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• Berry Brothers

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• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Ananias Berry (1912, New Orleans, Louisiana – 1951)

James Berry (1914, New Orleans, Louisiana – January 28, 1969)

Warren Berry (December 25, 1922, Denver, Colorado – August 12, 1996)

The Berry Brothers, the sensational flash tap and acrobatics dance team that found fame in nightclubs, stage and film, comprised three blood brothers, Ananias, James, and Warren. Encouraged by their mother, they perfected their unique dance style from from the eccentric dancer Henry Wessels, who game them their only formal lessons. Their father, who was an extremely religious man and did not at first approve of their performance aspirations, eventually relented and taught them the Cake Walk and the Prancing Strut. In 1925, after the family made its way to the West Coast and settled in Hollywood, Ananias and James entered an amateur dance contest, billed as "A Miniature Williams and Walker." Jimmy danced at parties given by such reigning silent movie stars as Mary Pickford and Clara Bow, and landed a job on the Our Gang comedies. Like many young African American dancers, the brothers served their appreticeship on the back vaudeville circuit T.O.B.A. (Theatre Owner's Booking Association) which embarked them on a strenuous non-stop tour of cities in the South and Northeast.

In 1929, seventeen-year-old Ananias and fifteen-year-old James opened as a duo with Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club in Harlem, which became their home base for five years. The duo also appeared in the London production of Lew Leslie's popular all-black revue Blackbirds of 1929, and in the Broadway productions of Blackbirds of 1930 starring Ethel Waters and the dance team of Buck and Bubbles, and Rhapsody in Black (1931). Performing in top hats and tails, they combined strutting with acrobatics executed with seeming effortlessness. "Ananias Berry stops the show," wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about Berry in Blackbirds of 1930. "No one, black or white, can dance as he does. A kid, he has gone farther already than most dancers ever get." Their growing fame prompted them to be hired as part of the opening show at Radio City Music Hall, the Art Deco palace, on December 27, 1932. The Berry Brothers' act, which was practiced to perfection and remained intact over a span of their career, began with Ananias doing an elegant Strut with a cane under his arm, high-kicking across the stage and ending with a double turn. James entered singing, while Ananias posed, then both men strutted together, stopping and starting in sudden contrasts of tempo. They ended with an explosion of acrobatics, precisely-timed splits and jumps and somersaults, all the while passing the cane which stayed airborne. Though they never wore taps, their precision timing and rhythmic stepping place them in the family of tap dance. Their routine consisted of two sections: a Strut (a prancing walk that has roots in the Cake Walk) and a cane section, with great emphasis on dynamically quick-moves interspersed between posed immobility and flashing action; called "freeze and melt."

In 1934, Ananias married the popular entertainer, Valaida Snow and left the act. James taught Ananias' routine to Warren, the only brother to receive formal musical and dance training, and who had studied tap dance with Derby Wilson. When Ananias divorced and returned to the act two years later, the Berry Brothers turned into a newly- ormed trio that appeared on stage, in clubs, and in films across the United States and Europe. The trio appeared in such Hollywood films as Lady Be Good (1941), Panama Hattie (1942), and Boarding House Blues (1948); with Ananias and Warren appearing in You're My Everything (1949). Slowed down by injuries, Ananias died suddenly in 1951 at the age of thirty-nine; soon after, Warren began to suffer from hip injuries. They returned to Broadway in 1951 to perform in the revival of Shuffle Along. Shortly after, Ananias died tragically at the age of thirty-nine, and the act dissolved.

Just once in their career, the Berry Brothers fought for supremacy on the same bill with their rivals, the Nicholas brothers (Harold and Fayard) at the downtown Coton Club in 1938. Both acts were on the same bill, though the Berry Brothers were last on a program which challenged them to top the preceding acts. For their grand finale, Ananias and James jumped up on the band platform and sprinted further up a flight of stairs to leap over the heads of the musicians, twelve feet through the air. They landed in a body-rending split on both sides of Warren, who had just snapped out of a twisting back somersault into a split of his own, all on the last note of the music. "That was a flash act," said tap dancer Pete Nugent to Marshall Stearns, "the greatest flash act we ever had!"

The Berry Brothers are considered one of the finest acrobatic flash act teams of the 1940s, of which tap dance was only one of their specialties. They combined two widely different styles of black vernacular dance—the Softshoe Cake Walk and Strut the turn-of-the-century popular entertainments; and acrobatics, which reached the peak of specialization in the mid 1930s, thus compressing jazz dance and acrobatics into a flashy theatrical performance style.

[Sources: 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); "'Be for Real,' an Interview With James Berry," Dance Magazine (September, 1961); "Throngs Mourn for [Ananias] Berry," New York Amsterdam News (October 13, 1951, p. 3).]