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Tip, Tap, and Toe [biography]
Tip, Tap, and Toe, the acrobatic-tap act organized in the late 1920s that set the pace for comedy tap acts for decades, included original members Sammy Green, Teddy Frazier, and Raymond Winfield. For a short time, the much-admired Freddie James joined the group, as well as Prince Spencer, the extraordinary rhythm tap dancer who was a member of The Four Step Brothers. The group had been employed by Eddie Cantor at New York's Palace Theatre and played the Paramount Theatre on their own, but the peak of their career arrived when George White put them in his Scandals of 1936. They were among the first to line up and tap the same sounds using different steps or the same steps making different sounds, and then to build on that idea. Raymond Winfield is said to have contributed to the act's innovative slides. Working on a small oval platform, Winfield slid forward, backward, sideways, and around, as if he had buttered feet on a hot stove: gravity-defying balance with a maximum of activity on a minimum of space.
Films include By Request (1936), You Can't Have Everything (1937), Pardon My Sarong (1942), All By Myself (1943), Honeymoon Lodge (1943), and Hi Good Lookin' (1944), with Louis DaPron.
Admired and copied by many groups, Charles Honi Coles once told the story that the tap group called The Four Bobs (which included the great Baby Laurence) "sat in a Philadelphia Theatre all day until they copied the entire performance of Tip, Tap, and Toe, including the mistakes."
[Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968), Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Stage Directors: an Illustrated Biographic Encyclopedia, 1893-1995 (1995)]