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 thatās 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 āBojanglesā 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 ā which Iāll be real is probably contributing to people thinking itās old-fashioned and white, because itās easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)
Hereās Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather ā heās performing a variation of his famous āstair danceā in parts of this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM
Hereās probably the most widely famous version of the āstair danceā, from The Little Colonel:
Thereāve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years ā see, for example, everyoneās favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:
ā¦ but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and itās weird to me that people donāt know that.
Have a scene from Tap (1989).
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