IT’S GETTING DARK ON OLD BROADWAY
Ziegfeld’s weren’t the only Follies. In 1913, a Follies opened in Harlem. As a result of overdevelopment, the area had recently been made available to black tenants, who could be charged higher rents. The long migration of New York’s Darktown up Manhattan from the Five Points stopped and pooled, converging with a rising tide of blacks from the South and the Caribbean. The growing numbers of black tenants caused white tenants to flee, and so Harlem became Harlem, the great black metropolis. Neighborhood theaters—the Lincoln, then the Lafayette—acknowledged the demographic shift by opening their doors to black patrons and by booking productions those patrons might appreciate. J. Leubrie Hill’s Darktown Follies fit that qualification perfectly. His shows toured the same black theater circuit as those of the Whitman Sisters. Increasingly, Harlem was a hub for colored time.
The first Darktown Follies show at the Lafayette was My Friend from Kentucky, a broad and conventional comedy of social climbing. What made it distinctive was the dancing: the Texas Tommy, the tango. For the finale, the entire cast formed a hands-to-hips chain that circled backstage and on again. Ethel Williams, the girl on the end, did her own thing entirely. For Carl Van Vechten in the New York Press, this approached that undiscoverable grail, “the negro as he really is—and not as he wants to be on stage.” Van Vechten enjoyed how the performers enjoyed themselves. He enjoyed how the spectators enjoyed themselves, rocking and screaming like worshippers at a camp meeting. Writing again six years later, after he had established himself as the white authority on happenings uptown, Van Vechten could still remember the spontaneity and joy of “the real nigger stuff” in the Darktown Follies and how the rhythm had “dominated” him for days.
Florenz Ziegfeld paid the show a different kind of compliment. He bought the finale for his own Follies. He did not buy the cast, though he hired Ethel Williams and other Darktown players as tutors. It’s unlikely that the copy matched the original. (Van Vechten didn’t think so. The girls were pretty, he wrote, but “the Congo had disappeared.”) The Ziegfeld Follies program made no mention of J. Leubrie Hill or Ethel Williams or the Darktown Follies at all. Appropriation was an old story, but Ziegfeld’s purchase was a tentative indicator of a new surge of power in black theater. The Darktown Follies moved downtown onto Hammerstein’s Roof Garden and into the Bijou, a “theatre for colored people.” Neither of these incursions lasted more than a year, yet they softened up defenses. Rebuffed, the Darktown Follies rallied on colored time. In 1914, the troupe helped inaugurate the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, one more stop on an expanding black belt.
By 1914, the show also had an added attraction in Toots Davis. Sylvester Russell, the severe dean of black critics, judged Davis “the greatest buck dancer on the American stage, a whirlwind of science.” The First World War was on, and trench warfare in Europe suggested names for two tap steps credited to Toots. The first was called Over the Top. In this maneuver, the dancer leans forward and bounces off the tip of one toe as the opposite leg vaults over the top of it and lands with a heavy crash. Performed on alternating legs, the step makes a figure-eight pattern, and each crash looks perilous, as though the dancer might land on his face. When Davis played the Palace, the New York Tribune praised him for “a variety of new and surprising ways to be just on the point of falling on his ear.”
Similar praise would have served for the companion step, Through the Trenches. Bent over again, with all his weight on one leg, the dancer slides that leg backward along the outside edge of the foot, falls forward onto the opposite leg, slides backward, and so on. The arm across from the falling foot reaches for it, the other arm for the sky, and both arms swing as the legs alternate, the whole package going nowhere in style. Executed correctly, the step is beautiful in cross-body oppositions and a fluid sluicing of weight through the slide. A swoosh shunts into a bass note each time the weight shifts. Though trenches have been described as running in place, the best dancers make the step look more like speed skating. If you’ve seen a Broadway show or a Hollywood movie with tap in it, you’ve seen trenches, though likely in inferior form. Trenches are the most consistently faked step in the history of tap. The essential and hardest part—the slide—gets left out, transforming something smooth and free into something jerky and hectoring, the sound clomping along as outstretched arms beg for the applause that the step undeservedly receives. A proper trench is “pulled.”
DIXIE TO BROADWAY
Trenches and Over the Tops quickly became standard, and their combination a default finish. The new steps seem not to have made it to Broadway until black dancers did, and that wasn’t until 1921 and the advent of Shuffle Along. The story is a classic showbiz tale of perseverence: an ordeal of one-night tryouts in the boondocks, a booking in a broken-down New York lecture hall at the upper edge of the theater district, encouraging reviews, and slow ticket sales gradually ramping up through word of mouth into a society fad and some five hundred performances, a record surpassed that season only by Marilyn Miller’s Sally. All of this was particularly remarkable considering the obstacles a black show faced, such as the white backers who saw it in tryouts, laughed their heads off, then confidently insisted that white audiences wouldn’t enjoy it. On tour before and after the Broadway run, the production had to start over in each city and persuade the skeptical. But persuade it did. Shuffle Along proved again that black musicals could play white theaters and make money.
It was the brainchild of two vaudeville teams. The Dixie plot about a mayoral election came from the burnt-cork comedy pair of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The songs, slangy but clean, came from the duo of singer-lyricist Noble Sissle and composer-pianist Eubie Blake. Before the New York opening, the creators were most worried about an operetta-style song that broke taboos by treating romance between two black characters seriously, but white audiences ignored it in favor of “The Baltimore Buzz,” the dance-craze number with lyrics advertising raggy-draggy sliding and gliding. Critics mostly disparaged the plot to rhapsodize over the music—“a breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie!”—and especially the infectious vitality of the dancing: struts, strolls, slow drags, one-steps, two-steps, and more.
Not much of that dancing was strictly tap. The already vintage “Fisticuffs” routine—during which Miller, who was tall, held the head of Lyles, who was not, as the shorter man kept swinging and missing—used buck-and-wing to give jazz timing to the slapstick. The precision-kicking chorus did some syncopated stenography for the mayor. There was Tommy Woods, a young veteran of the Whitman Sisters troupe, who launched out of a time step into flips on the beat as the porter Old Black Joe, and Charlie Davis, who did Over the Tops and trenches while playing a traffic cop named Uncle Tom. Few reviews mentioned either man. The stars who emerged were Florence Mills, a replacement soubrette, and Josephine Baker, a replacement chorine whose cross-eyed clowning at the end of the chorus line would propel her to France, where she was embraced as an icon of glamorous negritude. Mills and Baker were not tap dancers per se, though tap was an ingredient in their music-makes-me-crazy style.
Shuffle Along inaugurated a fashion for black shows, and it became the standard against which those shows were judged. “The first reportorial responsibility of any reviewer who goes to a Negro musical comedy,” explained Heywood Broun, “is to say whether or not it is as good as Shuffle Along.” Over the next few years, Strut Miss Lizzie, The Chocolate Dandies, Lucky Sambo, and many others—some of them musicals with a plot, some revues—snuck into out-of-the-way or seasonally vacant theaters. The 1922 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, staged by Ned Wayburn, acknowledged the trend with a number for the naughty Gilda Gray. “We used to brag about the Broadway White Lights,” she sang, announcing that those lights were now growing dim. “Real darktown entertainers” had taken over, “pretty chocolate babies” and the “dancing coon.” It was, the lyrics explained, like an eclipse. Suddenly, the Great White Way was white no more, and, as the lights went out and the dancers cavorted in phosphorescent costumes, Gray sang the refrain: “It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway.”
Can you hear the nervous laughter? The black shows couldn’t approach the opulence of the Follies, but it became an instant critical platitude that black chorus lines surpassed every white equivalent. Writing about Liza’s chorus, for instance, The New York Sun judged that “clog dancing, such as Ned Wayburn sponsors, seems very tame in comparison.” In 1923, the all-black Runnin’ Wild, for which George White as producer hired away Miller and Lyles, popularized the dance that defined the decade. The origin stories of the Charleston are as murky as you might expect: Geechees doing it on Charleston levees, Kongo parallels. The dance got into Runnin’ Wild, Miller once explained, because he caught some kids—two black boys (one from Charleston) and an Italian kid who went by “Champ”—doing it with garbage can lids outside the Lincoln Theater. He had Willie Covan elaborate it into a routine with a song by the stride-piano king James P. Johnson. A group of Dancing Redcaps clapped their hands and stomped their feet, up on a platform in their porter uniforms. The Charleston had been danced in black neighborhoods for years and in black musicals the year before Runnin’ Wild, but it was this version that set off a vogue.
The cultural brushfire of the Charleston spread farther and faster than even the cakewalk had. It embodied the spirit of the twenties: Throw away your cares, fling off the old restraints. The dance enacted abandon in kicks and swivels. Its turned-in knees were eccentric but not necessarily comic; the action could be sexy, depending on the knees. What was crucial was the rhythm; that’s what made a Charleston a Charleston across an abundance of variations. Doing it, a broad swath of America might learn to hit the beat just before the beat, to feel that little rush. The Charleston was the self-expression of youth and the characteristic dance of the flapper, whose fringed fashions it threw into bold motion, but soon it was also the businessman’s indulgence. Prohibitions against it were about as effective as Prohibition. And in this latest phase of the commerce between black dance halls and white, Broadway was the bridge. For a talented few, the Charleston served as a gateway into the theatrical profession. Many a tap dancer learned his first steps to a Charleston beat and first walked the boards during a Charleston contest. Strong traces of it would endure in their style.
But there was tap on Black Broadway, too. To read the reviews is to watch the terms clog and buck-and-wing get replaced by tap, with a consensus coalescing around mid-decade. Audiences at Put and Take, in 1921, woke up at the late appearance of Maxie McCree and his “dizzy hoofing.” A husband of Alberta Whitman, he had broken off from the Whitman Sisters troupe. Black dancers would remember him as a pioneer in combining tap with the trend toward ever-more-daring acrobatics. Suddenly, he would sink to the floor on an accent, landing on his knees; just as suddenly, he would pop back up. Freakish in the wrong hands, the move could seem superhuman if done with the right aplomb. (Ankles and calves helped break the fall, but the patella still got a beating. It was a young man’s step.) At the time of Put and Take, McCree was crossing over, integrating white vaudeville circuits and Reisenweber’s, New York’s most fashionable cabaret. George White hired McCree and his partner, George Brown, for the Scandals of 1922, and “Maxie and Georgie” got good reviews in Boston. When the production made it to New York, though, McCree wasn’t in it. A drowning accident was the official story, though there were rumors that connected McCree’s death, at age twenty-three, with his interest in one of the Scandals showgirls.
Some of the tap in Dixie to Broadway (1924) was handled by McCree’s cousin Willie Covan, that accidental inventor of the Double Around the World with No Hands. In addition to his strutting impersonation of a “Georgia Cohan,” Covan tapped in front of a curtain graced with the picture of a pickaninny chomping on a watermelon. His partner for that number was Ulysses “Slow Kid” Thompson, an eccentric dancer who had worked his way out from under the rag with his wife, Florence Mills. She was the star of Dixie to Broadway. A few years before, the producer Lew Leslie had hired her to sing and dance, at 12:30 and 2:00, in his Plantation Club on Broadway. Leslie exported the revue to London, and a silent snippet of that production shows Covan and Thompson in striped convict oufits, trading rubbery steps and huge cross-body wings. When the company returned to America, a different trio wore convict outfits and tapped while chained together. (“Lincoln freed the slaves for America and for Lew Leslie” was the going quip in the black theatrical community.) One of the production’s showstoppers was a burlesque of “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” from the Russian revue La Chauve-Souris. Where the original had employed snare drums, the Dixie version beat its tattoo with an ensemble of precisely tapping feet. That’s how America answered Europe. The military routine had been a specialty of the Darktown Follies tap dancer Eddie Rector, but Leslie had Rector teach it to a chorus led by Florence Mills, who was an adequate tap dancer, an enchanting personality, and the most celebrated black entertainer of the day. That’s how Darktown adapted to Broadway.
Of all the tap specialists in the black shows of the early twenties, Johnny Nit attracted the most press. It’s fairly clear why. U. S. Thompson identified Nit’s foremost assets as “a broad smile and ivory teeth.” Rarely did a critic fail to mention that smile. According to Charlie Davis, Nit was “a good buck-and-wing dancer and a better showman.” He would do the same steps as everyone else, “and when he added that grin of his, the audience went crazy.” It wasn’t that Nit was a faker. He was known to train like a boxer so he could keep up high speeds for long stretches and pump out wings by the dozen. But it was his showmanship that sold. When Nit performed in Britain, a critic called him perfect, and he returned the compliment by staying for the rest of his life. (He married an Englishwoman and had children.) In 1932, British Pathé filmed his act. He dances to a quick 2/4, up on his toes and really pounding. The grin is there and the wings, too. Midway through, he pulls out a chair, sits down, and continues tapping as a show of nonchalance. Yet his next move is to lay the chair sideways and lie down beside it, tapping feebly on the seat—showmanship tipped over into mere novelty.
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While the Black Broadway shows brought renewed attention to black dance, the greatest black hoofers of the time—the ones most respected by later black hoofers—didn’t play much of a role. They danced elsewhere. In 1921, the same year as Shuffle Along, the Theater Owners Booking Association was organized, binding theatrical houses in the East, South, and Midwest. On this circuit, blacks performed for blacks, and black producers had a shot at surviving. Toby Time was a theatrical ghetto, a home and a prison, and the acronym TOBA was said, with some affection, to stand for Tough on Black Asses. Material conditions were inferior to those of white showbiz, but opportunities for black artists were far more abundant. The fare inclined toward road shows: traveling revues with comedians, blues singers, dancers, a line of girls, and a jazz band. These seem not to have differed much from the black revues on Broadway—many of those played TOBA on tour—except in being a little looser, a little faster (the ads all boasted about speed), and perhaps a little racier. The sets and costumes were less costly and the comic situations not always ones that whites would immediately recognize, yet the crucial difference was to be found out in the audience: a crowd that was harder to please and more enthusiastic when won over.
Irvin C. Miller (brother of Shuffle Along’s Flournoy and producer of Put and Take and Liza on Broadway) might have three or four shows touring TOBA at any one time. One of them was certain to be the latest edition of his Brownskin Models, through which he sought to glorify the Brownskin Girl. The Whitman Sisters were the queens of TOBA, packing houses to overflowing fifty-two weeks a year. Their accelerated revues—titled Rompin’ Thru or High Speed—carried blackface comedians such as Rastus Airship, Daybreak Nelson, and Willie Too Sweet, or the ribald henpecked-husband-and-nagging-wife team of Butterbeans and Susie. Little Pops Whitman always stopped the show, tapping and flipping like his uncle Maxie. His mother, Alice, was “Queen of Taps,” the “China Doll of Syncopation.” Chappy Gardner of the Philadelphia Courier once crowed that “Broadway has no superior girl dancer.” Her hair was bobbed, her costumes abbreviated. One dress had a large bow on the back. “If I ever lost that bow,” she would recall, “I’d sure catch cold.” “I don’t know what you call it,” she might say of her dancing, in a baby voice with a squeak, “but it sure feels good.”
Alice danced solo or with Bert, her male-impersonator sister. In photos, they look like a gangster and his moll. Alice might also team up with a fresh recruit, such as the teenaged Willie Bryant, whom the sisters discovered selling candy at the Grand Theatre in Chicago. By his own estimation, Bryant was an excellent tap dancer. “There was no step I saw I couldn’t do,” he later boasted. But his pride and joy was his nerve-control step, a protracted spasm. “Kids called it the Tommy Gun.” No more Rattlesnake jig or galloping horses: this was the twenties. When Bryant wasn’t outgunning Dillinger with his feet, the six-foot adolescent was partnering the three-foot Princess Wee Wee, the World’s Smallest Perfect Woman.
“A colored audience is our favorite,” Mabel Whitman told the Baltimore Afro-American in 1931. “For there we get full appreciation without grudge, and there is no such thing as a nasty little feeling that we are breaking in where we are not really wanted.” TOBA was where you could find Ginger Jack Wiggins, still challenging everyone as the World’s Greatest Buck Dancer. In the twenties at Atlanta’s 81 Theatre, the future comedian Nipsey Russell was stunned by Wiggins, “the first black man I ever saw in a good suit with great dignity and speaking good English.” TOBA was where you could find King Rastus Brown. The British-born vaudevillian Leslie Hope caught Brown’s act in Cleveland, the King pointing his cane as if it were a gun and shooting off nerve taps. (Hope built an act out of steps he learned from Brown, well before he switched to comedy, swapped the cane for a golf club, changed his first name to Bob, and conquered Middle America.) When Prince Spencer, a Toledo kid whose career as a tapper was just beginning, came upon Brown a few years later, the cane seemed the crutch of an old man. When someone in the audience complained about not being able to see Brown’s feet, the King made a remark that permanently altered Spencer’s conception of tap: “You don’t have to see my feet to enjoy my dancing. My dancing tells a story.” It was a story you could see or hear only on TOBA.
Of the strong hoofers who did make it into Broadway revues, most found little success outside of them. Others, revered within the tribe, such as Willie Covan, never got much press attention and never starred. Or if they were given top billing, like Eddie Rector, it was in shows that flopped. The headliners were comedians and singers, not mute tap dancers. Only one black tap dancer achieved the status of a star, and he didn’t debut on Broadway until 1928.
THE NEW LOW DOWN
That one exception was Bill Robinson. The vehicle was Blackbirds of 1928, another Lew Leslie revue. Late in the second act came a number called “Doin’ the New Low Down,” Robinson’s sole appearance. People who had seen his vaudeville act wouldn’t have noticed much that was new, yet the critical response was nearly unanimous: Robinson was the high spot. And the reviews he received were of a different order from the usual enthusiasm for fast and furious black dancers. His dancing was “extraordinarily beautiful.” His feet were instruments that conveyed “true esthetic emotion.” Reviewers saw the comedy in his pantomiming, but they also heard the wit in his rhythms. Fifty years old, he was no unknown, yet the outpouring of praise brought him an unprecedented level of prestige. It also may have saved the show, which ran for 518 performances, much longer than any of the other black musicals after Shuffle Along.
In 1930, Robinson starred in Brown Buddies, a musical comedy about blacks serving in the First World War. Again he did his stair dance, now flanked by chorus girls; again the reviewers asserted that he alone redeemed the show’s weak material, making the audience hold its breath with his “lullaby hoofing.” Critics remarked on how he watched his feet and chuckled at them, “as if he were talking to them gently and coaxing them to do the impossible.” His gaze guided the spectators’. His delight stoked theirs. His pantomime traded on an eccentric dancer’s sense of self-surprise, though Robinson could hardly have been startled by anything his feet said—the same steps, often on the same set of stairs. Much of his appeal came from a kind of standing still. Tap dancing was accelerating, growing more complex and athletic, whereas Robinson, wrote Brooks Atkinson, “reduced his act to its essentials.” Where other hoofers looked as if they were risking cardiac arrest, Bojangles never lost the crease in his pants. “Robinson was absolute tops in control,” recalled Pete Nugent, a hoofer who debuted around this time. “The toughest thing about imitating him is to get that perfect balance which seems so natural. He would never impress a novice.” And yet he did impress. “It’s really very simple,” Robert Benchley wrote in The New Yorker. “All you have to have is God-given genius and take your time.”
“There are hundreds of tap dancers,” explained a Times review of a program at the Palace, “but there is only one Bill Robinson.” Robinson’s dancing put him in a different class in other ways, too. By the middle of the thirties, he would be making $3,500 a week. In Harlem, he owned seven rooms in the prestigious Dunbar Apartments. His chauffeur drove a Duesenberg limousine. In 1934, a group of New York’s prominent white citizens elected him the unofficial “Mayor of Harlem,” but on his home turf, the title was superfluous. All of Harlem knew Uncle Bo. They knew that he didn’t smoke or drink but ate ice cream at every meal. They knew that he burned those calories by dancing and by running backward, a skill for which he held the Guinness World Record (8.2 seconds for 75 yards—a record that stood until 1977). They knew him as someone they could count on to buy a week’s groceries, to cover funeral costs or bail, to settle the doctor’s bill for a sick child or the back rent for an evicted family. They knew that he appeared in benefit performances almost as frequently as the paying kind—as many as four hundred a year, as many as six in one day.
His 1934 New Yorker profile noted that, along with a “gold-inlaid, pearl-handled, thirty-two-caliber revolver” given to him by the police of his Harlem precinct, Robinson carried a diamond-studded case in his upper right vest pocket containing a gold badge designating him Special Deputy Sheriff of New York County (an honorary position); that under the lapel of his coat, he wore another badge identifying him as Special Inspector of Motor Vehicles (another honorary position); and that in his left hip pocket, he carried a pistol permit and his credentials as Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska. He also carried documents establishing his friendship with the police chiefs of most major American cities, and he always made a point of performing at benefits for police widows and orphans. When he arrived in a new town, the first place he would visit would be the local police department.
During a Pittsburgh tryout of Brown Buddies, Robinson heard a scream and saw two black kids mugging an elderly white woman. He yelled, took up the chase, pulled out his revolver, and fired in the air. A white policeman, coming on the scene to find a black man discharging a gun, shot Robinson in the shoulder and let the muggers escape. Collapsed on the ground, Robinson showed the cop a letter of friendship from Pittsburgh’s chief of police, who later confirmed the relationship by visiting Robinson in the hospital. The victim of the mugging brought flowers. Robinson was famous enough that the incident made headlines across the country, and according to The Chicago Defender, the policeman offered the excuse that “all black men look alike to me.” At the New York opening of Brown Buddies two days later, Robinson was tapping again, his arm in a satin sling, his grin bright. The bullet must have been somewhere inside.
ANOTHER IMITATION DANCE
The most frequent charge lodged against the black shows of the twenties was the charge of imitation. Over and over, white critics rang variations on the same complaint: “another childlike imitation of dull white extravaganzas,” “aping the more ambitious and generally less endurable features of the Broadway extravaganza.” Look past the condescending adjective and the simian verb and note the nature of the disappointment. Of Lew Leslie’s Plantation Revue, the Times said, “There are places when, if you love the things these natural entertainers can do best, you wish they would not slavishly imitate the usual Broadway stuff.” The Chicago critic Ashton Stevens, a great admirer of Shuffle Along, described Sissle and Blake’s follow-up as seeming to “suffer from too much white man.” That meant “too much politeness … and not enough of the racy and razor-edged, too much ‘art’ and not enough Africa.”
Along with their new success, black artists such as Sissle and Blake found themselves in an old bind. After Shuffle Along, they felt they could write any show they wanted. “We were wrong,” Blake remembered. “People who went to a colored show—most people, not all people—expected only fast dancing and Negroid humor, and when they got something else they put it down.” Blacks were chided for stepping out of character. Reviewing Put and Take in 1921, Variety’s critic put it frankly: “Colored folks seemed to have set out to show the Whites that they are just as white as anybody. They may be as good but they’re different—and, in their entertainment at any rate, they should remain different—distinct—indigenous.” (Which part of Put and Take did that critic like? “The regular darkie business” of Maxie McCree’s tapping.)
The sharpest journalistic response came in the Chicago Defender column of the black actor and producer Salem Tutt Whitney. Sixty-four years old, with a career stretching back into the preceding century, Whitney had seen enough of the imitation charge. Deep Harlem, his Broadway show of 1929, had attempted to chronicle the progress of the Negro from African kingdoms through slavery to Harlem; most white critics called it pretentious with some good dancing, an attempt to “play the white man’s game” redeemed only when the performers “became themselves.” Tutt sneeringly explained that it was difficult for black performers “to be ourselves” when the average white person found the title characters of the popular radio show Amos ’n’ Andy—the minstrel-like creations of white actors—to be more authentically black than black people. Even more galling was the way that white performers would frequent black dance halls, pick up a few moves, then introduce them to white audiences as original creations—with the result that black performers later doing those same moves before white audiences became de facto imitators, people doing imitations of themselves. Whitney was complaining about stolen steps.
This was the other side of “It’s Getting Dark on Old Broadway.” Gilda Gray, who introduced that song about shimmying chocolate babies, was herself best known for her shoulder-shaking shimmy, which she claimed to have invented. Negroes had nothing to do with it, she insisted in 1927, even though the Shimmy and the Shake were ubiquitous in black juke joints and tent shows before she was born. Similar claims of white origination were made for the Charleston and for the Black Bottom, a slow, hip-swiveling dance with off-beat stamps that Ann Pennington brought into fashion in George White’s Scandals of 1926. According to the black songwriter Perry Bradford—whose “Black Bottom Dance,” referring both to a body part and the black section of Southern towns, came out in 1919—White bought the dance from Irving C. Miller after seeing it uptown in Miller’s show Dinah. A 1926 Times article credited White with the sole creation of that dance and the Charleston, too.
It’s hard to say whether Gilda Gray was lying or ignorant or just telling a very narrow truth. It’s also hard to imagine who believed her. The song she sang in the Follies teased with an open secret. The source of the “new” steps and rhythms was no more of a mystery than it had been in minstrel days. Indeed, the origin, barely disguised, provided much of the attraction. One 1930 magazine advertisement for Old Gold cigarettes equated its product with Marilyn Miller: just as Nature had blessed the musical comedy star with “a charm all her own,” so Nature was responsible for the better tobacco that made Old Golds popular. The illustration showed Miller in her childhood basement, getting her feet educated by “Grandmother’s kinky-haired old furnaceman.” Elsewhere, Miller told the press that her first teacher had been a colored boy who brought coal to her home. Either way, Nature had help.
For many, many white dancers, help came in the form of one particular colored boy: Clarence Edward Bradley. He was a kid from Harrisburg whose parents had died by the time he was fourteen. Looking for work, he ended up in a Harlem rooming house whose residents just happened to include a few dancers. As a boy, he had learned the time step from an uncle, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it on the left side and gave up. Now he progressed quickly, spurred by the other young hoofers who practiced with him and by the prospect of a job in a Harlem nightclub. He got one of those jobs, and then another in Lew Leslie’s Dixie to Broadway. In 1925, now going by the name Buddy Bradley, he met Billy Pierce, an enterprising black businessman who owned a one-room dance studio near Times Square. Pierce asked Bradley to put together a routine for Irene Delroy, a white client who was appearing in the Greenwich Village Follies. The number stopped the show, and the next morning at the Pierce studio there was a line of girls from the Follies looking for what Delroy had found. Pierce expanded his establishment, taking over a whole floor and hiring five assistants. Bradley worked twelve-hour days, shuttling back and forth between rooms. It was a rare week that the teenager pulled down less than a grand.
The Pierce studio merely made a formal business out of the kinds of transactions that were happening all the time: the black dancer Freddie Taylor teaches the Black Bottom to Ann Pennington and she buys him a car. The number that Bradley devised for Delroy was a Charleston with some strut and tap trimming. He had realized he would have to tailor to the ingenue’s limited abilities. This became his specialty: he cut down the tap to what his client could handle and padded with what he and his Harlem friends called “jive” dancing, stuff they considered corny because everybody they knew could do it. The Sugar Foot Strut, the Jungle Stomp, Harlem Hips, the Virginia Essence—Bradley didn’t invent the steps any more than W. C. Handy invented the blues, but they were novel enough to Broadway, not part of Ned Wayburn’s syllabus. (They were “marvelous, new, dirty steps” in the words of one of Bradley’s more successful pupils, Adele Astaire.) Bradley decided that girls doing tap looked awkward and required cute styling. Bill Robinson’s steps were simple, Bradley once explained, “but he made them look great.” That’s what counted.
Over the next four years, according to Bradley, there wasn’t a Broadway production that didn’t have one or more of his routines in it. Any attempt to substantiate that claim is complicated by the fact that Bradley’s name never appeared on programs. A publication such as The Dance might print photos of Bradley demonstrating low-down steps, but white dance directors got the credit for Bradley’s contributions to the stage, or there was some fiction about the number being of the star’s “own devising.”
In 1930, Charles B. Cochran, the British Ziegfeld, began hiring Bradley to choreograph his London revues. Bradley’s name went in the program, and Cochran paired him with the ballet choreographers George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, and Frederick Ashton. Bradley taught the British stars Jack Buchanan and Jessie Matthews, and he served as choreographer for Matthews’s films, such as the 1934 Evergreen, in which one can catch six seconds of the man himself Charlestoning with kids on the street. Evergreen also shows how good he could make a hardworking charmer like Matthews look. In show after show and film after film, as well as through his large and prosperous Soho school, Bradley exercised an influence on British theatrical dancing that was significant and prolonged. He stayed abroad for thirty-eight years before returning to the country that wouldn’t give him credit. In 1972, not long after his repatriation, he died little known.
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The increasingly ornate black productions competing with the Scandals and the Follies struck white critics as pretentious. Many of the sketches in the black revues were burlesques of white shows and performers, so the question rises again of how much imitation was mockery. But by the end of the decade, the imitation charge was as likely a complaint about stale blackface comedy, “a bad imitation of what was not a very good imitation in the first place.” One motif in the charge sounds reasonable—something like “play to your strengths.” To the extent that black performers adopted white performance practices, they became more ordinary. The white critics didn’t want blacks to conform to worn-out white conventions; they wanted blacks to do what blacks, in the opinion of the white critics, did best. Black critics, such as the young Caribbean-born intellectual Eric Walrond, could agree that the black revues, in following white models, did so “at the expense of a genuine negro spirit,” though that didn’t necessarily mean that Walrond agreed about what genuine Negro spirit was.
Pretty much everyone agreed about one thing: blacks could dance. A reviewer might disparage every other aspect of a show, but dancing was dependable. “Negro performers are dancers first of all,” generalized Brooks Atkinson in a review of Brown Buddies. Writing about the same production in The Washington Post, Robert Littell generalized further that dance was the one thing white folks would never succeed in imitating. Covering Dixie to Broadway, Heywood Broun had quipped, “When I see a Negro child two or three years old come out and dance a little better than anybody at the New Amsterdam or the Winter Garden”—where the Ziegfeld Follies and Earl Carroll’s Vanities played—“I grow fearful that there must be certain reservations in the theory of white supremacy.” But everyone conceded black superiority in this realm. “Regular darkie business” was “rhythm that’s born, not made.”
That last phrase, applied by a reviewer of Blackbirds of 1930, was what prompted Salem Tutt Whitney’s article. He protested the natural-born idea, recounting how none of the blacks he grew up among could dance and some of the whites could. In the 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois had coined the now-famous term “double-consciousness” to capture the Negro’s “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” the eyes of the white world. African-Americans, from Du Bois’s point of view, had a surfeit of self-consciousness. Yet what white critics, and probably the majority of white audiences, saw in black entertainers was a lack of self-consciousness—an effect that must have been in some measure genuine and in some measure cultivated. Lew Leslie understood one reason that the black performers he hired were more eager: “They learn to dance faster and smoother and easier and to sing more heartily,” he once explained to the press, “knowing they’ve got to be far better than white entertainers to overcome their handicap and get across to a white audience.” But then the same man could say that “they don’t know what sadness is” and that “they’d rather perform for nothing than work for money,” making merry “in their natural, never-serious way.” He also complained that Negroes wore out their shoes faster.
One of the most intriguing editorials on the imitation question came from John Martin, the first full-time dance critic hired by an American newspaper. “Negro dancing itself,” he claimed in a New York Times article in 1928, was “not benefiting from the experience.” For Martin, the problem had gone beyond imitation. “The Negro’s attempt to give white audiences what they choose to consider negro dancing” was, he wrote, “as far removed from the real thing as Tambo and Bones of the old minstrel tradition.” The real thing, Martin asserted, was based in relaxation, “not just physical but mental and even moral as well.” What was once “simple” and “naïve” had become “brazen, sophisticated and vulgar.” According to the Kentucky-born critic, “Dixie heritage” resided in the “laziness of the Southern negro,” and this was to be admired as “the ability to employ the minimum of muscular exertion in the performance of a physical action,” an ability that “dancers of the white race generally attain only by diligent effort, and in the vast majority of cases never attain at all.”
The negro has not yet proved for himself any claim to be regarded as a serious artist in his dancing. He seems not to care a whit for beauty of line or movement for its own sake. But in his grasp of relaxation and control lies a contribution to the art that is quite sufficient in itself, even if we omit the subject of rhythm of which he is obviously and admittedly a master.
How easily an insult could be converted into praise. How thin the line between illuminating generalization and damning stereotype. Martin was calling for blacks to behave as they used to. It was a plea for aesthetic conservatism that could sound socially reactionary. His diagnosis was not entirely negative. I’ll bet you can guess which dancer he singled out as an exception.
Two years earlier in The Nation, Mary Austin, known for her novels and essays about Native American life, had written that Bill Robinson restored for his audience “the primal freshness of their own lost rhythmic powers.” Though Robinson himself was apparently unaware, the buck and wing, Austin explained, was a dance for the increase of spiritual power, “the mysterious wokonda.” This “earth-medicine” is what Robinson was offering to his audience—“the gift of the Negro,” “the great desideratum of modern art, a clean, short cut to areas of enjoyment long closed to us by the accumulated rubbish of the cultural route.”
There was an idea in the air: blacks could save white America from itself, set it free. Black rhythms, black tap dancing. To Alain Locke, however, it was the black performer who was “in vaudeville chains” and needed to be unshackled. Locke was a Harvard graduate, the first black Rhodes scholar (in 1907), a professor with a PhD in philosophy. In his writings, he argued for the importance and influence of Negro music, particularly the “instinctive mastery of rhythm” stemming from a culture in which dancing was a natural and spontaneous activity. But Locke was even more worried than John Martin about commercial pressures, and he dreamed of black symphonies and ballets, not jazz and not tap, which he considered “a terrible hybrid.” “A Bojangles performance is excellent vaudeville,” he wrote in 1936, “but listen with closed eyes, and it becomes an almost symphonic composition of sounds. What the eye sees is the tawdry American convention; what the ear hears is the priceless African heritage.”
What was the heritage of black Americans? The gift, the contribution to modern art? What part of it was African? What part American? These questions lay at the heart of The New Negro—the anthology, edited by Locke and published in 1925, that announced a new phase in African-American culture. One name for this phase is the Harlem Renaissance. To Locke and many others, culture seemed to be the realm in which blacks could lay aside “the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization.”
The writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and the many books about them, would not have much to say about tap. But Bill Robinson, just about the only tap dancer who does rate mention by those writers, sounded a similar note in describing Blackbirds to The Chicago Defender. “A safe and sane advertisement for a better understanding of my people” was how he labeled a show that, like all of the Blackbirds revues, moved in historical progression from scenes set in Jungle Land and Dixie to scenes set in a Harlem gin mill; a show that had blackface comics cowering in graveyards and cheating at poker; a show bursting with jazz; a show that made a star of Bill Robinson. “To give our hearts and souls to the spirited impulses of joy that are our national heritage, that is our pride,” Robinson said. If separating priceless heritage from tawdry convention was the goal, black tap dancers would find themselves in an especially difficult position. Making people listen with closed eyes was not really an option.