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Lon Chaney [biography]
Dates: 1927-1995
Birth Date: Jan 27, 1927
Death Date: Jan 31, 1995
Place of Birth: South Carolina
Place of Death: Bronx, NY
Lon Chaney, the rhythm tap dancer hailed as the "King of the Paddle and Roll," was born Isaiah Chaneyfield in South Carolina. Trained as a boxer, he became interested in tap dance when he moved to New York City where, in the time-honored tradition of tap dance, he learned to tap in the street. As his sister Evelyn Peterson recalled, "He saw someone dancing, loved it and asked how to do it." He shortened his last name and renamed himself Lon, not after the Hollywood Chaneys, but because he liked the name. In the 1960's and 70's, Chaney began performing with The Original Hoofers, a fraternity of rhythm tap dancers that at one time or another included Chuck Green, Jimmy Slyde, Ralph Brown, Baby Laurence, and Raymond Kaalund. In 1969, The Hoofers participated in the Bert Wheeler Theatre in Tap Happenings (1969), demonstrating with ease how tap had no one rhythmic style or sensibility. Given the size of the foot, the weight and build of the dancer, the influences in the training, each was unto his own as to how to play the lexicon of basic steps that comprised the shuffle, flap, hop, and stomp.
One of Chaney's most moving performances on film is the Christian Blackwood documentary Tap Dancin' (1980), which followed The Hoofers-- Chaney, Chuck Green, and James Buster Brown. Chaney's style used a flat-footed paddle-and-rolling shifted forward and back on the toes and heels, arms swinging like a pendulum. Square and stout, he was a baritone hoofer who made his soft-shoe sound like a rippling underground stream. The master of the accumulating variations, each bar building on what came before, he structured his rhythmic phrases into perfectly comprehendible paragraphs of thought. As he expressed about tap dancing: "Dancing is singular because you have to feel it in order to execute it-- and rhythm is what it is all about. You've got to have rhythm." When all three men (Chaney, Green, and Brown) formed a line in the so-called Chaney track, with a "HO-step-step-step/HO-step-step-step," sounding out the time with pendulum arm-swings, it was all too apparent that these were a very special breed of hoofers. What resounded in their feet were not only the echoes of their buck-and-wing ancestors, but the triumph of tap dance's survival. In his last words, delivered straight on into the camera, Chaney was intent on never again letting tap dance slip away: "If we're gonna be seen, we're gonna have to keep dancing, get some decent working hours to keep supporting our family. It [hoofing] will get back on the top, as soon as people in America here get a chance to see what a beautiful art they have been missing so long."
In 1996, Chaney was a featured dancer in the Paris production of the Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli musical Black and Blue and was a featured performer when the show opened on Broadway in 1989, where it received Tony Awards for Choreography, Direction, and Costume Design.
The New York Times wrote that Chaney was "built like a barrel and moved with the deliberation of the boxer he once was, but his dancing had a surprising lightness and clarity." He has been credited with the development of jazz steps called the Paddle and Roll, a close-to-the-floor style of tap dancing alternating the heel and toe in a rhythm that duplicates the rhythm of a drum paradiddle (which combines single and double strokes).
(Sources: Tap Dancing America Database; "Lon Chaney, 68, A Tap-Dancer," New York Times, February 1, 1995]