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Harriet "Quicksand" Browne [biography]
Dates: 1932-1997
Birth Date: Aug 7, 1932
Death Date: Sep 1, 1997
Place of Birth: Chicago, IL
Place of Death: New York, NY
Harriet "Quicksand" Browne was born in the south side of Chicago, Illinois, to mother, Ruby Jordan, a hotel worker and amateur musician, and father, Reuben Jordan a pharmacist and shoe salesman who was a self-taught dancer (expert at dancing Snake Hips). The entire family was musical: her mother played piano, her grandfather standup bass, her maternal uncles played the saxophone and older sister, Marquita, had a voice "that could quiet any room." Through the Depression years, the family entertained each other by singing, dancing, making music at home. Browne credits her father as the first to give her tap dance lessons: "He could tap, and the rhythm fascinated me. It always has," she said, and she took every opportunity to watch the numerous tap dance acts that played the Regal Theatre, a black vaudeville house in Chicago.
She also listened to jazz music, was familiar with "every musician, every solo," and a serious collector of the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Jimmy Lunceford, Fats Waller, and Nat "King" Cole. Chicago was a jazz town and at DuSable High School, Browne remembers the slew of jazz musicians (saxophonist Johnny Griffith, bassist Eugene Wright, Gene Ammons, Chico Freeman) who studied under the direction of Captain Walter Dyette, musical director of the high school band. By the time she was ten, Browne says she was "wired for sound," and could dance. The Jordans sent their preteen daughters to take formal dance lessons from the Bruce Sisters (Mary, Sadie and Evelyn) in Chicago. There, Harriet learned jazz dance and rhythm time steps.
In her early teens, and after performing in several spots in Chicago's NRA Theatre, she developed a song and dance act with her sister they called the Jordan Sisters: Marquita sang (her big number was "sitting on Top of the World") and both tap danced. Their routine consisted of traditional steps from the Shim Sham (steps her father knew and taught her: "I remember doing them long before I ever saw Leonard Reed, she says.") danced to "Nagasacki." From her earliest performances, Browne was an alert and speedy dancer. Even before the MC could finish his introduction of her, she was already onstage, halfway through her number: "I couldn't wait. The piano player had to catch me on the bridge [of the song], because I was gone. They were talking a bout this little girl that's going to do a little tap dance. And I shot out there in my patent leather shoes, started doing my number." Though she was speedy, she says that the steps had to be "clean and clear and sharp as a piece of bacon, I always say…If it wasn't clean and clear than you [were] just rattling around and making a lot of noise. And nobody likes a noisy tap dancer." Early on, Browne was a low-heeled rhythm dancer in the style of a John Bubbles; "I can do more with my feet in a flat shoe." For Browne rhythm tap dancing, as opposed to chorus dancing which was visual, had to be an audible statement.
Around the age of fifteen, while dancing nightly in clubs around Chicago, such as the Club DeLisa and Robert's Show Club, Browne dropped out of the eleventh grade of Englewood high school, determined to get a job dancing in one of the chorus lines. "I didn't want to be a bad kid but I just wanted to dance," she recalls. Sixteen years old but "I was all made up to look like I was twenty-five," she recalls, she finally got a job dancing in the chorus, though not for long. After meeting the young musician Paul Gonsalves, who was the featured saxophonist with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Browne got pregnant: "I had a baby, and that sort of put a stop to my career for a minute." She gave birth to a boy, Renell Gonsalves who raised in his early year by Browne's mother and sister, grew up to become a musician and music teacher.
Some time after her son was born, Browne began performing as a soloist and also as an ensemble chorus dancer, appearing in such clubs in around Chicago as the Savannah Club, Town Hill and Town & Country clubs. By the 1950s, her tap choreography landed her in the center of variety shows and nightclubs where she was toured with the Cab Calloway band and later appeared with Flip Wilson, Betty Carter, Dinah Washington, Della Reese, and T-Bone Walker. She also worked in Idlewild, Michigan as both a showgirl and as one the chorus dancers for The Whitehall Dancers, a revue that included the exotic dancer Tequila and eccentric dancers Miss Wiggles and Lottie the Body.
In the 1950s, Browne got a job working in the chorus at the Savannah Club in Greenwich Village, New York, where tap dancers like Derby Wilson were performing on a bill that included a number of variety performers. Though she continued traveling and touring, New York thus became her home base.
It was in the post-World War II years that sand dancing was again in popularity (sand dancing was a popular style of rhythmic stepping done in people's houses and Browne remembers doing it at the age of twelve): "Everybody was doing sand… And I liked that sound…I always like to see what kind of patterns I could make and how hey would sound, how they would affect people." And though it went out in popularity as soon as it came in, she began working on it and having fun with it. In the 1970s, after marrying and taking the name of Browne, her husband built her her first sand dancing apparatus: an upside-down card table with lips around it to keep the sand contained. Browne says that while Howard "Sandman" Sims was playing around with sand at the time, she had taken this style of rhythm dancing on sand to new artistic dimensions. There was no comparing her style to any others. "I'd give Sandman a heart attack trying to keep up with my tempos because that's my thing. I didn't start it, I didn't originate it. But I made it mine." Browne sand danced to such extremely fast tempos that musicians had to struggle to keep up with her; the originality of her improvised rhythmic phrases was also her signature style: "I never know what I'm going to do. I'm an improvisational dancer, I'm always thinking and I'm always listening. So it's easy not to do the same thing over again." Dancing to Pony Poindexter's swinging "Little Pony," Browne says "When I'm out front, I try to stay in charge of what I'm doing. If I take a tempo down and I'm still working and we're still together, I can also bring it back up, because they're watching and they're listening." Browne's style of sand dancing requires that the whole foot shuffle and dig the floor, all sounds made from the knees down.
After a dance student Henry Chu designed for her and built a portable sand box (with a nice floor in it that contained sand and could be folded up and carried away like a suitcase), Browne became more mobile sand dancer. During black History Month in the late seventies, Tina Pratt invited Browne to perform at Barry Harris' Jazz Cultural Theatre in New York: she came with her portable sand dance floor and was an immediate success, and thereby always included sand dancing in her performances.
By the seventies, jobs for tap dancers continued to be scarce, Browne continued to work as a high-heeled dancer in the chorus line, "just kicking, dancing and moving, and going across the floor. Everybody changing positions and going across…We called it hours line. It was choreographed, routines were choreographed, but there was no tapping." But even in this period in which, she says, "Taps went away" she began teaching in New York, at first at the Bronx Dance Theatre, subsequently writing a syllabus for tap dance and earning certification from Dance Educators of America. In the 1980s Browne opened her own studio and founded the Aristaccato Tap Company, training inner-city Bronx youth in passing on the history of tap and jazz. She also toured Europe with veteran tap masters Bunny Briggs, Charles Cookie Cook, James Buster Brown of the Copasetics Club as a featured tap dancer in The Perugia Festival in Italy; Jane Goldberg's Changing Times Tap Company in Sole Sisters, and became one of the youngest members of the Silverbelles a sorority of former Apollo Theatre and Cotton Club chorus line dancers. As one of the outstanding women tap soloists in the 1990s she appeared in the Boston Women's Theatre Festival, and events at Carnegie Hall, LaMama, ETC, and Symphony Space. In 1995-1996, Browne was a recipient of he Choreographer's Fellowship from the National Endowment on the Arts.She was honored for her choreography at Lincoln Center's Allice Tully Hall in 1996 during National Tap Dance Day.
Browne has remained a vocal and supportive of women in tap dance, frequently reminding of the inequity of women in tap dance. Even in the nineties, when female tap dancers were gaining in opportunities to perform, Browne continued to remind us that though the times have indeed changed for female jazz tap dancers, "If they can find enough guys to do it, they will go and call the fellas…But it doesn't belong to them. We can do it, to, given the opportunities. Men who tap have a different approach to it, just like musicians have a different approach with their instruments. Maybe more forceful…but women can do it and do it just as well given the opportunity. Give us the gig."
Browne considers herself a dancer "because I can hoof, and I can do the sand. I can do jazz and I can teach. So I would say I'm pretty well-rounded as far as dance is concerned." She has always aspired to and achieved the distinction of being "the world's greatest female sand dancer," (a title bestowed upon her by Gregory Hines) but she continued through the end of her life to believe that "I don't think I have reached my full potential in what I can do…I've never done Broadway. I'd like to sing. There's a lot of things that I think I could do if given the chance. But the gig goes on. So I just wait and see who's going to call me."
Browne died at the age of sixty-three in New York.
[Sources: Quicksand, produced with Mickey Davidson and Musical Director Frank Owen, featuring Browne's tap choreography and rapid-fired sand dancing; Susan Goldbetter, "Obituaries: Harriet Browne," ITA Newsletter (Vol. 8, No. 4 Nov.-Dec. 1997, p. 17); Dennis Levy, "Harriet Browne, Tap Dancer Extraordinaire," Body Positive (November 1997, Vol. X, Number 11); Rachel L. Swarns, "Her Tap Shoes Tell the Story," The New York Times (11 June 1996, B1, B4); Melba Huber, "Tap Talk for Intellectual Rhythmic Superiors: Silver Belles," Dance Pages (September 1993, p. 20-21); "Interview with Harriet Browne," by Constance Valis Hill, Oral History Project of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library (February 3 and 12, 1996).]