-and-down dancers, flat-footed dancers with no acrobatics . . . well-dressed, well-mannered, good music, good deportment-- all those things,” said Honi Coles about the “class act” dancers, naming the immaculate soft-shoe Irish dancer George Primrose; precision dancer Jack Wiggans who performed refined translations of the Argentine tango; and Eddie Rector,  whose “stage dancing” dovetailed one step into another to create a seamless flow of sound and movement.  

The Nicholas Brothers followed in the class act tradition. Performing at the Cotton Club in the 1930s, they looked smartly streamlined in black tailcoats and dancing with such swirling speed that their tails were flying out behind them. Turning and tapping, brushing and patting the floor with the tip of his patent-leather shoe, Harold waved the dance to his brother, Fayard, who stroked the floor with velvet-smooth glides; together, they traversed the stage with slides and traveling crossover steps. Moving side by side and in perfect step with each other, their kicks and struts etched double-image designs in space. Whether leaping onto the platform, step-clapping down the stairs, or leaning into smooth-tapping reverse turns, the brothers exuded cosmopolitan cool, right through to their exit which had Fayard walking closely behind Harold, the two of them looking like one man with four legs.  Dancing at the Cotton Club in the 1930s and often on the same bill as the Nicholas Brothers were Pete, Peaches, and Duke -- Pete Nugent, Irving Beamon, and Duke Miller -- who further defined the class act through their precision-dancing. They opened their act with a precision-line military drill, tapping as if glued together. During each man's solo, the other two joined in to establish a new kind of continuity that was interwoven rather than episodic. They closed with a One Man exit, facing the audience, one behind the other, in single file, disappearing into the wings like a man with three pairs of legs. Descending from the great tradition of soft-shoe dancers, from Primrose and Jack Wiggans to Eddie Rector, Pete Nugent made full use of the stage. He insisted on the absolute perfection of sound and step, but his own style of strutting was like a swagger -- he walked with a bounce and there was a nonchalant hunch to his shoulders. That attitude held up his virtuosic dancing as the unrivalled model of the class dancer: “I'm a tap dancer first, last, and always,” said Nugent, “but if you have to make a choice, I prefer all body motion and no tap to all tap and no body motion. Any hoofer can execute all the steps, but the way a man handles his body and travels is what gives it class,” Nugent told Marshall Stearns. Other class-acts included Wells, Mordecai and Taylor, the Hillman Brothers, Three Little Words, The Three Dukes, the Dunhills, Rutledge and Taylor, The Lucky Seven Trio, the Rockets, the Five Hot Shots, and the white act of Virginia Lee and the Lathrop Brothers: all of these fine dancing acts had an opening number that was generally a flash number, a competitive dance, a soft-shoe; and a closer, usually a big flash number. The class act of Miller Brothers and Lois (George, Danny, and Lois Bright) is said to have one-upped all the other acts with high-speed rhythm tap dancing on a set of four-foot-high pedestals, each one shaped to spell their name: MILLER. They began with rhythm-style soft-shoe, followed by Danny and Lois performing precision tap and acrobatics, then climaxed with the trio dancing on and quickly across the pedestals, executing wings, barrel turns, and trenches.   

No one, however, surpassed the class-act dancing of Charles Honi Coles and Charles Cholly Atkins. In 1940, Honi was working as a dance soloist with Cab Calloway and his jive-Swing orchestra when he met Cholly who, with his wife Dorothy Saulters, did a song-and-dance act with Calloway. Coles had a polished style that melded high-speed tapping with an elegant yet close-to-the-floor style where the legs and feet did the work; his specialty was precision. Atkins, who had danced with and choreographed acts for the renowned Cotton Club Boys, had a highly refined sense of rhythm; he was an expert wing dancer. In 1946, after the war, they combined their talents by forming the class act of Coles and Atkins, and were immediately hired to perform at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre. The dance act they created was six-to-seven minutes long. Wearing handsomely tailored suits, they opened with a fast attention-getting tap dance that included a cross-current of patter; then they moved into a precision Swing dance in unison, and followed it with what became their classic soft-shoe, to the tune “Taking a Chance on Love,” played at an extremely slow tempo. Their soft shoe was followed by a challenge dance, in which each dancer showcased his specialty, working exclusively with the drummer to achieve a swinging percussive complexity. Coles performed speedy, swinging, and rhythmically complex combinations in his solos; Atkins was more light-footed and physically sculptural in his moves, blending tap with modern dance and ballet. They ended with tight precision steps and a walk offstage together. As Honi once explained to me: “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. The Big-Band era was swiftly drawing to a close, vaudeville had vanished, television was in its infancy, a new style of ballet 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.  Some argue that “tap dance died” during the period from the late forties through the fifties -- and the class act with it; some say that tap dance never died (it was only neglected). While that debate continues into the new century, the performance aesthetic of  class-act—with its elegant dress, aural precision, detached coolness, and flawless execution—has never died, and will forever continue to be the standard for the highest octave of tap-dancing perfection. Constance Valis Hill

Gary Lambert “Pete” Nugent was born in Washington D.C., on July 16, 1909.  At the age of 16, Pete ran away from home to pursue a career in dancing, joining the TOBA circuit. Pete danced with the TOBA Circuit until around 1926 when he landed a job in the “Honeymoon Lane” Broadway Production. During that time he met and later formed a partnership with Irving “Peaches” Beaman in Chicago. In 1928 they formed a duo act and called themselves “Pete and Peaches”.  Duke Miller was added to the duo around 1931, and they became the unsurpassed class act of “Pete, Peaches and Duke”.  This act was often found performing in venues such as the Cotton Club in NYC, sharing the bill with other well known acts such as the Nicholas Brothers. After the act with Pete, Peaches and Duke split up in 1940, Pete had a solo act “Public Tapper, Number One”. During World War II he spent his military service touring in Irving Berlin’s show This is the Army, entertaining American troops around the world. His unit is the first integrated unit in the army, because Berlin insisted that the piece “This is What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear” be performed by black dancers (therefore forcing integration due to casting for the show). Pete Nugent’s style was heavily influenced by the great vaudeville soft shoe dancers George Primrose, Eddie Rector and Jack Wiggins.   Although Nugent considered himself a tap dancer first and foremost, he preferred “all body motion and no tap”, rather than “all tap and no body motion”.Nugent prided himself on being more than a just a hoofer. Although he insisted on clean, clear taps—“Good dancers lay those rhythms right in your lap”— Nugent was primarily concerned with making full use of the stage.  “I’m a tap dancer, of course, first, last, and always, but . . . I prefer all body motion . . . Any hoofer can execute all the steps, but the way a man handles his body and travels is what give it class.”  (from Jazz Dance by Jean and Marshall Stearns). Nugent’s insistence on perfection made the teamwork of his trio outstanding. Many dancers tried to copy his steps and style, and he became a sought after coach for professionals, working with artists such as Buster Brown, Fay Ray, the 4 Step Brothers, and the class act “The Dunhills”.  He graced the floor as a teacher and “tap stylist” at several well known tap “hot spots” such as the studios of Henry LeTang, Jerry LeRoy (which became Fazil’s) in NYC, and Stanley Brown in Boston, MA. Pete was also an original and beloved member of the Copasetics, whose members included such legends as Billy Strayhorn,  Cookie Cook, Honi Coles, Cholly Atkins, Peg Leg Bates, and Ernest “Brownie” Brown to name a few. Nugent continued performing until the new wave of “bebop” changed the music scene. Unwilling to dance to bop, he eventually went into retirement around 1952. Around that time period the dance team of Coles and Atkins split up, and Pete teamed up with Charles “Honi” Coles and opened a dance studio in NYC with called “Dance Craft”. However, due to the declining interest in tap dance at the time, the studio did not survive. A short time later he was hired to be the road manager for the Motown group “The Temptations”, and continued with similar work that followed, drifting away from working as a tap dancer. In 1962 Nugent came out of retirement to perform with a handful of tap legends including Baby Lawrence, Honi Coles, and Bunny Briggs in a presentation by George Wein entitled “A History of Tap Dance and its Relationship to Jazz” at the famed Newport Jazz Festival, which brought tap back into the public eye. He enjoyed a brief resurgence in the early tap revival, and passed away April 25th, 1973. Although Pete Nugent was well known and highly respected by his colleagues for his style and craftsmanship, he did not gain as much notoriety and fame as his contemporaries. There is no archival video footage of his dancing; only oral accounts and descriptions from those who knew and worked with him. The choreography “Breezin” is one of the only known examples of his choreography that exits today. This choreography was made available through Nancy Howell, who studied with Pete Nugent for a year at the Stanley Brown Studio in Boston, MA. In 1953, while Nugent was associated with Stanley Brown’s studio, Nancy was selected to be a featured soloist for the annual student performance. Nugent was asked to create a solo choreography for Nancy to perform in Stanley Brown’s Studio “Dance Patterns of 53’ - Fifteenth Annual Student Revue”, held on June 2nd and 3rd at John Hancock Hall in Boston, MA. Sandi Sandiford, a noted dance arranger, did the original dance/musical charts for Breezin’. Compiled by Susan Hebach  

By the late 1980s, despite the tremendous interest in and worldwide revival of tap dance, it was no longer possible to find a copy of Jazz Dance.  We sent out scouts, squirreled copies from each other, Xeroxed chapters for courses we were teaching, and repeatedly called publishers to plead for the return of Jazz Dance to the book shelves. Finally, miraculously, here it is, reissued by Da Capo Press. It is a testimony to the community of dancers, fans, and scholars: we have made ourselves heard. Artists like Bill Robinson, King Rastus Brown, John Bubbles, Honi Coles and others who speak to us in this book, are our Nijinskys, Daighilevs, Balanchines, and Grahams. We honor them by studying their lives and work. This is a book I have read over and over; I will read and recommend it for as long as I am a tap dancer or a student of American History. There are so many books on ballet and modern dance. There are still so few on tap dance and they are so cavalierly allowed to go out of print even though the interest in them is so deep and sustaining. Studying tap dance through this marvelous book is like studying this country’s history, not through its wars and politics but through the creation of its own indigenous art form. It has been over twenty years since Marshall Stearns interviewed the tap dance for this book on jazz and vernacular dance. His introductory remarks read like an obituary; they ring with the sadness, melancholy, and nostalgia of the blues, mourning the loss of this unique dance form, with few presentiments of how and when it would be revived. Many of the dancers died before the first publication of this book; neither they nor Marshall Stearns lived to see the revival and the renaissance of tap dance. This is truly sad, for Marshall would have seen his book become the Bible for the new generation of tap dancers and a reference manual for the tap masters still living who worked so diligently to pass on the tradition as well as the technique. This book gave those dancers a reference point from which to observe both their contributions to, and the history of, their form, They incorporated this history with a new self-consciousness and respect for both tap dance as an art form and the tap dancer as an artist. A new generation of dancers-turned-producers pulled tap dance kicking and screaming into the 70s, 80s, and 90s—applauded but still misunderstood. Practitioners were required to become evangelists and apologists. This book really helped: it gave us credibility and created vocabulary and context for students, critics, producers, teachers, and archivists. With this reissue we can be assured that universities and libraries will have resource materials for students of black history and dance. A new generation of tap dancers and fans will not enjoy this marvelous work that documents a powerful, magnetic, and thoroughly magical history.
JAZZ DANCE Foreword By Brenda Bufalino  

One of the greatest class acts of all time was Coles and Atkins, Charles ‘Honi’ Coles and Charles “Cholly” Atkins. The met in a show business hotel in Harlem in 1939, and spent much of the next two decades dancing together. Honi Coles was unusually tall for a tap dancer, and his lanky build simply enhanced the graceful tap style he was then developing. His good looks and sparkling eyes exuded a rare joy beyond the charm he possessed. During the 1930s, Honi Coles was known as having the fastest feet in the business. His main interest was rhythm tap, that lyrical, percussive tap form that was developing rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s by many tap dancer, including the “father” of rhythm tap, John Bubbles. It was said that Honi Coles could do everything Bubbles did, but faster. Cholly Atkins cut his teeth performing in nightclubs throughout the country with the duet The Rhythm Pals. In 1939, he landed in New York City, and through a tip from Honi Coles, auditioned for the great World’s Fair show The Hot Mikado, featuring the legendary Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins first met in 1939; however, they did not dance professionally as a team until after World War II, when they formed their act Coles and Atkins. Coles and Atkins - the definition of a Class Act. It ran twelve minutes. This was unusually long for a tap act, but then again, this was no ordinary tap act. Most tap acts of the time lasted anywhere from three to eight minutes, and they were just expected to tap. Any singing or comedy was considered an invasion of the other entertainers’ territory. However, Coles and Atkins broke through that barrier with their delightful twelve-minute act comprised of singing, comedy, and of course, excellent tap dancing. It was a blend that was ultimately pleasing to the audience and proved to ensure their longevity as an act. Coles was the rhythm dancer, creating poetry with his feet; Atkins was the flash dancer, combining balletic moves with tap. Their confidence as individual dancers, and their rapport as a team, was winning. Their most outstanding number was their Soft Shoe. The Soft Shoe had been performed for nearly a century before Honi and Cholly began working on theirs. What set their version apart was the seemingly perilous slowness of it. Each step was executed in graceful symmetry that was absolutely breathtaking. Never before had such precision and style been brought to this tempo of Soft Shoe. The “slow Soft Shoe” became a favorite in their repertoire. Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins were not the first to bring class to tap. Bu by the 1950s, they were definitely the last word on it. 
Excerpt from TAP by Rusty Frank

2010 - Maurice Hines began tap dancing at the age of five, at the Henry LeTang Dance Studio in New York City.  LeTang recognized his extraordinary talent and choreographed routines specifically for Maurice and his brother Gregory. The young brothers appeared in the 1954 Broadway musical The Girl in Pink Tights, and toured as the opening act for Lionel Hampton and Gypsy Rose Lee. Following in the footsteps of the Nicholas Brothers, their father Maurice, Sr., a drummer, joined the act Hines, Hines and Dad performing to rave reviews worldwide. They also appeared on the television shows The Pearl Bailey Show and Hollywood Palace, and made 35 appearances on The Tonight Show. In 1973, he launched his solo singing and dancing career as Nathan Detroit in the national touring company of Guys and Dolls.  He created a stage sensation as a song and dance man in the hit musical Eubie choreographed by LeTang. In 1981, he co-starred in Bring Back Birdie with Chita Rivera and Donald O'Connor and starred in Sophisticated Ladies. Hines made his screen debut as Clay Williams in Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 film The Cotton Club. In 1986, he conceived, directed, choreographed and starred in the musical Uptown … It's Hot! The show played for 17 sold-out weeks in Atlantic City before moving to Broadway, where Hines received a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Musical. He co-directed and choreographed the national tours of the musicals Satchmo and Harlem Suite, which he also starred in with leading ladies Jennifer Holiday, Stephanie Mills and Melba Moore. The Boston Herald American exclaims “Hines is the consummate showman … There’s a master at work.” Hines directed and choreographed music videos, including Quincy Jones’ "I'll be Good To You” and was the first African-American to direct The Radio City Spectacular. In 1994-95, Hines starred as Jelly Roll Morton in the 40-city national tour of the musical Jelly's Last Jam.  Internationally, Hines directed and choreographed the musicals Havana Night in Cuba and The Red Shoes in Santo Domingo. He recently created Broadway Soul Jam, inaugurating an entertainment complex in Holland. Mr. Hines is in pre-production for Yo Alice, a new urban hip hop fantasy he conceived and will direct and choreograph. His critically - acclaimed jazz albums Maurice: I've Never Been In Love Before and To Nat 'King' Cole With Love are on the Arbors label. Hines' performances are dedicated to his mother Alma, Susan Weaving, and his manager Stanley Kay.p >

2011 Charles “Cholly” Atkins (September 30, 1913 – April 19, 2003), jazz tap and class act tap dancer, “the man with the moves” who choreographed, staged, and staged acts for countless vocal groups (between 1953-1994) was born in Pratt City, Alabama on September 13, 1913 to mother, Christine Woods, a native of Westminster, South Carolina, and father Sylvan Atkinson, a steel plant worker. At the age of seven, he moved with his mother and brother to Buffalo, New York. He began his professional career in 1929 as a singing waiter near Buffalo, where he met William Porter, another singing waiter; they formed the vaudeville-styled song-and-dance act in the early 1930s known as the Rhythm Pals. Around 1923, at the age of ten, he won a Charleston contest at a local theatre. A Russian physical education teacher and coach in elementary school who knew about cakewalks, struts, and acrobatics put together an elementary soft-shoe tap dance for Atkins and two other schoolmates. By the time he was in high school, around 1926, Atkins was alternating basketball practice with rehearsals for musicals. In 1929, began his professional career as a singing waiter at Alhambra on the Lake, a club near Buffalo, where he met his future partner, William Porter, who was a dancing waiter. By the late twenties, they worked as the Two Rhythm Pals, a vaudeville style song-and-dance team that incorporated solo dancing and the Charleston steps. Katherine Davis, a fine chorus line dance, taught him to tap dance and compose tap combinations. They were also influenced by the classy flash tap dancing of the Chocolate Steppers (two males and one female), which they saw at Shea’s in Buffalo with Cab Calloway. By 1929-30, Atkins and Porter, as the newly-named Rhythm Pals, performed with Sammy Lewis’ Revue, a traveling show that had comedians, chorus girls, singers and dancers. In 1932 they went on the road again with Stringbean Williams, performing through New England. In 1936, they performed with singer June Richmond and the Les Hite Band. When his partnership folded in the late 1930s, Atkins’ skills landed him a job dancing and helping to choreograph acts for the renowned Cotton Club Boys, who were appearing with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the Hot Mikado at the World’s Fair. During the early 1940s, Atkins toured with his second partner, singer and dancer Dotty Saulters. This winning team shared stages with the Mills Brothers, the Earl Hines Band, the Louis Armstrong Band and Cab Calloway Revue. In 1946 Atkins formed his last and most enduring partnership with high-speed rhythm tap dancer Charles “Honi” Coles, and formed the class act of Coles and Atkins. A ”class act,” in black headliners’ terms, referred to tap dance acts of the 1920s, 30s, 40s that were based on precision, elegant dress, detached coolness, flawless execution, and dignity. Coles and Atkins’ formation of a class act team, in 1946, led to a series of tours with the bands of Charlie Barnett, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Johnny Otis (featuring the Ink Spots), Charlie Barnet, and Billy Eckstine. In 1949, their creation of the show-stopping “Mamie is Mimi” number in the Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which they performed, went uncredited by the show’s choreographer Agnes DeMille. They also created choreography for June Taylor dancers for early television. Coles and Atkins continued to work in the 1950s. By that decade’s end, tap dance took a sharp decline in popularity and jobs became increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, Atkins was building a new kind of dance career with a new kind of dance form. As early as 1953, he periodically coached vocal groups who were replacing variety shows at theatres around the country. His vocal coaching skills were solicited by the Shaw and William Morris Agencies, which led to him being named staff choreographer for Motown Records. Between 1953 and 1994 he choreographed, directed, and staged acts for countless singing artists, including the Cadillacs, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Moonglows, O’Jays, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Shrelles, Supremes, and Temptations. He taught them to perform with gestures, rhythmic dance steps, and turns drawn from the rich bedrock of American vernacular dance and, in doing so, created a new form of expression called Vocal Choreography. Atkins’ contribution to American culture is extraordinary and significant. He has won numerous Gold Record awards for his choreography and, in 1989, won a Tony Award, shared with Fayard Nicholas, Frankie Manning, and Henry LeTang, for his choreography in the Broadway show, Black and Blue. In 1993, recognizing his vast contribution to American culture, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Atkins the highest honor, a three-year Choreographer’s Fellowship for the Arts, to record his memoirs and tour colleges and universities, teaching vocal choreography as a dance genre. In 1999, Atkins received the Living Treasure in American Dance Award from the Oklahoma City University School of American Dance and Arts Management. Master choreographer, master dancer, master director, and master teacher, Atkins is the quintessential American dancer. Constance Valis Hill

2012 - Alice Whitman and the Whitman Sisters’ Legacy The Whitman Sisters -- Mabel Whitman (1880-1942), Essie Whitman (1882-1963), Alberta Whitman (ca. 1887-1963) and “Baby” Alice Whitman (ca. 1900-1969), comprise the family of black female entertainers who owned and produced their own performing company, which traveled across the United States from 1900-1943 to play in all the major cities, becoming the longest running and highest-paid act on the T.O.B.A. circuit and a crucible of dance talent in black vaudeville. They were called the greatest incubator of black dancing talent, and their star dancer, youngest sister Alice Whitman, was called the “Queen of Tap,” considered the finest woman tap dancer of the 1920s-30s. The four sisters were daughters of Caddie Whitman and the Reverend Albery Allson Whitman, who was called the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” and served as Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lawrence, Kansas and Dean of Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia. When they were young, their father gave singing and dancing lessons to Mabel, Essie and Alberta, teaching them the Double Shuffle—for exercise only he insisted—and religious songs with the intent that the girls would accompany him on evangelical tours and church benefits. They attended the New England Conservatory of Music and at a young age became well-known as singers, dancers and musicians. In 1899, Mabel, Essie and Alberta formed the Whitman Sisters Comedy Company and toured all of the leading southern houses, playing to black and white audiences. With the establishment of the Whitman Sisters’ New Orleans Troubadours in 1904, Mabel became one of the first black woman to manage and continuously book her own company in leading Southern houses. Refusing to follow the set pattern of segregating audience by having whites in the auditorium and black in the balcony, the Whitmans insisted upon blacks being allowed in the parquet and dress circle sections of the theater although spectators were probably still grouped together by race. They worked for a season with Billy Kersands, the famed minstrel soft-shoe tap dancer and comedian. In 1910, she organized Mabel Whitman and the Dixie Boys, and toured the country and Europe. Her sister toured U.S. circuits to great acclaim as Bert Whitman and Her Three Sunbeams. By 1914 Mabel had consolidated the family talent into the fastest paced show on African-American vaudeville. “Baby” Alice was born in Atlanta, Georgia. By the time she joined the company at the age of four, the Whitman Sisters had become a family-run business that played most of the major vaudeville circuits in the South, East and Northeast. All four sisters were featured performers. Mabel directed the large company and handled all the bookings, Essie designed and executed costumes, Alberta composed music and kept the books, and Alice was billed at the star dancer, the  “Queen of Taps,” enhancing such popular dances as Ballin’ the Jack, Walkin’ the Dog, and the Shim-Sham-Shimmy with clear and clean tapping. She was considered the best female tap dancer in the 1920s to 1930s. Considered “The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville,” the Whitmans’ fast-paced shows, based on a variety format of songs, dances and comedy skits, which included twenty to thirty performers, a chorus line, and jazz band, and always plenty of talented dancing kids. Historian Nadine George-Graves writes that the Whitman Sisters offered something for everyone: jubilee songs and coon shouts, cakewalks and breakdowns, comedians, midgets, cross-dressers, beautiful dancing girls, jazz and blues singers, a swinging band, and extraordinarily talented child performers, in the parlance of the day referred to as “picks” or “pickaninnies.” Two or three of the teen girls, including Jeni LeGon, Lois Bright Miller and Catherine Basie (future wife of Count Basie), were featured as the Snakehip Queens. They would do a shake dance (something like the shimmy) to the jazz song, ‘Diga Diga Doo.” Shifting the focus to the lower half of the body, the girls would then do a snakehips dance, the movement of their satin costumes emphasizing their undulations. Mabel would come on with the pickaninnies, singing old favorites then turning the show over to the boys, who would belt out songs, tap like there was no tomorrow, and challenge each other while Bert clapped a Charleston rhythm. The audience would roar as the young dancers turned flips, ran up walls, and generally defied gravity. Alberta cut her hair short, dressed as a man, and excelled as a male impersonator. A singer and flash dancer, “Bert” topped her Strut with high-kicking legomania, playing the dapper gentleman partner to her youngest sister. A description of Alice Whitman’s dance style comes from a reconstruction of Whitman Sisters’ act 1909-1920 by Nadine George-Graves: “Alice would then begin to sing her number and the stage would clear as she broke into a clear, clean tap routine full of wings, pullbacks, and time steps that put most tappers to shame.” When interviewed by Marshall and Jean Stearns, Alice said, “I’d make my exit with the Shim-Sham-Shimmy, mostly from the waist down -- along with more squeals -- wearing a shawl and a little flimsy thing around my middle with a fringe and a bow on he back. If I ever lost that bow, they used to say, I’d sure catch a cold. I could swing a mean [Alice winked her eye] around.” “Of the tap dancers (Alice) was the best there was,” Jeni LeGon stated. “She was tops. She was better than Ann Miller and Eleanor Powell and me and anybody else you wanted to put her to…. She could do all the ballet-style stuff like Eleanor. And then she could hoof [heavy, grounded tapping]!” No film footage exists of Alice Whitman or of the Whitman Sisters Troupe. LeGon notes that Alice Whitman “never went out on her own . . . she stayed with the sisters.”  The highly segregated entertainment world created both limitations and opportunities for the Whitmans. The established film industry was closed to Mabel Whitman, as one of the foremost company directors of the day, and her star female dancer, Alice. But the black vaudeville Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) and devoted African-American audiences ensured that the Whitman Sisters would become one of the longest running, highest-paid, and most popular companies on the black vaudeville circuit. “Performers like the Whitmans had to carefully control the images they portrayed in order to stay in the ‘big time,’” biographer Nadine George-Graves wrote. “From the time they performed in front of their first audiences, singing and dancing on their father’s evangelical tour, through their years as an independent troupe playing the top vaudeville houses and heir time as headliners on the Toby circuit to the end of their 40-year careers, Mabel, Alberta, Essie and Alice made sure that they were never taken advantage of, and maintained spotless reputations. Ever loyal to the African-American community, the Whitmans entertained whites and blacks, men and women, upper-,middle-, and lower-class Americans.” Alice’s son, “Pops” Whitman (1919-1950) became one of the stars of the Whitman Act at the young age of four, and developed into one of the finest acrobatic tap dancers, one of the first to execute cartwheels, spins, flips and spins to swinging rhythms. The team of Pops and Louie were stars of the African-American variety circuit, appearing in several films and became well known to white audiences. The sisters knew talent then they saw it, and gave hundreds of dancers their first big break. Leonard Reed, Willie Bryant, Jeni LeGon, Lois Bright Miller, Aaron Palmer, Eddie Rector, Clarence Taylor (Groundhog), Jack Wiggins, and dozens of others all served apprenticeship with them. They not only employed comedy dancers, they featured dancers as dancers, and sold their show on the strength of its dancing talent—and without doubt, the incredible long life of the Whitman Sisters was based on the premise that good dancing always pleased the public. Written by Constance Valis Hill and Margaret Morrison

2013 - James Buster Brown (May 17, 1913, Baltimore, MD – May 11, 2002, New York, New York) James “Buster” Brown, the elegant rhythm tap dancer with a heartwarming wit who was much beloved in the tap community as a teacher and mentor, was born James Richard Brown, the sixth and only male of eight children. His father, William Brown, was an oyster shucker in Baltimore, and mother Mary Brown (Mary Ella Otho), who raised the children when her husband died, when Buster was six years old. Raised in the jazz age, listening to music and dancing, Buster became interested in show business, especially after seeing Albert “Pops” Whitman (1921-1951), son of Alice Whitman of the Whitman Sisters, who built the famous tap and acrobatic act known as Pops and Louie.   He first performed as one the Three Little Dots, a male dancing trio with John Orange and Clifton Payne. He attended Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore (Noble Sissle, Cab Calloway, Baby Laurence Jackson, and Derby Wilson also attended), where he befriended (who was later to become) Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, from whom he picked up moves. With John Orange and Sam Campbell he formed The Brown Brothers, which became The Three Aces. After graduating around 1933, the act was renamed The Speed Kings because of the speed and precision dancing they featured. In Philadelphia, they launched a two-week tour with Jeni LeGon in a variety show that toured Washington D.C.  Around 1936-1937, the Speed Kings worked with Brownskin Models, which played the Apollo Theater.   After John Orange drowned in a swimming accident, Brown returned to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met Emmet McClure and Sylvester Lake. Naming the act Speed Kings 2, they danced a Soft Shoe, and then did “rhythm” dance. “We opened with the soft-shoe, and the music never stopped,” Brown recalled. “We segued into speed and precision dancing.” The act was influenced by and modeled after Pete, Peaches, and Duke, one of the greatest of precision dance teams.   Speed Kings 2 arrived in New York in 1939, playing the Apollo and Small’s Paradise with Earl Bostic’s band. In his spare time, Brown hung out at the Hoofer’s Club. The team worked through World War II and broke up in 1942. One of the last gigs was the Cole Porter musical film, Something To Shout About (1943), starring Don Ameche, Janet Blair, and Jack Oakie; also on the bill were Hazel Scott, Charles Walker of Chuck and Chuckles, and Cyd Charisse, making her film debut. After moving to Boston, having dissolved The Speed Kings 2 and working with a singing group called The Three Riffs, Brown moved back to New York to form his own solo act which comprised comedy and tap dancing. He opened with a soft shoe, closed with flash, and in between interspersed songs with jokes and dances. He also worked from 1945 to 1951 with the duo Brown and Beige (with partner Ernest “Pippy” Cathy), where they played the Apollo Theater. When the duo broke up in the early 1950s, Brown worked briefly with the Choclateers (Eddie West, Paul Black, and Gip Gibson, replacing West), a comedy, singing and dancing group who are credited with originating “Peckin,’”, which they performed in a Soundie. From the time Bill Robinson died in 1949 and through the 1950s, jobs in tap dance were scarce. Brown found several jobs, such as working for a record company (Broadway and 50th Street) and managing the Bobby Restaurant.   In the 1960s he began dancing with the Hoofers, a group that included Lon Chaney, Baby Laurence, L.D. Big Red (“Rhythm Red) and that performed tap jams on Monday evenings on 125th Street in Harlem. Leticia Jay was an eccentric dancer who had worked with Chuck Green. Around that time, Jay produced a television show that included Brown, Gibson, Jimmy Slyde, Fred Kelly, Chuck Green and Ralph Brown. In 1968, The Hoofers toured Africa for eight weeks with a State Department sponsored Jazz Dance Theatre, in which they gave a command performance or Emperor Haile Selassie who awarded them with “The Lion of Jedea Coin.” In 1966, Brown also toured as a soloist with the Duke Ellington Big Band throughout the United States and Canada, performing in one part of Ellington’s Sacred Concert entitled “David Danced Before the Lord” (in a role originated in 1965 by Bunny Briggs). In 1967, after moving with his wife Dorothy into an apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhatta, Brown began singing with the Ink Spots. At the beginning of the 1970s, Brown became a lifetime member of The Copasetics Club, founded in 1949 in memory of the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In 1974 he traveled with the group to New Paltz, New York, where he appeared in the tap dance documentary, Great Feats of Feet.   In the 1980s, as tap dance launched into its so-called renaissance, Brown picked up his career as a jazz tap dancer. He appeared in the Broadway touring production of Bubbling Brown Sugar and the Paris production of Black and Blue. Dancing and teaching at festivals and workshops across America, he continued working with the Hoofers, the Copasetics, with Leon Collins (as one of the “Schnitzel Brothers”), and as a single in Europe. He appeared with the Hoofers in the television production Tap Dancing, in the Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club (1984), and in Susan Goldbetter’s video documentary Cookie’s Scrapbook (1987).   In 2000, Brown toured with the Savion Glover and Friends production Footnotes, with Jimmy Slyde and Dianne Walker. In the late 1990s, he hosted his own Sunday evening tap dance jam sessions at Swing 46 in New York City, where he nurtured the next generation of tap dancers. In February 2002, Brown was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts degree from Oklahoma City University. When asked by the tap dancer Roxanne Butterfly what he thought made a dancer a great artist, Brown replied, “If you are making me feel like I am dancing with you.” He would also say, “It’s not in the move, it’s in the groove.” Constance Valis Hill

2013 - Paul Draper (October 25, 1909, Florence, Italy – September 20, 1996, Woodstock, New York) Paul Draper, tap dancer, teacher, dance director, and dance writer whose “classical” style combined tap dance with the elegance of manner, precision of execution, arm movements, and turns and jumps of ballet, was born in Florence, Italy. His mother, Murial Draper, was a hostess of the music and art world; his father was a singer of lieder in England. At age nine he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and then to New York City where he lived with his mother who enrolled him in the progressive Lincoln School.   By 1930, at age twenty-one, and having a natural flair for dancing, he applied to the Arthur Murray Dance Studio and was accepted as an instructor of ballroom dance; there, he began his own tap lessons with Tommy Nip. Soon after, he moved to London, fortified with letters of introduction, to launch his newfound career as a dancer. He was cast in Sensations of 1932, performing a “flash routine” with partner Nina Ford, in which he danced on a marble pedestal. Returning to New York, he performed at Cobina Wright’s Sutton Club. Engagements followed at the Roxy, Paramount Theater, and Radio City Music Hall. In 1935 he appeared in the Broadway musical Thumbs Up, dancing his pedestal routine. He partnered Ruby Keeler in a tap dance in the movie musical Colleen (1936). He returned to Hollywood to make another movie with Keeler, Six Hits and a Miss (1942).   In the mid-1940s, after studying ballet at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, he began combining tap dance with ballet and embarked on a series of concerts, teaming with harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. “Paul Draper combines ballet steps and gestures, as well as suggestions of Spanish and ‘modern,’ with tap dancing,” wrote dance critic Edwin Denby about a 1944 concert.   In 1948, Draper was blacklisted on allegations of pro-Communist sympathies. Unable to secure bookings for concerts during the McCarthy era, he left the United States in 1951 to live in Switzerland. Upon returning to the states in 1955, he continued to give solo performances of his dances to the music of classical composers, such as J.S. Bach and Francois Couperin. In January 1955 he appeared on a program with his aunt, the monologuist Ruth Draper, at New York’s Bijou Theatre. New York Times dance critic John Martin wrote: “He is dancing brilliantly these nights . . . he has developed a fabulous speed and delicacy in his feet, and the Bach “Gigue” and 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 August 1956, Draper was within the mix of a show titled Three for All at the Carnegie Recital Hall, and received superb critical reviews. Despite critical acclaim, an insidious form of censorship followed Draper and sometimes dissuaded him from appearing in public performances. In 1959 he 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 pro-Communist sympathies had been attributed to Draper.   Draper managed to continue performing on Broadway (in the 1957 revue All in One) and on the concert stage. In 1958 he performed his famous Sonata for Tap Dancers without music; and in the fall of 1959 he embarked on a 45-city concert tour with partner Ellen Martial under the auspices of Columbia Artist Management. He also made literary extensions of his career as a tap dancer by becoming a writer for Dance Magazine, for which he wrote monthly features on the art and technique of tap dance performance. Constance Valis Hill

2014 - Gene Kelly  Born Eugene Curran Kelly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1912, Gene Kelly served his “apprenticeship,” as dance teacher, summer stock choreographer and amateur night performer, before heading to New York in 1937. Achieving his first great success as “Harry the Hoofer” in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life in 1939, Kelly became an overnight sensation on Christmas 1940, in the title role in the landmark musical Pal Joey. David O. Selznick signed him for pictures, but sold the contract to M-G-M. In his first film, For Me and My Gal in 1942, Kelly established himself as a strong and unique screen personality. With Cover Girl in 1944, he began to explore what he saw as the unlimited reaches of the film medium. His “Alter Ego” number still stands as testimony to the vision of an individual determined to change the look of dance on film. In his first work as director, Kelly took the musical On the Town out onto the streets of New York. His innovative use of dance, music and camera continued through such films as An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, Brigadoon, Summer Stock, and his homage Invitation to the Dance. An American in Paris won the Academy Award as Best Film of the Year for 1951. In recognition of his contribution, the Academy presented Kelly with a special award “in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer; and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” Following his creation of the ballet Pas de Dieux for the Paris Opera in 1960, Kelly was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. In 1995, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. Frequently described as the best musical of all time, Singin’ in the Rain was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry. Kelly died in 1996 at the age of 83. For information regarding upcoming Gene Kelly Legacy events, please go to www.genekelly.com and “subscribe.” Also “like” Gene Kelly The Legacy on Facebook.

2014 - Carnell Lyons belonged, like so many American jazz musicians, to the so called “American musicians in Europe” and so was a great influence on the tap scene in Europe. Carnell was born the 6th of August 1917 in Kansas City, Missouri. In the 20s and 30s Kansas City was a swinging town, a secret jazz center to the general public (until record producer John Hammond discovered Count Basie 1936 by hearing Basie on a radio broadcast from the Reno night club). It was the town of Benny Moten, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee, Jay McShann, Lester Young, Jimmy Rushing, Ben Webster and future jazz star Charlie Parker. The so-called “Vine Street District” in Kansas City, Missouri was full of all kinds of night spots and jazz clubs owned by the local mafia and protected by Kansas City’s “Al Capone” Tom Pendergast. In this atmosphere of jazz and crime Carnell grew up. The dance of the time was tap dance and Lindy Hop. Many night spots like the Reno and theaters like the Lincoln Theater had a floor show which would feature America’s best tap dancers. In the movies you could see Bill Robinson, Buck and Bubbles and the young Nicholas kids, a special inspiration for all youngsters. Seeing the Nicholas Brothers and the young Peg Leg Bates inspired Carnell to try to tap dance himself. His first teacher was a neighbor kid by the name of Cornelius Redman, everybody called him “Perk”. He was a little older than Carnell and the other kids, and he would teach them on the streets the basic steps like Time Steps, Wings, Over the Tops – what they would call “Plain Dance”. In a little barn in the backyard of his house Carnell and his friend Fuzzy built up a good wooden floor and all the neighbor kids met in there to practice all day long. Carnell: “We had a big house, a backyard and a frontyard. And we had a shed like a garage. I made a dancing place there, takin’ up the floor and put a new floor down. And we had an old gramophone there to wind up – Tea for Two, Honeysuckle Rose – and we was dancin’ off that.” This little practice room became the dance center of the neighborhood and new teachers came in. Virgil Bowles, a neighbor kid who was already in show business taught them the Soft Shoe, Harvey Collins, who specialized in the new style of Rhythm Tap, and Jimmy McFadden (father of the McFadden Brothers), who was the founder of the famous Kansas City tap quartet “The Chocolate Drops” also joined them. In the middle of the 30s Carnell founded, with two of his friends, “The Three Rags of Rhythm”.  With this trio they went to local amateur contests and theaters like the Lincoln which had the famous Vine Street Variety Show. About 1937 they auditioned for a carnival named the “Hennies Brothers” which toured the whole USA. On this carnival he met his life-time friend, the great tap dancer Fay Ray who at that time, as a sixteen year old girl, was in the chorus line of the show. Back in Kansas City Robert Wilson replaced Cecil Groves and the group’s name changed to “The Three Businessmen of Rhythm” and they invested all their new money in good clothes. 1938 started the decline of Kansas City as a jazz paradise. First of all, Pendergast, the big protector of the mafia, and that means show business, went into jail. Count Basie went to New York, Jay McShann went to Chicago. And like them, many young musicians and dancers were looking for new and bigger possibilities in the big jazz centers. And like their schoolmate Charlie Parker who hoboed to Chicago in autumn the Three Businessmen of Rhythm jumped on a train heading for Chicago. Soon they auditioned for the Club de Lisa, one of the most famous night clubs in town. They got the gig which turned out to be a steady job whenever they came to town. In 1942 they got their first professional management by the Frederick Brothers agency which was looking for dancers to accompany Fletcher Henderson’s band.  And so they made it the first time to New York playing the Apollo Theater. In 1943 they had their Broadway appearance in the Broadway Revue “Artists and Models” with Jane Froman, Jackie Gleason and the Peters Sisters. Right after the show Robert Wilson was drafted and Carnell and L.D. continued as a duo and got their first taste of European show business when they were hired by Val Parnell for the musical “Here, There and Everywhere” with Tommy Trinder and the fabulous Mable Lee at the London Palladium (April 1947 – January 1948). When they came back the act broke up and Carnell joined the duo of two successful acrobats, Jesse Franklin and James Hawthorne. The trademark of Jesse and James was the spinning of huge trays. Carnell learned the tray spinning and with “Jesse, James and Carnell” his most successful years in show business followed.   With Jesse, James and Carnell and their new agent Eddie Smith they climbed the heights of black and white show business. They’ve been in the Kate Smith, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle TV shows and they were one of the few black acts playing Las Vegas (El Rancho) and Radio City Music Hall (May 23rd 1953). After a tournee through South America and the Far East with Xavier Cugat, Jesse left the act and was replaced by L.D. who came back (1955). The act of Jackson, James and Carnell can be seen billed as Businessmen of Rhythm at the Harlem Variety Revue (studio film clips with Willie Bryant as MC, Coles and Atkins, Little Buck and many others). The midfifties was the time when the possibilities for tap dancers to perform in USA died out and only very few acts could continue. So like many other artists who didn’t want to stop, the trio immigrated to Europe where this type of show business was still en vogue. With Paris as their headquarters they toured whole Europe and in 1956 they were engaged for the German picture “Liebe, Tanz und 1000 Schlager” starring Caterina Valente, Peter Alexander and also John W. Bubbles, who was another emigrant. They can also be seen in the Austrian TV production “Fatty George’s Black and White Show”. At the end of the 50s, first L.D., then James went back to America. Since 1961 Carnell was a solo act, living in Frankfurt, Germany, jumping from military base to military base to perform in the different soldier clubs. In the famous Vagabond Club in Wiesbaden he met his future life and show business partner, the contortionist Edith Fügert billed as “Eddi Dorino”. They fell in love. But tragically short after that, when she was back in East Germany, the “Iron Curtain” fell and East Germany built up “The Wall”. And for them a ten years fight for freedom started until 1970 when Edith could legally emigrate from East Germany (Moskau Treaty). In 1972 they were engaged to Tokyo through dear friends and colleagues, Peter and Romaine McKay. To work on the same spots every night Carnell and Edith put a duo act together and toured five years in Japan and the whole Far East.  Coming back to Berlin, Germany at the end of the 70s tap dance was no longer a way of making a living in Germany. So, around 1980, when Carnell was asked to teach tap dance, this was the start of his new teaching career which made him the man who brought Rhythm Tap to Europe. Almost at the same time when tap started to come back in the USA, Carnell started the tap revival in Europe, teaching all the dance festivals and schools. After twelve years the highlight of his teaching career was that he was invited through Jackie Shue to teach the 1992 Tap Festival in Portland and the coming back to New York where Jackie Shue arranged a performance party for his 75th birthday. Jackie organized a show where many of his old and new friends like herself, Buster Brown, Fay Ray, Chuck Green, Lon Chaney, Harriet Browne, Brenda Bufalino, Josh Hilberman, Hank Smith, Rod Ferrone, Joe Orrach, Herbin van Cayseele, Jane Goldberg and us danced for him. With the sweet memory of this late recognition in the tap revival Carnell went back home to Berlin. – Thank you, Jackie! Alan Carnell Lyons died on September 12th, 1992 in Berlin, Germany. A tribute to by Kurt Albert and Klaus Bleis

2015 - Ray Bolger who has the distinction of being one of the few American eccentric comedy dancers to gain full star status on stage, film and television, was born Raymond Wallace Bolger, on January 10, 1904 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the son of Irish parents, Anne and James Edward Bolger. Unable to afford formal dance classes, he learned tap dancing from a friendly watchman, Dinny Haley, a retired tap dancer. He finally took ballet lessons from Senia and Regina Roussakoff in Boston, paying for lessons by performing bookkeeping services for their dance school, and making his stage debut at the age eighteen in a Roussakoff recital. He then toured for two years throughout New England with the Bob Ott Musical Comedy Repertory Company. Broadway first saw the “nimble, rubber-legged” dancer in The Merry World (1926). More vaudeville followed until he returned to Broadway for the Rodgers and Hart musical Heads Up (1929) and George White’s Scandals of 1931. He was featured in Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), singing and dancing with Dixie Dunbar in the “You’re a Builder-Upper” number and offering his interpretation of the Max Baer-Primo Carnera fight; and also in “The Window Dresser Goes to Bed.”  Bolger gained full stardom in On Your Toes (1936), directed and choreographed by George Balanchine, playing the role of hoofer Junior Dolan, the son of an old vaudevillian who helps a struggling Russian ballet company mount a jazz ballet, and in the process falls in love with a ballerina (Tamara Geva). He was lauded for his jazz tap dancing in “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet, in which he was dubbed “The Jazz Nijinsky.” Said Bolger of his rehearsals with Balanchine: “When I got around to the tap-dancing effect, I said to George [Balanchine] in French, ‘Les percussion.’ He stopped and listened and said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ When it came to the end of the ballet, where I had to do my own thing, I did a lot of eccentric jumping up steps, anything that I liked, a hodgepodge…and Balanchine just let me go.” Bolger also performed on Broadway in two other musicals choreographed by Balanchine, Keep Off the Grass (1940), in which he portrayed a super animated jitterbug, and later displayed a more serious side to his art in “Raffles Ballet”; and Where’s Charley? (1948), in which his transvestite clowning was innocent good fun and his soft-shoe routines (one performed on top of a piano) was enchanting; Bolger’s softshoe in that show, “Once in Love With Amy,” often required several encores. In the 1930s Bolger began making films for MGM, playing the role of the Scarecrow, a spineless man of straw whose personality was expressed through eccentric dance moves, in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Alternating between films at RKO, Warner Brothers, and MGM, Bolger played the role of famous vaudeville hoofer Jack Donahue in the 1949 film Look for the Silver Lining, dancing a style of tap dancing that resurrected that of the great softshoe dance George Primrose, who was renowned for his beautiful soft-shoe routines, which covered the whole stage, and his graceful stepping in 4/4 time. Like Primrose, Bolger’s hoofing style stayed close to the floor and looked effortless. In the number “Who Stole My Heart Away,” however, Bolger’s routine became increasingly comedic as he strung together such Irish-inflected steps as “broken waltz clog,” “croppy-lie-down,” and “cover-the-buckle.” Bolger danced them in his own eccentric style -- one that capitalized on physical abilities and disabilities. Other memorable solo routines on film include The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Rosalie (1937), Sweethearts (1939), No, No Nanette (1940), Four Jacks and a Jill (1941), Sunny (1941), Stage Door Canteen (1943), The Harvey Girls (1946), Look for the Silver Lining (1949), Make Mine Laughs (1949), April in Paris (1952), and Where’s Charley? (1952) Bolger’s unique blend of ballet, tap, eccentric, and comedy dance, which required that he create most of his own solo routines, has made his one of the most endearing tap dancers of his generation. He died on January 15, 1987 in Los Angeles, California.
By Constance Valis Hill From Tap Dance America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Performance on Stage, Film, and Video, an online publication of The Library of Congress. [Sources: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010); Francis Mason, I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him (1991)]

2015 - Henry LeTang, the Broadway tap dancer and choreographer who taught and created routines for countless entertainers, was born Henri Christian LeTang on June 15, 1919, in Harlem, New York City, the fourth of five children into a West Indian family; his father, Clarence LeTang; his mother, Marie Martin, from St. Croix. He gravitated toward dance early in life and at the age of seven, after having seen a dance recital, became entranced by tap dance. He encouraged his parents to enroll him with Harlem dance teacher Ella Gordon, who took the aspiring ten-year old to the famed choreographer and teacher Clarence “Buddy” Bradley, who was teaching at the Billy Pierce Studios in Manhattan. Bradley helped LeTang develop as a performer and teacher, making him a studio assistant. At the age of sixteen, LeTang was working for such white blues singers as Sophie Tucker, touring with her as far as Chicago, until his mother brought him back to New York. He also worked with big bands, such as that of Lucky Millinder, who began his career as a dancer, working in cabarets and ballrooms before becoming a bandleader. When not dancing, LeTang haunted the theaters, learning everything he could through observation. It was at this time that he was taken under the wing of the great rhythm tap dancer John Sublett Bubbles who tutored LeTang in steps and the presentation of tap choreography.

In 1937, at the age of seventeen and having polished his own technique, LeTang opened his own studio off Broadway and quickly became known as the “teacher of stars.” One of the first stars to emerge from those he taught was Betty Hutton. LeTang choreographed tap routines for the Hines Kids (Gregory and Maurice) when they started in show business. He worked with Lena Horne, when she was an up-and-coming talent, and with Billy Holiday. He also worked as a choreographer in a variety of venues, from the Apollo Theater to fraternal organizations. In 1959 LeTang married Eleanor lpps, a dancer who had studied with LeTang, as well as with Katherine Dunham and Anne Frank. She left her career in medical pathology in 1971 to work full time as LeTang’s studio assistant, offering considerable organizational skills and artistic support. The LeTangs created an environment intended to nurture the whole performer, offering classes in voice, acting, and other dance forms. The working partnership continued when the LeTangs relocated to Las Vegas. Ellie LeTang passed away in 2002. LeTang’s inimitable style transformed and emphasized the importance of choreography for nightclub performers, thereby establishing him as one of the country’s foremost motion stylists, creating specialty dances for Joey Heatherton, Lola Falana, Flip Wilson, Ben Vereen, Leslie Uggams, Bette Midler, Milton Berle, and former boxing champions Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Frazier. In addition, Hinton Battle, Debbie Allen, Peter Gennaro, and Chita Rivera all studied with him. He is known for his simple rhythmic lines that crescendo, for the repetition of flashy steps, and for choreographic structures that make the sounds clearly accessible to audiences. In the Broadway hit Eubie! (1978), LeTang’s choreography captured a sense of tap dancing of the 1920s. As one of three choreographers who shaped the dancing in the Broadway hit Sophisticated Ladies (1981), starring Gregory Hines and Judith Jamison, LeTang earned two Tony Award nominations, a Drama Critics Award and Outer Circle Award. Other Broadway musicals include Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (1952), starring Pearl Bailey; Crazy With the Heat (1941), My Dear Public (1943), Dream With Music (1944), and the Tin Man’s dance in the musical, The Wiz (1979). In 1989, LeTang became one of four choreographers of the Broadway hit Black and Blue; his ensemble number, “The Rhythm Man,” was the rousing Act I finale and earned him a Tony Award (along with Fayard Nicholas, Frankie Manning, and Cholly Atkins) for Best Choreography of a Musical. He also staged nightclub acts and concerts for Jack Albertson, Debbie Allen, Hinton Battle, Lola Falana, Joe Frazier, Peter Gennaro, Joey Heatherton, Gregory & Maurice Hines, Lena Horne, Bette Midler, Sugar Ray Robinson, Leslie Uggams, Ben Vereen and Flip Wilson. On film, LeTang choreographed Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), Tap!(1989), starring Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis, Jr., and Bojangles (2001), starring Hines. The Henry LeTang School of Dance is on both the East and West coasts. LeTang is known for his innovative choreography and his generous willingness to impart eight decades of tap knowledge to generations of young dancers. His fine work has been represented on Broadway by his students and stars of Bubbling Brown Sugar, Guys and Dolls, My One and Only, and The Tap Dance Kid. The legendary Bill “Bojangles” Robinson summed up LeTang’s choreographic talent by saying “That young man’s staging is really copasetic.” In 1995, LeTang received the Living Treasure in American Dance Award from the Oklahoma City University School of American Dance and Arts Management. He died on April 26, 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
By Constance Valis Hill from Tap Dance America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Performance on Stage, Film, and Video, an online publication of The Library of Congress. [Sources: Constance Valis Hill, “Henry LeTang,” African American Encyclopedia of Culture and History (1996), Oklahoma City University, The Doctors of Dance: Honoring Nine Performing Artists Who Carved the Landscape of American Culture and Dance (2002) program; Allana Radecki and Meffrey Morris, “Henry LeTang: Creating Dances from the Inside Out,” On Tap!: International Tap Association (November 13, 2005; September/October 2006, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 16-28, 61); Terry Monaghan, “A Life Remembered: Henry LeTang, 1915-2007,” On Tap!: International Tap Association, vo. 18, no. 2, Fall 2007, 15-6, reprinted from the May 9, 2007 issue of The Guardian)]

2016 - Harriet "Quicksand" Browne was born on August 7, 1932, on the south side of Chicago, Illinois. Her mother, Ruby Jordan, was a hotel worker and amateur musician; her father, Reuben Jordan, was a pharmacist and shoe salesman who was a self-taught dancer (expert at dancing Snake Hips). The entire family was musical: her mother played piano, her grandfather standup bass, her maternal uncles played the saxophone and 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 credits her father as the first to give her tap dance lessons: "He could tap, and the rhythm fascinated me. It always has," she said, and she took every opportunity to watch the numerous tap dance acts that played the Regal Theatre, a black vaudeville house in Chicago. She also listened to jazz music, was familiar with "every musician, every solo," and a serious collector of the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Jimmy Lunceford, Fats Waller, and Nat "King" Cole. By age ten, Browne was "wired for sound," and could dance. The Jordans sent their preteen daughters to take formal dance lessons from the Bruce Sisters (Mary, Sadie and Evelyn) in Chicago. There, Harriet learned jazz dance and rhythm time steps. In her early teens, and after performing in several spots in Chicago's NRA Theatre, she developed a song and dance act with her sister they called the Jordan Sisters: Marquita sang and both tap-danced. Their routine consisted of traditional steps from the Shim Sham, danced to "Nagasacki." From her earliest performances, Browne was an alert and speedy dancer, with steps that were clean, clear, and sharp. She was a low-heeled rhythm dancer in the style of John Bubbles. "I can do more with my feet in a flat shoe,” said Browne about rhythm tap dancing. Around age fifteen, while dancing nightly in clubs around Chicago, Browne dropped out of the eleventh grade of Englewood high school to dance in the chorus. After meeting the young musician Paul Gonsalves, who was the featured saxophonist with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, she became pregnant, giving birth to a boy, Renell Gonsalves, who was raised in his early years by Browne's mother and sister, and who grew up to become a musician and music teacher.  Soon after Renell’s birth, Browne began performing as a soloist and also as an ensemble chorus dancer, appearing in such clubs in around Chicago as the Savannah Club, Town Hill and Town & Country clubs. By the 1950s, her tap choreography landed her in the center of variety shows and nightclubs where she was toured with the Cab Calloway band and later appeared with Flip Wilson, Betty Carter, Dinah Washington, Della Reese, and T-Bone Walker. In the 1950s, Browne got a job working in the chorus at the Savannah Club in Greenwich Village, New York, where tap dancers like Derby Wilson were performing on a bill that included a number of variety performers. New York thus became her home base. In the post-World War II years, sand dancing was again in popularity, and though it went out in popularity as soon as it came in, Browne began working on it. In the 1970s, after marrying and taking the name of Browne, her husband built Harriet her first sand dancing apparatus: an upside-down card table with lips around it to keep the sand contained. While Howard "Sandman" Sims was playing around with sand at the time, she had taken this style of rhythm dancing on sand to new artistic dimensions. There was no comparing her style to any others. "I'd give Sandman a heart attack trying to keep up with my tempos because that's my thing. I didn't start it, I didn't originate it. But I made it mine." Browne sand danced to such extremely fast tempos that musicians had to struggle to keep up with her; the originality of her improvised rhythmic phrases was also her signature style. Browne first began teaching in New York at first at the Bronx Dance Theatre, subsequently writing a syllabus for tap dance and earning certification from Dance Educators of America. In the 1980s, she opened her own studio and founded the Aristaccato Tap Company, training inner-city Bronx youth in passing on the history of tap and jazz. She also toured Europe with veteran tap masters Bunny Briggs, Charles Cookie Cook, James Buster Brown of the Copasetics Club; performed with Jane Goldberg's Changing Times Tap Company; and became one of the youngest members of the Silver Belles, a sorority of former Apollo Theatre and Cotton Club chorus line dancers. As one of the outstanding women tap soloists in the 1990s, she appeared in the Boston Women's Theatre Festival, and events at Carnegie Hall, LaMama, ETC, and Symphony Space. In 1995, Browne was a recipient of the Choreographer's Fellowship from the National Endowment on the Arts. She was honored for her choreography at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in 1996 during National Tap Dance Day. Browne has remained a vocal and supportive of women in tap dance, frequently reminding of the inequity of women in tap dance. Even in the 1990s, when female tap dancers were gaining in opportunities to perform, Browne continued to remind us that  "If they [male producers] can find enough guys to do it, they will go and call the fellas…But it doesn't belong to them. We can do it, to, given the opportunities. Men who tap have a different approach to it, just like musicians have a different approach with their instruments. Maybe more forceful…but women can do it and do it just as well given the opportunity. Give us the gig." Browne died on September 1, 1997, at the age of sixty-three, in New York City.
Constance Valis Hill [Sources: Quicksand, produced with Mickey Davidson and Musical Director Frank Owen, featuring Browne's tap choreography and rapid-fired sand dancing; Susan Goldbetter, "Obituaries: Harriet Browne," ITA Newsletter (Vol. 8, No. 4 Nov.-Dec. 1997, p. 17); Dennis Levy, "Harriet Browne, Tap Dancer Extraordinaire," Body Positive (November 1997, Vol. X, Number 11); Rachel L. Swarns, "Her Tap Shoes Tell the Story," The New York Times (11 June 1996, B1, B4); Melba Huber, "Tap Talk for Intellectual Rhythmic Superiors: Silver Belles," Dance Pages (September 1993, p. 20-21); "Interview with Harriet Browne," by Constance Valis Hill, Oral History Project of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library (February 3 and 12, 1996).]

2016 - William Henry Lane, “Master Juba” African-American dancer known as "Master Juba," is believed to have been born a free man, although neither his place of birth nor the names of his parents are known. He grew up in lower Manhattan in New City, where he learned to dance from "Uncle" Jim Lowe, an African-American jig-and-reel dancer of exceptional skill. By the age of fifteen, Lane was performing in notorious "dance houses" and dance establishments in the Five-Points district of lower Manhattan. Located at the intersection of Cross, Anthony, Little Water, Orange, and Mulberry streets, its thoroughfare was lined with brothels and saloons occupied largely by free blacks and indigent Irish immigrants. Lane lived and worked in the Five-Points district in the early 1840s. In such surroundings, the blending of African-American vernacular dance with the Irish jig was inevitable. Marshall Stearns in Jazz Dance (1968) confirms that "Lane was a dancer of ‘jigs' at a time when the word was adding to its original meaning, an Irish folk dance, and being used to describe the general style of Negro dancing. Charles dickens, in his American Notes (1842), describes a visit to the Five-Points district in which he witnessed a performance by a dancer who was probably Lane: "Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross cut; snapping fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man's fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs.” In 1844, after beating the reigning white Irish minstrel dancer, John Diamond, in a series of challenge dances, Lane was hailed as the "King of All Dancers" and named "Master Juba," after the African juba or gioube, a step-dance resembling a jig with elaborate variations. The name was often given to slaves who were dancers and musicians. Lane was thereafter adopted by an entire corps of white minstrel players who unreservedly acknowledged his talents. On a tour in New England with the Georgia Champion Minstrels, Lane was billed as "The Wonder of the World Juba, Acknowledged to be the Greatest Dancer in the World!" He was praised for his execution of steps, unsurpassed in grace and endurance, and popular for his skillful imitations of well-known minstrel dancers and their specialty steps. He also performed his own specialty steps, which no one could copy, and he was a first-rate singer and a tambourine virtuoso. In 1845 Lane had the unprecedented distinction of touring with the four-member, all-white Ethiopian Minstrels, with whom he received top billing. At the same time, he prospered as a solo variety performer, and from 1846 to 1848 was a regular attraction at White's Melodeon in New York. Lane traveled to London with Pell's Ethiopian Serenaders in 1848, enthralling the English, who were discerning judges of traditional jigs and clogs, with "the manner in which he beat time with his feet, and the extraordinary command he possessed over them." London's Theatrical Times wrote that Master Juba was "far above the common [performers] who give imitations of American and Negro character; there is an ideality in what he does that makes his efforts at one grotesque and poetical, without losing sight of the reality of representation." Working day and night and living on a poor diet and no rest, Lane died of exhaustion in London. In England, Lane popularized American minstrel dancing, influencing English clowns who added jumps, splits, and cabrioles to their entrees and began using blackface makeup. Between 1860 and 1865, the Juba character was taken to France by touring British circuses and later became a fixture in French and Belgian cirques et carousels. The image of the blackface clown that persisted in European circuses and fairs continued to be represented in turn-of-the-century popular entertainments as well as on concert stages during the 1920s, in ballets such as Leonide Massine's Crescendo, Bronislava Nijinska's Jazz, and George Balanchine's "Snowball" in The Triumph of Neptune (1926). In the United States, Lane is considered by scholars of dance and historians of the minstrel as the most influential single performer in nineteenth-century American dance. He kept the minstrel show in touch with its African-American source material at a time when the stage was dominated by white performers who offered theatrical derivatives and grotesque exaggerations of the African American performer. He established a performing style and developed a technique of tap dancing that would be widely imitated.  Lane's grafting of African rhythms and loose body styling onto the exacting techniques of British jig and clog dancing created a new rhythmic blend of percussive dance that was the earliest form of American tap dance. Constance Valis Hill
[Sources: Marian Hannah Winter, Juba and American Minstrelsy," Chronicles of the American Dance, ed. Paul Magriel (1948), Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]

2016 - The Copasetics, the tap fraternity of largely African-American tap dancers, were organized on December 5, 1949, in the wake of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who died in New York City on November 25, 1949. The Preamble to the Copasetics Club stated itself as a "social, friendly, benevolent club," its members pledged "to do all in their power to promote fellowship and to strengthen the character within their ranks." The name of the club was taken from Robinson's famous catchword, "Everything's Copasetic," meaning everything's fine, or tip-top. The original twenty-one members included Cholly Atkins, Peg Leg Bates, Paul Black, pianist Paul Branker, Ernest Brown, Charles Honi Coles (who became the organization's first president), Chink Collins, Charles Cook, Emery Evans, fraternal twins Francis and Frank Goldberg, trumpeter Milton Larkin, LeRoy Myers, Pete Nugent, Luther Preston, Henry Phace Roberts, John E. Thomas, James Walker, Elmer Waters, Eddie West, and composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, who was president from the early 1950s until his death in 1967. 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, in the 1950s and 1960s, had turned its back on tap dance and turned its attention to ballet and modern dance on the Broadway stage.   Subsequent members included Louis Brown, Louis Simms Carpenter, Leon Collins, William Chink Collins, Harold Cromer, Steve Condos, James "Stumpy" Cross, Billy Ekstein, Albert "Gip" Gibson, Norman Gilliam, orchestra leader Milton "Tippy" Larkin, Chink Lee, Jan Micken, Charles Pendleton, Timmy Rogers, and Charles "Chazz" Young. Honorary members of the Copasetics included Peg Leg Bates, Sammy Davis, Jr., Redd Fox, Dick Cavett, Chuck Green, and the Nicholas Brothers (Fayard and Harold).   With the reemerging popularity of tap dance in the 1970s and 80s, the now veteran Copasetics were suddenly in demand as teachers and performers throughout the United States and Europe, and the club began performing as a group. As a result of their excellence in performing and technical skills, future tappers inherited standards by which to define what tap dance had been and set foundation for tap's future. The group became the living repository of tap history, and from their ranks came most of the teachers of the next generation. Constance Valis Hill Sources: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010); Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap on Stage, Screen, and Media, by Constance Valis Hill (Library of Congress http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html.

2016 - Ludie Jones, tap dancer and member of the female team, The Three Poms, was born on January 28, 1916 in New York City. She was one of five children. Her mother, Lottie Pearl Jones, was from Roanoke, Virginia, and her father, Luther Jones, from Savannah, Georgia, was a carpenter and painter who worked for the United States Postal Service. She began to dance around age three, being introduced to the Charleston by a family friend from Norfolk, Virginia. "At that time, the Charleston was in vogue, the Airplane Charleston," Jones recalled. "She [family friend] came up with the Tap Charleston, containing rhythms made with the feet. That intrigued me, so she taught me the Time Step. And from then on, it was just dancing. I never had a formal teacher in tap."   Jones' mother enrolled her in dance lessons at Elks Hall, on 129th and 7th Avenue. Jones traveled the el (elevated transportation) from her home on 64th Street to get there. By the late 1920s, dance studios were becoming popular in Harlem. Teachers included Alice Garrett, Phil Simmons, Grace Charles, Ella Gordon, Mary Bruce, and Ruth Williams. Emma Kemp, who taught ballet, asked Jones at age eleven to teach tap dance in her studio. At the yearly dance recitals, she would close the show -- be placed last on the program, a placement designation the star quality of the musical dance number, most likely to win approval and extensive applause from the audience. Jones was studio-trained, and never engaged in street dancing, which was performed by boys. She and her brother, however, went downtown to Greenwich Village to perform in bars that had marble floors and sawdust to prevent dancers from slipping. In her last year in high school (1933-34), hoping to attend Hunter College but recognizing that in the midst of the Depression it might be financially prohibitive, Jones heard of an audition for Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1934 that was to play in London. She auditioned and was hired as a member of the dancing chorus.   While in London Jones, along with Blackbirds chorus dancers Peggy Warton and Marion Worthy Warner, took tap dance lessons with the African-American tap dancer and choreographer Clarence "Buddy" Bradley, who had been hired as choreographer by the English producer Charles Cochran to take over the British edition of Blackbirds. After returning to the United States, Jones, Wharton and Warner formed the tap dance team called the Lang Sisters, incorporating the steps that Bradley taught them into an act. The Lang Sisters worked the RKO and Loews' circuits, which featured the Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, and Louis Russell's bands. When work slowed down, Warner was cast in Bill Robinson's all-colored show, Hot Mikado (1939); Wharton joined the Apollo Theater chorus line; and Jones spent her days watching Henry LeTang teach tap classes in his New York studio, intent on making her tap dancing improve.   Around 1940 Jones met Sylvia Warner (from Canada) and Geraldine Ball. The three formed the dance team called The Three Poms (the name derived from Ball's nickname, Pom-pom). The group featured Warner's fast buck-and-wing dancing, Ball's tap-acrobatic novelties, and Jones' rhythm dancing. The team remained together until the early 1950s. The Three Poms opened the show with a six-minute performance, usually to a jazz standard such as Duke Ellington's "Perdido." The three danced, after which Warner performed quick tap dancing to two choruses of "Just One of Those Things." Ball then performed her specialty acrobatic work to two choruses of "Tea For Two" that consisted of high kicks, cartwheels, Around-the-World splits (splitting her legs apart until seated, she lay on her abdomen, swinging the back leg across to land in a split facing a different direction), Rocking Chair (or chest roll, from a kneeling position the dancer rolls forward onto her thigh, abdomen, chest, and side of face, as the feet come over the head to the floor, landing either on the feet or knees), and Spot Walkovers (placing her hands on the floor, the legs kick into a split position while the back arches, landing on one foot, while the other foot to come over swings back and the hands are placed in the beginning position to repeat the trick in one spot). Jones next performed her rhythm tap dance specialty for two choruses of the song, followed by a challenge dance among each of the members of the group; they finished by all three performing Through the Trenches. Warner and Jones then took Ball's hand and flipped her over, leading to the bow.   The Three Poms performed in clubs and theaters throughout the United States, toured the Orient with USO show, and for many years were featured with the Cab Calloway Band. "I was a good tap dancer, said Jones, "I'm not being egotistical. I know I was a good dancer, that's true. I was just born that way really . . . . You don't have too many black women tapping. I'd like to be remembered as a good tap dancer . . . and a good person." Constance Valis Hill
[Sources: Cheryl Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues of African-American Women Who Performed between 1930-1950, Phd. diss., Temple University, 1991. There is a great picture of Ludie Jones in Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance, ed. Sharon E. Friedler & Susan B. Glazer (1997)]

2016 - The Apollo “Number One” Chorus Line Of all the tap dancers to grace the Apollo Theater stage, the sixteen female dancers who made up the Apollo “Number One” Chorus were considered the be the best female dancers in New York, unmatched by any chorus line on stage or in film. “A dancing act could come into the Apollo with all original material and when they left at the end of the week, the chorus line would have stolen many of the outstanding things they did,” remembered Honi Coles. The Apollo Chorus was the backbone and the rhythmic body and soul of every Apollo performance. Among the hundreds of dancers who worked in the chorus line during the 1930s were such notables as Ristina Banks, Carol Carter, Marion Evelyn Edwards, Elaine Ellis, Myrtle Hawkins, Temy Fletcher, Cleo Hayes, Mable Lee, Jackie Lewis Parton, Jackie Bass Pinkney, Thelma Prince, Fay Ray, Ruby Riley, Hazel Walker Rogers, Juanita Boisseau Ramseur, Yak Taylor, and Bertye Lou Wood. Many performed in the Apollo chorus line from 1934—when it was called the Apollo Theater Rockettes -- to 1940, when the Apollo “Number One” Chorus was directed by Ristina Banks.   “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in Harlem,” the backstage entrance to the Apollo read, but it should also have inserted, “and the most hard-working.”  The chorus line worked four to six shows a day, from ten o’clock in the morning till eleven o’clock at night; they had rehearsals after the second and last shows; and they opened Friday mornings with a new show each week with three major dance numbers. Though the pay was poor ($20 a week), the women enjoyed a deep sense of autonomy and sisterhood. Whereas shows at Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club were staged by male dance directors, many of the steps in the routines at the Apollo were created by the women themselves working as a team.  “the girls made up the steps, said Harold “Stumpy” Cromer, “the Shim Sham, Truckin’, and the Susie Q were all made up by chorus girls—they could have all had their own act, but they weren’t given the freedom. The women did all the choreography and were the best dancers.” Praising the 1920s Cotton Club dancer Cora LaRedd, tap dancer Bunny Briggs said, “But of course, the men wouldn’t talk about her much because she was a woman. They were talking, like the women were trying to take over the business. Yeah. Because the chorus girls used to watch the men dance, so they stopped doing anything in front of them, the men, because they would be doing their act the next day—and they were good!”   Despite the enormous popularity of the Apollo chorus line, the poor pay brought discord. After the American Guild of Variety Artists was organized in the late 1930s, the women decided it was time to ask for a raise. Ristina Banks organized the group, asking for $22.50 a week. On Saturday night, February 23, 1940, the women walked out of the Apollo Theater in this historic first strike by African American performers. The strike was settled in two weeks, the women ended up with a contract that paid $25 a week for performances and extra rehearsals. Victory, however, was short-lived. Later that year, Frank Shiffman, stating the need to cut costs, phased out the Apollo Number One Chorus, and in 1941 sixteen of the best dancers in New York City were out of a job. Constance Valis Hill
Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)

2017 - Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974), premier American composer, pianist, and bandleader, and a pivotal figure in the history of jazz, was the greatest supporter of tap dance artists, his music the most widely used in tap performance, from the premier of his Duke Ellington Orchestra at the Cotton Club in 1923 until his death in 1974. Born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., in the 1920s, when the 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 to expressive growls and animal sounds from muted horns, or creating for his orchestra soaring harmonies transcribed from the most poignant of Negro spirituals, Ellington stretched his musicianship to new limits. 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, where he established a rich style of jazz musicianship, one distinguished by harmony and a beautiful, jumping, swinging sound. 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. The big numbers included “Dancemania” and “Jazzmania, and featured Cotton Club singers and dancers. Earl “Snakehips” Tucker performed, twisting his haunches and thigh joints; Edith Wilson sang “adult songs”; and the dance team of Mildred and Henri regaled 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. Ellington worked steadily at the Cotton Club from 1927 to 1931, and sporadically from 1931 to 1938, during which time he composed music and performed with such tap dancers as Nicholas Brothers, Peg Leg Bates, Chocolateers, Four Step Brothers, Bill Robinson, Cora LaRedd, Henry “Rubberlegs” Williams, and Bessie Dudley. Ellington’s first film feature, Black and Tan (1929), performed by his Cotton Club Orchestra, featured the actress-dancer-singer Fredy Washington and the tap dancing of The Five Dancing Blazers (alternately billed as The Five Hot Shots), an all-male, precision tap team. When performing at the Apollo Theater, the Duke Ellington Orchestra performed with such tap dancers as Bill Baily, Edward Sisters, Patterson & Jackson, Roll & Tap, Charles “Honi” Coles, and Stump & Stumpy. On tour, the Duke Ellington employed such tap acts as Cook and Brown, Condos and Brandow, Tip, Tap and Toe, Four Step Brothers, Chuck and Chuckles, Two Zephyrs, and Bill Robinson. Ellington’s masterwork, Concert of Sacred Music, which premiered on September 16, 1965, at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, featured Bunny Briggs dancing “David Danced Before the Lord,” and was subsequently performed by the likes of James “Buster” Brown, Baby Laurence Jackson, and Rich Rahn. Ellington wrote more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, with many of his works having become standards for tap dancers., such as “Take the A-Train,” “Satin Doll,” and “In A Sentimental Mood,” co-written with oft-collaborator Billy Strayhorn. Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and thanks to his eloquence and charisma, Ellington is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an art form on a par with other more traditional musical genres. Written by Constance Valis Hill

2017 - The Cotton Club Girls and The Cotton Club Boys The Cotton Club Girls The Cotton Club Girls, a chorus of "tall, tan, and terrific" female, African-American dancers who performed exclusively at the Cotton Club, were famous for shimmying in long-feathered gowns and high-heeled shoes, strutting and snapping to the pervasive, insistent rhythms of hot jazz with cool sophistication. Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson opened the Club De Luxe at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem in 1920. Owney Madden, a prominent bootlegger and gangster, took over the club in 1923 and changed its name to the Cotton Club. While the club reproduced the racist imagery of the times, often depicting blacks as savages in exotic jungles or as "darkies" in the plantation South, it imposed a more subtle color bar on the chorus girls, who were expected to be "tall, tan, and terrific," which meant that they had to be at least five feet, six inches tall, light skinned, and under twenty-one years of age. Duke Ellington made his Cotton Club debut on December 4, 1927, in a revue produced by Dan Healy and comprising some fifteen acts with a number of encores. The big numbers, which included “Dancemania” and “Jazzmania, featured Cotton Club singers and a chorus of women dancers who would be billed as the Cotton Club Girls. Tap dance choreographer Henry LeTang cited one of the early choreographers of the Cotton Club as being Elida Webb. When Florence Mills went to England in 1926 with Blackbirds, two of her fellow performers were Hyacinth Curtis, as one of the high stepping 'Plantation Wildflowers' (or 'Cossacks' or 'Trotters', whatever the scene demanded) and Clarence Robinson, who was featured in many of the dance specialties that enthralled English audiences. Curtis and Robinson married, and she had a thirteen-year career as a Cotton Club dancer, while he became one of the most highly regarded choreographers of the increasingly popular black dance scene at the Cotton Club. The Cotton Club Girls in the early years included Mae Robinson and Isabel Washington, as well as sisters Hilda and Vivian Brown, Margaret Cheraux, Millicent Cook, Mildred Dixon, Peggy Griffiths, Carolyn Rich Henderson, Ethel, Lucia and Julia Moses, Julia Noisette, Evelyn Shepard, and Tondelayo. In 1992 the New York City Tap Extravaganza awarded its Flo-Bert Award to the Cotton Club Girls and named the following: Juanita Ram (Boisseau-Ramseur), Vivian Brown-Veal, Hyacinth Curtis, Ruby Dallas, Bessie Dudley, Marion Egbert, Vivian Harris, Tondelayo Levy, Corinne Chickie Morton, Estrellita Morse, Ruby Zizi-Richards, Edna Mae Robinson, and Elvera "Baby" Sanchez. The Cotton Club Boys The Cotton Club Boys, a chorus of male African-American dancers who appeared exclusively in Cotton Club performances, made their debut in the Spring of 1934 Edition of the Cotton Club Parade. The Cotton Club Girls had already become an institution in their own right and the Club's management, feeling they needed a new gimmick, decided to use a line of young male dancers. Dozens were auditioned, and ten were finally chosen: Maxie Armstrong, Louis Brown, Charles "Chink" Collins, Howard "Stretch" Johnson, Thomas "'Chink" Lee, Eddie Morton, Tommy Porter, Walter Shepherd, William Smith, and Jimmy Wright. They were made a feature act of the show and their new style of group dancing, in which all moved together in rhythmic unison, was immediately popular. At the end of an eight-month run they became an established feature at the Club. The Boys later performed in specialty acts at the Apollo Theater and also toured with Cab Callaway and his band. Subsequent members of the Cotton Club Boys include Julius Adger, Al Alstock, Roy Carter, Sherman Coates, Warren Coleman, Ernest Frazier, Freddie Heron, and Roy Porter. Author Jacque Malone notes that in 1940, the Cotton Club Boys’ performance in Chicago included Jules Adjers, Louie Brown, Freddy Heron, Chink Lee, Eddie Morton, Charles “Cholly” Atkins.
[Sources: "Henry LeTang: Creating Dances from the Inside Out," interviewed by Allana Radecki and Jeffrey Morris on November 13, 2005," On Tap , a publication of the International Tap Association (September/October 2006, vol. 17, number 2, pp. 16-28, 61; James Haskins, The Cotton Club (1997); Constance Valis Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2010); Cholly Atkins and Jacqui Malone, Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins (2001).] Constance Valis Hill

2018 - Ralph Brown Place of Birth: Indianapolis, Indiana Place of Death: New York City Ralph Brown, tap dancer on Broadway and in films, known for his paddle-and-roll style of hoofing, was born and raised in Indianapolis before moving to New York City in 1931. After watching New York dancers at the Hoofers Club, he toured with the Mills Brothers and in 1934 began working at the Cotton Club as a solo performer, beginning a long association with the singer and bandleader Cab Calloway. He also performed with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Claude Hopkins, Les Hyte, Jimmie Lunceford, Charlie Parker, and Cootie Williams. In the 1930s he performed regularly at the Apollo Theater as well as such uptown black vaudeville theaters as the Lafayette, appearing on the same bill as Chuck and Chuckles and Aaron Palmer and Peaches. In 1934 his rhythm tap dancing and pronounced paddle-and-roll style was featured in the Oscar Micheaux-directed musical film Harlem After Midnite, and in 1947 the musical film Jivin' in Bebop with Ray Brown, Dan Burley, Benny Carter, Freddie Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Hagood, Helen Humes, Milt Jackson, James Moody, Sahij, Ray Sneed, and Johnny Taylor. He also achieved notoriety as a featured dancer on stage in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939.

In 1966, Brown became a founding member of the Original Hoofers, a rhythm tap ensemble which included Jimmy Slyde, Chuck Green, Raymond Kaalund, James Buster Brown, and Lon Chaney. And in 1969 Brown performed in The Hoofers: An Extravaganza of Tap at the Mercury Theatre On television, Brown was featured, with Chuck Green in the 1972 Tap Dance #1, telecast telecast by WCBS-TV on the series Camera Three. Narrated Richard Lamparski, this overview of the history of tap dance in America was depicted through still photographs, archival footage, and demonstrations by Brown and Chuck Green in the television studio. Film clips included Dancing Darky Boy (1897), filmed by Thomas A. Edison; an excerpt of Edwin S. Porter's film version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903); a clip of Louis Douglas performing a stair dance in the manner of Bill Robinson in the film No Man's Land (1931); and Tom Patricola and Buster West in a short dance subject film in the 1930s. Performances included a reconstruction (by Green) of John Durang's Pas de Matelot (A Sailor Hornpipe -- Old Style), published in 1855; a demonstration (by Brown) of Essence of Old Virginia/Softshoe; a Sand Dance (by Green); Eddie Rector's and Toots Davis' "Over-the-Top" and "In-the-Trenches," introduced in the teens; and basic tap steps.  In 1975, Brown participated in the Cotton Club Gala, an homage to the uptown Cotton Club with several members of The Hoofers. In the 1980s, at the height of the tap dance renaissance, Brown was a featured performer in The Hoofers: 1000 Years of Jazz and Tap at Brooklyn College; New York City Tapworks (1983) at Manhattan Community College. He was also a featured dancer in the Paris production of Black and Blue (1985) and the Broadway production of Black and Blue (1989). [Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance; Rusty Frank, Tap; "Ralph Brown Dead; Tap Dancer Was 76," New York Times, November 21, 1990]

2018 - Tap Happenings   Filmed for the Lena Robbins Film Archive under the supervision of Leticia Jay. Excerpts from a performance on May 12, 1969 at the Bert Wheeler Theatre in Hotel Dixie, New York City. Filmed by Eugene Marner. Contents: Chuck Green, Raymond Kaalund, Howard Sandman Sims, Green and Sims; Act II competition line introduced by Derby Wilson: Lon Chaney, Sims, Rhythm Red, Green, Jerry Ames, Raymond Kaalund, Jimmy Slyde, and Bert Gibson. Rhythm Red, Kaalund, Gibson, Wilson, Slyde, Green. Finale. Organized by Chuck Green and Leticia Jay, an East Indian dancer specializing in so-called primitive dance; a friend of Green who had the resources, funds, and producing skills to organize the Tap Happenings as a preservation of rhythm tap dancing. Excerpts from this Tap Happening event were filmed and can be seen at The Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance:  Chuck Green, Raymond Kaalund, Howard Sandman Sims, Derby Wilson, Lon Chaney, John Shivers, Jerry Ames, Jimmy Slyde, Bert Gibson, Eugene Marner, Leticia Jay.   New York Public Library: CATNYP: Dance Collection: Tap Dancing. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance.

2019 - Ruby Keeler, actress, singer, and dancer who popularized tap dancing on the silver screen in the 1930s, was born Ethel Hilda Keeler in Nova Scotia, Canada, on August 25, 1910, the eldest of six children. She immigrated at age three to the United States when her family moved to the Yorkville section of New York City where her father became a driver for an ice company. The teacher of her gymnasium class at St. Catherine of Sienna grammar school noticed her natural grace and ability during “rhythmic exercises” and suggested formal dance training. After taking tap lessons from Joe Prince and Jack Blue's School of Rhythm and Tap, Keeler at age thirteen taught elementary tap steps to a class of youngsters in exchange for her own lessons. She studied ballet at the Metropolitan Opera School and attended Professional Children's School, and in 1923 at age thirteen (but adding two years to her age) she joined the chorus of George M. Cohan's The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly. Cohan was looking for a fresh young face to sing and dance “There's a Ring to the Name of Rosie,” and signed Keeler for a wage of forty-five dollars a week, which pleased her struggling family. After winning a dance contest conducted by Broadway impresario Nils Thor Granlund, Keeler was promptly hired by the Strand Roof, a second-class cabaret that paid the young performer $50 a week to do her “fast rhythm tap” on its dime-sized dance floor. At the Silver Slipper she was spotted and offered a chorus job in the Broadway musical Bye Bye Bonnie (1927, Ritz Theater) in which she was featured dancer in three scenes. She was then cast in Charles Dillingham's musical The Sidewalks of New York (1927), starring the Irish vaudeville dancer Barney Fagan. After marrying Al Jolson in 1928 and following her husband to Hollywood, she returned to Broadway on the request of Florenz Ziegfeld to perform in Showgirl (1929), featured in two numbers, “Liza” and “Harlem Nocturne,” for which she received good notices. In Hollywood, Keeler's dance abilities, combined with her refreshing beauty and personality, made her one of musical film's most beloved dancing stars, despite a heavy, plodding style of tap dancing derived from the jig and clog style of musical theater dancing as taught by dance director Ned Wayburn.” Daryl E. Zanuck, head of production at Warner Brothers, cast her to play the leading ingénue in 42nd Street, directed by Busby Berkeley. Her tapping of the title song and her soft-shoe dancing to “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” had the New York Herald Tribune critic Richard Watts, Jr. proclaiming her “one of the best of all tap dancers.” Of the nine pictures Keeler made at Warners, four involved her with Busby Berkeley, who devised routines in which she would become forever identified. Gold Diggers of 1933 saw Keeler dancing in “Pettin’ in the Park” and “Shadow Waltz.” Footlight Parade (1933) saw her dancing with James Cagney in “Shanghai Lil.” In Shipmates Forever (1935), Keeler tapped prettily in a nightclub sequence to Dick Powell’s crooning. In Go into Your Dance (1935), Keeler’s best number was “She's a Latin from Manhattan.” For Colleen (1936), Keeler was paired with Paul Draper in “You Gotta Know How to Dance.” Ready, Willing, and Able (1937) gave Keeler “Two Marvelous for Words” with dancer Lee Dixon. Keeler's last film before retirement and after her divorce from Jolson, was Columbia's Sweetheart of the Campus (1941) which cast her as a showgirl dancing “Tap Happy” with Ozzie Nelson and his Orchestra. Her greatest comeback, however, was on Broadway in the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette, reuniting her with Busby Berkeley.  By Constance Valis Hill

2019 - The Radio City Rockettes, the all-woman precision chorus line famous for performing eye-high kicks, was founded in 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri. They were originally inspired by the Tiller Girls, a precision dance company of the United Kingdom established by John Tiller in the 1890s. In 1900, Tiller sent the first troupe of Tiller Girls to perform in the United States and eventually there were three lines of them working on Broadway.  In 1922, choreographer Russell Markert saw one of these troupes, the Tiller Rockets, perform in the Ziegfeld Follies and was inspired to create his own version with American dancers. “If I ever got a chance to get a group of American girls who would be taller and have longer legs and could do really complicated tap routines and eye-high kicks, they'd really knock your socks off,” Markert recalled. Indeed, the Rockettes are required to be between 5' 6" and 5' 10 1/2" tall. In kick lines, wearing high-heeled shoes, they stand with the tallest women in the middle, moving down to the shortest on the ends, which creates the illusion that they're doing everything in unison. These women have performed at New York’s Radio City Music Hall since 1932, and best known for starring in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, an annual Christmas show, and for performing annually at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. While known for their long legs and high kicks, the Rockettes are dancers trained in ballet and tap dance performing four shows a day, with more than 160 kicks per show, each show requiring eight costume changes. One of the most breathtaking dance falls dating back to 1933 involves thirty-six women who, in a nail-biting descent, collapse onto the floor like dominoes. This fall, in the grand finale of “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” is a physical act that demands abs of steel, steadfast teamwork, and infinite patience. In the center of the line, a dancer must slow the fall down, even though their weight is on top of her; with every dancer staying completely flat all the way down. And while from the audience it looks like the Rockettes link arms during those famous kick lines, they are not allowed to touch each other, only to rely on their core strength to stay upright. The Rockettes have had to endure a long history of sexism, racism, and labor inequality.  Represented by the American Guild of Variety Artists, in 1967, they won a month-long strike for better working conditions, led by American actress Penny Singleton, the first woman to head an AFL-CIO union when she was elected President of AGVA.  In August 2002, contract negotiations for the troupe's veteran members resulted in a buyout by the owners of Radio City Music Hall, leaving roughly a fourth of the veteran Rockettes with retirement-only options, and the remaining dancers the opportunity to re-audition. Long a precision line chorus of white women, the first East Asian Rockette, a Japanese-born woman named Setsuko Maruhashi, was hired in 1985. The Rockettes did not allow dark-skinned dancers into the dance line until 1987.  The justification for the policy against hiring African Americans was that they would distract from the consistent look of the dance group. The first African- American Rockette was Jennifer Jones, who made her debut in 1988. In late 2016, the Madison Square Garden Company, which manages the troupe, agreed to have the Rockettes perform at the inauguration of Donald Trump.  Immediately, several Rockettes dissented, including Rockette Phoebe Pearl who complained that she was being forced to perform at the inaugural against her wishes. Madison Square Garden reportedly allowed dancers to opt-out if they thought that they would feel uncomfortable performing. In December 2016, three of the thirteen full-time dancers chose to sit out the event. The company danced to a medley of Irving Berlin songs at the Inaugural Ball on the evening of January 20.  By Constance Valis Hill

2019 - Dianne Walker is one of the most honored and beloved mastresses of tap dance, known for her elegant and fluid style of dancing that is delicate yet rhythmically complex. A pioneer in the resurgence of tap dancing in the 1980s, her thirty-year career spans Broadway, television, film, and international dance concerts. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she began dancing at age seven with Mildred Kennedy (Bradic), a professional tap dancer with a successful performing career on the New England and New York vaudeville circuits who ran the Kennedy Dancing School in Boston.  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 City Hospital, when she walked into the studio of the reknown tap master Leon Collins, soon after becoming his protégé; in 1982 she became one of the founding members of Collins & Company. After attending Jane Goldberg's By Word of Foot II (1982) festival in New York City, disappointed to see the paucity of black dancers, Walker returned to Boston with the intent of teaching and helping to revive jazz tap for the young black dancers, subsequently becoming a mentor to such talents as Derick Grant and Savion Glover. In 1985, Walker attended the International Tip Tap Festival in Rome, Italy, and performed Collins’ classic tap masterwork, Flight of the Bumblebee, to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, establishing herself as a premier tap soloist. In 1989 Walker was featured in Great Performances: Tap Dance in America, hosted by Gregory Hines, dancing a solo to the swinging up-tempo Latin “Perdido.” New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning later described her as “a tapper from whom steps and moves flow like music, she has an easy warmth of presence that makes her dancing incandescent.” That same year, Walker appeared as one of the Shim Sham Girls in the movie Tap!, starring Gregory Hines. Walker is 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 of Black and Blue, and will always be remembered for performing “Memories of You,” choreographed by Cholly Atkins. Directed by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli, the show considered the quintessential black-rhythm tap musical of the century. Walker is the most sought after teaching artist in dozens of festivals nationally and internationally, and has been lauded with dozens of awards—- Boston’s Tapestry Award (1997), Oklahoma University’s Living Treasure Award (1998), the “Savion Glover Award for Keeping the Beat Alive” (2000), New York Tap Extravaganza’s Flo-Bert (2003), American Tap Foundation’s Hoofer Award (2004), Vancouver Tap Dance Society’s Rhythm Bound Award (2005), Flint Michigan’s Tapology Award (2006), and the Dance Magazine Award (2012), for her lifetime achievement in dance. She is considered by many female black tap dance artists as the transitional figure between the young generation of female dancers -- such as Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Germaine Ingram, Ayodele Casel -- and the “forgotten black mothers of tap,” such as Edith "Baby" Edwards, Jeni LeGon, Lois Miller, and Florence Covan. Lovingly nicknamed “Lady Di” and “Aunt Diane,” Walker is revered by now two generations of tap dancers who regard her as mentor, teacher and confidante.  Constance Valis Hill

2020 - Arthur Duncan (born September 25, 1933) was born to dance.  A highly visible performer, he is often referred to as an Entertainer’s Entertainer as he performed around the world: a quintessential song and dance man, whose performances are a lively collection of sophisticated footwork and wonderful songs. He has performed in concert at both Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. His television credits include guest appearances in “Diagnosis of a Murder” with Dick Van Dyke, Columbo with Peter Falk, The Phil Donahue Show, The Betty White as well as being a regular  for 18 years on the weekly Lawrence Welk show. At a time when tap dance was fading from Broadway and Hollywood, Duncan’s charm and talent captivated audiences. He brought the art form to a new medium, allowing American across the nation to experience tap dance in their own homes. 

Duncan has performed in Las Vegas, in movies (he was a featured personality in the movie “Tap” starring Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr.), and toured with Tommy Tune in the Broadway show “My One and Only.” He joined Bob Hope on several USO tours and even danced a high-spirited tap in a McDonald’s commercial. Duncan is also a dedicated mentor and shares his spotlight experiences through lecture demonstrations and master tap classes.

While living abroad, Arthur spread his magic all over Europe, Asia, the Middle east and Australia, giving to his audiences a stunning and dazzling show. It is said a beautiful “Song and dance” never end. He has been honored with the 2004 Flobert Award for Lifetime Achievement of Tap Artistry in New York City, the 2005 Living Treasure in American Dance Award from Oklahoma City University and received an honorary Doctor of Performing Arts in American Dance at OCU, as well.

On July 21st 2011  The Chicago National Association of Dance Masters hosted a very special awards banquet , as tap dancing legend Arthur Duncan  accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award.  joining the ranks of an elite list of only three individuals who have received this honor in their 100 year history. One of the most entertaining performers of today, Arthur Duncan’s seamless blend of song and dance continues to make a significant contribution to the artistic legacy of dance and entertainment.

2020 - The June Taylor Dancers Daughter of Percival Guy Taylor (a chauffeur) and Angela Taylor (housewife), June Taylor started taking dance lessons at age 8 and later at the age of 10 at the Murriel Abbott School of Dance in Chicago where she got her Tap training from Ken Murray. She would visit vaudeville house and movie theatres with her mother as a child and watched many dancers. While at one vaudeville performance, they held a children's amateur contest and June took 2nd dancing a "Stars and Stripes Forever" Tap dance routine. While with Muriel's, they would perform in various summer fairs. At age 14 and lying about her age, she made her official debut at the Chez Paree nightclub in Chicago and became one of the original " Chez Paree Adorable's." She stayed at the Chez Paree until her 16th Birthday.
   
Taylor is quoted as saying: "I wanted to be another Eleanor Powell, another Ruby Keeler. I was going to outdo them. I had looked forward to dancing with Fred Astaire. That was my great ambition ... that was my ambition, to dance with Fred Astaire." In 1936, she left the Abbott School and started her solo journey, joining up with MCA ( Music Corp. of Events in America.) She was to become a seasoned Hotel styled nightclub dancer but for only a short period of time. Traveled the states as well as performing in London, Paris, etc., becoming very well known in London as a dancer. At age 20, after returning from London due to her expiring visa, her dance career was derailed in 1938 when at the Palace Theatre in Chicago, dancing with the Abbott dancers, she collapsed on stage. While at the Hospital she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in both lungs. She would spend the next two years in a sanitarium getting weekly numathoras injections that she maintained well into the 1950's. Upon her leaving the Sanitarium, with no hopes now of dancing with Fred Astaire or even of being a professional dancer herself, she turned to choreography, and started touring with her own company ... the "Six June Taylor Dancers" that she founded in 1942 (Actually, it was only four dancers who started at the Blackhawk restaurant in Chicago, slightly prior to the official expansion of the six.)      Later, Taylor met Mr. Jackie Gleason, then a little-known comedian, at a Baltimore nightclub in 1946. Taylor gained fame with her choreography  on Jackie Gleason's television series in 1966 and featured the opening 3 minute dance scenes to his show as well as some nice overhead camera shots of the 16 "June Taylor Dancers (JTD.)" They basically did an updated classic Busby Berkley Broadway style chorus lines which featured various kaleidoscopic type arm and leg movements, shot from an overhead camera, that would become their trademark. Gleason gave Taylor great leeway on producing her numbers and on one show in 1953 Gleason and Taylor collaborated on ''Tawny,'' a ballet of more than 20 minutes with music by Gleason. Her dancers and choreography became a staple of Television shows. If you were a dancer, especially a female dancer ( Yes, men were part of the extended troupe as well) and wanted to dance in the entertainment show business world of the 1960's, becoming a June Taylor dancer was every young dancers fantasy role on Television.      Though the name June Taylor is most associated with Jackie Gleason, Taylor made her television debut in 1948 on "The Toast of the Town" starring Ed Sullivan featuring her dancers in about 3 to 6 shows as early as his 3rd show as the "Toastettes." In 1950, however, her name became a household word when she joined the Cavalcade of Stars with Gleason. It was Gleason's idea of putting a camera in the balcony to film some of the kaleidoscopic routines that Taylor would choreograph. She was most noted for her choreography of the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason TV Show, which ran from the 1950's through the 70's, and in 1954/55 she received one of five Emmy Award's for television: choreographers. Gleason moved his show in 1964 from New York to Miami, where he could play golf all year long, and Ms. Taylor remained in Florida after the show ended. Taylor would become the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders (Starbrites) choreographer from 1978-1990 when she retired. Taylor originally used 24 girls who all were prior professional dancers to form the Starbrites. They would be accompanied by a brass band and her squad performed Broadway-style routines during Miami's home football games. In May of 2004, living in Ft. Lauderdale, June Taylor died in a Miami, Florida hospital, apparently of natural causes, not TB. She is interned at Our Lady Of Mercy Catholic Cemetery, Miami, FL. She was 86 years old.

2021 - Paul Lawrence Kennedy (1940, Boston, Massachusetts - March 16, 2002, Los Angeles, CA) and his sister Arlene Kennedy (n.d., Boston, Massachusetts) - October 8, 2009, Los Angeles, California), tap dancers, choreographers, and directors who trained some of the most talented dancers in their Universal Dance Design Studio in Los Angeles, were born in Boston, Massachusetts.

Their mother, Midred Kennedy Bradic, was a renown dance teacher who introduced them to the art at an early age, her motto, "If you can walk you can dance." Mildred began her dancing career at the age of seven and earned 35 cents weekly for offering dance classes at the Boston Community Center. Her first teacher was Doris Jones, who would run the Jones/Hayward School of Dance in Washington, D.C. She later studied with Mildred Davenport and Clare Hayward. Known as the "Brown bomber," she danced on the New England and New York circuits. Tap dancers in or performing in Boston, like Derby Wilson, Buck and Bubbles, and the Will Mastin Trio, often met at Charlie's Restaurant, on Columbus Avenue, where Mildred often attended. When she tried to enroll her children, Paul and Arlene, in dance school she was told they were too young. In 1946 she opened her own school at the Lenox Street Projects Social Hall where she taught ballet, toe, tap and acrobatics, charging 50 cents a class. After three years, she moved the Kennedy School of Dance to Massachusetts Avenue.

When Mildred moved to Washington, D.C. with Arlene, Paul -- who found he could pick up steps faster than most, remained in Boston and ran the school from 1963 to 1979. Paul was the first black male dancer at the Boston School of Ballet. He received a B.F.A. in Dance from the Boston Conservatory. In the 1960s and 70s, he arranged dances for bands and singing groups, touring with Gladys Knight and the Pips. He also choreographed moves to the songs from Marvin Gaye's album From Here, My Dear for performances, and worked with Michael Jackson on tap dancing. In 1977 he went on the road with Kool and the Gang as choreographer of their shows. He went to Los Angeles with Gladys Knight and the Pips and worked with such Motown groups as High Energy, the Commodores, and Temptations. Arlene, meanwhile, toured Europe with dance groups. She later joined her mother in Washington D.C. to teach at the Academy of Theatrical Arts and her mother's dance school.

In 1980 Paul signed a two-year contract as Marvin Gaye's choreographer, and sent for Arlene. They also began to teach in Victoria Park in Carson, California with 500 students in the Parks and Recreation Department, from 1980 to 1983. In 1988 they moved the studio to the west side of Los Angeles and called it the Universal Design Dance Studio. They were known for training students to have beautiful footwork; for staging recitals that were like Broadway shows; for teaching students with no money and the children of celebrities, among them Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, Derick K. Grant; the son of Sammy Davis, Jr., the grandson of Al Williams (of the Four Step Brothers), and the granddaughters of Fayard Nicholas.

"Children are like diamonds in the rough," Paul said. "We smooth and polish them. We're trying to build children into better human beings.”

During his career, Paul received a number of awards from the dance community. In 1998 he received special recognition when the legendary Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso invited the Kennedy tap company to perform in Havana at the 50th anniversary celebration of the National Ballet of Cuba. [Source: Melba Huber, "The Dancing Kennedys," Dance Pages (Fall 1994)]

2021 - Hal Le Roy was born John Le Roy Schotte on December 10, 1913 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His first professional job was in "Hoboken Heroes" at the Lyric Theater, Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1928. He was young, tall, thin as a pole and had a distinctive, dazzling, eccentric style that was acclaimed by audiences and dancers alike. In 1931 he attracted the attention of Broadway producers, who engaged him in the short-lived Broadway show "The Gang's All Here." Later that year he and partner Mitzi Mayfair stole the spotlight from big stars such as Harry Richman and Ruth Etting in the "Ziegfeld Follies of 1931." His unique, eccentric style made him popular in numerous film shorts made in the Brooklyn Vitaphone Brooklyn studios. He was a feature of several Broadway shows, including "The Gang's All Here" (1931, with Eunice Healy), "Ziegfeld Follies of 1931" (with Mitzi Mayfair), "Thumbs Up" (1935, again with Healy) and Rodgers & Hart's "Too Many Girls" (1939, with partner Mildred Law). His biggest feature film was Warner Bros. Harold Teen (1934) in which he performs an elongated solo (to the song "Collegiate Wedding") in the last reel. Throughout the 1930s he was given the occasional "spot" in feature films, such as the brilliant college dance scene in Start Cheering (1938).

In vaudeville, he appeared throughout the 1930s and '40s in such venues as Radio City Music Hall, the Capitol Theatre (with the Woody Herman band), the State Theatre (with Smith & Dale) and the Earle Theatre (Philadelphia) with Clyde McCoy's band. 

LeRoy's expertise allowed him to be one of the few Caucasian dancers allowed into the legendary Hoofer's Club. He continued to perform in supper clubs, on television, and in summer stock during the perilous 1950s when tap dance went out of favor in the popular entertainment industry. 

In 1955, LeRoy was featured on the Ed Sullivan Show in a tap dance challenge with the one-legged monoped tap dancer Peg Leg Bates. He appeared on television and summer stock, including Guy Lombardo's production of "Show Boat" (1956) at Marine Stadium, Jones Beach, New York. 

LeRoy also helped historians of tap to pinpoint when "taps" were put on hard-soled tap shoes, when telling tap dancer Danny Daniels that metal taps did not regularly appear on the toes and heels of hard-soled shoes until the early 1930s. When LeRoy performed in his first Ziegfeld Follies in 1932, he wore no metal taps on his shoes; but soon after, he remembered, "Everyone started wearing them." In 1966 he directed the off-Broadway show "Summer's Here." He died in 1985 following heart surgery.

2022 - Gary Lambert "Pete" Nugent (1909-1973) was an African-American tap dancer who was prominent in the 1930s. Born in Washington D.C. on July 16, 1909, Nugent left home as a teenager to begin dancing with the Theatre Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) circuit for African American vaudeville performers. In 1928 Nugent met Irving "Peaches" Beaman and the two formed a duo and later became a trio, "Pete, Peaches and Miller" with the addition of Duke Miller in 1931. The three performed together in class act routines until Miller's death in 1937.

Nugent continued his solo career while also coaching and teaching other dancers. During World War II, Nugent toured with Irving Berlin's musical comedy This is the Army and insisted the show be integrated. In 1949 he completed business administration courses through the evening program at the City University of New York.

 As musical and dance styles changed, Nugent retired in the early 1950s but came out of retirement to participate with other tap legends in a tap dance history performance at the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival. He continued to work with other dancers and opened his New York City dance studio, Dance Craft, in 1955 with actor and tap dancer Charles "Honi" Coles. In the late 1960s Nugent worked as the road manager for the Temptations and spent some time teaching dance to children in the South Bronx. He died on April 25, 1973.

2022 - Born in Orange, NJ, Eddie Rector was a famed tap dance artist and master of ceremonies.  His career spanned the1920s-40s as he danced in Harlem, across the US, and in Europe. He is known as a “soft shoe expert,” and he invented the Slap Step.] Rector was the protégé of John Leubrie Hill and later danced as a team with Ralph Cooper. He danced in notable revues including Darktown Follies (1914), Tan Town Topics (1926), Blackbirds of 1928, Hot Rhythm (1930), Rhapsody in Black (1931), Blackberries of 1932, and Yeah Man (1932).  Eddie Rector died in 1963 at the age of 66. Rector was born on Christmas day in 1890 in Orange, New Jersey. According to Constance Vallis Hill’s biography on the Library of Congress Tap Dancing America database, Rector started at age 15 in Mayme Remington’s Vaudeville troupe. His first job in the theater was as a pickaninny. Shortly thereafter, in 1913, he got the part of 'Red Cap Sam' in a musical revue called "the Darktown Follies." After finishing his run with the follies, he began touring with his partner Toots Davis in the T.O.B.A. Circuit. He partnered with Toots Davis, dancing “over the tops and in the trenches,” a particular dynamic step juxtaposing upright jumping over the legs, with bending at the waist almost touching the floor and sliding the feet back. It was during this period that he met his wife, Grace.

In the 1920s, he and his wife began to tour the Vaudeville circuits along with their new partner Ralph Cooper. The Rector-Cooper act played at Connie's Inn. It was at New York's Connie's Inn that he developed his own military precision drill-routine to the tune of The Parade of the Tin Soldiers. The routine allowed him to move around the entire stage, breaking from the sedentary style that was usually seen in tap of that time. As he became a regular Cotton Club performer, he developed his own style of dance, particular incorporating the use of big drums.

The Rector-Cooper act was especially were featured at the Lafayette Theatre.  They were considered a draw, and often danced to standing room only.  Their dancing was described as “clever” and “defying description,” as having “inimitable style that few dancing teams of today can equal,” and of being “one of the snappiest dance teams in the country,” and of being so hot, that their dancing “burnt ‘em up.” Numerous sources describe Rector and Cooper as a “class act,” and they were known for their sharp dressing styles as much as their sharp tapping skills.  As described in the Baltimore Afro-American, “their raccoon coats were the talk of the fashion-conscious.”

Eddie Rector performed with some of the biggest names in the business.  He performed with Duke Ellington at the Ziegfeld Theatre in 1922 with Fats Waller in Tan Town Topics in 1926,  and alongside Ethel Waters in 1925.  Rector danced in “Dixie to Broadway” in 1924 alongside Florence Mills and Willie Covan. In 1942, Rector and Cooper headlined the Murrain’s Lounge and Cabaret Show with Christopher Columbus and his orchestra. In 1945, Eddie Rector danced in the Atlantic City Follies with Peg Leg Bates.

In 1928, Eddie got a job performing in the international tour of Blackbirds of 1928, replacing Bill Robinson. After the tour, he returned to the United States and began dancing with Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club.

Hot Rhythm (1930) received scathing reviews from the critics, but Eddie Rector’s dancing described as “the best,” “one of the best dancers on the boards,” and “unquestionably the peak attraction of the show. 1932’s Yeah Man was similarly panned, excepting the dancing of Eddie Rector. As the Baltimore Afro-American stated, “its only redeeming feature is the dancing. Eddie Rector sets a high standard, while Roy and Rastus, the Stepping Quintette and three acts of Lindy Hoppers work hard to maintain.” In 1957 Dar Burley listed Rector as #7 in the 12 greatest tap dancers of all time, after Bill Bojangles Robinson, John Bubbles, Teddy Hale, Derby Wilson, Bill Bailey, Baby Lawrence, and Honi Coles.

2022 - Leonard Harper (April 9, 1899, Birmingham, Alabama – February 4, 1943, Harlem, New York) was a producer, stager, and choreographer in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. Harper's works spanned the worlds of vaudeville, cabaret, burlesque and Broadway musical comedy. As a dancer, choreographer and studio owner, he coached many of the country's leading performers, including Ruby Keeler, Fred Astaire and Adele Astaire, and the Marx Brothers. He produced floor shows and theatrical revues both uptown in Harlem and downtown on Broadway's Great White Way. He co-directed and staged the ensemble segments of The Exile and the short film Darktown Revue with Oscar Micheaux. Harper staged for Broadway Hot Chocolates at the Hudson Theatre and was the premiere producer who opened up the Cotton Club. He also produced Lindy Hop revues and an act called Harper's Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy Ballroom, as detailed in his biography Rhythm For Sale.

Harper was born in 1899 in Birmingham, Alabama, to William Harper, a performer, and his wife. Harper started dancing as a child to attract a crowd on a medicine show wagon, traveling with the show throughout the South. In 1915, he first toured in New York City, and quickly moved to Chicago. There he began choreographing and performing dance acts with Osceola Blanks of the Blanks Sisters, who became the first black act for the Shubert Brothers. He married Osceola Blanks in 1923. Harper and Osceola Blanks performed in his first big revue, Plantation Days, when it opened at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1922–23. He began producing floor shows in Harlem and New York thereafter. From 1923 to 1924, Harper offered the Duke Ellington Orchestra the house band position at the speakeasies, Connie's Inn in Harlem and the Kentucky Club in Times Square. He was producing shows there and the Duke Ellington orchestra played as the house band at the Kentucky Club for the next four years. At the suggestion of drummer Sonny Greer, Duke Ellington and his wife Edna along with their son Mercer Ellington were lived in one of Harper's Harlem apartment bedrooms in the early 1920s.

By 1925, Harper owned a Times Square dance studio where black dancers taught their dances to white performers. As a nightclub and Broadway producer, Harper counted Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Bill Robinson, Harold "Stumpy" Cromer of Stump and Stumpy and Count Basie among his colleagues. He introduced Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway to New York show business, and worked with Mae West, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, Fats Waller and Eubie Blake. Harper was part of the transition team when the Deluxe Cabaret was turned into the Cotton Club, producing two of its first revues during its opening. His biggest milestone on the Great White Way was his staging of the Broadway hit Hot Chocolates, which established the classic Broadway show tunes "Black and Blue" and "Ain't Misbehavin'". Harper was one of the leading figures who transformed Harlem into a cultural center during the 1920s. His nightclub productions took place at Connie's Inn, the Lafayette Theatre, the new Apollo Theatre, and other theatres in New York. He had a daughter, Jean Harper, out of wedlock with Fannie Pennington. Harper died in Harlem, New York, on February 4, 1943, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. conducted his funeral at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

2022 - “Salt and Pepper” were African American women in the field of tap dance during the Big Band Era. In 1944, the dance team “Salt and Pepper” was born with Edwina “Salt” Evelyn’s Rhythm Tap and Jewel “Pepper” Welch’s Flash.

Being in competition with the male dancers, “Salt and Pepper” performed Rhythm and Flash in tuxedos, zoot suits, and Eisenhower Jackets. The act started with a song that introduced the team. They danced two choruses in unison and told a few jokes. In their challenge sections, Salt improvised close to the floor swinging rhythms. Pepper executed quick spins, jumped up landing in a split and rising without hands. The team “got down” with some vernacular dances, such as Shorty George or Struttin.’ In the 12-15 minute act that change often, the team carried out a series of flash steps: Kazotsky kicks, over the tops, through the trenches and sliding splits. The act concluded with several quick spins, straddle jumps touching their toes, and a pose with expressive hand gestures. A character style strut, showy or humorous, took them off stage.

During their first year, “Salt and Pepper” traveled with Earl “Fatha” Hines establishing their reputation as an outstanding female tap dance team. They appeared in Irvin C. Miller’s production Born to Swing in Philadelphia’s Lincoln Theatre, and Sherman Dudley’s Production Harlem’z a-Poppin at Philadelphia’s Fans Theatre. Throughout the years, they were on the bill with some of the best in entertainment: International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Fletcher Henderson and his Band, Lucky Millinder and his Orchestra, comedians Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Dusty Fletcher, and singers Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

The team performed regularly at the Club DeLisa and Rhumboogie Café in Chicago; the Club Plantation in St. Louis, MO; Club Paradise in Atlantic City; Rockhead’s Paradise Café and the Café St. Michel in Montreal, Canada. They worked on the Round the World Circuit, and were featured in nightclubs and theatres in Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, the Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains, and many cities in between.

Edwina “Salt” Evelyn was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1922. Her family valued accomplishments as her dad John Evelyn from Roseau, Dominica in the French West Indies, was the first African American sea captain on the East Coast. Her mother’s family immigrated from the Dutch West Indies and her grandfather with his own printing press wrote articles for the newspaper The North Star published in Rochester, New York.

When Edwina was six the family moved to New York City where she learned to tap dance with the boys and performed on her stoop. As a teenager, Edwina danced with Annie Ree Gilliam winning the RKO Regent Theater amateur contest. She also partnered with Anna Baxter appearing at the Apollo Theater with The Lucky Millender Band and with The Fats Waller Orchestra. Edwina also danced as a solo act billed as “The Little Lady of Taps.”

Jewel “Pepper” Welch was born in Emporia, Virginia. Pepper never revealed her age but she was probably born in 1916, 1922, or 1923. Her mother Anabelle Walker Welch worked as a cook in Atlantic City hotels and generously opened her home to anyone in need. Pepper grew up in Philadelphia where she learned to tap dance on the street corner with the boys. At ten years old, she debuted in show business when the boys dared her or pushed her into a jazz bar. She strutted in, took the mic, and sang and danced to “Pennies from Heaven.” Afterwards, Pepper won many Kiddie Hour and Amateur Contests in Philadelphia.

As a young girl, Pepper danced with the “Three Rhythmettes,” and with Lula Styles as “Pep and Pepper.” Around 1938, Pepper performed with Mildred “Candi” Thorpe as “Candi and Pepper.” They were an outstanding team of Rhythm and Flash. In 1941, columnist Billy Rowe of the Pittsburg Courier, ranked Candi and Pepper with the superb male tap dancers of the era.

The dynamic duo “Salt and Pepper” burst on the stage in 1944 and performed together until 1954. They achieved stardom billed as Headliners! Receiving the honor of International Tap Dance Hall of Fame Recipients, Edwina “Salt” Evelyn and Jewel “Pepper” Welch will take their place among the legends of tap dance.

2023 - Leslie “Bubba” Gaines Feb 12, 1917 - Jun 3, 1997
Place of Birth: Waycross, Georgia - Place of Death: New York, New York
Leslie "Bubba" Gaines, boxer, tap dance master, and longtime member of the Copasetics Club, was born in the youngest of eight children, the only brother to seven sisters. His father was a farmer who owned a plantation in Georgia. He got the nickname Bubba from living in the South, where many male children were called Bubber. As the only male in the family his father, in raising him, separated him from his sisters. "He [my father] was well off," Gaines told tap historian Delilah Jackson. "He hired a man to teach me manly things, like horseback riding and boxing. Sometimes I was treated to shows where I saw dancers."

Around 1926, Gaines moved to New York with his mother and began dancing the Charleston on the streets to make money. After graduating from school around age seventeen and getting working papers, he met Sunshine Sammy, a well known screen actor who encouraged him to dance. This he learned to do by frequenting Harlem's Hoofer's Club, where he watched such masters as Bill Robinson, John Bubbles, and the tap team Tip, Tap and Toe. The dancers that Gaines most admired included Baby Laurence, Walter Green, Charles Honi Coles, Raymond Kaalund (one of the members of Tip, Tap & Toe), Bill Robinson, John Bubbles, and Chuck Green, Jimmy Slyde, and Leon Collins.

In New York, Gaines met Arthur "Pie" Russell, and after a short time the two hooked up with James "Hutch" Hutchinson and called themselves the Three Dukes, billing themselves as "The International Aristocrats of Rhythm." The group played at the most exclusive venues in New York, including the Cotton Club, and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe. They were noted for their elegant presentation, synchronized jump rope tapping, and class-act tapping, a genre known for its elegance, spaciousness, and musicality, with clear tap sounds. They were extremely stylish, wearing top hats and white full dress, and tails and cutaways; and though they did jump rope with the top hats, it all had to be classy. It was Hutch who taught Gaines the rope dance, which would become his specialty. Gaines developed it into a novelty act by inventing a number of moves both inside and outside of the rope. In 1934 The Three Dukes performed at the London Palladium with Cab Calloway and his orchestra and subsequently returned to New York where they performed at Connie's Inn, which had moved downtown where the Latin Quarter used to be (and which became the downtown Cotton Club). In 1936 the group returned to Europe, and in 1937 they performed at the Casino de Paris in Paris with Maurice Chevalier for four weeks. The show was held over for eleven months; and the group stayed in Europe about four-and-a-half years, performing in Germany, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

After serving in the army during World War II, he returned to the United States at a time when opportunities began to decline for tap dancers. He began working with the U.S.O. as a solo act, telling stories, tapping, and playing the trumpet; he also began arranging and writing music. In 1952 he joined the Copasetics Club, a fraternity of mostly black tap dancers dedicating to preserving the memory of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and with them danced on the Dick Cavett Show, as well as traveling throughout the country with them, teaching at colleges and giving master classes.

Gaines' style of tap dancing was determined by his sense of rhythm and the feeling of free flow from the body. "All the colored guys-- none of us sound alike. Everyone has his own sound. Because we didn't learn in mass or in a school . . . we learned how to dance and applied the feeling to the rhythm," he told Linde Sigmyd in an interview. "Dancing is a rhythmic flow of the body. Your body must be saying something, not just your feet. Your body must be saying something . . . like an expression."

In 1973, when Honi Coles brought Bubba Gaines and Charles Cookie Cook to Brenda Bufalino's dance studio in New Paltz, New York (these visits would later recorded in her 1977 documentary Great Feats of Feet), Bufalino remembered that "Bubba was the only one of the three who had been dancing steadily for all these years. He had been traveling with the USO and was in great shape." In the 1980s Gaines found a new partnership when he began working with the young dancer Deborah Mitchell. He also appeared in nightclub acts and in revues that included Black Broadway, a 1980 retrospective of black musical entertainment, created for the 1979 Newport Jazz Festival, whose cast also included Nell Carter, Gregory Hines, and Bobby Short. He also appeared with the Copasetics in Tappin' Uptown: A Tap Dance Musical (1982). Writing in the New York Times, John S. Wilson described his routines as "brilliant combinations of footwork, timing, and working an audience." Well into his sixties, Gaines was one of the few tap veterans not to be surprised to find an enthusiastic audience for tap. Audiences went crazy watching him perform the rope in single and double time. "He effortlessly included wings and delicate ‘pull-up time steps' in his routines," wrote Brenda Bufalino. "His edge was still sharp. I loved to watch the gleeful expression of his upper body as he went into his toe stands, his shoulders lifted, arms thrown back, hands outstretched as if to shout hallelujah." Gaines' turns with the rope brought people to their feet. Out of breath, but ecstatic with the warm applause, he would exclaim, "If you keep encouraging me like this I'll completely destroy myself." Then with an impish feigned humility, he announced, "I will attempt to do the rope . . . double time. After that . . . that's all." He then looked to the band. "Takin' off fellas . . . down to the runway and here we go." And he always delivered.

Gaines was not only flash. "Even though he thought he had to do his novelty of the rope each time he performed, it was his beautiful rhythms and graceful delivery of a dance to the music of ‘Poor Butterfly' that lit up the documentary Great Feats of Feet, which captured Bubba in the prime of his dancing," remembered Bufalino. Gaines was also most supportive of his peers. "You pay too much attention to your critics," he told Bufalino. "Remember, they're not going to understand what you're doing until you're dead." What Bufalino learned from Gaines was not to hold onto her first idea, to give herself value as the composer, and to always create her own arrangements.

Gaines will always be remembered for his clean footwork and articulation, and elegant style of dancing, as well for his virtuosic tap-rope dancing-- and for his endearing expression to his audience-- "I'm not all out of breath, the breath is all out of me, but if you encourage me like that, I will completely destroy myself."

[Sources: Great Feats of Feet (1977), film documentary directed and produced by Brenda Bufalino; Brenda Bufalino, "Memories of ‘The Great Feats of Feet' of Leslie ‘Bubba Gaines," International Tap Association Newsletter (vol. 8, no. 4, November-December 1997, p. 23); Arthur "Pie" Russell, "The Three Dukes," International Tap Association Newsletter (vol. 6, no. 5 January-February 1996, pp. 3-4); Delilah Jackson, ""Leslie Gaines," International Tap Association Newsletter (vol 8, No. 3, September-October 1997, 5;) "Cookie and Bubba Keep Steppin' Out in Style," Fort Collins Coloradian (June 19, 1977); Linde Sigmyd, "Interview of Bubba Gaines," Sally Sommers archive of tap dance); "Leslie Gaines, 85, a Leading Tap Dancer," New York Times (July 5, 1997); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]

2023 - Juanita Pitts was an African-American tap dancer. During performances, she was known to wear a tuxedo and Oxford shoes, which was common attire for male tap dancers at the time. However, during her life she "danced in relative obscurity".

Pitts was from Philadelphia and performed on stage and in clubs as a headliner, mainly in the 1930s and 1940s. She danced an act titled "Pitts and Pitts" and performed with her husband, Leroy, until he became ill. Pitts wore men's suits while performing, including a white three-piece suit, and she "had a style of close-to-the-floor rhythm tapping". In 1945, she appeared in the short film It Happened in Harlem, credited on movie posters as "Pitter-Patter" Pitts. Her dancing career continued on into the mid-1950s, and she performed at the Howard Theatre in the 1950s as well as at smaller clubs and the Apollo in New York City.

The Village Voice stated that after tap dancer Louise Madison, Pitts was "the best among the female rhythm tappers" and she "could dance toe to toe with the great male dancer Teddy Hale". Tap dancer LaVaughn Robinson said she performed at the Two Bit Club, stating, "And anytime she came through there, she had a job. Do you understand what I'm saying? And regardless to who the dancers was, if she came through and wanted to work....she was always welcome to dance at the Two Bit Club." Tap dancer Frances Nealy mentioned she saw Pitts for the first time at Club Eureka in Sacramento, California, later reflecting, "Well, she was such a terrific dancer. I'd never seen a woman dance like she did before. She danced like the guys." In 2007, tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith mentioned that important people in tap dance are often omitted from the history when tap is taught, including Pitts.

Around 1998, Pitts was included in a touring film and photo exhibition from the Philadelphia Folklore Project. A 2005 documentary titled "Plenty of Good Woman Dancers: African American Woman Hoofers From Philadelphia" includes footage of Pitts. A 2009 performance titled "Thank You, Gregory" gave tribute to Pitts, along with other dancers in tap history. A 2016 performance named "While I Have the Floor", by Ayodele Casel, gave tribute to "tap’s forgotten women" including Pitts, Jeni LeGon and Lois Bright. A section of the dance performance "Tap in Time" was inspired by Juanita Pitts.