Nightclubs

From the 1920s to the ’40s, fans of tap could find their favourite dancers in a new venue, nightclubs, where—together with singers and bands—dancers became regular features. A single evening’s show could involve as many as 20 tap dancers—a featured solo dancer, a featured duo or trio act, and a chorus line. This formula was common across the nation in venues such as the Cotton Club (Harlem, New York City), the Plantation Club (Culver City, California), the Cocoanut Grove (Los Angeles), and Ciro’s (Hollywood). Many tap dance luminaries, including Ruby Keeler, the Nicholas Brothers, and Louis DaPron, began their careers in nightclubs.

Nightclubs and other live shows (vaudeville, Broadway) were segregated in the early years. The white circuit included such prestigious routes as the Orpheum Circuit and such acts as that of Fred and Adele Astaire. African American artists, however, generally relied on the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA), which booked Black entertainers in the “chitlin circuit” (venues that catered to Black audiences); TOBA nurtured such performers as Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant, creators of the Shim Sham Shimmy (c. 1927; the “national anthem of tap”), and the Whitman Sisters. The “Chop Suey circuit” of Chinese nightclubs—primarily in San Francisco and New York City—featured artists such as Toy and Wing (Dorothy Takahashi Toy and Paul Wing) and catered mainly to white tourists and military men and women.

With the help of a few open-minded booking agents, African American entertainers eventually broke the colour line by sheer determination and skill. Bill Robinson is credited with being the first African American solo entertainer to perform in big-time vaudeville shows. Others soon followed, and shows had begun to be integrated by the 1930s and ’40s, but not until the 1970s had performance opportunities noticeably improved.

Film

An entirely new arena for tap dancers opened up with the introduction of “talking” motion pictures. Although the technology for sound on film had been around for several years, it was not until The Jazz Singer (1927) that the public accepted this new medium. The advent of sound enabled entire acts of many popular vaudeville tap dancers to be captured on film. Some dancers who had been Broadway stars—including Bill Robinson, Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and Ginger Rogers—found a new stardom in Hollywood in the early 1930s. They extended the possibilities of tap once more by creating entirely new material specifically intended for film. The first tap dance numbers on film had been shot straight on, with little or no camera movement (early sound cameras were stationary until Dorothy Arzner created the “boom mike”). The early dance numbers also typically used cutaways from the dancers to actors or featured close-ups on the dancers’ faces or feet. Working closely with directors and cinematographers, Fred Astaire was the first major film dancer to insist that there be few, if any, cutaways and that the camera follow him, head to toe, throughout his numbers. He set the standard for how tap dance was shot during the next three decades.

In 1934 a young dancer, six-year-old Shirley Temple, took the film world by storm and became the country’s top box-office draw from 1935 to 1938. Between 1934 and 1940 she made 24 films and arguably did more for tap dance’s popularity than any single person in the dance’s history. Despite the Great Depression, enrollment soared at tap dance schools throughout the country.

From the 1930s to the early 1950s, musical films and stage shows served to distract the public from bleak social conditions brought on by events such as the Great Depression and World War II. Every major studio featured tap dancers: among others, MGM had Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen; Warner Brothers had Ruby Keeler and Gene Nelson; Twentieth Century-Fox had the Nicholas Brothers, Dan Dailey, and Betty Grable; and Universal Studios had Peggy Ryan and the Jivin’ Jacks and Jills. Ann Miller and Donald O’Connor worked for several studios. Outstanding tap dancers, such as Hermes Pan, Willie Covan, Louis DaPron, Miriam Nelson, Nick Castle, Buddy Bradley, and Henry LeTang, were hired to choreograph musical sequences.

Although Black artists of all types were prevented from starring in mainstream feature films during this time, many dancers nonetheless appeared as specialty acts in feature films, musical short subjects, and Soundies (three-minute black-and-white sound films that could be viewed on coin-operated 16-mm rear-projection machines called Panorams in restaurants, bars, and other public places). The artistry of a vast array of African American talent—among these Buck and Bubbles, Jeni LeGon, and Tip Tap and Toe—can be seen in three-minute celluloid flashes. Even the exceptional Asian American dance team Toy and Wing can be seen as a specialty act in Deviled Ham (1937).

Though vaudeville was on the wane by the mid-1930s and dead by the 1940s, tap dancers continued to be popular acts in nightclubs and musical shows. Paul Draper and Georgie Tapps were the first to popularize tap-dancing to classical music, and they performed at such glamorous nightclubs as Manhattan’s Rainbow Room. Throughout the Big Band era, tap dancers performed with well-known orchestras; Bunny Briggs, for example, danced with the bands of Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, and others, and Ralph Brown was featured with Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, among others.

The popularity of tap dancing began to decline in the 1950s. This change is often attributed to a series of events in the 1940s. In 1942 Agnes de Mille introduced narrative ballet into the Broadway show with Oklahoma!. Although in Rodeo (1942) she had also been the first to introduce tap dance into ballet, her billing as a “choreographer” and the false competition with ballet made tap seem “hokey” and passé. Another factor in the waning of tap dance was a dramatic drop in nightclub attendance, as men and women who had come home from service overseas concentrated on getting an education, starting careers, and raising families.