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Digging into the origins of 20th-century American tap dance

To be a tap historian is to be a sleuth. It is to revel, after days of painstaking research, in newly-found bits of information as if they were nuggets of gold. At the New York State Library in Albany, New York, I found the premiere date for Darktown Follies of 1914 (3 November 1913, Lafayette Theater), a date that had eluded tap historians for many years. At the State University of New York Library, where I viewed microfilms of the weekly issues of ten years’ worth of the Amsterdam News, I reconstructed a roster of tap dance acts that played the Harlem Opera House, Lafayette Theater, and Apollo Theater in the 1930s. At the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City (where I muffled laughter while watching reruns of The Jackie Gleason Show, with the June Taylor Dancers), I located the television specials in which John Bubbles, the “Father of Rhythm Tap,” had appeared. The New York Public Library and its staff, especially the newly created Gregory Hines Collection of American Tap Dance and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, were indispensible to my visual research.

Errol Hill, the renowned black theater historian and Caribbean scholar, and my uncle by marriage, first presented me with the plausibility of Afro-Irish fusions in tap dance by introducing me to Joseph Williams’s book Whence the Black Irish of Jamaica? (1932) and John Messenger’s 1975 article “Montseurrat: The Most Distinctly Irish Settlement in the New World.” Catherine Foley, in her archive of Irish Dance at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and the Irish dance historian John Cullinane, in his archive at the University of Cork, Ireland, offered me a galaxy of visual sources on the southern (Munster) style of Irish step dancing. The Lindy Hop historian Terry Monahan travelled with me to the Connemara region in Ireland to investigate the lesser-known sean nos (Old Style) step dancing, and continually connect me to the Irish roots of tap dance. The librarians in the Oak Bluffs Library, in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, offered me a rainbow of materials on the Irish in America.

I do not know what drove me to devote thousands of hours, ten years of my life, to digging into archives, squinting through microfiche, compiling lists, organizing materials, and coming to the sober realization that doing the work meant resigning to be alone, surrendering to silence, and dwelling in darkness. When I looked through the final installation of Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Performance on Stage, Film, and Media before its public release by the Music Division at the Library of Congress, I began to question my sanity.

What drove me to write a 20,000-word “Short History of Tap Dance,” compile 2800 performance records, and write 180 biographies of twentieth-century tap dancers? Was it growing up in the house of my grandparents in Astoria, Queens and learning early on that hard work would be the only means to survive in this world? Was it the ballet and tap dance classes my parents enrolled me in at age three to ensure I would speak English when enrolled in kindergarten? Whether it was to please my grandparents or to reassure my parents that I would do them proud, I remember always being an over-achiever; a friend calls mine an obsessive-compulsive disorder, characterized by uncontrollable, repetitive, ritualized behaviors you feel compelled to perform.

As a second-generation Greek-American girl born in the American tumult of the 1960s, and having “come of age” in the decade of the 1970s, immersed in the Anti-Vietnam War, Black Power, and Women’s Liberation movements, I felt a strong affinity with tap’s artistic tradition that could never be separated from its long history of hardship–from slavery to blackface minstrelsy, and to the favoring of the western canon of European traditions over the improvisatory African-American forms. An even more compelling reason to my attraction to tap dance was its rhythmic brilliance, musicality, eloquent footwork, and full-bodied expressiveness that made for the most sophisticated refinement of jazz as a percussive dance form.

It was not until 1970 that I returned to dance when, after graduating from University of Massachusetts with a Master’s degree in Rhetoric and Public Address, I moved to New York and found myself at the Alvin Ailey School of American Dance. On a dance scholarship, I studied ballet and modern dance, but gravitated to jazz dance. After studying with various members of the Copasetics, especially Charles “Cookie” Cook, and with Gregory Hines at the first By Word of Foot tap festival in 1980, I was transformed into a jazz tap dancer. I spent the next 20 years teaching, choreographing, performing, and writing about tap dance.

After earning a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, welcomed me in the fall of 2000 as a Visiting Five College Professor of Dance. They lauded my first book, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers and then proceeded to endow me with myriad forms of support for what I audaciously announced would me my magnum opus—a twentieth-century chronology and cultural history of tap dance in America. The book could not be written so quickly, as the nitty-gritty who-where-when-how of tap history had not been documented. There had been star-centered narratives of tap dance but no historiographies of detail and substance that would trace the arc of tap performance through the decades. Stephanie Willen Brown, the database librarian at Johnson Library at Hampshire College, designed a database that would comprise a chronology of tap dance in print and performance, film and video, festival and social history. I knew that to compile a chronology of twentieth-century tap performance, I needed to inclusive of the cultures rooted in modern tap dance, spanning African, Irish, Latin American, African American, and Afro-Caribbean dance forms and traditions, as well as women’s contributions. And so I consulted with the following personages and source materials that were absorbed into the Tap Chronology.

By 2005, I began to see how the database could serve as the basis upon which to write Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History. I began to see trends in venues for tap dance through the decades. For instance, the decade of the thirties had live stage performances of tap in Harlem, and a plethora of tap performances in Hollywood films. In the decade of the fifties, when tap dance declined in popularity on stage, the trend shifted to television. I continued to gather dozens of dance reviews and features I had written as a dance critic and transcribed dozens of interviews with tap dancers–one of the earliest, a 1991 telephone interview with Charles “Honi” Coles and Marion Coles. These led to biographies of tap dancers complete with birth and death dates and representational performances, with description of the rhythmic aesthetic of each tap dance artist. Women’s contributions include such tap soloists as Lotta (Mignon) Crabtree, Ada Overton Walker, Cora LaRedd, Eleanor Powell, Jeni LaGon, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and the rising number of high-and-low-heeled tap dancers who have contributed to making tap the most cutting-edge dance form on the national and international stage.

Tap dance is invisible in the scholarly canon because it continues to be characterized as a constantly-dying art form. Its sporadic uprising in popularity over the decades has come on the wings of nostalgia, with shows such as the 1971 revival of the 1925 musical No, No Nanette, directed by Busby Berkeley starring Ruby Keeler, and the spring 2016 revival of the 1921 musical Shuffle Along, directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Savion Glover. Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth- Century Chronology of Tap Dance Performance on Stage, Screen, and Media should aid in countering tap’s invisibility, and perhaps enlighten critics to the fact that tap dance it is alive and thriving, and continues to be the most cutting-edge dance form on the American stage, and most deserving of scholarly attention.

Featured image: “Tappity tap” by Abulic Monkey. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Recent Comments

  1. Jenna

    As a tap dancer of almost 14 years, I wanted to say thank you–I pored over and sourced much of your work throughout my academic career as I explored the history of my favorite dance form (in high school, my junior research project focused on tap’s multicultural roots; in college courses I delved into subjects like dance as an expression of black identity in the Harlem Renaissance). Tap is so underappreciated, its history interwoven with worldwide cultural trends, changes, climates over decades. Thanks for all your work–I agree that tap is alive and well. We just have to pass on the history as we do the steps!

  2. Thomas Waldkircher

    Dear Mrs Hall,

    I had the chance to read your biography of Cook “Cookie” Brown with help of your donation to the national library. I would like to write an article about this two dancers for wikipedia, and ask in this comment if you would agree if I use your article for wikipedia.

    I am looking forward to hear from you and would be very glad about that!

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