Tap History (영문)

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History Of Tap

The roots of tap

So, what is tap dancing? Every dancer you ask will probably have a slightly different answer -- including me. It is more than just making sounds with your feet. It is about expressing yourself, percussively, with your feet and body. Making music. Making statements. Now, these qualities can be found in other forms of dance, but not in the way that tap dance expresses them.

The body as a drum

Two vital elements of tap, improvisation and rhythm, have their origin in West Africa. When African-born peoples were brought to the Caribbean and Americas to be enslaved, they retained some of their culture in creating dances such as the Chica, the Buzzard Lope, the Ring Shout, and the Juba, and in using drums as a form of communication. In 1739, in the Stono Insurrection, 20 slaves on a plantation in South Carolina attempted to escape by killing two guards and fleeing toward the Florida territory. They marched to the beat of two drums, signaling to other slaves to join them and killing whites who interfered, until they were stopped by the militia at Stono River. After that, however, laws were created preventing slaves from using drums. Without drums, slaves found ways to make rhythms with tambourines, bones, and "patting Juba," which was the use of the body as an instrument by hand clapping and body and thigh slapping (essentially, making the body a drum). Today this is called "hambone." Accompanying this body percussion with stomping on the ground (and later, wood surfaces) increased the range of multiple rhythms one person could create.

Mixing cultures

Living in relatively close proximity to each other had a lasting cultural effect on both black slaves and white plantation owners, as each was exposed for the first time to the other's culture. Talented slaves often played fiddle for dances and dance lessons held in masters' homes, where European dance forms, such as reels, were performed. Africans on slave ships were frequently made to dance as a way for their captors to check on their health. In these instances, one group became aware of the music and movement of the other. One place where these influences came together was on the stage.

Minstrelsy

In the early 1800s a phenomenon called minstrelsy was born. The minstrel show consisted of white men with blackened faces portraying blacks, or Negroes, on the stage. Claiming their work to be the result of careful study of the Negro, minstrel shows became popular by capitalizing on the ignorance of many white people toward blacks at that time. Most of these performers were English or Irish immigrants, and they brought their own musical and dance heritages to the stage. So, in addition to trying to perform dances they had seen slaves do, they might also perform the Jig from Ireland or the Lancashire Clog from England. One dance, the Essence of Old Virginia, was based on shuffling foot movements that blacks were observed doing on plantations, and this dance evolved into the Soft Shoe. By the late 1800s, black dancers were performing in minstrel shows, also in blackface, but they brought a more authentic representation of early African American dance to the stage and began to adapt the Jig and Clog to their rhythms. In fact, the term "jig" soon was used to identify any "Negro" dance.

Tap is born

Most minstrel companies had Southern names like "The Virginia Serenaders," but for the most part, their performers and audience members were Northerners. New York City was one of the main centers for minstrelsy troupes and home to the man many consider the first great tap dancer, William Henry Lane. Lane was born a free black man in Providence, R.I., and went into minstrelsy as a dancer. He wound up living in the Five Points district of lower Manhattan, in an area called Paradise Square, where free blacks and poor Irish lived. He picked up the Irish idiom of the jig and by 1845 was considered the greatest dancer of all, becoming the first black performer to get top billing over a white performer in a minstrel show. He became known as "Master Juba," and was revered for his combination of the fast footwork of the jig and African rhythms and beat. Descriptions of his dancing written during his day render something close to what we now think of as tap dance.

Musical influences

As tap evolved, it always went with the music of the time. The form developed and grew out of stage performances in minstrel shows and then vaudeville and nightclubs. Jazz composers wrote original compositions with tap in mind, and dancers and musicians fed off each other to push the limits of their art.

Getting jazzed up

The evolution of jazz played a large role in tap's development. Over the years, dancers started to use the rhythms and melodies of ragtime, blues, swing, big band music, and bebop; some tunes actually became associated with tap dance. The legendary Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was known for singing and dancing to the tune, "Doin' the New Low Down" in the 1920s. Swing and tap dancers thrived on the music of jazz great Count Basie and his orchestra, and that band's version of Neal Hefti's "Cute" became a standard still used by tap dancers today. (Right now, "Cute" is the signature dance number of my good friend, James "Buster" Brown.) One of the greatest jazz bands of the 1930s, Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra, often played an original number called "For Dancers Only," which was used for a tap chorus line routine. I myself recently learned that routine from ex-chorus dancer Marion Coles, a woman who at 83 years old is still kicking up her heels with a group of other former chorus dancers, The Silverbelles.

Ellington taps in

Some of America's great composers have written pieces for tap dancers. Duke Ellington, a musical genius in his own right, wrote one piece called "Bojangles" as a musical portrait of Bill Robinson. Ellington also performed a series of sacred music concerts, and in one he created a piece called "David Danced," based on the tune, "Come Sunday," for a tap dancer named Bunny Briggs. The name of the piece, "David Danced," is a reference to the Second Book of Samuel: "David danced before the Lord with all his might." This piece is a wonderful example of dance being used to communicate a sense of spirituality. In 1952 another composer, Morton Gould, wrote "Tap Dance Concerto," a work that has been danced by Paul Draper, Brenda Bufalino, and Fred Strickler. The difference in how these two pieces are danced is very interesting. Ellington's work, with its easy blues/jazz/spiritual feel, inspires improvisational tap to bring out the emotion of the piece, whereas Gould's work is more tightly structured musically and lends itself to a more choreographed approach from the tap dancer.

Dance, music, and creative synergy

Dancers and musicians also learn from each other. Baby Laurence (whom you'll learn more about in the third topic, The master dance innovators) worked with jazz pianist Art Tatum in the 1950s to try and duplicate with his feet what Tatum was doing on the piano. A dancer named Groundhog, who worked on and off from the 1920s to 1960s, said that drummer Max Roach showed him how to do interesting rhythm combinations with his feet, and Roach has said that he learned a lot just by listening to Groundhog's feet. Honi Coles, who with Cholly Atkins formed the team Coles and Atkins, supposedly had an ongoing debate with Roach as to who began bebop jazz. Honi said tap dancers did, while Max maintained it was drummers. They're probably both right! Tap dancers have danced to all kinds of music and the more types of music a dancer is aware of, the greater his or her range can be. This is especially important when it comes to improvisation. I often will dance without music, tapping out rhythms heard in my head, or tapping out popular melodies that I hope the audience might guess. Brenda Bufalino once said that she tells her tap students to not only learn the melodies of different tunes but also the words, so that they try to convey what the song is saying through dance.

The master dance innovators

There have been many well known tap dancers over the years who became famous on stage and film, including Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ruby Keeler, Ann Miller, and Eleanor Powell. There are also many famous actors and comedians who were good tap dancers, such as George Burns and Gracie Allen, James Cagney, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, and Milton Berle. In the days of vaudeville, you needed to know how to do many things in order to survive and, no matter what your specialty was, just about every vaudevillian learned some basic tap steps. In this section, I mention some of the many masters who helped shape tap dance.

King Rastus Brown and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

I've already told you about Master Juba, the first great jazz or tap dancer. The next name that frequently pops up as an "original" is King Rastus Brown, who was considered a great "buck" dancer. Buck dance is a basic blend of shuffle and tap, with the body being close to the floor moving from the hips down and the dancing flat-footed. The basic buck step evolved into the time step, which all tap dancers learn. Brown, who performed from the early 1900s to 1920s, was a master tap dancer who could do any kind of step and, as Eddie Rector once said, "keep it up forever." He could keep up his dazzling footwork for hours, standing up and sitting down, without repeating a step. A man who Brown often wanted to challenge on stage was Bill Robinson, who is considered by some to be the greatest tap dancer ever. Bojangles (Robinson) was known for executing clear, precise sounds in his tapping and bringing the dance up on its toes. When he danced he was very upright and light, in contrast to the more earthbound Rastus Brown. He also became known for doing a stair dance -- even though King Rastus Brown and others had done it before, it was Robinson who perfected it. Although he began dancing as a child, he did not become famous until he was 50, when he appeared in the show "Blackbirds of 1928." He later gained wider fame once he began making movies with Shirley Temple; he did a notable stair dance routine in one of their films, The Little Colonel. When Robinson died in 1949, a fraternal organization of dancers called The Copasetics was formed in his honor.

John Bubbles and rhythm tap

A man who brought a change to tap was John W. Bubbles. John teamed up with Ford Lee "Buck" Washington around 1915 to form the team Buck and Bubbles -- Buck played the piano, and Bubbles danced. Bubbles is considered the founder of rhythm tap. Before him, dancers tended to dance flat-footed or on their toes, but Bubbles introduced dropping the heel to add more flexibility in shifting rhythmic accents in tap. In rhythm tap, the toe is used like the treble and the heel is the bass, allowing for more combinations of steps and sounds.

Baby Laurence improvises modern tap

Laurence Donald Jackson, better known as "Baby" Laurence, picked up where Bubbles left off. Laurence was born in 1921 and was a singer until he started hanging out at the Hoofers Club in Harlem, where he turned to dancing. Baby was influenced by the new modern bebop jazz of the late 1940s and early '50s and listened to jazz greats such as Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie. He developed a rhythm tap style that captured the improvisations and variations he heard in that music, making him a "modern jazz" tap dancer. His swift alternation of the toe and heel, known as the Paddle and Roll (QuickTime), was a continuation of what John Bubbles had begun, and it enabled him to do all the close intricate rhythms and melodic lines of the jazz of his time.

Nowadays, Savion Glover is affecting the landscape of tap. But I'll talk about him in the next topic. There are many more greats -- the incredible Nicholas Brothers, the stylish Eddie Rector, the class act of Coles and Atkins, Alice Whitman of the Whitman Sisters, and others. Visit the Tap Dance Homepage site for more information on these folks.

The tap scene today

Tap is alive and well -- in fact, there seems to be a resurgence right now of tap. Some are calling this time the second tap renaissance, the first since the late 1960s and early '70s. But, you may ask, when did tap die out? Did it ever really die out?

The glory days

Older dancers I talk to say that it was relatively easy to get a gig tap dancing in a show, club, or tour until the early 1950s, when the work suddenly dried up. One theory, espoused by the late tap dancer Honi Coles, was that Agnes DeMille killed tap dance when she choreographed "Oklahoma." Until that show, many Broadway shows included tap performances, but DeMille incorporated choreography into the storyline. Hollywood musicals were at the end of their heyday, and even though Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly were still active they were appearing less frequently. Many tap dancers left the business and only danced occasionally for fun or on a rare performing job. But tap was still alive, though not as big as it had been before. Television was one outlet for tap -- Peg Leg Bates appeared many times on the Ed Sullivan Show, as did the Step Brothers. The June Taylor Dancers were part of the Jackie Gleason Show, and Arthur Duncan regularly tapped on the Lawrence Welk Show. Bands run by Lionel Hampton and Billy Eckstine regularly employed a tap dancer, and across the nation dance schools continued to teach tap.

The next generation

Tap came back in the 1960s. Hines, Hines & Dad (Gregory Hines and his brother Maurice with their father) appeared regularly on the "Tonight Show." Marshall Stearns (author of "Jazz Dance") brought a group of dancers called Old Time Hoofers to the Newport Jazz Festival of 1963, which inspired Leticia Jay to put together a 1969 show called "Tap Happening" in New York City. This last event in particular brought to the public's eye some fabulous dancers -- Bert Gibson, Tony White, Jerry Ames, Harold Cromer, and others -- who had not been widely seen for some time. By the 1970s, a number of women, many of whom had modern dance backgrounds, began to seek out these artists to learn tap. They created tap dance companies and began giving tap concerts, often with some of the great masters as guest stars. People such as Brenda Bufalino, Jane Goldberg, Anita Feldman, and Peggy Spina brought their own ideas to tap dance. During this period, Baby Laurence hosted a monthly tap jam at the now defunct Jazz Museum in Manhattan, and the Copasetics, the group of veteran tap dancers formed after Bill Robinson died, began performing. The Copasetics put on big, annual dances that always included a fabulous tap show, and annual Copasetics boat rides that were always fun (at least the ones that I attended were!).

Tapping into the 21st century

In the late 1970s, many dancers who had been in retirement went back to performing, drawn by new Broadway shows like "Bubblin' Brown Sugar" and opportunities offered to them from the new tap companies. Also, Broadway shows such as "Eubie," "Sophisticated Ladies," and "The Tap Dance Kid" were returning to tap and showcasing tappers like Gregory and Maurice Hines, Hinton Battle, Greg Burges, and a young Savion Glover. A grown, 26-year-old Savion Glover has adapted the modern rhythms of funk and hip-hop music to tap and promises to galvanize tap dance as we enter the 21st century. His feet do things that are amazing to see and hear, as he displayed in his Broadway show, Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk. Buster Brown told me that he hasn't seen anyone like Savion since Baby Laurence was dancing, and Gregory Hines calls him the Michael Jordan of tap. I had the opportunity to work with him for a few years on "Sesame Street," where I was a stage manager. I even got to play his teacher on camera, twice -- like I could teach him something!

So, tap is alive and well. There is even an official Tap Dance Day on May 25, Bill Robinson's birthday. Around the world, events are held on that date to celebrate. Current shows like Riverdance, Stomp, and Tap Dogs are making a worldwide impact, and tap jams are springing up all over. At a jam I attend every Sunday in New York City run by Buster Brown, you can see dancers ranging in age from 2 to 86 from Japan, Austria, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, and the United States all expressing the joy of being in a community of rhythm. Buster, who all us tappers consider an elder statesman of tap, is doing his best to make sure that everyone who is walking will be dancing!

By Hank Smith -- Performance artist, educator

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