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Patrick Sharpe

Kim Whittam

Ballet II

13 December 2016

History of Tap Dance

Tap Dance is perhaps the most typically American art form there is. Epitomizing the

ideal of the great American melting pot, tap dance was born out of the unlikely marriage of Irish

and West African culture. Traditional Irish dances and tunes collided with the complex rhythms

and vibrant syncopations of African music to form a uniquely American dance form. Thanks to

its diverse parentage, tap dance became a sort of double hybrid. First, a cultural hybrid of Irish

and African dance, and second, an artistic hybrid of dance and percussion. This striking new

dance soon gained popularity across the United States, enthralling audiences with the duality of

its visual aspect as dance and its auditory aspect as music. As the Harlem Renaissance writer

Alain LeRoy Locke put it, “Listen with closed eyes, and it becomes an almost symphonic

composition of sounds. What the eye sees is the tawdry American convention; what the ear hears

is the priceless African heritage.” Despite tap’s uniqueness, both as a manifestation of American

culture and as an art form, its popularity has waned since its glory days in the early 20th century.

This can be blamed in large part on its having been reduced to a medium for nostalgia, often

used only to evoke the jazzy 1920s or the showy movie-musicals of the 1930s. If tap is to

survive much longer, it needs to reassert itself as a living art form in its own right, and not

merely a hold-over from a bygone era.

There are two main theories about how and where tap dance emerged. The older and

most often cited theory posits that it evolved on plantations in the American South and the
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Caribbean. In the 17th century, Caribbean plantations relied heavily on African slave labor and

also, surprisingly, on unpaid Irish labor (Hill). Although the Irish workers are usually referred to

as indentured servants, they were treated very much like the African slaves. Living and working

together under British rule, Africans and Irishmen began to intermingle. Irish historian Leni

Sloan describes “Ibo men playing bodhrans and fiddles and Kerrymen learning to play jubi

drums, set dances becoming syncopated to African rhythms, Saturday night ceili dances turning

into full-blown voodoo rituals.” Historians believe that on the Caribbean island of Montserrat,

the Africans’ first European language was Gaelic Irish. To this day, Montserrat is the only place

outside of Ireland that celebrates St. Patrick’s Day as a public holiday. It is no wonder, then, that

this cultural exchange should give rise to a new Afro-Irish dance form. As Sloan writes, “For an

entire century, these two people are left out in the fields to hybridize and miscegenize and grow

something entirely new.”

In 1740, something happened that catapulted tap’s progression forward: the South

Carolina Slave Code was passed. Plantation owners, fearful of slave revolts, worried that slaves

could communicate across long distances using drums. To prevent this, they banned the use of

drums by slaves. In an attempt to preserve their traditions, slaves developed creative alternatives

to drumming, notably percussive footwork (Hill). Once syncopated African rhythms, dexterous

Irish footwork, and the percussive foot tapping that came out of the 1740 Slave Code had come

together, tap was well on its way to becoming the dance form we know today.

The second, and more recent, theory about tap’s origins proposes that it developed

primarily in the Five Points District of New York City, where a variety of ethnic groups,

including free African Americans and Irishmen, lived together in crowded urban housing. This

theory is tied to the story of William Henry Lane (1825-1852), often considered the “father of
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tap dance,” who grew up in the Five Points District. Lane is better known today as Master Juba,

after the juba dance, an early form of tap.

In the Five Points District in the 1840s, the dance hall was a common source of

entertainment. Irish and African American dancers would often dance together, learning from

each other and imitating one another’s steps (Frank). Master Juba was among the most

prominent of these dancers. In 1842, Charles Dickens witnessed one of his performances and

described Juba as “Dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs,

two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs.”

In addition to dancing in the Five Point District’s dance halls, Master Juba also entered

many dance competitions, even defeating the Irish-American John Diamond, who was the most

celebrated dancer of his day. After this great victory, Juba went on to tour as the only black

member of the Ethiopian Minstrels. Even though he was he was black and all the other dancers

were white, he was still made to perform in black face (Blumberg and Yalzadeh).

After its early beginnings in the South, the Five Point District of New York City, or

perhaps both, tap dance gained popularity as it traveled the country with touring minstrel shows,

which reached their greatest popularity between 1850 and 1870 (Frank). As the dance

progressed, so did the shoes. At first dancers used wooden clogs. In 1902, choreographer Ned

Wayburn coined the term “Tap and Step dance” in his musical comedy Minstrel Misses, which

featured chorus girls in hard split wooden soles (Holmes). It wasn’t until around 1920, when

metal taps were screwed onto shoe soles at the toe and at the heel, that tap dance as we know it

today was born.

After the invention of metal taps, tap dance was everywhere. According to the producer

Leonard Reed, throughout the 1920s “there wasn’t a show that didn’t feature tap dancing. If you
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couldn’t dance, you couldn’t get a job!” (Frank). One of the main reasons tap dance experienced

such great popularity was that it found the perfect musical accompaniment: jazz. But it can’t

really be said that jazz made tap popular, because in a sense it was tap dance itself that gave rise

to jazz. Tap historian Rusty Frank writes that “tap dancers influenced the evolution of popular

American music in the early to mid-20th century; drummers in particular drew ideas as well as

inspiration from the dancers’ rhythmic patterns and innovations.” He adds that “Early recordings

of tap dancers demonstrate that their syncopations were actually years ahead of the rhythms in

popular music.”

The Golden Age of tap lasted through the 1920s and then on into the ‘30s, as dancers

such as Fred Astaire and Shirley Temple brought tap to the silver screen. Even during the Great

Depression, enrollment at tap schools soared throughout the country (Frank). Beginning in the

1940s, however, tap slowly began to decline. This decline can be attributed in part to the

introduction of narrative ballet into the Broadway show, beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943.

Oklahoma!’s choreographer, Agnes de Mille, is sometimes referred to as “the Woman Who

Killed Tap” (Acocella). In addition to this change on Broadway, there was also a change in the

night clubs where tap had enjoyed much of its popularity. After World War II, young men and

women were more concerned with starting their careers and raising families than with going to

night clubs (Frank). On top of that, the increasing spread of television enabled people to find

entertainment in the comfort of their own living rooms, without paying to see live performers in

night clubs (Acocella).

After a multi-decade hiatus from national prominence, tap experienced a gradual revival

beginning in the 1980s. This resurgence can be attributed to a number of factors. In part, tap

was resuscitated thanks to an effort to create tap festivals and workshops which introduced a new
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generation of students to the old tap masters. But perhaps the biggest factor in tap’s revival was

the emergence of tap dancer Gregory Hines. Before Hines, tap had been largely limited to

nostalgic imitations of dances from tap’s Golden Age in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Hines’s strong,

masculine style and preference for energetic modern music brought tap into the modern era.

Frank writes, “In the film Tap (1989), he updated the image of tap and brought a new style of tap

dancing to the public.”

More recently, tap prodigy Savion Glover has also brought something modern and

cutting edge to tap. At the age of ten, Glover starred in The Tap Dance Kid (1984) on

Broadway; he later won a Tony Award for his choreography in Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da

Funk (1996). Known for his incredibly fast and precise footwork, Glover is “certainly the most

accomplished tap technician living—probably the most accomplished who ever lived,” according

to Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker.

Today, however, tap dance is too often reduced to nostalgia, always evoking a bygone

era. Most of the Broadway musicals that showcase tap today use it either to recall the ‘20s and

‘30s, or to spoof the musical theatre genre. Shuffle Along (2016) featured tap, but it was an

adaptation of a 1921 musical. 42nd Street (2001) and Anything Goes (2011), recently revived on

Broadway, are tap shows—but one is set in the 1930s, and the other was written in the 1930s.

Something Rotten! (2015) features tap prominently, but primarily to parody the musical theatre

genre. None of these shows uses tap dance for its own sake, as it might use jazz, ballet, or hip-

hop. Joan Acocella warns that “This is a road that tap cannot go down forever. It makes the art

too inverted, too limited, and it offers too few jobs.”

In order to stay vibrant, tap needs to reassert itself as an art form in its own right. We

need more dancers like Gregory Hines and Savion Glover who can make it relevant to modern
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music and culture. Tap dance was once at the forefront of the artistic world, creating innovative

rhythms and syncopations that were years ahead of the music industry. There is no reason that it

cannot be at the cutting edge of dance and music again. The tap shoe is an ideal rhythm-making

machine. It allows rhythm to flow seamlessly out of the dancer’s feet, responding to the slightest

shift of weight, the slightest flick of the foot. We must not allow this innovative musical

instrument to be relegated to the past, when it still has so much to offer the world, so much

“untapped” potential.
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Works Cited

Acocella, Joan. "Up from the Hold." The New Yorker. 24 Nov. 2015. Web. Dec. 2016.

Blumberg, Naomi, and Ida Yalzadeh. "Master Juba." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia

Britannica, Inc., 18 Feb. 2016. Web. Dec. 2016.

Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy: And American Notes for General Circulation. Boston:

Houghton, Osgood, 1880.

Frank, Rusty. "Tap Dance." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 23 Apr.

2009. Web. Dec. 2016.

Hill, Constance Vali. Tap Dance in America: A Very Short History. New York Public Library.

Web. Dec. 2016.

Holmes, Vance. "All About Tap Dance." TheatreDance.com. Web. Dec. 2016.

Locke, Alain. The Negro and His Music. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education,

1936.

Sloan, Leni. "Irish Mornings and African Days on the Old Minstrel Stage," Callahan's Irish

Quarterly, No. 2 (Spring, 1982): 50-53.