I am gritting my teeth at the mere suggestion that tap is primarily associated with dainty white people.
Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.
Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.
The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)
Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM
Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:
There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:
… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.
Have a scene from Tap (1989).
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