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• Earl "Groundhog" Basie

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Place of Birth: Birmingham, AL

Earl "Groundhog" Basie, rhythm tap dancer known for his hard-hitting, flat-footed style-- and who maintained that any move in which one took their feet one inch off the floor while tap dancing was merely flash dancing-- was born Abner Gibson (according to Francis Soto Moravcik, who knew him as a child) in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother was a chorus girl and his father a comedian known as Showboy Holland. He grew up with a local spasm band. "I used to dance in the streets with a tin-can band, along with Slick and Slack who tapped with bottle caps between their toes," Groundhog recalled. He then he saw Rastus Murray at the Frolic Theatre and decided he wanted to be a real dancer. Around 1928, The Whitman Sisters troupe came through town and saw Basie, at the age of six, dancing in the street. Mable Whitman convinced Basie's father into letting him go on the road with them; and he was billed as Showboy Holland, Jr., becoming one of the young dancing stars of the show.

In the 1930s, Basie was touring with the Whitman Sisters as part of the variety/flash act team of Pops and Louie (Albert "Pops" Whitman, son of Alice Whitman) which was a runaway hit of the show. Basie and Pops Whitman, who was three years older, lived, worked, and played together. "Pops and I used to shoot marbles, and several times I've kept him from falling over the footlights," Basie recalled, claiming to have saved Pops' life once in Birmingham, Alabama, when Pops accidentally tripped a man with his jump-rope; the man knocked Pops down and was going to kill him but Basie talked the man out of it. Basie considered Pops to be one of the first and greatest flash of acrobatic dancers. "When I first saw Pops dance," Groundhog confessed, "I knew I had to do better." The Whitman Sisters show was a training ground for young dancers, with daily compulsory classe organized by Mable Whitman's husband, "Uncle" Dave Peyton. Basie was a young rebel who ran away from the company several times but always returning. Louis Williams remembers the company once boarded a train in New Orleans for New York City but Basie boarded a train for Los Angeles, and the Whitmans had a terrible time finding him. Basie worked on and of the the Whitman sisters from 1928 to 1936, appearing first as Pops Whitman's "shadow" -- taps and all.

From the late 1930s, Groundhog began working abroad, spending three years in Paris. In 1941 Basie appeared in the Marx Brothers movie The Big Store doing a no-hands flip onto a truck in "The Tenement Symphony" number. Rhythm Red (John Chivers), a loyal and long friend, first met Basie in Chicago around 1942 when it was jumping with such great dancers as Jack Williams, Pops and Louis, and The Rhythm Makers (all on the same bill at the Rhumboogie), Baby Laurence and Nip and Tuck at the Club DeLisa, and Rhythm Red and Leon Collins at White's Emporium with Red Simmons, Derby Hicks, and Monte Blue-- all of them passing through town. Rhythm Red remembers a challenge dance on the South Side of Chicago at around five o'clock in the morning after the night clubs closed, when entertainers went out to relax along Garfield Boulevard, when several dancers were trying to "carve each other" when Basie saw his chance to cut loose. He started with cramp rolls on the concrete and built up fast to knee-drops, flips, and splits. Stunned, nobody dared follow him, and that was the end of the dancing.

In 1951 Basie assisted Nick Castle in choreographing a number for the chorus in Skirts Ahoy! with singer Billy Eckstine. But for most of the decade, there were few appearances that Basie made in the tap scene. In 1964 guitarist Danny Barker announced at the Copper Rail Bar and Grill in New York, between sets at the Metropole, that Groundhog was "back in town" (New York City) and that a group of dancers had locked him up in a Harlem cellar and making him show them his steps, "feeding his liquor while stealing his stuff." Another rumour about where exactly Groundhog was at that time came from Groundhog's buddy Rhythm Red (John Chivers), a tap dancer who was working as a night watchman at a building under construction on Eighth Avenue and 52nd Street: Rhythm Red claimed the two practiced together among the cement mixers. Marshall and Jean Stearns finally caught up with Groundhog at the Village Vanguard where he had gone to see his old friend, drummer Max Roach. Mrs. Roach (the singer Abbey Lincoln) introduced the Stearnses to Groundhog, who was wearing a rumpled business suit and scuffed Oxfords. With a slight cast in one eye, Basie offered a rough, work-worn hand, and for the next two hours, the Stearnses, alternated between listening to Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach and interviewing Groundhog and Rhythm Red. While Rhythm Red was pleasantly chatty, the most Groundhog offered in the conversation was his name: "My name is Earl Basie."

Marshall Stearns regards Groundhog as more a tap legend than a fact or date, and that everyone he asked had known, and perhaps seen, Groundhog, but often did not know where he would disappear to. "The nickname alone was unforgettable, and persistent inquiry only clouded a paradoxical legend." Alice Whitman recalled that Groundhog was a boy who was always disappearing; and that while few tap dancers praised him, and seldom flocked to see him, would rank him at the very top of tap dancers. Baby Laurence, who first saw Groundhog dance in Detroit, described him as "short and not very good looking," but a fine drummer who knew all the acrobatic flash steps and had "two of the greatest dancing feet in the world." Conrad (Little Buck) Buckner remembered that he didn't have "carriage" but was "strictly a hoofer, a dancer's dancer, a carny type." The eccentric tap dancer Louis Williams, who worked with him in the team of Pops and Louis, called him a great jazz and eccentric dancer. Charles "Honi" Coles admitted, "He's just about the best dancer I've ever seen." Said Pete Nugent "Groundhog can really dance."

"Drumming and dancing are the same," Basie told the Stearnses, adding that the drummer Max Roach taught him drum paradiddles when he was working with Benny Carter. Basie would lie in bed for hours and listen to a metronome before inventing new combinations. "I don't like to repeat a step unless it's necessary to help the audience catch on-- dancing is about twenty years ahead of its time, and people don't understand it." Aaron Palmer, Eddie Rector, and Paul Draper are among the tap dancers that Basie admired. Perhaps it was because of his great admiration of John Bubbles that he had to battle Chuck Green, who was a protégé of Bubbles, at the Village Gate in New York City on November 21, 1964 where, in tap battle with Green, he declared himself "King of the Gate" to no one's dispute. When the Stearnses last saw Basie, they complimented his dancing, to the modest reply that he always tried to do his best, adding "I hate that name Groundhog. I think my old man gave it to me when I was too young to argue." Showing his hands that were full of callouses becase of the labor he undertook to make a living for himself, he confessed, "A dancer gets no credit for being an artist. Instead, he's persecuted-- all my life I could never earn enough money to live like a man."

[Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 196); Whitney Balliett, "Groundhog," The New Yorker December 12, 1964, pp. 47-49, 51; J.R. Goddard, "The Night Groundhog Was King of the Gate," Village Voice, November 26, 1964, pp. 8-9; Groundhog praised byBaby Laurence in Whitney Balliett, "Something Thing Else," Dinosaurs in the Morning (1960, pp.70-73) as an addendum to article that first appeared in The New Yorker (February 20, 1960, pp.146-147). There is great picture of Groundhog performing at New York's Village Gate in Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance.]