Dates: 1922-
Birth Date: Jul 3, 1922

Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Edith "Baby" Edwards, extraordinary rhythm tap and acrobatic dancer, was born the youngest of seven children. Her father, Sterrett Edwards, from South Carolina, worked for the railroad; her mother, Lillian Beele Strutters Edwards, from Charlottesville, Virginia, spent much of her time promoting the career of her daughter. She grew up in west Philadelphia and began her performing career at the age of three by competing in amateur dance contests. By the age of five, she had danced and sung on the Kiddie Hour (a show in which African-American children auditioned for a performing spot) at the Standard Theater, one of the largest black vaudeville houses located on Tenth and South Streets in Philadelphia. She later competed and performed at the Lincoln Theater's Kiddie Hour, where she would shake her little finger at the audience and sing, "I'll be there when you're dead, you rascal you." Her performance at the Lincoln won the recognition of a talent scout from the Horn and Hardart Children's Hour, who asked Edwards' mother to bring her to an audition at WCAU Radio Broadcasting Station. The program, which featured white child talent, was directed by Stanley Broza, a pioneer in radio broadcasting in Philly. Edwards was one of the first to break the color line on this program. Billed as "Eadie Edwards," she was a regular on the radio broadcast for five years, able to sing, dance, and do some acting spots.

Edwards learned to tap dance from her brother Harry. Eleven years her elder, Harry was performer who played the piano and sang, having the stage name of Harry Karry, His tap dancing, which he learned on street corners, resembled that of the great tap dancer Pete Nugent. He had performed and recorded with the "Wash Board Rhythm Kings" and toured the Keith circuit. During the late 1920s, Harry teamed with John Hart, a Philadelphia tap dancer who toured the TOBA circuit with Bessie Smith's traveling vaudeville show. Hart, who worked as a solo performer as well as with Harry and Willie Green, had grown up in the same neighborhood and went to school with such tap dancers as Charles "Honi" Coles, Frank Condos, George and Danny Miller, and Duke Miller, whose dance styles were influenced by such Philadelphia tap dancers as Bill Bailey, Derby Wilson, Teddy Hale, Eddie Rector, and Jack Wiggans. Both Hart and Harry Edwards taught Baby to tap dance. "I danced more like a boy," she remembered, adding that her brother always wanted her to practice and insisted that she "get out there and do the rhythms without missing a rap."

In 1933, Edwards' mother took Baby, at age eleven, to compete in a talent competition at the Chicago's World's Fair; she won first prize in the Children's Dance Contest. She continued to perform in the Philadelphia/New York area, and in November 1939 was cast in Erik Charell's Broadway jazz musical, Swinging' A Dream. The show, based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, was choreographed by Agnes DeMille and starred Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Maxine Sullivan, with featured performances by the Dandridge Sisters, Bill Bailey, Nicodemus, Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, Jackie Mably, Gerald De La Fontaine, Alberta Perkins, and the Deep River Boys. When the show closed after thirteen performances, Edwards returned to Philadelphia to finish the tenth grade at West Philadelphia High School. Her mother then enrolled her in Lincoln Preparatory School to prepare her for life as a secretary. Edwards refused to attend, wanting a career as a dancer. She continued to be booked as a solo performer in clubs and theaters, teaming for a time with Pops Whitman (son of Baby Alice Whitman of the Whitman Sisters) in an act called "Pops and Baby." She also teamed with Taps Miller as "Taps and Baby" and together they performed the finale at Harlem's Apollo Theater with John Mason, Avon Lon, and the Earl Hines Band. The partnership lasted only a year, as Taps Miller died at a very young age. Baby, who retained her name even after maturing into womanhood, was too short to be a chorus girl at such places as the Cotton Club. She nevertheless appeared at the Apollo Theater where she worked as a soubrette, the female song-and-dance girl who performed in front of the chorus girls and boys and usually "tagged the number," or followed the last chorus person off the stage and finished on stage alone with some fancy steps to a reprise of the song.

Around 1940, Baby teamed with Willie "Span" Joseph in an act called "Baby Spic and Span," later called "Spic and Span." The act opened with the dancers tapping on a platform two feet high and wide and four feet in length; the sound of the taps were clear as they then danced two choruses of "It's Wonderful." Baby then usually sang a jazz number like "My Man Is Gone," from the opera Porgy and Bess. Then the duo performed up-tempo to "Crazy Rhythm," and followed by a tap challenge, concluding with their both dancing together. "St. Louis Blues" was one of the tunes in their encore. "Spic and Span" usually performed in clubs to white audiences; their tunes were appropriately chosen, as the goal of their act was to captivate audiences and keep them interested.

Edwards believed that one had to know when to stop dancing, to keep an audience longing for more. Rhythm was essential to the tap dance: Edwards sang the rhythm, which needed a memorable beginning, middle, and ending. The team performed a combination of cramp rolls in their rhythm work. Flash steps, such as toe stands, five tap wings, were also incorporated in combination with rhythm steps. One combination Baby learned from John Hart as a child, and that she always used for the challenge part of the routine, was a step in which one foot brushed to the side as the other executed a wing; and an illusion element in which one touched the floor with the right hand while standing on the left foot, the right foot crosses in front of the left and carries the body into a full turn, and lands on the right foot. The body is on a low diagonal during he turn and the left hand replaces the right at the end of the turn. "Spic and Span" also combined softer steps in their act, as well as acrobatic moves that included cartwheels, flips, several styles of splits. Edwards' specialty was a split she performed while her partner jumped over her in a straddle jump as he touched his toes. Their sensational ending, in the style of the great Nicholas Brothers, consisted of Edwards sliding across the stage in a full split, sliding between her partner's legs and returning to a standing position, ending the routine in a pose. Spic and Span remained together for over twenty years, performing nationally and internationally on stage, as well as performing on several television shows in the 1950s.

Says La Vaughan Robinson about Edwards, "If she hadn't retired in the 1960s to take care of an ailing mother-- the type of family obligation that undermined the careers of many women in tap-- she'd have been ‘more than really good,' which she was. She probably would have been the greatest tap dancer in show business." Tap dancer Germaine Ingram, who organized the photography exhibit for Plenty of Good Women Dancers for the Philadelphia Folklore Project, had this to say about Baby Edwards: "She is impeccably rhythmic, and she moves in a way that has sensuality without suggestiveness. She embraces an audience like few performers I've seen."

[Sources: Cheryl Willis, Tap Dance: Memories and Issues of African-American Women Who Performed between 1930-1950, Phd. Dissertation, Temple University, 1991; Njeri, Itabari, "Shadowed Feats: The Forgotten Mothers of Tap-- and Their New Crop of Daughters; Hoofing It: The Hidden History of Black Women in Tap," The Village Voice, July 28, 1998; Sharon E. Friedler and Susan B. Glazer, Dancing Women]