“In Boston in those days, the boys didn’t worry about what they were going to do when they grew up: you were going to be either a dancer or a fighter.” Those days were the first years of the century, and the speaker did not become a boxer. Jack Donahue and his pals swapped steps on the street corner or, if a cop chased them off, on a flatcar at the freight yards. At the Howard Athenæum, they climbed three flights of stairs to sit on benches and gaze down in judgment on professional dancers, raining disapproval on a missed tap or a stolen routine. Donahue’s hero was George Primrose, though in the boy’s eyes the minstrel man’s soft shoe belonged to the old school, beautiful but out-of-date. Where Primrose took a graceful tour of the stage in leisurely 4/4, the new style was stationary, packing more taps into a faster 2/4. For young Donahue, the modern mode was Paddy Shea doing a speedy buck dance in a Boston barroom with a glass of beer on his head and not spilling a drop.
On the corner, the boys called out the names of steps to try. There was Falling Off a Log, which really does look as if the dancer were struggling to maintain his balance atop a rolling surface of timber, crossing his legs as he tilts, twists, and topples onto alternating feet. Then there was Shuffle Off to Buffalo, in which the weight also rocks from foot to foot but the crossed legs don’t change position as elbows and knees pump like the pistons of a train that propels the dancer across the stage, often toward the exit (and the next gig, in proverbial Buffalo). Both steps entered the general repertory of stage dancers. A version of Falling Off the Log would show up, before long, in the final step of the Shim Sham.
A certain kind of step was useful for setting a tempo and synchronizing with musicians. Steps of this kind became known as time steps, and their most common shape could be found in decades-old clog manuals: three-and-a-break. Repetition established a pattern that the break punctuated, a winding up that the break released, and the whole simple structure offered the tension of asymmetry within a reassuringly squared-off form. A few time steps—each known as the Time Step—became standard. These were the building blocks of tap, the basics. By executing the elementary syncopations of such a step cleanly, any dancer could demonstrate his ability to keep time. Still today, to say of a tap dancer that he can’t even do a time step is to dismiss him utterly, while to say that he can make even a time step look good is to grant mastery. Back when Donahue was a boy, every self-respecting hoofer had at least one of his own, recognizable both as a time step and as his.
Many step names were onomatopoetic. The fact that someone heard the four-count rhythm of one step as “croppy lie down”—words from an Irish song—suggested the ethnic background of those doing the listening. But the ethnic mix was in flux. Benny Rubin, who grew up in Boston at about the same time as Donahue, began as both a dancer and a fighter, entering amateur contests in both fields. “I didn’t know it was dancing,” he remembered. “To me it was just a noise they were making, and we kids loved making noise.” As a dialect comedian who danced a bit, Rubin joined a wave of Jews about to dominate show business—Balines becoming Berlins, Joelsons becoming Jolsons.
Jack Donahue turned professional after buying wooden shoes with his winnings from a dice game. He relocated his step swapping to the lobby of the Rexford Hotel and angled to dance in a theater. The fare at the Howard was burlesque—displays of female flesh offset with knockabout comedians and champion buck-and-wing dancers, a variety show distinguished by lower prices and lower standards of propriety. Burlesque theaters were now organized into circuits, or wheels, and a performer could arrange a series of bookings into an itinerary, a route. But those weren’t the wheels that Donahue wanted to be on.
“The variety show was an outcast,” a writer for Everybody’s Magazine explained in 1905; “vaudeville is an institution, respected and respectable.” Vaudeville shared variety’s structure—its variety—but vaudeville was clean. Fabled backstage signs outlawed “slob,” “son-of-a-gun,” and “Holy Gee,” along with everything sacrilegious and suggestive. Wholesome entertainment was big business. By 1905, New York and Chicago sustained several palaces of vaudeville, opulent structures seating more than a thousand. From the mid-teens onward, the zenith was the Palace Theatre in New York. To have “played the Palace” was a pinnacle of vaudeville success. That was the “big time,” where the most famous acts performed, but the same cities supported dozens of smaller theaters. You could find vaudeville in just about every city in America. As in other national industries, competition led to consolidation. Big-time theaters in Chicago and points west were gathered into the Orpheum circuit, while Keith-Albee dominated the East. Keith-Albee’s subsidiary, the United Booking Office, arranged a performer’s route, and to maximize efficiency and kickbacks, it treated each act independently, to be moved around easily or replaced.
As many as twenty-one acts might appear on one bill, though the average was seven to fifteen. The guiding principle was “something for everyone.” Vaudeville was singers, comedy teams, escape artists, hypnotists, jugglers, contortionists, mind readers, acrobats, ventriloquists, magicians, monologuists, impressionists, dancers, regurgitators, sports figures, celebrities with no discernible talent, actors from the “legitimate” theater slumming for better pay, and every sort of animal act. If you didn’t like one thing, something else was coming. And the pace was quick. Exceeding the allotted time could get an act fined or fired, and the interval between performers was minimized by having a self-sufficient act perform in front of the curtain while a more elaborate act was set up behind it. Tap dancers served this purpose well.
In small time, the show might repeat three to five times each day, whereas another phrase for big time was “two-a-day.” The order and composition of a bill was an art in itself. There was no universal formula, but in the ideal, a show might open with a “dumb” act—a trained seal, a troupe of acrobats, a dancer, something that wouldn’t be too spoiled by the hubbub of latecomers. Next came something to settle the audience in, then something to wake them up. Everything built toward the headliner, who took the penultimate slot, and the show finished with a “chaser.” This was often another dumb act, since folks on their way out make as much noise as on the way in—either flashy to send them off abuzz or awful to clear them out faster. The running order was a hierarchy of salary and fame, and every ambitious vaudevillian aspired to the rank of next-to-closing in a big-time theater. The default position for a strictly dance act was the deuce spot, number two, six minutes and off.
Vaudevillians showed you what they could do, fast. “They have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time,” explained the critic Gilbert Seldes. There was no room for mistakes, no chance for recovery. But if the format pushed vaudevillians toward a kind of perfection, it also provided plenty of practice. The circuits were vast and varied enough to embrace the best and the worst, and the ladder from small time to big time could extend to great length. Most bookings lasted three to six days, and then the performer started over in a new theater with a new clientele. The system gave vaudevillians opportunities to hone their acts in response to an ever-changing public and also insured that once an act was perfected, they might never need another. It could take years for a performer to cycle around to the same venue, and by then people had forgotten, or were happy to be reminded. One newspaper columnist estimated the average life of an act to be two years, but some lasted decades.
An act was a livelihood. Some vaudevillians filed theirs with the National Vaudeville Association in sealed envelopes to be opened when one trouper accused another of theft. These were scripts and sheet music; the method didn’t work as well for dance. But more important than the act was the persona. Even in the largest theaters, vaudeville put little distance between performer and audience. “Personality” was everything, for comics and singers especially, yet not even the animal acts were exempt. The audience was always right, and managers’ reports kept track of the public’s verdict.
The soft shoe was prevalent. Vaudevillians who didn’t specialize in dancing could manage one; it bestowed a little class and helped turn a comic into an entertainer, a candidate for next-to-closing. “The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance,” Seldes decreed in the early twenties. He was protesting the “aesthetic dancing” that had crept in through the teens, supplementing the dominant buck-and-wing, and what he meant by stunts was gimmickry, which vaudeville encouraged in dance as it promoted speed in comedy. Milt Wood did his clogging atop a chair. Louis Stone did his upside down on his hands. Al Leach buck-danced on stairs as if drunk. The female winners of the Police Gazette championship medal for “wooden shoe buck dancing,” when they danced in vaudeville as opposed to at smokers and stag parties, tended to pair up with a man. Bertha Gleason, who won in 1902, traveled with her dancing brother, John. Since so many stages, laid over concrete, were acoustically dead, the Gleasons carried a mat of wooden slats glued to canvas as a portable shingle. To handle their tricky musical cues, they also brought along their own pianist, a young man whom Bertha soon married.
Family was an especially effective gimmick. Among the most popular of acts was Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys, a first-generation Irish comic with his singing-and-dancing brood, lined up by age and height. The Four Fords worked as siblings: Dora, Mabel, Ed, and Max. Their dancing father instructed the boys; the sisters spied and figured it out for themselves. Reviewers praised the quartet as without equal for their perfect time and novel steps. Handsome scenery and costumes softened their strenuous dancing, and their lobby photo was genteel, a boardwalk stroll in boaters and bonnets. In 1910, they were headliners, but the act split soon after, the sisters yearning to express themselves in Grecian dancing, à la Isadora Duncan. This venture into Art flopped, and Dora and Mabel reverted to buck dance and headlined for another decade. Max went into teaching, and a ubiquitous step in his name proved the most lasting legacy of his clan—a lunging, scissoring burst of sound known as the Maxie Ford. (If you’ve seen Gene Kelly dance, you’ve seen this step.)
Pat Rooney, Jr., was also born into the business, the son and namesake of one of the foremost clog-dancing Irish comedians of the 1880s. Twenty at the turn of the century, the younger Rooney toured first with his wife, then with his wife and their son, Pat the Third. Though billed as the premier dancing team of vaudeville, they likely wouldn’t have been headliners without their catchy songs and patter. Rooney was five feet three, a leprechaun with a bright grin. The waltz clog, a step introduced during his father’s day, became so associated with him that people assumed it was his invention. With his hands in his pockets, hitching his trousers up, he hopped, lifting one bent leg high and tucking the other underneath to click heels in flight—fixing the pigeon wing, which he called a “bell,” as Irish for the new century.
As for Jack Donahue, that Boston Irish boy, he spent the teens on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, singing and dancing and talking nonsense with a nice-looking girl named Alice. His kind of dancing was called eccentric. “Nature helped me,” he later wrote, “by endowing me with a pair of long legs and arms.” His face was long, too, and on his gaunt frame, the standard steps looked funny, so he exaggerated further and milked more laughs. He packed more eccentric steps into a routine, one Rhode Island critic attested, than three or four other dancers combined. Donahue understood what another aspiring dancer, hoping to make use of the flat-footed style he learned from “the little darkies” in St. Louis, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “There’s little enough money in dancing … you must mix comedy to get by.”
UNDER THE RAG AND OUT FROM UNDER IT
Down the same drain—or, depending on your perspective, up it. Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, born in North Carolina in 1903, preferred the analogy of educational advancement. “Show business for a colored dancer,” he explained,
was like going through school. You started in a medicine show—that was kindergarten—where they could use a few steps if you could cut them, but almost anything would do. Then you went on up to the gilly show, which was like grade school—they wanted dancers. If you had something on the ball, you graduated to a carnival—that was high school—and you sure had to be able to dance. College level was a colored minstrel show, and as they faded out, a vaudeville circuit or even a Broadway show. Vaudeville and Broadway sometimes had the best, although a lot of the great dancers never got out from under the rag, never left the tent shows.
That was the path that led Leonard Reed to the Shim Sham and beyond. Reed was born in 1906, and when he was a child, it took exposure to only one or two of the traveling shows that came through Oklahoma—“the pretty girls and the comedians with the cork on their face, doing funny jokes”—to get him hooked. Whenever carnivals came through—“the tambourine shakers and the black comedians doing what they called their jig”—he was there every night. By the time he was fifteen, his dancing talents had earned him a summer job in a medicine show.
For whatever ailed you, a medicine show could offer a miraculous elixir. Turpentine and sugar, Coca-Cola and salt. Such outfits might be a few guys peddling a snake-oil cure-all or a hundred men traveling together by railroad, carrying an entire catalogue of dubious treatments. More commonly, the show consisted of a “doctor” and two or three assistants, a team that wandered from town to town in a wagon, on the lookout for suckers. The assistants’ job was to lure customers, which is where the dancing came in. The wagon had a small platform, upon which the assistants did their breakdown. The dancing, Reed remembered, was in “a comic, exaggerated, almost grotesque style”—whatever it took, said Markham, to “put the yokels in a buying mood.” After the doctor made his sales pitch, the assistants would roam the crowd, exchanging bottles for cash and pocketing a little for themselves. It wasn’t much of a start for a dancer, but you learned how to attract attention—how to sell.
A gilly was a small carnival, still a small-town operation, but it offered steadier work at better pay. Black performers had their own tent. (Reed remembered it as a “jig top,” the tent for people called jigs.) To entice customers, they put on a preview called the ballyhoo. Up on a platform they went, everyone clapping and singing, the dancers trying to outdo one another as a barker fast-talked people into buying tickets. Inside, events proceeded as in a minstrel show. The blackface comedian traded jokes with a straight man and flaunted funny steps. Then came a section of specialties, and the whole thing would finish with a plantation afterpiece. This might repeat fourteen or fifteen times a day; one Fourth of July, Reed claimed, the count was forty-eight.
Carnivals and circuses and even Wild West shows carried something called a sideshow annex that was essentially an all-black minstrel show. The brass band was a big draw. Magicians, human corkscrews, trick cyclists, and trapeze acts shared the tent with champion buck dancers. They came solo or double, sometimes husband-and-wife, and most of them sang. Pigmeat Markham and his partner did a sand dance, the band going quiet so people could hear the scraped rhythms. Audience members called out requests for imitations: do a racehorse, do a train. The star of these shows was the dancing comedian. Markham remembered a “very funny” one named Joe Doakes, who would “shake his head from side to side so hard and so fast that the makeup on his lips dotted his ears.” The dancers Markham rated the best were the craziest. “Exaggerating the peculiarities” was still sometimes referred to as “grotesque,” but as in vaudeville, the term of art became “eccentric.”
The activities of black entertainers were covered by the Indianapolis Freeman, often in the form of self-aggrandizing letters from the entertainers themselves. There you could also read about all-black minstrel shows that toured the South independently, under canvas. Long-enduring organizations such as the Rabbit’s Foot Company, the Florida Blossoms, and Silas Green from New Orleans, along with more fly-by-night affairs, maintained Tambo and Bones while keeping up as ragtime gave way to the blues and early jazz. In 1911, Bessie Smith was not just “a great coon shouter”; she was “the girl with educated feet.” Markham remembered “dancers who were so good you wouldn’t believe it,” such as Jim Green, known as the Human Top because he spun on his seat. Before, it had been Master Juba, Master Diamond; now it was Kid Checkers, Kid Slick, prizefighter names acquired in adolescence and then never outgrown.
They did start young. Robert Everleigh, who displayed his “eight minutes of footology” with Rabbit’s Foot in the mid-teens, was a “boy wonder.” His career was short, yet some lasted as long as minstrelsy held out. Eddie “Peg” Lightfoot was the One-Legged Dancing Wonder in 1916, a laugh machine in blackface and a squashed stovepipe; in 1923, he was nearly beaten to death by a white mob, but he would still be dancing beneath a Rabbit’s Foot tent in 1954. His early years were not exactly years of obscurity. Even the backcountry was a high-traffic zone where minstrel managers pasted posters on top of the posters of other troupes. These performers were seen by hundreds or thousands—by blacks and whites—every night. But they are the dancers who never got out from under the rag.
THE BLACK CIRCUIT
One hope of getting out was to get into a theater. This usually meant a road show. Multiple companies of In Old Kentucky were still making the rounds with pickaninny bands and buck dance contests. (The favorite tune for contestants, a Baltimore regular recalled, was “Turkey in the Straw.”) Around the turn of the century, if you wanted the gold medal, you had to get around Harry Swinton, who had a minuscule role in the play but a large reputation among black dancers. Eubie Blake joined the pickaninny band as a teenager and later painted Swinton in memory: “He came out in roustabout clothes with a paper cone full of sand and he did more dancing just spreading the sand than other dancers could do with their whole act.”
Black Patti’s Troubadours rolled on as well, with their eponymous opera singer and their own buck dance contest. Ida Forsyne, a dark and tiny dancer out of Chicago, joined the Troubadours at fifteen, doing her buck and pushing a baby carriage as she sang, “You’re Just a Little Nigger but You’re Mine All Mine.” In 1905, she went abroad, securing fame as a Topsy in England and outdoing the Russians at Russian squat-kicks in St. Petersburg. Muriel Ringgold, from Alabama, joined the Troubadours at twelve as the “greatest child buck dancer.” (Sometimes she was the “Honolulu Pickaninny Buck Dancer,” playing to the Hawaiian vogue that followed American annexation of the archipelago in 1898.) In the Ernest Hogan shows Rufus Rastus and The Oyster Man, Ringgold’s roles remained Topsy-like. She grew into a comedienne in oversized shoes, frequently dressed as a man, and danced and clowned into her fifties. She could “dance like a man,” Forsyne would recall approvingly.
A positive review of the Troubadours might look like this one from a Dallas paper in 1910: “Don’t look disgusted, they’re pretty good stuff, these coon shows.” In fact, the review continued, “a nigger that is willing to come right out and be pure nigger, to avail himself of the delicious peculiarities of his race, can be quite the funniest thing going, and the one who pompously apes the mannerisms of his brother in white can be just a tiny bit funnier.” The music was fantastic, sounds “approached by no human,” and the dancing, well—“From pickaninny days the buck-wing has been his own private possession, and the Negro comedian is in his element when his feet are describing eccentric circles.” Supremacy in the buck and wing was conceded to blacks. It was their element, like the Jim Crow car, the sideshow annex, the balcony from which colored people could watch the Troubadours. And to profit from this possession, this peculiarity, this heritage, was to “come right out and be pure nigger.”
Starting back in the 1890s, the musical comedies of Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker had broken into the “legitimate sphere” of theaters. They had shown white audiences, as the Freeman phrased it, that black entertainers could do something “besides shouting coon songs and buck and wing dancing.” But the early deaths of Cole, Walker, and Ernest Hogan, in a demoralizing cluster around 1910, appeared to derail that train. At the same time came a boom in the construction of black theaters—venues, many owned by blacks, that presented black performers to black patrons and were first organized into a circuit in 1912. This meant performers could set up a string of engagements with a single contract and organize transportation more efficiently, a real concern considering that throughout much of the country Negroes were not welcome at the local restaurant or hotel and had to rely on boardinghouses and the kindness of black strangers. Performers at these new theaters didn’t have to worry as much about what might offend or please whites. If Keith-Albee was the big time, this was “colored time.”
It was in a black theater in Jacksonville that “Ginger” Jack Wiggins burst onto the scene. The year was 1910, and soon he was in Memphis, boasting in the Freeman of never having lost a contest. Initially, he traveled with his brother, Henry, but Jack was the true “tanglefoot artist.” Their act “All Black Stars Shine at Night” was hailed not only as the “danciest” but also the “swellest dressed.” Even in grainy newspaper photos, Ginger Jack looks sharp. He made four “shining” wardrobe changes in ten minutes (aided, it was said, by his little dog). Through the teens, he toured black theaters with stock companies, acquiring and shedding partners male and female. The Freeman praised him as “a good self-impersonator” but also for originality in “twisting and turning”; among dancers he would be remembered for his Bantam Twist and Tango Twist, tap steps that leaned and reversed. His “Pull It” ended elegantly, with his back arched and one leg curling behind, but it also involved yanking an invisible object toward his pelvis. Wiggins introduced the move by announcing, “I’m going to do it!” (One version of this step wound up in the Shim Sham under the name Tack Annie—the nickname of one of Wiggins’s girlfriends, a big, tough bouncer.)
Over the same circuits, the Whitman Sisters ran their own show, the most successful around. They wrote the sketches, composed the music, secured the bookings. Whenever they spotted a promising kid, they would ask his or her parents for permission to take on the child as part of their extended family, and in this way, a great many tap dancers—including some of the best—were reared. One reason that parents trusted the Whitman Sisters was the group’s reputation. Their father, the Reverend Albery Allson Whitman, was born a Kentucky slave around 1851, but after the war, he studied at Wilberforce University and eventually published seven volumes of epic poetry. His daughters—Mabel, Essie, and Alberta—were born in the 1880s. Reverend Whitman made sure they had music lessons, and he taught them the double shuffle, Essie remembered, “for exercise.” Soon the girls were accompanying him as jubilee singers whose camp meetings included minstrel songs and humor. By 1899, they were the Whitman Sisters Comedy Company, bolstered by a band of buck-dancing kids. In a photo from that year, Mabel and Essie are Southern belles cradling banjos, the ruffles of their hoop skirts cascading like fountains of white lace. The skin that shows isn’t much darker.
After the Reverend died, in 1901, Mabel took over. When the troupe played Birmingham in 1904, the Freeman noted two facts indicative of Mabel’s mettle: first that she was the only colored woman managing her own company, second that it was the first time in the history of Birmingham that colored people had been allowed seats in the dress circle and parquet. In 1911, the Sisters split, and it was under the name Bert Whitman that Alberta developed her strutting skills as a male impersonator. One of the kids with Mabel was a ten-year-old named Aaron Palmer, whom the press followed Mabel’s lead in dubbing the next George Walker. One of Alberta’s Three Sunbeams was the fourth Whitman Sister, a “rompish” adopted girl named Alice whom the Freeman rated the best girl buck dancer. By 1914, the Whitmans were reunited and about to begin two decades as perennial box-office favorites, two decades of notices in the black press judging theirs the greatest of companies. By 1919, Alice and Aaron had a child of their own. His name was Albert, though everyone called him Pops. He wasn’t four years old before he was stopping the show.
BLACKS IN WHITE VAUDEVILLE
On a Friday afternoon in 1912, an audience of record-breaking size gathered in a Philadelphia theater to witness a contest between Ginger Jack Wiggins and King Rastus Brown. Brown was the favorite, monarch of the East. It was announced in the Freeman that he had canceled engagements in order to stop the crowing of this upstart from the South. He went first, wearing a triumphant smile for all six minutes. In the end, though, it was Wiggins’s name the Philadelphia public screamed as the winner of the world championship and fifty bucks.
King Rastus did not relinquish his sovereign title, but then he and Wiggins moved mostly in different circles, geographically and otherwise. Though Brown was brown-skinned, he danced in white vaudeville, billed as the Chocolate Drop or the Lively Coon. “The white people all say he is a wonder,” reported the Freeman in 1909. Yet it was among black dancers that Rastus would be remembered. Questioned in the 1960s, they described a thin man who wore a derby, smoked long cigars, and loved his liquor. His endurance was as legendary as his imaginative fecundity: he could keep up his buck dancing for hours without repeating a step. Willie Glenn, half of a blacks-in-blackface team that toured the Keith-Albee circuit, recalled: “He could imitate anything, whatever the audience called for: a train, a drunk, different nationalities—Irish, Dutch, Jewish, Scottish. Then he’d say ‘Now I’ll go for myself’ and top them all.”
Since the days of Juba, blacks in otherwise white productions had become much more common. “The stage is the only profession open to the negro in which he has equal opportunity with the whites,” asserted the Kansas City Star in 1901. Vaudeville might just have been the most integrated profession in America, though it was usually assumed that one black act on any white bill was enough. The pay, while generally below the rates offered white acts, far surpassed the going wages in almost any other profession open to blacks; the highest-paid black acts pulled down figures that most white Americans could only dream of.
Probably the greatest number of blacks entered white vaudeville as children. A female singer, usually white, would surround herself with a few black kids, usually boys, who would sing and dance and unfailingly please the audience with their adorableness. In showbiz lingo, these were pickaninnies or “picks,” and they were “insurance.” They never flopped. Whether dressed as street urchins or done up in opera hats and tuxedo jackets, they were an advertised part of the show: Mayme Remington and Her Picks, Mattie Phillips and Her Jungle Kids, Naomi Thompson’s Brazilian Nuts. The picks normally put together their own numbers, and they didn’t earn much, but the job beat being an assistant in a medicine show.
Around 1908, ten-year-old Willie Covan, along with five other kids, hooked up with the singer Cosie Smith and headed for California, dreaming of orange groves. In Roundup, Montana, they performed for a theaterful of cowboys. “They had never seen coloreds before,” Covan remembered. “The cowboys didn’t care nothing about no prejudice. They loved the dancin’.” Afterward, a young fan took them to a saloon outside of town. “We tap danced like crazy. And they started throwin’ money. We danced and we danced, and we picked up that money and stuffed it into our pockets.” Then, along with the coins, came bullets. “They shot into the ground, and laughed, so we laughed too and danced like they told us to.” Outside later, the boys discovered that the coins were gold. Roundup was a mining town. In one evening, Willie and his friends had made eleven hundred dollars, probably more than their parents could make in a year.
Covan was born in Atlanta, but by the time he was six his family had moved to Chicago, joining the tens of thousands of blacks migrating north during these years, seeking opportunity and fleeing Jim Crow. A city boy, he would claim he had learned to dance by listening to the rhythm of streetcars. The only lessons he would admit to were informal tutorials by Ida Forsyne’s son, who had only one good leg and was known as Friendless George. In 1915, Willie was seventeen and ready to be recognized. When In Old Kentucky came to Chicago, he signed up for the dance contest, which drew the best from as far as Cleveland and Detroit. As was now traditional, judges were stationed on the stage and underneath it; a banjo player plunked stop-time through each contestant’s allotted minute. Covan got lucky, drawing number eight, which gave him an opportunity to survey the competition ahead of him. He realized two things: everyone started with a time step, and a time step wasted time. When his turn came, he jumped right in with his fanciest stuff. He won the hundred-dollar prize, and his friends carried him home on their shoulders. “Everybody knew I was the greatest dancer in Chicago!”
Among those fancy steps were wings, a class of moves that in their simplest form work like this: Perched on one leg, the dancer jumps up, but as he takes off, he scrapes the outer edge of his jumping shoe, sending that leg off to the side as his body continues upward; while still airborne, he pulls the leg in and strikes the ground one more time before landing. That’s three sounds in total: scrape, tap, land. The whole thing usually lasts a second or less, and calibrating the force of the jump requires musical timing. Many other fancy steps were “flash” steps—rhythmic but not necessarily rhythm-producing. Flash steps, more acrobatic, were helpful for a big finish or for whenever the band drowned out taps. What’s special about a wing is that it’s a cross between a flash step and a tap step. It’s a jump that makes noise. The initial scrape adds another sound to the tap dancer’s palette, longer than a tap, raspy or whooshing. Wings can be done with both feet—synchronized as three sounds or separated into six—or in alternation, with the wing launching off one leg and landing on the other. The leg that isn’t winging is free to swing or kick or strike the floor from multiple directions. Visually exciting variations emerged: the Pump, the Pendulum, the Saw, the Fly. And the winging leg itself could pack in more sounds between scrape and landing. Once there was a three-tap wing, four- and five-tap wings weren’t far behind.
Covan developed other tricks. A highlight of his act with his brother Dewey was Willie’s execution of the Double Around the World, a step he had probably adapted from Russian dancers then prevalent on vaudeville stages. To pull off an Around the World, a squatting dancer swings one leg in a circle parallel to the floor, periodically shifting his weight to his hands and raising his squatting leg to let the circling one pass underneath; if the dancer starts alternating legs, he’s doing the Double. During a matinee in 1917, the floor was slick, and the band kept accelerating. After they got offstage, Dewey turned to his brother and said, “You were doing it with no hands.” Willie did not believe him. Nevertheless, the next time they performed, Willie concentrated hard and did it again. And the next time that the brothers were on Thirty-first Street and State, the corner where black dancers in Chicago gathered to challenge one another, Dewey started bragging. Bets flew down. Willie was wearing a brand-new, sixty-five-dollar suit, and as he changed the impossible to the possible, he cut his pants at the knee. “It was worth it,” he remembered, even though he won only twenty bucks.
Covan would never forget how, around this time, he was given a pair of wooden shoes by the dancer he considered the best, King Rastus Brown. King Rastus didn’t cut his pants doing flash steps, and he wasn’t much of a comedian, either. Through the twenties, when King Rastus and Jack Wiggins could be seen only on the black circuits, Covan rose on the white ones. Yet he felt restricted, too. As an old man, he would tell about how he and his partner had stopped the show at the Palace in the early twenties, and got fired for being too good, and then moved to the Hippodrome, only to have the same thing happen, because the only spot for an act as good as his was second-to-closing and that spot was never ceded to a colored act. The story is partially verifiable in newspaper records, but the reasoning is still a bit off. It was possible for a colored act to play next-to-closing. If Covan wanted a role model for how a black tap dancer could be a headliner on the white circuit, one was readily at hand.
THE DARK CLOUD OF JOY
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1878. By the time he was seven, both of his parents had died. He and his younger brother moved in with their grandmother, who told them stories from her life as a slave. Robinson brought in money by shining shoes, and he danced in the street for pennies, often in front of the theater where George Primrose’s minstrel shows played. Robinson would later tell white reporters that Primrose had inspired him to become a dancer.
The dancing didn’t go over well with Robinson’s Baptist grandmother. She also disapproved of the boy’s petty thievery. He learned fast that he could dance and charm his way out of punishment, and it is remarkable, even considering his poverty, how many early Robinson stories involve theft. One of many accounts of the origin of his nickname (which might also be a Southern word for troublemaker or for “happy-go-lucky”) traces it to a child’s mispronunciation of Mr. Boujasson, owner of a Richmond haberdashery from which the young Robinson stole a hat. As for his given name, Luther, Robinson resented how other kids ridiculed him about it, so he beat up his younger brother, Bill, and took that name for himself. He forced his brother to go by Percy. All the misbehavior may have been too much for their grandmother, since she went to court to have the boys taken out of her custody. For a while, they lived with the presiding judge, but Robinson had other ideas. He had met a white boy named Lemuel Toney, who, dreaming of minstrel glory, had worked up a blackface act and needed a pickaninny. The interracial pair hopped a freight train and lit out for the nation’s capital.
Toney, discovered by George Primrose, took the stage name Eddie Leonard and was on his way to becoming one of the last stars of minstrelsy. He helped Robinson get work as a pick in The South Before the War. It was at this time, according to his fellow performer Tom Fletcher, that Robinson began to notice how each of the top dancers had a style. He started to do impressions, and out of those impressions he began to forge his own dance. Robinson traveled with the show and similar ones for a long time, not taking any of it as seriously as his poolroom activities. In after years, he would show reporters knife and razor scars from the period. During the Spanish-American War, he said, he served as a drummer in a colored regiment and was shot in the knee in a dance hall in North Carolina. The gunman was his unit’s second lieutenant. “I think he was cleaning his gun,” Robinson later told The New Yorker’s St. Clair McKelway. When Robinson showed McKelway the scar from the bullet and the lack of a corresponding exit wound, McKelway came to a simple conclusion: “The bullet must be somewhere inside.”
Robinson became a regular in the New York sporting clubs where black entertainers congregated. He was known for his comical singing—that is, until In Old Kentucky came to town and he won the buck-and-wing contest. His big break came when he was offered a job with Cooper and Bailey, a black vaudevillian duo. Cooper considered Bailey an unreliable drunk, so he hired Robinson as a replacement. In a derby and a tutu, Robinson played the fool to Cooper’s straight man, and he did not dance much at first. He imitated a mosquito by blowing air through his lips, and he and Cooper amused audiences with their comic arguments and dialect numbers such as “Oiy Oiy Yoi.” Since Cooper and Bailey had been advertised, not Cooper and Robinson, Robinson didn’t perform under his own name for the first six months. He was working, though, and in the big time.
That’s where he stayed, for more than a decade, honing his skills in show after show, town after town. When he and Cooper rolled into Denver in 1912, the Tribune found them the best thing on the bill:
The men, who are honest to goodness Ethiopians, not burnt cork “make-believers,” have that provoking flavor of real down Southern “darky” about them, which with homemade maple syrup is fast becoming a thing of the past. Cheap imitations have spoiled both. Both Cooper and Robinson are the genuine article and their chuckling guffaws, pigeon wing steps and cachinnating songs are a real vaudeville entertainment.
That same year, the Freeman cited the Cooper-Robinson act as a model that all colored performers should follow: clean, clever, up-to-date. “The negro gets a fair deal in modern vaudeville,” Cooper told the Duluth News-Tribune, citing vaudeville as the one business where blacks had an advantage: “My partner and I seem to be able to dance to ragtime and to sing ragtime in a way that few white dancers or singers can.”
Onstage, Robinson was a consummate professional. Offstage, he would draw both his partner’s pay and his own and use the money to gamble. One time, he took a pool cue to a policeman’s head. That predicament he talked his way through, but Cooper had to bail him out of trouble too often. This may have been why the act split up, and reunited, and split up again, though one of Cooper’s later partners cited another cause for the final breakup: Cooper’s marriage to a white woman. During the following decade, Cooper played the black circuits exclusively.
Whatever the reason, Robinson was on his own. He found help in Marty Forkins, a brash Irish-American manager from Chicago. Forkins’s wife, Rae Samuels, herself a successful vaudevillian, had seen something in Robinson: “Bo had that personality,” she recalled. “He could take the toughest audience in the world and take them in his hand and put them in his hip pocket.” Over the next years, Forkins and Robinson worked his solo act up the ladders of the Keith and Orpheum circuits. Before long, Bojangles was at the Palace in the number two spot. In lesser venues, he played next-to-closing, his act now an expansive eighteen minutes. Even when he wasn’t the headliner, reviewers often treated him as if he were. In 1922, the Los Angeles Daily Times could write assuredly, “Everybody must know Bill Robinson by this time.”
At the Grand in Chicago, he was billed as “The Black Daffydill: A Cloudy Spasm of Song, Dance and Fun.” On most marquees, he was “The Dark Cloud of Joy.” White critics habitually remarked on his flashing teeth and rolling eyes. They admired the “exceptional artistry” of his dancing, his perfect rhythm, but they also loved his imitation of a man on a pogo stick. The magazine The Dance described him as “the most efficient buck dancing machine on stage,” yet also took care to emphasize “that rare spirit of care-free abandon and sky-larking zest for which his race is noted.”
Louis Armstrong noted something else. In 1922, just after the young trumpeter moved from New Orleans to Chicago and just before he almost single-handedly transformed jazz into a soloist’s art, Armstrong caught Robinson’s act. What struck him first was how the dancer was dressed: “That man was so sharp he was bleeding.” In his dressing room, Robinson kept his suits spaced one inch apart, with matching shoes underneath. His favorite indoor sport, his wife once reported, was brushing his clothes with a whisk broom. For each performance, he changed outfits, and he always kept a towel in the wings so the audience wouldn’t see him sweat. During the appearance Armstrong attended, Robinson had to wait long minutes for the applause to die down after his entrance—applause for being Bill Robinson. Then the dancer looked up at the lighting booth and said, “Give me a light, my color,” and all the lights went out. The audience exploded in laughter, the kid from New Orleans loudest of all: “I hadn’t heard anything like that before.” The young trumpeter shared the crowd’s joy in Robinson’s jokes and mosquito imitations. “Every move,” Armstrong remembered, “was a beautiful picture.” Robinson was as dark-skinned as he was, and that meant something. So did the phrase Armstrong later chose to express what he was thinking as he watched Robinson that day in 1922: “Wow, what an artist.”
There was more to Robinson’s act than carefree abandon. A key part of it originated back in 1918, when Robinson saw some friends in the audience at the Palace and danced down the stairs to greet them. Thus was his stair dance born, or so he said sometimes. Other times, he said it came to him while he was dreaming of a different palace, in England. In that dream, he stood at the bottom of a staircase, waiting to be knighted. “I didn’t like the idea of just walking up,” he recalled, “so I thought I’d dance up. I danced up the stairs to the throne, got my badge, and danced right down again.” He said that his best steps always came to him in dreams. These stories are probably apocryphal, which isn’t to say that they hold no truth. Professional black and white dancers had been clogging on stairs since at least the 1880s. King Rastus Brown claimed that Robinson stole the idea from him, though Brown almost certainly stole it from somebody else. Notwithstanding such antecedents, Robinson was viciously possessive. There’s many a tale about what he did to those who dared use stairs: stop the act mid-performance, slap the offender, pull out a pistol. Once, when the dancer Eddie Rector replaced him in a show, Robinson sent him a cablegram warning him not to do the stair dance, on penalty of death. His effort to protect his claim was largely futile. When he attempted to secure a patent on the stair routine, the U.S. Patent Office denied the application.
In the early years, he danced up and down stage stairs. Soon, he had a portable staircase built. The stairs were central to his act, his vaudeville gimmick, but they must have been important to him for another reason. They magnified the essential strengths of his dancing. The staircase was symmetrical. It was two staircases joined back to back, a terraced pyramid, five steps up, five steps down. Each step was just large enough to accommodate Robinson’s two feet, and the connected top steps served as a platform. The entire staircase rose to the height of Robinson’s ribs, and a triangle of empty space underneath it made for a resonant drum. Upon these steps, Robinson could portion out his own. These were mostly time steps, three-and-a-break steps, and what the stairs did for Robinson was reveal how he played with the structure of the music through how he played with the structure of the staircase.
He would become known for bringing tap “up on the toes.” In contrast to the flat-footed style of dancers such as King Rastus Brown, Robinson carried his weight over the balls of his feet and drew his carriage up from there in an erect line. It’s as if he were trying to balance a glass of water on his head, as if he had been studying Clog Dancing Made Easy. His arms swung more freely than a clogger’s, but for the most part, he kept his feet neatly underneath him, which is why his dancing fit so well on the stairs. The small space emphasized the extraordinary efficiency of his movements, his impeccable control. The height gave his floor-bound dance a vertical dimension, ampliflying his rhythmic wit. The staircase was an extension of his instinct to dramatize. It used the eye to direct the ear. From the back of a theater, you could perceive that it was an instrument, each stair of which rang a slightly different note. The tonal distinctions were subtle, but then, Robinson was a subtle dancer.
The Aiston Shoe Company in Chicago made his clogs special order, twenty to thirty pairs a year. If one sole split, he discarded the pair—using shoes with different levels of wear would have compromised the perfect balance of his sound. He liked to challenge people to go beneath the stage and try to distinguish his right from his left—an easy task with many dancers, impossible with him. Robinson wore out shoes by dancing often, not by dancing hard. Wood met wood, two equals. It was a warm sound, precise but with a soft center. His taps were even, measured. “Indescribably liquid,” wrote the critic Robert Benchley, “like a brook flowing over pebbles.” The Chicago Daily News compared them not just with “the steady beat of a racehorse’s feet,” but with quail’s wings; not with firecrackers, but with “firecrackers heard in the distance.” Audiences leaned in to listen.
To imagine Robinson’s stair dance, first hear a song such as “Old Folks at Home,” Swanee River played in ragtime. He starts on the ground with a time step, marking accents with sharp nudges to the face of the bottom stair. Adjusting the angle of his bowler, he hops up a couple levels and back. Then he repeats the rhythm by swinging his right leg up and skipping it down, turning the stairs into a tilted xylophone. His leg’s momentum spins him around, and he hits an upbeat en route before finishing out the phrase facing his instrument. The next measure he splits between tapping on the floor and patting the stairs with his foot. His knuckles handle the repeat. Then he’s up and down the stairs, half a phrase on one step, the remainder on its neighbor. The complexity of the rhythms builds, then subsides, and builds again; the brook flows over more pebbles, or fewer, but it does not cease flowing. All along, Robinson’s arms swing loosely, now drooping for a droll show of relaxation, now pushing out small circles as if to say, That’s nothing. Sometimes he concentrates on one stair and sneaks in a tap on the stair below it, or he slips a tap between stairs as he ascends. He scales the stairs backward with just as much ease. For a while, he uses the top platform to showcase quick rolls and drum-tight wings. He keeps packing in more stairs per bar, subdividing the beat with stairs. By the end, he’s running up and down the stairs. That’s all he’s doing: running up and down the stairs. But it’s music and it’s magic and he knows it as he struts off the stage.
The dance thrills, but not with acrobatics or speed or even inspired rhythms. For much of the number, Robinson’s rhythms are metronomic. He can be plain. But you can trust him. You can relax. The stairs are a stunt that conceals its daring. As generations of imitators would learn to their grief, the properties of the staircase that magnified Robinson’s mastery equally magnify the slightest imperfection. Robinson’s timing, his metronome sense, was legendary. Dancers tell a story in which he had his musicians cut out for three and a half minutes while he continued dancing. After the allotted time, the musicians came back in, cued by a metronome that Robinson couldn’t hear. He was exactly on beat.
It was another sense of Robinson’s timing, though, that would prove most consequential. Unlike, say, King Rastus Brown’s stair routine, Robinson’s signature number was filmed, most fully and simply in the 1932 all-black short Harlem Is Heaven. (That’s the source of my description.) Bill Robinson came in at the right time. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that when the right time came, he was still there, on beat and in step.