What the Eye Hears Read online

  He grew up in Kansas City, and when he first arrived in New York, around 1925, one of the first places he visited was a gambling den two doors down from Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre. A room in the back, furnished with a bench, an old upright piano, and a good floor, served as an informal rehearsal space for tap dancers—hoofers, in the parlance of the time. This was the Hoofers’ Club, a small space that would grow in memory into the epicenter of twentieth-century tap. Reed, a relentless debunker, would insist that more dancers came to gamble than to practice. Even so, he remembered, “There was always dancin’ going on, known dancers and unknown dancers”—so much dancing that the floor had to be replaced every six months or so. (As at Swing 46, tap would always rely on permissive property owners.)

  “All the dancers would hang out,” Reed recalled, “and they would trade ideas.” The scene resembled the trading sessions that Buster Brown would find in Baltimore, and the gatherings on the street corners of Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Omaha. But this was New York, Harlem in its heyday, where the most ambitious black dancers came to prove themselves. Reed learned his own specialty, the set of tap steps called “wings,” from a guy everyone called Piano. (“I don’t know his real name, and I don’t know if anyone ever did.”) Using the upright as a ballerina might use a barre, Piano would jump, and as he slowed his descent with his arms, he would fit in a flurry of ground-striking sounds before his weight settled. Take the piano away, and he couldn’t do a thing. Not all the dancers at the Hoofers’ Club were ready for the stage. But even those who weren’t contributed ideas. “He invented all sorts of things and we would do them”—figure out how to accomplish the feats unassisted. A guy like Piano stretched the conception of what was worth trying.

  That conception was stretched further when a known dancer came in, a master. Then the place went quiet, all eyes and ears fixed on the informal demonstration. Once the master was satisfied that he’d confirmed his mastery, he left, and only then did the younger dancers take to the floor and try to reconstruct what they had just witnessed. (“He did this.” “No, he did this.”) By such means, a solo likely improvised became set, duplicated, and distributed. Other aspiring kids around the country were memorizing the improvised solos of jazz musicians, captured on records and shipped all over, but very few of the tap dancers at the Hoofers’ Club, or anywhere else, would appear on records. Just a handful made it into films. Most of the time, dancers studied their betters and rivals live. They came to the theater in packs, soaking up as much as they could. Stealing took a sharp eye and an ear that could recognize and retain rhythms. A step was a rhythmic phrase and also the movements to make it: you had to catch both. Canny dancers frustrated stealing by changing their act frequently or, through improvisation, constantly.

  At the Hoofers’ Club, the exposure was at its most direct and intense. Dancers would vie for prominence in battles that might last for hours or even days. These matches were called cutting contests, carving contests—violent terms that suggest how fierce competition could get. Between bouts, a few experienced dancers might be willing to share their knowledge openly and break down steps for upstarts. One of those novices remembered King Rastus Brown, legendary and past his prime, not merely demonstrating a step but tracing its genealogy: the steps that came before it and the steps that branched off. Most masters, however, guarded their treasures closely. You had to be clever to pry anything out of them. John Bubbles, one of the greatest hoofers, became infamous for his espionage. Noticing a step he liked, Bubbles would shake his head sadly, informing the dancer that he’d missed a beat and had better try again. Taking the lure, the dancer would repeat the step, and Bubbles would say something like, “Now, that’s not what you did the first time,” which would prompt the dancer to repeat himself again and give Bubbles all he needed. “That reminds me of a step I used to do,” Bubbles would finally say, rendering the newly acquired step and topping it with variations. If the first part of his method was devious, the last part was crucial. It followed the lesson that King Rastus Brown taught: the variations made the step yours.

  Ralph Brown, a younger Hoofers’ Club member unrelated to King Rastus, put it this way: “You can take whatever you stole. Because you never learned the complete step anyway. You learned how to do part of it, so you take that part and put something else with it. Then you made your own step.”

  “That was affectionately called ‘stealing steps,’” Leonard Reed remembered, stressing the affection. “Everybody did it. That’s how you learned. You would do something, and you’d say to the other dancers, ‘You tryin’ to steal it? All right, do it!’ And they’d try it. Of course, when they did it, it was slightly different.”

  A challenge. An imitation. Something slightly different. Essentially, that’s how tap was handed down. It was, in this way, similar to the children’s game called Telephone or Operator or Pass-the-Whisper: kids confiding a phrase to each other that mutates as it travels from mouth to ear to mouth, until, through a mix of mishearing and invention, it becomes something new. So it was with the techniques, styles, and traditions of tap. Part of the change was accidental: someone misremembered a step or couldn’t do what the first guy had done. Part of it was inevitable: steps just come out different on different dancers. Much of the change was willed, dancers striving to stand out, to express their individuality through the tradition. Competition pushed technical advancement, yet restyling in a more general sense was valued and encouraged. Steal It and Change It was integral to a professional code, and a way of life.

  That code had rules. You could mimic somebody else’s moves, among other dancers, as a tribute, a witty allusion, or a jibe. But doing it in public, for pay—that was theft. As much as there were steps that everyone shared, a dancer’s specialties were part of his livelihood, distinctive goods he could offer employers and audiences. The packs of dancers in certain theaters were also inspectors, and if you tried to pass off someone else’s stuff as your own, they might stand up and call you out. You could be humiliated, ostracized, maybe even roughed up. The best defense was to claim variation and try to prove it. One-upmanship was the ladder to respect.

  And so if a cocky youngster was laughed out of the Hoofers’ Club, as John Bubbles was on his first visit (“You’re hurting the floor,” the experts told him), he went away and practiced hard. “One night I started practicing about eleven o’clock,” Bubbles remembered. “At three a.m. I took off my shoes and danced barefoot”—in consideration of his neighbors—“and around six a.m. I finished working out the step.” By the time the shamed dancer returned to the club, he would be prepared, “fortified,” in Bubbles’s words, “like a fellow with a double-barreled shotgun.” Then a relative old-timer like Toots Davis might be forced to swallow his laughter, saying, as one witness recalled, “I invented that step, but I never knew there were so many ways to do it.” When the transformation was thorough, credit was easily granted. When the something extra was less obvious, arguments could grow hot. Disputes were unavoidable, since private creations were continually entering the public domain. The truth was, as the highly original, influential, and now nearly forgotten hoofer Eddie Rector said, “You can’t copyright no steps.”

  Within black show business, however, the code basically held. Early newspaper reports announced the Hoofers’ Club as a membership organization with a board of directors, but this was likely no more than a front for illegal gaming and liquor. Most dancers would recall the club less formally, as just the room in which steps were traded. Still, a club’s a club. Anybody could walk in—anybody who was male, that is—but not everybody belonged. Some described tests and trials. For one, a would-be member danced to the clapping of everyone else. Instructed to remember that tempo, the aspirant was escorted out and walked around the block, distracted by street noises and the chatter of his guide. Meanwhile, inside the club, the remaining members held the groove until the pledge returned, preceded by his minder, who gave the signal to maintain the beat mentally. That silent meter the
recruit now had to match, synchronizing his dancing with the inaudible grid to demonstrate that he could keep time—could shelter it, like a flame.

  Being black wasn’t exactly a requirement, but for many reasons, almost no white dancers ever entered the Hoofers’ Club. Hal LeRoy was one of the few. He had learned the basics from a black kid in his hometown of Cincinnati and had stolen the rest from hoofers who passed through the local theater. “Maybe I didn’t do the exact step,” he remembered, “but more or less.” He practiced five, six hours a day. In 1931, his rubbery, rapid tapping and boy-next-door manner made him an overnight star on Broadway. It got him into many movies, mostly short ones. And it earned him the respect of many black dancers. John Bubbles noticed what LeRoy was doing with Bubbles’s steps, and he encouraged the kid with a gift of metal taps. According to LeRoy’s memory of visiting the Hoofers’ Club around 1931, the assembled members asked him to dance outside on a platform six feet off the ground. Some hoofers called out steps and watched; others, underneath the stage, listened. LeRoy passed the test and was appointed an honorary member. The hoofers awarded him a pin.

  It was one thing for a talented outsider to be invited—especially if, as in the case of LeRoy, the outsider’s sponsor was Bill Robinson, the most celebrated black tap dancer of all. This in itself was complicated, considering the mixed feelings that Harlem dancers harbored toward Robinson and his cozy relations with whites. Whatever LeRoy’s skills and personal appeal, his sudden fame and the unequal opportunities that his skin color afforded him could be cause for resentment. The taps that Bubbles gave him, the test, the pin—these all could have been tinged with irony and still have been genuine tokens of esteem. But it was another thing altogether for total outsiders to steal steps, or an entire act, then present that pilfered material in front of an audience that wouldn’t recognize the difference between original and copy, perhaps in a venue where the originator and his friends might not be welcome. That happened, too. In either case, and in the vast gray area between, the history of tap is a history of stolen steps.

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  ORIGINAL STEPS

  Leonard Reed could give an account of tap that went back some ninety years. It was only his version, but he lived it and was eager to tell. Any attempt to trace tap’s roots back much farther faces multiple obstacles. Drawings of dancers in action can capture a gesture, a pose, but can only imply motion. Written accounts are often imprecise, contradictory, and—particularly in the case of forms, such as tap, that develop largely below the notice of official recordkeepers—simply scarce. Historians of pre-twentieth-century dance (which is to say, pre-film) are forced to recycle a few descriptions, arrange them by date and location, surround them with speculation, and patch them together with mutable oral traditions wherever those traditions have been fixed by documentation. Tracking development requires much gap-leaping and guesswork.

  Consider the following story told by one James W. Smith about an event he witnessed while a slave in Texas just before the Civil War. By way of explaining how good and kind his master was, Smith spoke of how there was dancing on the plantation most Saturday nights, how his master built a platform for “jigging” contests, and how the colored folk came from miles around to compete. He spoke of a fellow slave, Tom, as “the jigginest fellow dat ever was.”

  Everyone round tried to get some body to best him. He could put de glass of water on his head and make his feet go like triphammers and sound like de snaredrum. He could whirl round and sich, all de movement from his hips down. Now it gits round that a fellow has been found to beat Tom and a contest am ’ranged for Saturday evenin’. There was a big crowd and money am bet, but master bets on Tom, of course.

  They starts jigging. Tom starts easy and a little faster and faster. The other fellow doin’ de same. Dey gits faster and faster, and dat crowd am a-yelling. Gosh! There am ’citement. They just keep a gwine. It look like Tom done found his match, but there’s one thing he ain’t done—he ain’t made a whirl. Now he does it. Everyone holds his breath, and the other fellow starts to make the whirl, but jus’ a spoonful of water sloughs out his cup, so Tom am the winner.

  If this isn’t tap, it sure sounds like an ancestor, a clear antecedent for cutting contests at the Hoofers’ Club. Tap dancing is a twentieth-century term, but the practice it labels is much older, at least as old as the United States. Like most of the testimony about slave dance given by slaves themselves, Smith’s account entered the historical record in the form of an interview conducted by members of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. In it, the seventy-seven-year-old Smith is remembering his very early childhood. He is talking to a representative of the government, most likely a white person, in the segregated South. The words on the page are that interviewer’s transcription of Smith’s dialect—what the interviewer thought he heard, and maybe what Smith thought the interviewer expected or wanted to hear.

  Caveats aside, what is happening in Smith’s story? This contest—was it the master’s idea or the slaves’? The glass on the head, the hip-down action, the feet behaving like “triphammers” and sounding like a snare drum up on a platform—where did these practices come from? Smith calls it all jigging, a word that seems to point to Ireland even as the lineage of the slaves points to Africa.

  Any attempt to answer these questions is made difficult not just by the scarcity and ambiguity of documentation, but by the concept of race. Classifying humans by a rough set of physical features assumed to indicate ancestry is a scientifically dubious practice, especially when the physical differences are taken to stand for innate differences of intellect, aptitude, morality, or human possibility, and are used to establish and justify immutable hierarchies. Neverthless, it must be acknowledged that the socially constructed idea of race has been enormously influential in shaping how people regard, and treat, one another. Because of race, the question of tap’s origins is always on the verge of becoming a property dispute, a question of who owns what. Or, as Leonard Reed would say, a question of who gets credit. The denials, evasions, rationalizations, and resentments of four centuries taint every fragment of evidence, and since indirection and dissimulation were essential defenses for blacks, nothing is necessarily as it seems.

  AFRICA, OR, AN ECHO OF THE DRUM

  What can we know of the dance that Africans might have brought with them and thus contributed to tap? If the West and Central African tribes from which the slaves were taken described their dancing in written form, then Western scholars haven’t discovered it; it seems that the dancing, along with music and stories, was the record. Just about the sole written voice is that of Olaudah Equiano, a slave who purchased his freedom and who, in his 1789 autobiography, claimed that in his Igbo childhood, dancing was part of every occasion, translating stories and events into varied movement. That’s about all he wrote on the subject, and so we have to rely upon accounts by European travelers and traders, filtered through their prejudices and likely miscomprehension, or we must extrapolate backward from scholarship on twentieth-century African dance, always keeping in mind how much could have changed in the interim.

  Nevertheless, it’s possible to venture generalizations across the slave-trading region. All accounts stress how very much the Africans danced. As the British trader Richard Jobson put it in 1623, “There is, without doubt, no other people on earth more naturally affected to the sound of musicke.” (This generalization was already long in the tooth. In his eleventh-century guide to buying slaves, Ibn Butlan said of African slaves that “dancing and beating time are engrained in their nature.”) Africans danced to celebrate victories and to mark seasonal cycles. They danced at weddings and at funerals. In some tribes, dance was part of the instruction given to youth during initiations, part of the education considered essential for adulthood. European observers marveled at the dancing of children so young they could barely stand: “One would be apt to say that they are born dancing, to see the exactness of their movements,” a visitor to Senegal wrote in 1753. Later scholars w
ould add that the aged danced, too, and that when they danced, they appeared young.

  The Europeans identified patterns: a call-and-response between performers and spectators, blurring the distinction; the arrangement of dancers in a ring, with individuals taking turns in the center and those on the circle’s edge clapping their hands in time. “With crooked knees and bended body they foot it nimbly,” Jobson wrote about Senegambian dancers in 1620, catching what could be called the default position of West African dance: knees bent, torso piked forward, butt out. The crooked knees help the body to bend, freeing the pelvis and making it easier for upper and lower halves to operate independently. Supple knees absorb shocks, steadying the gait of someone carrying a load on her head. The crouch emphasizes a connection with the earth that deepens with rising intensity: when the music heats up, the dancer gets down. A great dancer was said to have no bones. Bent knees produced and signified flexibility, a quality prized not only in dance.

  “The Negroes do not dance a step, but every member of their body, every joint, and even the head itself expresseth a different motion, always keeping time, let it never be so quick.” So wrote a French botanist about a Senegambian funeral dance in 1749, identifying a core feature of West African dance, “keeping time.” What struck the botanist as distinctive would continue to amaze Europeans—a rhythmic exactness, which, to have attracted such consistent attention, must have been very pronounced. Africans danced percussively. They beat their feet on the ground, but they also tied bells to their ankles and loaded their arms with bracelets, adornments that were noisemakers, rendering a dancer’s precision audible. Even body parts without ornaments—shoulder blades, necks—behaved as if they could be making sounds.