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• Leonard "Hotfeet" Harper

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1899-1943
Birth Date: Apr 19, 1899
Death Date: Feb 10, 1943

Place of Birth: Birmingham, Alabama
Place of Death: New York, New York

Leonard Harper, dancer, choreographer, stage director, and producer who evolved a cabaret form of entertainment and pioneered the revue type of musical floor show in the 1920s and 1930s,started as so many black tap dancers had, as a child dancing to attract a crowd to the medicine show wagon. He received his formative theatrical training as a child dancer from the pioneering black producer George Freeman in medicine shows that toured the South in the early 1900s. These shows consisted of wild, quick, attention-getting variety acts like Chinese acrobatics and snake charmers, along with singers, dancers, and musicians. As a young man, he worked on the T.O.B.A. (Theater Owners Booking Association) circuit, and was the first colored act on the Shubert circuit of vaudeville, which was strictly stage theater, but with variety acts. Harper worked his way to New York City in 1915 but did not find enough work to stay there. In the early 1920s, he moved to Chicago, where he met Osceola Blanks, of the Blanks Sisters vaudeville team, and formed the popular song-and-dance team, Harper and Blanks; they married in 1923. Theirs was a classy dance act modeled on the exhibition ballroom dance craze sweeping white vaudeville. In Chicago, they got an offer to perform in the production of Plantation Days, the production of which gave Harper his initial ideas for staging night club cabaret revues. In Chicago, Plantation Days played at the Green Mills Gardens, where Harper and Blanks received raves for the number "Simply Full of Jazz," from the Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake 1921 musical, Shuffle Along. Following the close of the engagement, the show climaxed a record-breaking tour of larger Eastern and Midwestern cities, with a long run at the Empire Theater in London.

Upon a successful return from England, Harper was hired by George and Connie Immerman to produce shows for the black-and-tan uptown nightclub, Connie's Inn. There, he found freedom as a producer, drawing upon his experience from medicine shows and vaudeville to experiment with staging intimate cabaret entertainments. His stage shows were organized with impeccable taste and superb, jet-propelled theatricality. His monopolistic dominance as a creator of black floor shows for nearly every colored nightclub in New York City throughout the 1920s and 1930s was matchless. At the same time, he created cameo work, choreographing set pieces for such white Broadway revues as The Passing Show. Despite the fastidious coaching work with numerous white performers, and his overall brilliance as a choreographer, Harper never got a call from Hollywood that might have made him a film-directing star on the scale of a Busby Berkeley.

At Connie's Inn, Harper enlisted Bill "Bojangles" Robinson as a surprise guest in the audience. Harper performed as well, singing and dancing along with his high-kicking, high-yellow chorus line-- within which there was always one undetectable transvestite in the group. The entertainment was filled with such former snake charmers as Earl "Snakehips" Tucker, or the torso-twisting Jazz Lips Richardson, as well as ukelele numbers, and Spanish, Asian, and Hawaiian acts. Harper introduced "The Channel Crawl," a new dance for the black female swimming champion Izzy Ringold, who he featured in one of his shows. Harper's summer revue at Connie's Inn, "Hot Feet, featured "30 Beautiful Brownskins 30" and the Louis Armstrong and Orchestra, and promised "You'll Want to Dance." As early as 1923, Harper employed by Frank Schiffman, owner of the Lafayette Theater, to direct and choreograph plays. At the Hollywood Inn on Times Square in New York, Harper hired Duke Ellington, who had played background for The Kentucky Club Review with Fats Waller, who played a mini piano around his neck so he could be mobile and collect tips while walking within the audience.

Between 1920 and 1943, Harper produced some 2000 shows. In 1925, Harper was the first to put Josephine Baker in tails and top hat for the revue Tan Town Topics at the Plantation Club, a large-scale nightclub at Broadway and Fiftieth Street, over the Winter Garden Theater. When the Cotton Club first opened in 1926 in Harlem as the Club DeLuxe (bought by the former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who sold it in 1929 to a syndicate owned by Owny Madden), Harper directed the first uptown Cotton Club revue. He was instrumental in helping to establish the Cotton Club as the most prestigious showcase for black musical talent in New York. He was thereafter enlisted for every cabaret show of note, both white and black: Jimmie Cooper's Revue, Cotton Land, Creole Follies at the Ciro's Club, Texas Guinan's shows (with Ruby Keeler), Small's Paradise shows, Club Richman, Nest Club, Club Lido, Club Midnight, Elks Rendevous, Dan Cooney's Club, Ubangi Club, and the Grand Terrace Café. Harper's original signature on these musical revues was chorus of fast steppers and a show of colorful and variegated acts. At one time he had seven revues staged simultaneously with such musicians as Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway and Ethel Waters. In 1927 at the Lafayette Theater, Harper produced the Sundown Revue with Garland Howard; the tap dancer Leonard Reid was featured along with Madeline Belt. In Chicago at the Plantation Club, Harper's "Cotton Land" was advertised as "The Fastest Floor Show in Town."

The Hot Chocolates Revue, which opened at the Hudson Theater on Broadway in 1936, was the first-time collaboration of three African-American musical artists-- Harper as stage director, Fats Waller (with Harry Brooks) as musical composer; and Andy Razaf as lyricist. Louis Armstrong's solo in the show became one of the highlights of the show, but it was the dances that Harper staged dances for such tunes as "Ain't Misbehavin,'" "Rhythm Man", "That Snake Hip Dance," "That Jungle Jamboree," and "Waltz Divine" that summoned audiences.

In 1931 Harper directed the cabaret scenes in the black talkie, Death of the Blues, at the Grand Terrace in Chicago; it included tap dancer Leonard Reid, who called Harper "the best producer I ever knew, black or white." Also in 1931, Harper worked with black film pioneer Oscar Michaux to stage and choreograph the ensemble and cabaret scenes in what is considered the first African-American talkie, The Exile. Harper understood all too well that sexuality was marketable, and so he made sure that bodily rhythms of the female chorus dancers were designed to literally shake the screen and thus titillate, percussively, the viewer. He did this by transforming the physique of the female chorus line dancers into tambourines; the body movements of the dancers were synchronized with the up-tempo music to capture its force and compliment its tempo. Though women's bodies were commodified by the film, The Exile epitomized a splendid marriage of film and musical performance.

Harper's prodigious career as a dance director was amplified by his career as a dance instructor. An advertisement at the Billy Pierce Studio (at Suite 309 in the Navex Building at 223 West 46th Street, New York) boasted: "If It's Dancing You Want, We Have it: Leonard Harper System. Stage Dancing Taught. Latest New York Craze. Special. Charlestons and Black Bottoms, Buck and Wing, Eccentric, Tap, Knee Drops, Struts, Soft Shoe, and Waltz Clog; Chorus Work. Acts Staged-- Producer of Revues. Staged Hollywood Follies, now playing at Columbia Theatre. Fastest Dancing Chorus in New York." Harper Studios boasted such Broadway musical stars as Adele and Fred Astaire (Lady Be Good), Busby Berkeley dancers, and the Marx Brothers. The Apollo Theater in the 1930s advertised Harper's "Sixteen Lovely Harperettes"; "Sixteen Dancing Maids"; "Harper's Musical Rhythm Revue" with Erkstine Hawkins and the Alabama State Band, Bessie Smith, 3 Giants of Rhythm, The Phantom Steppers, and Brown and Brown, in a cast of sixty.

In1977, the playwright and director Ed Bullins wrote the musical Hot Feet, based on Harper's career, with musical song-and-dance numbers reconstructed from vintage Harper performance. A reading of the play was hosted by the New Federal Theater in 1998, directed by Woody King, Jr. Much of the material was painstakingly pulled together by Harper's grandson, Grant Harper Reid. In 1997, New York State Senator David A. Paterson honored Harper with a Proclamation for his exceptional contributions to arts and culture in Harlem.

[Sources: Frank Cullen, Florence Hackman, Donald McNeilly, Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America (2006); Grant Harper Reid, The New York Amsterdam News March 11-17, 1999; Grant Harper Reid, Leonard Harper Files sent to author; Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]