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  In 1938, they joined Irvin C. Miller’s Brownskin Models, an all-black revue that had been touring, in annual editions, for more than a decade. Along with its famed line of beauties, the show carried singers, comedians, and dancers, accompanied by a jazz band. Most cities had a few theaters that hosted such revues, often in combination with a movie, a new one passing through every week or so. It was with the Brownskin Models that Buster first visited the Deep South and first performed in a show blacks weren’t welcome to attend. Some theaters were blacks-only but would set aside a night for curious whites, and Buster would remember how the management sprayed the theater with disinfectant. Between the fear of contamination and the desire to be entertained was a space; black entertainers could squeeze in like a wedge. In the South, Buster became more aware of the peculiar role he had danced himself into. “They had certain places that the average black couldn’t go in, but we were allowed.” Performers were granted greater freedoms, and with them came greater exposure.

  Later in life, when someone asked Buster why he got into show business, he said it was because of the girls. He signed with the Brownskin Models before a salary had been discussed. The ladies were incentive enough. When he got one pregnant, he married her, right there in a theater. The family settled in Cleveland, but Buster had to get back on the road. Though his partner John had died in a boating accident, and Sammy had gone off on his own as “Clogging Campbell,” Buster continued the Speed Kings with Sylvester Luke and Emmet McClure, the brand name abiding through substitutions in the roster. It was this version of the Speed Kings that made it to Harlem, just in time to trade steps at the Hoofers’ Club before that legendary hangout closed for good. It was this version that played the Apollo Theater. In 1943, the group appeared in Something to Shout About, one of countless movie musicals that were then being cranked out. Buster’s part in the film’s big finish offers the only extant footage of him as a young dancer, ten seconds long. (The dog act gets four minutes.) He also landed a role in a “soundie,” a musical short made for coin-operated film jukeboxes. In it, he looks cute but doesn’t dance. There would be no Hollywood breaks for him. Only a very few black tap dancers made it into that club.

  The Second World War was ongoing, and though Buster wasn’t drafted, his partners were. It took him six months to work up new material, but he fit it into the same mold: soft shoe, rhythm dance, flash-dance finish. The main difference now was that he had to carry the act by himself, no rest. He met Ernest Cathy, better known as “Pippy,” and formed a duo called Brown and Beige. They appeared a few times on The Kate Smith Show, one of many television variety programs that were offering tap dancers occasional jobs. After five or six years, Buster began to tire of Pippy’s unreliability. The careers of many people Buster knew were hobbled by addiction to heroin, including that of his hero, Baby Laurence, whom Buster wasn’t alone in rating as the best tap dancer ever.

  Buster went single again, gravitating to Chicago and its thriving nightspots, such as the mob-owned Club DeLisa. “Money burned my pocket. I could be paid that night and three days later be broke.” He toured the country with the big bands of Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, and others. Buster didn’t realize it then, but he was witnessing an end. The turning point, as he later saw it, was the death, in 1949, of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the most famous black tap dancer of the time, the one with movie roles. “After that, everything just fell. Bang. No more jobs.” Venues closed. Tastes shifted. “By the time I got to the age when I could do some of the things I had rehearsed, show business was gone.”

  During the fifties and sixties, Buster worked for a record company, served as a clerk in a hotel, managed a restaurant, and cleaned office buildings. People would come to talk of these years as the time tap was dead, and many younger blacks were eager to relegate the dance to a shameful past, yet Buster and his friends never stopped dancing. He made sure to dance every day, if only to the record player at home. He and his pals would meet after work and convince bar owners to let them perform for free. From 1951 through the mid-eighties, the Copasetics, a fraternity of swing-era entertainers that Buster joined, put on an annual charity benefit attended by the Harlem elite. “You could dance,” Buster remembered. “You just couldn’t make any money dancing.”

  In 1966, touring European jazz festivals with a quartet of hoofing old-timers, Buster was surprised by standing ovations, proof that his art hadn’t lost its appeal when it fell out of fashion in his home country. “In New York, we were just dancers. In Europe, we were celebrities.” (Film exists of Buster dancing in Germany and France—about thirty seconds’ worth.) In 1968, he joined a tour of Africa sponsored by the State Department. The anti-Communist cultural-diplomacy effort found tap dancers valuable, images of American racial harmony to counter images of riots in the streets. The Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie hung gold medals on their necks, and in trading steps with Africans, they discovered evidence of shared roots that both sides greeted eagerly. While Buster was away, he missed out on the Tap Happening, when a group of hoofers of his vintage took over Monday nights in an off-Broadway theater and caused critics to exclaim, Where have these amazing artists been hiding? He toured South America with Cab Calloway and returned to the American South with the Ink Spots—“not the original Ink Spots. There were about eight or ten Ink Spot acts working everywhere.” Copying persisted while other seemingly never-changing facts of life did change. “The same people who had seemed to resent us before—looking at their wives—were kissing us.”

  When a generation emerged ready to appreciate tap more self-consciously as an art, Buster was well placed to take on the mantle of an old master, mentoring, teaching, receiving grants. He was perfect for revues resurrecting the past and for cameos in period films. His fun-loving manner and ancient jokes warmed tap documentaries, and he presided among the elders on Gregory Hines’s landmark Dance in America special on PBS in 1989. This stage of Buster’s career was recorded in hours upon hours of video. In the mid-nineties, when Hines and the national press anointed Savion Glover as the savior of tap, the twenty-something dancer included an homage to Buster in his Broadway show Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk and included Buster himself in concert tours. Never quite famous, Buster was now more widely known than he had ever been known before. In 2002, Oklahoma City University conferred upon him and seven other hoofers the honorary degree of Doctor of Performing Arts in American Dance. Tears filled his eyes as, standing in his cap and gown, he told those assembled that receiving the doctorate was “the biggest highlight in my life and the greatest feeling I’ve ever had.”

  Through it all, Buster never stopped dancing. He danced walking down the street, danced while drinking at the bar. He was as much a swing dancer as a hoofer, tiring out partners a quarter his age. At get-togethers in the eighties and nineties, he would sometimes nod off, and friends would gather around to watch the moving feet of the sleeping man, undoubtedly dreaming up some new step.

  * * *

  Such was Buster’s story, or part of it, his part in the larger story of tap. That larger story is what this book strives to tell. As Buster’s tale indicates in miniature, it is a story of several braided traditions, of dancers famous and forgotten, and of the times in which they lived. It is a story about the aesthetic and technical development of an art, and about America, and, unavoidably, about blacks and whites and the back-and-forth between them. Once the Swing 46 sessions had piqued my interest, I went looking for the past. I found it in libraries and on the Internet, but also in the homes of dancers, in photos on their walls, in video footage guarded like sacred relics and sometimes shared or traded, like steps. I found the past in the present: in dancers whose life experience spanned almost a century, but also in younger tappers to whom the tradition had been passed, body to body. Through them and through the historical record, I grew to know dancers I’d never meet, people who had died well before I was born and people who had lived just up to the moment before I started searching.

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; Again and again, I was made aware of my timing. For more than a year of Sundays at Swing 46, I tried to talk to Buster. Some weeks, I wouldn’t make it. Others, he would be too sick to attend. When we were both there, I’d ask him if he would like to talk, and he’d say, We’ll see. I knew he wasn’t very busy. Maybe he had reason to be suspicious of a white guy asking questions. Maybe he was just tired. I didn’t press him. I thought I had time. I didn’t have enough. In May 2002, ten days before his eighty-ninth birthday, Buster died. What I know of him, I know partly from Swing 46, but mostly from talking to other dancers, from interviews in tap newsletters, and from video footage. His death shouldn’t have come as a shock—Buster had been in and out of the hospital for years—yet it did shock me. As I was trying to understand the past, Buster’s death exposed for me the impermanence of the present. The man was gone, which was sad enough, but his departure made his art seem more ephemeral, too. Some part could be preserved on film, some smaller part in writing, but because the tradition out of which he came so stressed individual style, his dancing, it seemed, would die with him.

  Tap dancers had an answer for this. Over and over, I heard variations on the same idea. At Buster’s funeral, the tap dancer Jimmy Slyde told the crowd of mourners, “Buster didn’t leave, he left something for us.” Gregory Hines liked to say, about himself, that when he was dancing, you could see all the dancers who came before him. Then, as if to tell us whom to watch for, he would invoke their names—the men he grew up studying in the fifties as he stood in the wings of the Apollo Theater, the men who would show him a step or two in the back alley, those surrogate fathers and uncles in whom Hines, as a boy, imagined himself as a man. What he knew, he learned from them, including the idea that imitating them was not enough. “You can’t be a great artist by copying,” they told him. You watch and you listen and then you do it your own way. So young Hines observed his heroes carefully—“I could close my eyes and listen to them and know who is who.” And by paying close-enough attention, he discovered himself.

  The scene at Swing 46 was as different from the Apollo’s as the year 2000 was from 1950. And yet it wasn’t. “Do your own thing,” Buster would tell the young dancers. “Don’t copy me.” But also: “When you’re dancing, I’m dancing with you.” There was an idea in all of this—an idea about the relationship between the collective past and the individual artist—that was familiar to me from jazz history and from T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and from older sources Eliot was rephrasing. But at Swing 46, it was not just an idea. Frequently, near the end of a jam, Savion Glover would walk in. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Buster announced more than once, “here is the eleventh wonder of the world.” And this wonder of the world, hailed both in the press and among his peers as a genius, would kneel down and kiss Buster’s feet. As his skinny body bent over, the tap shoes half-tucked into the seat of his pants stood up like bunny ears. When Buster handed him the microphone, he mumbled, as if he had little to say. With his dreadlocks, his waistband several sizes too large, Glover seemed worlds away from Buster and the adult elegance that Buster had admired in Pops Whitman’s long pants and man’s suit. (“They look like they’re coming off digging ditches,” Buster once remarked of Glover and his friends.) Then Glover began to dance, and, just as frailty fell off Buster as he slipped into a groove, so would Glover’s reticence vanish as he drew inward in search of rhythms. Suddenly, he had a great deal to say, and he said it all intensely, squeezing Buster’s ease into a more compressed flow, trading the illusion of effortlessness for the illusion of raw force.

  If you knew the signs, you could sense dozens of dancers in Glover. And he had certainly taken their art and made it his own, reinterpreting the tradition so strongly that most tap dancers his age and younger seemed unable to do anything other than copy him. Imitating his power, if not his knowledge and subtlety, Glover’s followers beat the Swing 46 floor hard enough that the management had to keep replacing it. When Glover did steps that other dancers did, the fat burned away. Much of the time, he didn’t do steps at all—just rhythms, sounds. He would repeat one sequence over and over, dissatisfied, or skip from groove to groove with such frequency that it sometimes looked to me as if he were trying to evade the burden of his gift. Buster, watching the same process, once asked, “Do you think the devil’s out yet?” Glover would dance for two minutes or twenty, then abruptly walk off. He rarely paid attention to the audience. And still his phrases, like stray bullets, could pierce.

  Clearly, Glover was exceptional. Yet he wasn’t the only evidence of continuity. At the end of each jam, all the dancers would crowd the stage for the Shim Sham, a routine from the 1920s, designed to be easy enough for anybody to do. Buster meant no harm, but he always counted it off at his speed: fast. What ensued was a fine mess. Each dancer did it his or her own way, yet the group was held together, just barely, by routine and rhythm. Everyone stopped in the right places. Everyone made it to the ending—a tag rhythm that got stuck on somewhere along the line: Shave and a haircut, two bits! So corny, so American. Two bits make a quarter, a coin with a motto—E pluribus unum—and that two-bit vision was also part of the tradition. For almost as long as Buster had lived, people had been doing the Shim Sham, passing it down. The dance had spread across the country, and across the globe. All the tap dancers at Swing 46, different in so many other ways, had it in common.

  PART I

  FIRST STEPS

  Imitation is suicide.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Only an innovator knows how to borrow.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  “Dancing for Eels,” from New York As It Is, 1848

  1

  STEALING STEPS

  Whenever there’s a mixed bill of tappers, you can bet that all the dancers in the show will cram onstage at the end for the Shim Sham. Often the dancers in the audience will join in, too. Lingua franca and lowest common denominator, it’s the one routine that everybody knows, even if the versions they know aren’t exactly the same. Sixty years ago, when a top-rated TV program such as The Ed Sullivan Show might feature two tap acts in one episode, if the host decided, impromptu, to ask the acts to do a little something together, the dancers needed only a shared glance to break into the Shim Sham. A version without taps was even more common, a dance for performers who weren’t dancers.

  Where did it come from? Was it some folk tradition, its authorship shared by an anonymous collective? Or was it actually invented by someone? Up until his death in 2004, Leonard Reed claimed to have devised it; at the end of his life, when he was in his nineties, there were few people with firsthand knowledge left to contradict him. As Reed told the story, he and his partner, Willie Bryant, put together the Shim Sham in the late twenties when they were touring with the Whitman Sisters.

  “It was a simple thing to do for the finale,” Reed remembered. Willie Bryant told the jazz historian Marshall Stearns that the dance evolved from something called the Old Man Shuffle: “We used to do it at a very fast rhythm and it was a comedy dance.” They named their new routine the Goofus after a hillbilly song they set it to; later, they used “Turkey in the Straw.” There were four parts (an in-place shuffling, a crossover step, a side-to-side and in-and-out bit, and a twisting, hopping finish; one motif, the break, repeated at the ends of some steps and in the middle of others). They would teach audience members one part per night. If you wanted the whole thing, you had to keep coming back.

  Also performing with the Whitman Sisters was Jo Jones, who was soon fired. In New York, Jones joined up with Billie Yates, whom the Whitman Sisters had also let go. Along with a third dancer, Jones and Yates formed a tap trio called the Three Little Words, and at a Harlem nightclub they soon introduced a closing number with the catchy title of the Shim Sham. As Reed tells it, the number wasn’t new; it was a slowed-down Goofus. The nightclub may have been Connie’s Inn or Dickie Wells’s Theatrical Grill; the routine spread fast. “The whole club would join us, including the w
aiters,” recalled Jones, who informed Stearns that he had invented the dance. “For a while, people were doing the Shim Sham up and down Seventh Avenue all night long.” On Fridays, a spotlight would scan the audience, and whichever celebrity was caught in the beam was expected to do his or her own version.

  “I never got any money for saying I originated the Shim Sham,” Reed said. “If I were to get some money, then there’d be a fight. But I don’t care what they say. I know I did it.” He said this in an interview with a tap dancer in 1997, by which time he was being lauded as the creator of the routine, and few people remembered Billie Yates or Jo Jones. Twenty years earlier, while being interviewed for Redd Foxx’s Encyclopedia of Black Humor, Reed had offered a long list of his accomplishments as a producer, songwriter, and performer without including the Shim Sham. Among tap dancers, though, the routine was Reed’s number one claim to fame. In 2000, when he was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the New York Committee to Celebrate Tap Dance Day, all the dancers on the program gathered to join him for the inevitable Shim Sham. A few measures into the song, Reed stopped the band, stopped the show. “No, no, no,” he said. “You’re doing it wrong. It’s always been done wrong.” The problem was in the second step, where the dancers came in half a beat earlier than he wanted. Reed demonstrated how to do it his way and expected all of the performers to fall in line. Many had been doing the Shim Sham their own way for twenty, forty, sixty years. Some followed Reed’s command, some didn’t. Regardless, Reed had made his point, and he went on making it whenever he saw the Shim Sham performed. Reed’s Shim Sham is now official, though many dancers persist in whichever variation they learned first.

  When asked to account for the longevity of the dance, Reed gave a clear answer: “Simplicity.” But just as important is the answer he gave in frustration: the dance had always been done wrong. It was flexible enough to change while remaining itself. Reed couldn’t have been too aggrieved about credit, because he knew that he and Bryant had cobbled together the Shim Sham from popular steps of the day. In one of his last interviews, he admitted how he and his partner had lifted “excerpts” from the older dancers Jack Wiggins and King Rastus Brown, from “old films of kids shuffling their feet,” then “switched them around.” Reed understood the game. “I knew how to come up with an idea,” he said. “If I didn’t, I would steal an idea from somebody. I didn’t care who. I would steal it and change it around a bit. I watched everybody and I stole from everybody.”