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• James Barton

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1890-1962
Birth Date: Dec 1, 1890
Death Date: Feb 19, 1962

Place of Birth: Gloucester City, NJ
Place of Death: Mineola, NY

James Barton, Irish-American vaudevillian and tap dancer whose imitations of African-American tap dancers hailed him as being "As Negroid as Bert Williams Used to Be," was born into an Irish theatrical family where everyone danced jigs, clogs, and reels as naturally as walking. His father was an interlocutor in the Primrose and West Minstrels and his mother was a ballet dancer. An uncle taught him his first step when he was two years old; by four, he joined the family act, and by age seven he starred in the act as The Boy Comedian. Barton had the rare ability to dance any step he saw and make it his own. He always remembered the deep impression that Bert Williams and George Walker made on him when he saw them at age eight (1898) at the Howard Theatre in Boston: "I can see it now. Walker did a great strut, and Williams brought down the house with a terrific Mooche or Grind-- a sort of shuffle, combining rubberlegs with rotating hips." Years later he astonished audiences with his "own" Strut and Grind that had the critics praising that Barton with the following-- he was "as negroid as Bert Williams used to be"; others would write of him as being "truly Nubian" and "a true levee darky."

From 1898 to 1902, Barton traveled in a knockabout comedy act with his family. For the next thirteen years, he played stock and vaudeville, with side excursions into ice-skating, bicycle-racing, and baseball. From 1915 to 1919, he played the Columbia burlesque chain as a dancing comedian. Although he played the burlesque and vaudeville circuits of Morris, Fox, Lubin, Sun, Orpheum, Loew's, Pantages, Columbia, and Keith in everything from Uncle Tom shows (in which he was cast in all the roles except that of Little Eva) to repertory theatre, he received little or no attention. Not until Barton arrived on Broadway in Dew Drop Inn (17 May 1923, Astor Theatre), taking over the role written for Bert Williams, who had died before the show reached New York, did his career skyrocket. Donning blackface makeup, he performed fourteen dance routines, including a strut, Mooche, knock-about dance, military drill, dying-swan burlesque, ballroom shiek, skating act on a pedestal, mad-dog act, acrobatic bit, challenge dance, and burlesque waltz. Of his Grind, performed in a flannel shirt and baggy trousers, one critic wrote: "Perhaps the most extraordinary number he performed was that in which the upper part of his body remained utterly still, while the lower part, led by the region around the belt, went through striking gyrations."

When he performed, Barton carried his own portable six-by six-foot tap floor. He often began routines with a single, then a double, and then a triple time step; and then launched into his other steps without ever repeating himself. A description of Barton's dancing reminds one of the 1840s African-American jig dancer William Henry Lane (who danced, Charles Dickens wrote in his 1842 American Notes, "with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs-- all sorts of legs and no legs." The New York Mail's critic stated flatly that Barton's legs just about carried Dew Drop Inn: "He dances lying down or sitting or standing. He dances with his toes, his legs, his hands, his eyes."1 In the New York News, the critic Burns Mantle wrote: "Whenever the book failed him, he shuffled into one or more of his eccentric dances. And whenever the book failed any of his associates, he shuffled again."

Barton was a frequent attendee of the Cotton Club, where he loved to dance to the music of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, black jazz composers and the conductors of their own bands and orchestras. Located on Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street in Harlem, it was one of the few places where white and Negro dancers might meet and learn from one another. Although the performers were exclusively black, the audience was exclusively white. One evening, "Eddie Rector was in the floor show and Bill Robinson was often in the audience and we'd all do a challenge dance, competing in a friendly way."

From 1934 to 1939, Barton gave up dancing to star in the Broadway production of Tobacco Road, with subsequent performances in The Iceman Cometh (1946), Paint Your Wagon (1951), and The Sin of Pat Muldoon (1957), but it is in such films as The Underdog (1930), After Seben (1929), The Whole Show (1934), Wabash Avenue (1950), and The Daughter Of Rosie O' Grady (1950) that Barton's style of dancing and personality is best preserved. Barton's skills as a dancer of Irish jigs and reels, combined with his keen observation of moves from the black dancers, his penchant for improvisation, and his experience as a burlesque comedian helped bring "a new and shamelessly vital blend of vernacular dance to the notice of Broadway critics and thence to the rest of the country."

[Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, a Cultural History (2010)]