faces

Willie Covan was another black dancer who made it big in white Vaudeville. He started out tapping at a young age in Chicago and shortly thereafter, did a six year stint as a pick in the act, "Cosie Smith and her six pickaninnies." He achieved fame after winning an amateur dance contest in 1910 and in 1917 started a tap group named the Four Covans. Though they started out in the T.O.B.A. circuit, they proved very successful in white Vaudeville. In the early 1920's, Covan began a second act with a soft shoe dancer named Leonard Ruffin, and the two together displayed tap moves that stopped the show in both the Hippodrome and the Palace Theater.

Through the years, beginning with the cakewalk dancers and Thomas Dartmouth Rice, and continuing through the times of minstrel shows, Vaudeville, and Broadway, dozens upon dozens of tap dance geniuses have had their fifteen minutes or more of fame. Here are highlights of a few of those faces.

With the age of minstrelsy at a close and Vaudeville in its stead, famous tap dancers emerged in both black and white Vaudeville. In white Vaudeville around the late nineteenth century, Eddie Horan became known for his waltz clog and particularly for his use of a cane, which became a standard in tap dance. A little later, Irishmen Harry Kelly and John T. Kelly were the first to perform very fast tap steps. George M. Cohan, renowned not only for his musicals but for his tap antics of dancing up the sides of walls and kicking his feet high over his head, did the first professional parody of "Buck and Wing," a black style of fast tap. In the T.O.B.A. circuit, after greats such as King Rastus Brown and Eddie Rector was the famous John W. Bubbles. At age ten, Bubbles joined forces with pianist Ford Lee "Buck" Washington, forming one of black tapping's most well known song and dance team. In 1922, Bubbles went on to invent the "rhythm tap," which was syncopated yet casual tap dance performed at half the tempo than was standard.

Of the black tappers who broke free of Toby and into white Vaudeville, Bill Robinson was certainly the greatest. Mr. Bojangles began his career in entertainment when he was twelve in the minstrel show called The South Before the War. Touring with a mistrel show at young age, Bojangles was influenced by the white dancers who surrounded him. Later, he joined the T.O.B.A. where he achieved much success, and success followed him to Broadway. Bojangles immortalized the stair dance, was famous for his easy but controlled style of dancing, and in 1930, with the Broadway show Brown Buddies, became the first black dancer to star in his own show.

Family tap dancing acts, not just that of George M. Cohan, were also popular in the days of Vaudeville. Of them was the O'Conner Family, which started out as a circus family before adopting singing and dancing and moving to Vaudeville. An O'Conner boy, Donald, was the highly skilled tapper of the group, and he shone in Vaudeville around the late 1920's and early 1930's. The Five Kellys, Gene Kelly's family act which was modeled after the Seven Little Foys, were well-known in the 1920's as well. And of course, there were Adele and Fred Astaire, the brother and sister team of Vaudeville in the early 1900's. They were one of the major child acts of the times, though they did not reach the heights of fame instantly as some of the other tappers did. The one thing these family acts had in common, besides tapping, was that one of each of the groups left the stage later in their career for film. Donald O'Conner, Gene Kelly, and Fred Astaire all ended up in movie musicals, as did many other tapping greats and, eventually, as did stage tap dance's audience.

In the days of Minstrel Shows and George Primrose performed well-known white Essence dancers such as Dan Bryankt and Eddie Girard. Also famous in minstrelsy was Billy Kersands, a black man who was known for his act in whice he would dance Essence and take off vests upon vests to the song "Wait Till the Clouds Roll By." As far as women in Minstrel Shows go, Kitty O'Neill is regarded by many as one of the first great female performers. She was a sand dancer around the time of the Civil War; in other words, she danced with thin hard-soled shoes on sand sprinkled on the stage, a difficult feat that few could accomplish to the level that O'Neill reached.