PRODIGAL SON
Gregory Hines is standing in the alley behind the Apollo, reminiscing about the many hours he spent in that spot as a child performer three decades prior. In this scene from the 1985 documentary About Tap, he recalls the attention paid to him by Sandman Sims, an adult who took the time to trade steps with a kid—who took the kid seriously, pushing him to work on his weak left side. Watching Sims, Hines says, he could see himself “as a man.” He singles out the moment when, after trying to steal steps from Teddy Hale by watching his act multiple times, he realized that Hale had no routine, that Hale was improvising. He remembers what older hoofers had to say when Hines, then nine, declared that he wanted to be Teddy Hale. “‘That’s great,’ they said, ‘but you can’t hope to be a great artist, like he is, by copying him. No, you have to take all these steps that you’re stealing from him and that we’re feeding you and assimilate it. And have it come out in your own way, in your own style.’” Each of his heroes had that: a style. Hines says he can recognize each one with his eyes closed. He says he owes them everything: “I found myself through them.”
First there was his brother, Maurice, two years older. At four or five, Maurice was already enrolled in a neighborhood tap class. Gregory was supposedly too young, but he could copy his brother’s steps. Their mother sought out the best teacher around, and in the late forties that was Henry LeTang. As a Harlem kid in the twenties, LeTang had himself started out at the Peter Pan Kiddies School before graduating to Buddy Bradley’s. He also studied at the Hoofers’ Club and backstage with Bubbles. The Cotton Club said he was too short, but he toured with Sophie Tucker’s son, billed as “Bert Tucker and Friend.” By 1937, he had opened a Times Square studio of his own, following in Bradley’s footsteps, grooming white stars and choreographing Broadway shows and nightclub acts for which he sometimes got credit. Like Bradley, LeTang could cater to people with minimal dancing talent. He likened his job to that of a tailor and frankly labeled it “commercial.” Most of his students were white. Profiled by Ebony in 1948, he gave his take on racial difference. The average Negro hoofer, in his experience, had no more “natural rhythm” than the average white dancer. But the average Negro tended to learn faster and work harder—perhaps, LeTang suggested, because the field for Negro dancers was so much smaller.
LeTang didn’t normally teach children, but he saw something in the Hines kids. He gave the boys private lessons, standing between them and holding their hands as they mimicked his steps. He made them take ballet and he brought them to the Apollo, both to perform and to study. The theater was their day care center. Alma Hines regularly dropped off her sons to watch three or four shows while she was at work. In the audience and in the wings and in the alley out back, the boys soaked up a tradition on the wane. Once in the mid-fifties, they watched as Bubbles performed on a bill that was otherwise rock and roll. Maurice and Gregory figured the audience would reject the old man, but the veteran sang “Shine” and the crowd loved him. “So we went to his dressing room afterward,” Maurice would remember. “And we asked him how he did it. And he said, ‘Always tell the truth to the audience. Don’t pretend to be something you aren’t. They’ll know. And they’ll get you.’” Apollo audiences loved the Hines Kids, too. In 1954, they were cast as a newsboy and a shoeshiner in the Broadway show The Girl in Pink Tights. People were saying they might be the next Nicholas Brothers, a prediction that Maurice and Gregory believed until they saw the Nicholas Brothers.
Kinescopes of early Hines Kids TV appearances make comparison possible. Maurice and Gregory aren’t quite Fayard and Harold, not quite as bursting with talent and life. There’s something similar, though, about the sibling dynamic. Maurice, the brother with the French name, is more polished, more balletic, leaning effeminate where Fayard was pixieish. Gregory is offhand, digging in to his solo steps but otherwise not quite bothering with the arms. “Even back then,” Maurice told me, “I was like Fayard and Greg was like Harold. Even in temperament.” Maurice was the conscientious brother, Gregory the mischievous one who hated to rehearse. TV footage separated by years shows the brothers growing physically, but the act changing little. The routines, tightly bound to the arrangements, operate on the LeTang Principle of Repetition. As Gregory later explained it, “Henry would insist there were four or five steps in the routine that we would repeat six times. Because by the fourth time, the audience would understand the step, and start to applaud.”
As the fifties passed into the sixties, the Hines Kids played the contracting circuit. In Las Vegas, they replaced Teddy Hale at the Moulin Rouge after Wardell Gray’s death. Just as Tallulah Bankhead had once bought little Harold Nicholas a bicycle, Gregory got a drum kit from Marlene Dietrich. In Miami, the Hines brothers discovered segregated water fountains, a confusing revelation for the boys, who were growing up in the predominately white populations of professional children’s schools in New York. As an opening act, they performed in the Catskills and toured with Count Basie and the Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis, Jr. Like Davis, whom Gregory idolized, they gradually mixed in more singing and comedy, relegating their tapping to a number or two. In the early sixties, they added their father, Maurice, Sr., on drums, and it was this act—Hines, Hines, and Dad—that you could see on The Tonight Show and Hollywood Palace and that is captured on the 1968 live album Pandemonium. Amid jazzy renditions of show-tune medleys, tap enters as sibling-rivalry schtick. In this joke, Greg has the upper hand, but as the clown, he generally comes in for abuse. During the bows, Dad introduces his younger son as “our lovable idiot.”
By 1973, the lovable idiot was ready to quit. “I wanted to be real,” he would recall. “My family would tell me to smile. I never wanted to smile.” He thought smiling was phony. He was twenty-seven. Five years before, he had married a waitress he met in the Catskills, and their child was now three. All of that—marriage, parenthood, his brother, his father, showbiz, tap—he left behind for the beaches of Venice, California. This was his missed adolescence, his version of dropping out. He worked as a busboy, taught karate, and did nothing if he felt like doing nothing. He got his ears pierced, let his hair grow, dabbled in free love and acid, and did not own a pair of tap shoes. He didn’t stop performing; he played rhythm guitar and sang in an otherwise all-white rock band, aptly called Severance. (Their sole album sounds like a child of Steely Dan and the Eagles.) He fell in love and learned how to take care of himself, yet he missed his daughter. His desire to be a responsible divorced father, reinforced by the two men’s-sensitivity groups he had joined and the wake-up call of a buddy from childhood being murdered in a drug deal, prompted him to move back to New York in 1978.
He had no money, no job. But his brother told him about an audition for a musical, and he got the part. The Last Minstrel Show concerned a black minstrel company shut down by reformers. It closed in Philadelphia, shut down by insufficient audience enthusiasm, but Hines’s next show made it to Broadway. Eubie!, a revue based around the songs of Eubie Blake, the still-living composer of Shuffle Along, ran for a year and earned Gregory a Tony nomination. Maurice, who was cast in the show first, and Henry LeTang, who was choreographing it, had to lobby hard to get Gregory hired; he wasn’t an ingratiating auditioner. Once performances started, however, it was Maurice, the brother who had stayed in New York and in the business, who was upstaged. What had been true of the brothers as teenagers was even truer now; as Maurice admitted to me, “I was afraid of the audience. Greg wasn’t. I tried to grab it. And Greg let them come to him.”
Gregory’s next project, Comin’ Uptown, an all-black musical of A Christmas Carol, was a flop, yet his portrayal of a slumlord Scrooge earned him his second Tony nomination. For the three-week run of the historical revue Black Broadway, which featured John Bubbles, Hines credibly replaced an ailing Honi Coles, and did so for free. Then, in 1981, came Sophisticated Ladies. It was another revue, this time of Ellington songs, but it was lavishly produced, with a band stocked with actual Ellingtonians. “It’s no secret that Mr. Hines may be the best tap dancer of our day,” wrote Frank Rich in his rave for the Times, “but he’s more than a dancer; he’s the frisky Ellington spirit incarnate.” Hines could sing—wring the feeling out of a ballad, hold his own in scatted trades with a trombonist. And he was attractive, with hooded, droopy eyes set in a long and leonine face. He could be romantic, funny, sexy. Tap had a star.
In Sophisticated Ladies, Hines’s dancing contrasted with that of two other male dancers, both about ten years his junior. Gregg Burge had grown up as a Long Island talent-show champion who brought his shoes to a performance of The Hoofers and briefly became the boy wonder of Leticia Jay’s First Tap Company. By the time of Sophisticated Ladies, that exposure was hard to trace, covered over by formal training in ballet at Juilliard. Though his tapping was clean, it was wanting in subtlety and grit, and his perpetual display of flexibility had a preening quality. Hinton Battle’s background was almost entirely balletic. He had studied at the School of American Ballet before playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz (Burge replaced him, 42nd Street–style, after Battle sprained an ankle) and had performed with Dance Theatre of Harlem before starring in Bob Fosse’s Dancin’. When he was cast in Sophisticated Ladies, he knew almost no tap, and a crash course with LeTang could get him only so far.
What Burge and Battle proved was that you didn’t have to be white to tap white. The two men could have served as exhibits for what the author of Jazz Dance and his trusted sources had been worried was going to happen, as poster boys for an abandonment of the American vernacular in favor of the most superficial features of European dance: pulled-up spines, pointed toes, pirouettes, and compulsive ear-high kicks. Dancing next to Burge and Battle in video footage, Hines is different. In his big solo, that’s even more true, since he’s improvising. He toys with one idea, moves on to another. This isn’t esoteric: he’s talking to the people with his feet, pleasing himself and letting the audience share in his pleasure. As the number segues into a stair dance on multiple staircases, Hines plays with the levels in the same spirit. His ascents and descents aren’t as symmetrical as Robinson’s, no more than his get-down vigor reproduces Robinson’s erect daintiness. But critics listened to Hines the way they listened to Bojangles. For the first time in a long time, a tap virtuoso, a hoofer in the jazz tradition, was starring on Broadway.
As his brother took over his role in New York, Hines headed up the Los Angeles production, hoping to expand his career into the movies. He already had completed two films: as a wily dancing slave in Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I, and as a nondancing medical examiner in the horror flick Wolfen. Such roles, followed by a co-starring turn in the comedy Deal of the Century, were important for Hines’s acting career, but when he learned that Francis Ford Coppola was working on a film about the Cotton Club, he knew that such a film needed Gregory Hines. He showed up at the producer’s home in period costume and tapped on the man’s coffee table.
The making of The Cotton Club (1984) was a notorious fiasco: an exploding budget, thirty drafts of a script, multiple lawsuits. Along the way, Hines’s role became Sandman Williams, half of a brother act. Maurice was cast and the plot grew to incorporate elements of the Hines Brothers’ own split and reconciliation. This storyline ran in parallel with that of another pair of brothers, played by Nicholas Cage and Richard Gere, who was the white star needed to finance the picture. On top of this were piled love stories for Hines and Gere, plus a complicated gangster war between ethnic mobs. Pared down to fit with all these other stories, the Williams Brothers’ story lost whatever emotional impact it might have had. More important, the music and dance that might have been at the heart of a movie about the Cotton Club ended up relegated to background color.
Henry LeTang (credited for “tap choreography” while Michael Smuin was credited as “principal choreographer”) re-created numbers for many of the Cotton Club’s greatest acts, none of which made it into the film. The nightclub numbers that weren’t cut survive in the release print only in scraps, and the two fragments of the Williams Brothers’ act are incoherent excerpts from Hines Brothers’ routines. A scene set in the Hoofers’ Club gives more while falling farther from its potential. For the first time in a major motion picture, Honi Coles dances. And Buster Brown. And Jimmy Slyde. The frenetic editing allots each dancer a few seconds while the framing butchers their bodies. Their camaraderie injects a surge of warmth into a film that otherwise lacks it, but the movie doesn’t treat the hoofers with much respect.
Editing serves a more expressive purpose at the movie’s climax, when an impassioned tap solo by Hines is intercut with a series of mob hits, as the Italians take over the black numbers game. It’s like the crosscutting of mob war and baptism in Coppola’s The Godfather, but with a murkier moral point. In an earlier scene, Hines’s character, frustrated by racial injustice but realizing that retaliatory violence is a game he’ll lose, has vowed to kill with his tap shoes. Is the juxtaposition meant to reveal a balance between the cultural power of blacks and their weak position in a racist society? An imbalance? Or is it just about the sonic similarity between Hines’s hoofing and the chatter of tommy guns? Hines’s anachronistic performance looks like nothing anyone would have seen at the Cotton Club, yet it was important for Hines to dance in his own style in a mainstream movie, just as it was important for him to take off his shirt in a sex scene. Both gestures telegraphed that this was not Uncle Billy and Shirley. The dancing was new and Hines had come up with a neologism for its protean mix of worked-out steps and impromptu adaptations, a word that debuted in the film’s credits: “tap improvography by Gregory Hines.”
Eubie!, Sophisticated Ladies, and The Cotton Club had established Hines as a modern representative of tap’s past. His next film brought tap into the eighties. The implausible Cold War plot of White Nights (1985) cast Hines as Raymond Greenwood, a tap dancer of his own generation, a onetime child star who, after growing disillusioned with America while serving in Vietnam, has defected to the Soviet Union. His first appearance finds him relegated to a tiny theater in Siberia, performing with a Russian company of Porgy and Bess. He is Sportin’ Life—Bubbles’s role, Sammy’s role. He sings the hell out of “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon,” and though he twirls a hooked cane as Bubbles did, the virile aggressiveness is his own. At the end of the number, his wife appears, played by Isabella Rossellini. This casting was not Uncle Billy and Shirley, yet reviews didn’t make much of the interracial romance, nor of the offscreen fact that Hines’s second wife was a blond Jewish divorcee. Much had changed since Davis’s sixties.
In a later scene, drunk on vodka, Greenwood narrates the story of how he went from being a “cute little colored kid, a real novelty” to being a hired murderer and rapist in the army. When Hines’s volume goes up, his believability goes down, but the emotion he’s able to express through his hoofing—the bitterness, the frustration—is striking and novel. Much of the monologue, apparently, came from Hines himself. In interviews, he said that the speech had helped him get a lot of things off his chest, like his resentment that “the rich don’t patronize tap” and the monologue’s assertion—at once prideful and self-denigrating—that “most black people in America can tap,” an idea close to one that Hines grew up hearing: that all black people have rhythm. “Sure, he was putting the guy on,” Hines told The Washington Post; “but there was also a lot of anger behind it.” This was a complex anger, the anger of a black tap dancer who loved his tradition but struggled to come to terms with it. By dancing that anger—a black anger, long after it had become commonplace in music and other arts—Hines was altering the image of tap at least as much as Gene Kelly had by dancing in a T-shirt.
The guy Raymond is putting on is the film’s other main character, Nikolai Rodchenko, a Soviet ballet star and defector to the West who gets trapped in the Soviet Union and—this is just part of the film’s implausibility—put under the supervision of Hines’s character by the KGB. In playing Rodchenko, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Russian ballet star who had defected about a decade before, was also drawing on his own biography. One of the film’s high points is Baryshnikov and Hines dancing together. What they do is a hybrid, choreographed by the hybrid choreographer Twyla Tharp: a little of Hines’s karate, some slackened ballet. It’s not a great dance, but it’s good enough to show both men as great dancers. It’s difficult to choose which one to watch, which shade of cool to savor. For Hines to hold his own against the man justly considered the greatest dancer in the world—that said something about Hines. For a tap dancer, and a black one, to be framed as an equal to ballet’s prince—that said something about tap, and where Hines might take it.
The Hines-Baryshnikov duet has no tap in it, though. The news about where Hines was taking tap comes in his solo. He’s in the studio, improvising to a tape that Rodchenko has brought from the decadent West. Charging forward, grapevining sideways, swooping backward, Hines covers ground. There’s something of Sandman Sims in the way he bounces on the balls of his feet, yet he groups his rhythms like someone who once played in a jazz-rock band. Hines improvised the scene without music. Only afterward did the songwriter David Foster compose a track, drenched in synthesizers and heavy on backbeat, that, with the addition of vocals, could have played on FM radio in 1985. Hines looked contemporary and he sounded contemporary, too.
He didn’t dance in the buddy-cop movie Running Scared, and though the film was successful, his movie career sputtered. A guest duet on a Luther Vandross album turned into a hit single, but Hines’s subsequent solo recording, credibly executed in a satiny Vandross style, didn’t sell many copies. Just because Hines could do it all didn’t mean he could sustain multiple careers across genres. He spent much time touring as a soloist in nightclubs and small theaters, singing standards and R&B and always tapping. As a quality control measure, he brought along his own stage, a costly shingle outfitted with microphones. The platform raised the volume, righting the balance with amplified instruments. It satisfied the eleven-year-old boy in Hines who had once thrilled to the vibrations of Chuck Berry turned all the way up. But the custom stage didn’t just allow him to dance loudly; it allowed him to dance quietly, subtly, with the confidence that those quiet subtleties would be heard.
It was also a platform he was willing to share. Regularly, he would ask if there were tap dancers in the house. Then he would invite them up. Hines may have been a movie star, but anyone with a pair of tap shoes was a member of his tribe.
EXTENDED FAMILY
In 1986, when the Jazz Tap Ensemble appeared at New York’s Joyce Theater, the guest artist was Gregory Hines. His performance, captured on video, is beyond nightclub casual. In a T-shirt, Kelly-tight and bodybuilder-sleeveless, he chats with the crowd, stops to sip from a water bottle or to pull up his socks, laughs at himself. He makes a sound like African drums with his heels, then mocks it by mouthing jungle noises. As he feels out the floor, you can see him listening to himself, see him thinking. If he repeats a step four times, he does so mindful of the LeTang Principle of Repetition, but also because he enjoys it. Hines brought his own stage to the Joyce and danced on it alone, apart. That the troupe invited him as the guest artist, a position it had previously offered only to tap elders, was a gesture indicative of his unique position. He had marquee value, and yet as someone who had grown up in the tradition, with the right skin color, he also could bestow legitimacy. His participation connected his mass entertainment success with the subculture that had been developing at the same time.
But he wasn’t the only standout. Of the original members of the Jazz Tap Ensemble, only Lynn Dally remained: the one who never improved as a performer but also the one who kept the company going and brought in superior dancers. Among the new recruits was a thirty-six-year-old virtuoso named Sam Weber. The core of Weber’s childhood training had taken place in the San Francisco studio of Stan Kahn, a vaudevillian who, in addition to staging nightclub shows and the Ice Follies, had systematically broken down the mechanics of tap, developed a series of graduated exercises, and invented and copyrighted a pictographic notation system. (Rodney Strong, a student of Paul Draper’s who later founded a successful vineyard, also taught at Kahn’s studio.) Kahn made his students study ballet, and though his ace pupil resisted at first, in the late sixties a career in ballet seemed much more possible than Weber’s true dream of becoming a concert tap dancer. Weber spent the seventies in the employ of ballet troupes, and in the early eighties, he brushed up his tap to perform the Tap Dance Concerto with symphony orchestras. The first time he saw the Jazz Tap Ensemble, he thought, They’re doing what I always wanted to do. When Fred Strickler left the company, Weber leaped at the opening.
On the tape of the 1986 performance, he taps to Cole Porter and to Bach. With his lifted torso aligned over the balls of his feet and his ankles loose, he hovers, skims, floats, flutters. When he uses ballet port de bras, it’s with a fullness and fluidity far beyond Paul Draper’s; in speed, intricacy, and diversity of steps, he surpasses Hines. Weber’s rhythms are flawlessly accurate, his sound a dense nest of tones. Instead of awkwardly grafting ballet onto a narrow base of tap, as Draper did, Weber assimilates steps from Coles and Slyde and Condos into his own balletic system; the way he threads steps together and swirls them around the stage retains a ballet dancer’s measured sense of enchaînement. In a manner that would only intensify over the coming years, he takes efficiency—the greatest number of sounds activated by the fewest and smallest movements—to such a seemingly effortless extreme that some of his extraordinary flurries fail to register, and his filigree sometimes obscures the pulse. Compare that to Hines, who always keeps the beat handy and for whom grimacing effort is an expression of naturalness. There are other differences, of course: race the most obvious, charisma the most important. Weber’s charm is mild, as quiet as his taps. He wasn’t going to be a movie star or carry a Broadway show. His kind of art needed the concert stage.
And as much as the tap subculture that Weber belonged to needed Hines, it also needed to organize. A landmark tap summit at the Colorado Dance Festival in 1986 was a family reunion. Dancers from across the country converged on Boulder and Denver to celebrate the past and brainstorm about the future. Several participants, fired up, would start their own tap festivals back home, annual events in Boston, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Portland, Oregon. At the Colorado tap festival in 1987, the International Tap Association was founded. (Honi Coles, Honorary Chairman. Gregory Hines, Honorary President. Marda Kirn and Sally Sommer and others, People Who Did the Actual Work.) Among various forms of advocacy, the ITA began publishing a newsletter with tap news, tap advice, listings and reports of tap events, articles on tap history, angry letters about tap controversies, and transcriptions of tap dancers interviewing tap dancers. The newsletter reflected the membership back to itself: several hundred people, spread across the country and the globe.
“That’s another thing about tap dancers,” Honi Coles offered during one of the first Colorado panel discussions, “There’s no prejudice with us. With white, black, Oxford gray, pink, we have a togetherness that’s not common in other fields.” Steve Condos, the only white dancer on the panel, seconded the notion: “Tap dancers have a love, I can’t explain it. They have a love for one another.” This had always been true, to some extent, at least inside the stage door. But this togetherness didn’t mean there was no prejudice. In addition to Coles and Condos, the panel included Jimmy Slyde, Eddie Brown, and Gregory Hines, who were performing and teaching at the festival. During a panel featuring Brenda Bufalino, Jane Goldberg, and Lynn Dally, someone in the audience—Terry Brock, a new member of the Jazz Tap Ensemble—asked why the women onstage weren’t also teaching and performing.
On a panel the following day, Hines advised his fellow men to examine their own sexist attitudes and include women, because “tap dancing has come as far as it can go just on the strength of men’s feet.” During his performance that night, he stopped to asked women to join him. When Bufalino shouted back that she didn’t have the right clothes, Hines offered her pants and shoes from his own wardrobe. The next year, the Colorado festival—whose original all-male lineup had been chosen by female organizers—included women as teachers and performers. Tap festival organizers ever after became conscious about diversity in gender and generation.
SOLE SISTERS
But the place of women in tap persisted as a question. One node of controversy was this matter of the right clothing. In her autobiography, Bufalino recounts fretting about what to wear when she was asked to fill in for Bunny Briggs on a bill with the Copasetics. Part of the problem was finding an outfit that would go with her Oxford shoes. Bufalino had become dissatisfied with the sound she could get from high-heeled pumps; she craved the bass notes of a wider heel, and yet felt she couldn’t wear Oxfords with a dress. She ended up in a white tuxedo, a hardly unprecedented wardrobe choice, but there’s more to the anecdote. Honi Coles asks her to dance a waltz to show her “feminine side,” which she does but only to follow it, defiantly, with a fast Charlie Parker tune. The moment is a breakthrough, “probably the pivotal experience of my life.” The reaction of Coles—who had once told her that women would never be as good as men—shifts from shock to fury to pride as people applaud. Everyone has to admit, finally, “that a woman can lay down the iron.”
Bufalino felt she had something to prove. And she felt she had to dress more like a man to prove it. As she and the other young women were rediscovering the jazz tradition of tap, they asked their mentors why there hadn’t been more female soloists. The answers they received weren’t very satisfying: Chuck Green told Jane Goldberg that women had been discouraged from tapping because it was bad for their breasts. Might footwear have been a cause? Dianne Walker asked Sammy Davis, Jr., about the female dancers who wore flats. “Yeah, they could dance,” Davis answered, “but the women wore heels.”
During her second By Word of Foot festival in 1982, Goldberg presented a panel discussion that combined some of her young and white sisters with a few black women of an earlier generation. The result was less a disagreement than two parallel conversations. “There is no masculine and feminine rhythm,” Bufalino asserted, and Tina Pratt, who had turned to shake dancing when tap went out, said, “Of course there are differences between men and women.” After young Dorothy Wasserman argued that “people are used to watching women and listening to men,” Pratt said she was quite happy to be watched. There was some consensus about women being less competitive than men, or competitive in a different way, the veterans asserting that while men were challenging one another on the street, women were busy in the rehearsal hall; the ladies did their stealing from the wings. When the question was posed whether shoe type made any difference to sound, all of the older women answered “No.” All of the younger women answered “Yes.”
For the younger participants, high heels weren’t just high heels; they were symbols of patriarchal oppression, or at least a frivolous handicap. To wear low-heeled shoes, like men, was to level the playing field. In her book, Bufalino reports with satisfaction that soon after she started wearing low heels, Coles started judging any woman dancing in pumps as “not serious.” Bufalino’s tuxedo carried a similar meaning. She could remember the nightclubs where she thought she was doing art while the crowd yelled at her to “take it off.” Wearing the tuxedo was a strategy for deemphasizing her sexuality so that her audience might pay attention to other things, such as the music she was making.
Bufalino discussed these issues in Cantata and the Blues, her autobiographical one-woman show of 1983. It was an outgrowth of solo programs she had been doing at the Blue Note jazz club on Monday nights. In monologue and song, she chafed at being forced to choose between jazz and classical music—which had both been part of her upbringing—and between being a woman and dancing like her male teachers. In the lyrics to “Too Tall, Too Small Blues,” she lamented being always compared to Honi Coles. Few viewers, however, would have identified height as the salient point of contrast. The crucial difference was ease versus strain. Bufalino was a tap virtuoso, a highly versatile musician who had achieved that jazz benchmark, a recognizable sound—hers a glassy tone that sang against a strong floor of bass thumps. (And no tap dancer was more articulate about tap aesthetics.) But it could be difficult to hear that unless you closed your eyes. Her manner distracted, nervously wavering between hard-sell and pretentious, and the white mask she sometimes wore didn’t help. Reviewers compared her to a powerhouse, to Ethel Merman. “While you can admire her—immensely—you can’t love her,” wrote Burt Supree in the Voice. Coles met audiences primed to adore an elderly black gentleman, a role he could play without effort, whereas Bufalino struggled against preconceptions of female performers over forty and not even her mastery projected comfort with her-self. The internal forces that drove her to attempt things her mentor never would—to bring back tap when he was resigned to its demise—were likely the same forces that made her performances overwrought.
You could call that situation unfair. In a larger sense, there was something unfair, or ironic, about all such teacher-student comparisons. The women were inviting the men to upstage them. Katherine Kramer, a disciple of Bufalino and Ralph Brown, labeled the women of her generation the “Supermoms of Tap.” To them fell the roles of nurturer and caretaker, at the same time that they were playing producer, administrator, and fund-raiser. Kramer wondered if, while wearing all of those hats, women were spending enough time and energy working on their own dancing. Several of the men required a great deal of caretaking: trips to the market, the doctor, the liquor store. All of them needed attention. Soon the men would be awarded grants, and they didn’t fill out the applications themselves. At tap festivals, in classes given by the masters, it was usually the women who did most of the explaining, and the more feeble the masters grew, the more the women served as their “feet,” demonstrating steps as the old men sat on stools and corrected impatiently.
Kramer also described the seductiveness of the men and how they attracted the women artistically and sexually. The men found the women attractive, too—attractive and unthreatening. For similar reasons, Bill Robinson had been happy to help Shirley Temple with the stair dance that he slapped Bill Bailey for attempting. Something in all of this helped make the tap revival possible—convincing the men to share what had once been stolen, motivating the women not just to take but to give.
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Jane Goldberg, in her productions, continued to feature Cookie Cook, along with Buster Brown, Harold Cromer, Marion Coles, Leon Collins, and other elders. As she toured the country and Europe, old hoofers would emerge from the darkness of the theater as from the obscurity of the past. Their participation made for a surefire finale, but it could overwhelm the proceedings. At the 1984 premiere of The Tapping Talk Show, as soon as the goofy production had finished, a tap challenge took over: the older men in Goldberg’s show, plus Honi Coles, battling younger men led by Gregory Hines. At the end, Hines bowed down to Coles, calling him what Coles had called Bubbles at By Word of Foot: the “winner and still champ.” Sally Sommer, in the Voice, devoted two sentences to Goldberg’s show and three columns to the much more exciting aftermath. Goldberg felt like the Invisible Woman.
Partially in response, she organized an all-women show. She had always included other women, even representatives of a category that did seem just about invisible at the time: the Female African-American Tap Dancer. For her new show, Sole Sisters (1985), she invited, among others, two more veterans. Mable Lee, born in Atlanta in 1921, had been a chorus line dancer at the Apollo, a cheesecake cover girl for Ebony in 1947, and a singer in more than a hundred “soundies.” She put her shoes back on for Goldberg’s By Word of Foot. Harriet Browne, born in Chicago a decade later, had given up dancing in the sixties, only to pick it up again fifteen years later at the instigation of a dance troupe director who had heard about the old lady down the block who could tap. Now Browne became known for her sand dance, which was especially fast. Both women proved that male elders had no monopoly on seasoned charisma. Browne was friendly and wry, a little bewildered by the attention. Lee was irrepressible, a woman who handled the problem of aging by ignoring it, delivering bumps and grinds in the total conviction that she was still a sexpot.
Brenda Bufalino was the only tap virtuoso in Sole Sisters, but virtuosity wasn’t the point. In the show’s 1986 version, its silly premise had Goldberg pining for an Astaire, yet what she found, via Browne’s wise-talking fairy godmother and such numbers as “Post-Partum Blues,” was a sisterhood of mutual support, a sorority Copasetics. The noncompetitive ethos prevailed into the postshow open jam, except when Gregory Hines took his turn. Over the years, Goldberg argued with her friend about many things, but if they had a core disagreement, it was about the challenge. As sincere as Hines was about inviting everyone to the tap party, in his mind there was a back room where the serious business was transacted. To Goldberg, a never-ending chain of title matches sounded more like sport than art. “My idea of winning,” she later wrote, “was if everybody won.”
For Goldberg, the heart of the matter was “sensibility”: personality, humor. Like Robinson and Bubbles, she talked while she tapped, but she brought the topics up to date. In Sole Sisters, while banging a pot with a whisk, she cited a Newsweek cover story about women her age having a better chance of being the victim of a terrorist attack than they did of getting married. In another show, she and Sarah Safford traded steps and talked about their sex lives, giggling about the taste of semen. Goldberg would talk about how tap was supposed to be a happy dance but she had been doing it for years and was still depressed—a funny line that was funnier when delivered by a zaftig woman in a flouncy dress whose feet were knocking out a chipper rhythm. The tapping helped regulate her comic timing. Her act was amusing, wacky, and, in its self-deprecating messiness, endearing.
In 1986, Sole Sisters ran concurrently with the Jazz Tap Ensemble and Gregory Hines. Reviewing both, Marcia Siegel called the first black and intimate; the second, white and Hollywood and “for the millions.” But only Hines was of Hollywood. Only he, the figurehead of black and intimate, had a mass following. Sole Sisters and the Jazz Tap Ensemble were part of the same family, two directions in which the Hoofers’ Club legacy was being taken. Goldberg’s shows were nonprofit vaudeville; Jazz Tap Ensemble was concert tap. In the Voice, Sally Sommer praised the Sole Sisters for proving that women could do it. “Technically, they’ve got their feet together. And they’re prime for serious choreographic challenges.” And tap choreography, in the serious sense that Sommer meant, was a zone in which the younger generation had a shot at doing what John Bubbles had told Jane Goldberg to do: surpass him.