Most tappers at the time danced on their toes, but Bubbles brought his heels down, adding rhythmic complexity and syncopation. Where Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was revered for his light, crystalline patter and perfected patterns, Bubbles had a more powerful, dynamic and spontaneous style. His influence had spread throughout the tap world. Before Gershwin came along, Bubbles had insured his ankles for $50,000. Gershwin also prompted Bubbles to use his famous feet to dance out the songs note by note.Ī lot was riding on those feet. For the rest of his career, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” was Bubbles’s unofficial theme song. He called him “my Bubbles.”īecause Bubbles was a self-taught dancer, didn’t read music and had no opera experience, Gershwin tutored his “unconventional protege” himself, playing piano in his apartment while Bubbles sat next to him and sang. Gershwin gave him the part no audition necessary. Harker, who teaches music history at Brigham Young University, takes his book’s title from the leading role Bubbles created in Gershwin’s 1935 all-Black opera “Porgy and Bess.” Sportin’ Life was the showstopping villain of that historic production: a dancing drug peddler who was dangerous and - true to Bubbles’s nature - irresistible. The film industry had a blind spot (more on that soon), but George Gershwin didn’t. That, and Bubbles’s brief scene in the all-Black “Cabin in the Sky,” was about all Hollywood wanted from him. In the 1937 feature film “Varsity Show,” starring Dick Powell and Priscilla Lane, Bubbles tap dances brilliantly (playing a janitor, no less), accompanied by his pianist partner Buck (né Ford Lee Washington). In the very few clips that exist, he’s a natural. They were chauffeured around London by the Prince of Wales himself, pre-abdication, after a command performance for Edward and his not-yet-wife Wallis Simpson.Įven by the racial confines of the day, Bubbles was movie material: tall, handsome, killer smile. The duo was featured on the world’s first television broadcast in 1936. For 36 years Bubbles was part of the song-and-dance team Buck and Bubbles, one of the longest-lasting partnerships in vaudeville history. “Sportin’ Life,” by Brian Harker, author of books on Louis Armstrong and jazz, is the first life history of this dance artist, an astonishing fact given his onetime renown. The scene buzzes with electricity and visual surprise. He is, by the way, also singing, cheekily, and flirting with the ladies at their tables, teasing them with little dips of his shoulders. He’s in perfect command of his body, a body that flies in different directions then snaps together so fast you might suspect there’s film trickery at work. Uncanny, though, is Bubbles’s crisp clarity and liquid ease. The tight turns, the coin-flip toss of his hat, the way he freezes his strut with head bowed, one knee bent: It’s familiar because you’ve seen the moves copied by Bob Fosse, James Brown and Michael Jackson. Wearing a bowler hat and twirling a cane, Bubbles, in the role of a rakish murderer named Domino Johnson, swans into a cabaret and unleashes a cyclone of spins, floating slides and crisp, sudden stops that are at once familiar and uncanny. Bubbles, an American Classic,” it also helps explain why this tap pioneer is virtually unknown today. According to the penetrating and revelatory new biography, “Sportin’ Life: John W. There’s a fascinating scene in the 1943 film “Stormy Weather” that, however brief, sums up the virtuosic brilliance of dancer John W. Bubbles from “Sportin’ Life” Photo: Oxford, Handout / via The Washington Post"
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