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• Leonard Reed

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1907-2004
Birth Date: Jan 7, 1907
Death Date: Apr 5, 2004

Place of Birth: Lightning Creek, Oklahoma
Place of Death: West Covina, California

Leonard Reed, multitalented dancer, performer, producer, and songwriter whose career ran the gamut in show business, and one of the choreographers of the Shim Sham Shimmy, was born on an Indian reservation in Lightning Creek, Oklahoma. His father was white and his mother was half Choctaw Cherokee and half black. While all his life, he detested the term "African American" and treated racial division with disdain, he passed for "white" when it suited him. After his father abandoned him and his mother died when he was two, Reed was taken into the care of friends but not well-taken care of. He ran away to Kansas City where, after repeated truancies from school, was taken in by a school principal, Hugh Oliver Cook at Lincoln High School, who saw to it that he would get a decent education. There, he liked the schoolyard more than the classroom where, watching classmates dancing the Charleston, he became a dancer. "Everyone was clapping and doing the Charleston with no music," Reed recalled. Reed told the story that around 1923 or 1924, he won a Charleston contest at the old Orpheum Theater in Kansas City. When the organizers of the contest realized he was not white, they decided not to pay him the prize and instead brought in the strong-arm guys. Reed grabbed the prize money from the drawer and took off. The contest officials yelled "Catch the nigger!" and people started running, to do just that. Because Reed was light-skinned, he also started yelling, "Catch that nigger!" and most of the people who were running assumed they were trying to help Reed. They asked, "Which nigger?" and Reed replied, "The one that got my money!" Once he got out of the theater, Reed headed for the train yard and hopped on a freight train; he stayed out of town three days before returning.

After winning several Charleston contests, one of Reed's first jobs was working in a carnival, dancing the Charleston to tambourine accompaniment on a platform outside a tent show. In 1925 he also got a job in the show called Hits and Bits of 1925, produced by Travis Tucker, which toured the black vaudeville TOBA circuit in more than forty-five theaters throughout the South and Southwest. It was at the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore that Reed was on the same bill as the Nicholas Kids-- eleven-year-old Fayard Nicholas and his five-year-old sister Dorothy Bernice Nicholas. The act not only included Fayard and Dorothy but also five-year-old Harold, with parents Viola and Ulysses Nicholas accompanying them in the pit orchestra. "I don't recall how good or bad they were," said Reed. "All I know is they stopped the show, and my partner and I couldn't get on . . . we had to wait. They were applauding for the Nicholas Kids, and then they brought out Harold, who could hardly walk, to do the encore. And that just made it worse. When we did get on, they were still applauding"

Reed's style of dancing at the time combined the Charleston with shuffles and struts, twists and grinds, hops, and flat-footed buck dancing. He performed it with several partners, among them Willie Bryant, who he teamed with in the late twenties in an act they called "Reed and Bryant-- Brains as Well as Feet." The team toured with the Whitman Sisters, playing theaters on the black vaudeville TOBA circuit as well as a number of black-owned, independently run theaters in the Northeast, like the Royal Theater in Baltimore and the Standard Theater in Philadelphia.

After seeing Reed perform at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia, the teenaged Fayard Nicholas became most impressed, exclaiming Reed as the first great influence on him as a dancer. "It was a classy act," said Nicholas about Reed and Bryant. "They dressed well and moved with style and grace. They wore dapper suits for the afternoon performance, beautifully tailored suits for the dinner show, and classic top hat, white tie, and tails for the evening show." Their act opened with a smooth and speedy tap dance, moved to a languid soft-shoe, and finished with Goofus, or the Shim Sham Shimmy, a one-chorus routine to a thirty-two-bar tune with eight bars each of the double shuffle, crossover, and up-and-back shuffle called tack-Annie, and Falling Off a Log.

The Shim Sham Shimmy routine originated when Reed was touring with the Whitman Sisters, with its large chorus of female dancers. In its simplicity and scope, the Shim Sham was adopted by audiences, dancers and even entire swing bands. Reed continued to teach the details of the routine throughout his life, intent of correcting the "error" leading into the second step that most dancers made when dancing the Shim Sham-- the step needed to begin on the downbeat. (In the final weeks of his life, Reed was planning to film another installment on teaching the Shim Sham titled "Leonard Reed's Revenge of the Shim Sham.") When Nat "King" Cole challenged Mel Torme to a dance contest on his 1950s television show, they danced the Shim Sham. As lindy hopper Norma Miller remarked, "You're not a jazz dancer if you don't know the Shim Sham."

After Reed and Bryant broke up in 1928, Reed went to New York where he met Maceo Ellis, a comic tap dancer. They teamed up and became known as Cutout and Leonard, their first job playing Harlem's Lincoln Theater with blues singer Mamie Smith. With the tap Charleston hitting the New York scene in the mid-twenties, Reed decided to become a tap dancer. He frequented the Hoofers' Club (located in the basement two doors down from the Lafayette Theater, on Seventh Avenue between 131st and 132nd streets), a kind a fraternity of novice and experienced tap dancers who me to trade, improvise and steal each other's steps. Maceo Anderson of the Step Brothers recalled meeting Reed there. "We had a ball together. Leonard could really dance. He was tall and covered a lot of space, a lot like Honi Coles. Leonard taught me the fast time step, the traveling time step, the cross step, and Eddie Rector's "Bambalina." He always tried to help young dancers. He was always friendly to everyone and was a great dancer."

In 1928 in Chicago, Reed produced Rhythm Bound, which toured the country; by 1933 he produced a second version of the show at the Roosevelt Theater in Pittsburgh. When Frank Schiffman from the Harlem Opera House (later the owner of the Apollo Theater) saw the show he decided to bring it to New York. Stock performances followed in Baltimore and Detroit, where Reed met heavyweight-boxing champion Joe Louis, also known as the "Brown Bomber." They would develop a lasting friendship that would include a Professional Golf Association tour and a touring nightclub act in which Louis played straight man to Reed's comic wit. Through Louis, Reed met many important people, among them Joe Glazer, who managed Pearl Bailey and Billy Holiday. When Glazer told Reed that the Cotton Club in New York was looking for a producer, Reed applied for and got the job. In 1937 Reed staged and gathered much of the dancing talent for the third edition of the downtown Cotton Club Parade, titled "Tall, Tan and Terrific." The show which headlined the Nicholas Brothers also included Tip, Tap, and Toe, the Chocolateers, Dynamite Hooker (an eccentric dancer who vibrated his body while dancing at frenetic speed), George "Shorty" Snowden and his Lindy Hoppers, Cuban rhumba dancers Pete and Company, and Cooch dancer Tondelayo. One number, the "Bill Robinson Walk," featured Harold Nicholas doing an outstanding "Bojangles" impression. The show was described journalist Ed Sullivan as "The most elegant colored show Broadway has ever applauded" and was praised by Variety for its "frenzied . . . fast-dancing pace," but slighted for being "overboard on hoofing."

The next year, Leonard produced a show at the Grand Terrace Club in Chicago with Ella Fitzgerald and the Earl Hines and Fletcher Henderson bands. In 1939 Reed staged a show in St. Louis at The Plantation and the Zombie Club in Detroit with "Peg Leg" Bates, Pearl Bailey, and Billie Holiday. A year later at the Hollywood Casino, he produced a show featuring Noble Sissle and Benny Carter. During the war, he produced shows at Shepp's Playhouse. "I kept Sammy Davis' dad and uncle, Will Maston, in the show while Sammy was in the Army. When Sammy got out, they resumed their act," Reed recalled. He also produced shows for Dinah Washington, Baby Laurence, (Redd) Foxx and White, Joe Louis, and Ralph Brown.

In 1951, Reed, who was an excellent golfer, managed to secure membership to the hitherto all-white Professional Golf Association in San Diego as a result of the "confusion" about his racial heritage. When Joe Louis tried to register in a PGA tournament in San Diego, he was turned down. The story was given to the influential newspaper columnist, Walter Winchell. As Reed recalled, "PGA officials held a meeting and Joe Louis became the first black golfer to play in a PGA tournament." Reed them formed a comedy act with the heavyweight boxing champion, making Louis the straight man in the routine that appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. From 1953 to 1960 Reed was the production manager of the Apollo Theater where he produced such tap dance acts as Little Buck, Teddy Hale, Bill Bailey, and Coles and Atkins, and gave many stars, including James Brown, their first chance. Reed also wrote songs that were recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Chick Webb, and Lionel Hampton and he discovered, and launched, the career of Dinah Washington. He also piloted the Apollo through its transition from jazz tap dance and swing bands into comedy acts and rock ‘n' roll, and was the first to put the Apollo on national television. He would go on stage and ask, "Is everyone enjoying themselves?" From the balcony came the response, "It's none of your god-damned business-- get on with the show!" A sign that the culture was changing, Reed never again underestimated an audience. By the end of the 1950s, tired of the endless doo-wop groups performing at the Apollo, he "retired" with his wife Barbara to California.

Over the years passed, Reed has enjoyed increasing recognition. In 2000 he received the Living Treasure in American Dance Award from the Oklahoma City University School of American Dance and Arts Management and an Honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from Oklahoma City University. Across 70 years of entertainment, Reed covered everything from horse-drawn medicine shows to managing New York's Apollo Theatre in Harlem, Reed's mischievous spirit never left him. At the New York International Tap Dance Celebration in 2000, Dr. Reed chose the moment of his acknowledgment to correct a mistake in the way the Shim Sham had been danced since the 1930s. Out of the massed ranks of New York's tap fraternity he picked the doyen of rhythm tap dancers, Savion Glover, to make the correction. The audience howled with delight as Reed pretended to treat Savion as a rank beginner. "Anyone and everyone was an audience for Reed," wrote Terry Monahan. "He gave each person in it his best."

[References: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Rusty Frank, Tap!: the greatest tap dance stars and their stories 1900-1955 (1990); Constance Valis Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm : The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000); Melba Huber, "Leonard Reed's Shim Sham: The Original Version," International Tap Association Newsletter (July/August 2004); Variety (29 September 1937); Terry Monahan, "Obituary: Leonard Reed," The Guardian (May 27, 2004)]