John Sublett Bubbles [biography]
Dates: 1902-1986
Birth Date: Feb 19, 1902
Death Date: May 18, 1986
Place of Birth: Louisville, KY
Place of Death: Baldwin Hills, CA
John Bubbles, jazz tap dancer, singer and pianist, the undisputed father of rhythm tap, which dropped the heels on the offbeat, used the toes to accent, and extended rhythmic patterns beyond the usual eight bars of music, was born John Sublett (his nickname Bubber) in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Indianapolis. At the age of ten, he teamed with six-year-old Ford Lee "Buck" Washington (1903-1955) in an act billed as "Buck and Bubbles." Bubbles sang while Buck played accompaniment while standing at the piano. They won a series of amateur-night shows and in short time were playing engagements in Louisville, Detroit and New York City. When his voice changed at age eighteen, Bubbles focussed on dancing. He walked cockily into the Hoofer's Club and performed a strut and a turn before the watchful eyes of club veterans Eddie Rector and Dickie Wells. Amused but deadly serious, they told him he was hurting the floor and booed him out of the club. He left for California on the next train. After a year working as a singer on the Orpheum circuit in the West, he was back in New York at the Hoofers Club, with legs that were like double-barreled shotguns and a routine consisting of double over-the-tops and triple back slides, which multiplied time and changed steps so quickly that no one could copy him. His success was immediate: a new king was crowned. And Bubbles (as his name had become) fought hard to keep his reign.
By 1922, Buck and Bubbles reached the pinnacle in vaudeville by playing at New York's Palace Theater. Bypassing the black T.O.B.A. circuit, their singing-dancing-comedy act headlined the vaudeville circuit from coast to coast. Buck's stop-time piano playing, in the the laziest manner imaginable, contrasted with Bubbles' witty explosion of taps in counterpoint. Appearing in Broadway Frolics of 1922, Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1930 and Ziegfield Follies of 1931, Bubbles secured his place in Broadway history when he originated the role of Sportin' Life in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935); the role of Mingo in that production was played by Buck. Together, they played the London Palladium, the Cotton Cotton Club, and Apollo, and were the first blacks to play Radio City Music Hall, while breaking the color barriers in many theaters across the country. They were also among the first black acts to be featured on television, then in its infancy, in such shows as RCA-NBC's Night Club Revue (June 9, 1939). The team's prominence was such that a brush with the law over some contract matter resulting in two days in a Chicago jail, on a contempt of court charge, drew fairly extended press coverage. Buck and Bubbles' motion pictures include Varsity Show (1937), Atlantic City (1944), Cabin in the Sky (1943), A Song is Born (1948). On his own, Bubbles appeared with Judy Garland at the Palace and Bob Hope in Vietnam; and recorded Harlem Comes to London, Selections from Porgy and Bess, and Bubbles, John W. That Is.
There are several rare clips of Bubbles dancing. One is in the documentary No Maps On My Taps which shows Buck and Bubbles dancing "I Love You" in the Varsity Show (1937); another, in the same documentary, is Bubbles as a porter sand dancing for a white seated gentleman in an unidentified film. There is also an excellent clip of Bubbles dancing on television in the documentary film Baby Laurence: Jazz Hoofer.
Bubbles revolutionized tap, and there is no jazz tap dancer today who has not been influenced by his inventions. Before him, dancers tapped up on their toes, capitalized on flash steps and danced to neat two-to-a-bar phrases. Bubbles loaded his bar, dropped his heels and hit unusual accents and syncopation, opening the door of modern jazz tap percussion to important rhythmic exchanges between tappers and jazz musicians. "I wanted to make it more complicated so I put more taps in and changed the rhythm," said Bubbles about this new style which prepared for the new sound of bebop in the forties and anticipated the prolonged melodic line of "cool" jazz in the fifties.
[Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Larry Billman, Film Choreographers and Stage Directors: An Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia, 1893-1955 (1997); Variety, 8/7/1929p.21; 9/14/1929 p. 35; 6/14/1939 p. 61)]