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• Leslie "Bubba" Gaines

From:

• Performing Arts Encyclopedia
• Tap Dance America

Dates: 1917-1997
Birth Date: Feb 12, 1917
Death Date: Jun 3, 1997

Place of Birth: Waycross, Georgia
Place of Death: New York, New York

Leslie "Bubba" Gaines, boxer, tap dance master, and longtime member of the Copasetics Club, was born in the youngest of eight children, the only brother to seven sisters. His father was a farmer who owned a plantation in Georgia. He got the nickname Bubba from living in the South, where many male children were called Bubber. As the only male in the family his father, in raising him, separated him from his sisters. "He [my father] was well off," Gaines told tap historian Delilah Jackson. "He hired a man to teach me manly things, like horseback riding and boxing. Sometimes I was treated to shows where I saw dancers."

Around 1926, Gaines moved to New York with his mother and began dancing the Charleston on the streets to make money. After graduating from school around age seventeen and getting working papers, he met Sunshine Sammy, a well known screen actor who encouraged him to dance. This he learned to do by frequenting Harlem's Hoofer's Club, where he watched such masters as Bill Robinson, John Bubbles, and the tap team Tip, Tap and Toe. The dancers that Gaines most admired included Baby Laurence, Walter Green, Charles Honi Coles, Raymond Kaalund (one of the members of Tip, Tap & Toe), Bill Robinson, John Bubbles, and Chuck Green, Jimmy Slyde, and Leon Collins.

In New York, Gaines met Arthur "Pie" Russell, and after a short time the two hooked up with James "Hutch" Hutchinson and called themselves the Three Dukes, billing themselves as "The International Aristocrats of Rhythm." The group played at the most exclusive venues in New York, including the Cotton Club, and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe. They were noted for their elegant presentation, synchronized jump rope tapping, and class-act tapping, a genre known for its elegance, spaciousness, and musicality, with clear tap sounds. They were extremely stylish, wearing top hats and white full dress, and tails and cutaways; and though they did jump rope with the top hats, it all had to be classy. It was Hutch who taught Gaines the rope dance, which would become his specialty. Gaines developed it into a novelty act by inventing a number of moves both inside and outside of the rope. In 1934 The Three Dukes performed at the London Palladium with Cab Calloway and his orchestra and subsequently returned to New York where they performed at Connie's Inn, which had moved downtown where the Latin Quarter used to be (and which became the downtown Cotton Club). In 1936 the group returned to Europe, and in 1937 they performed at the Casino de Paris in Paris with Maurice Chevalier for four weeks. The show was held over for eleven months; and the group stayed in Europe about four-and-a-half years, performing in Germany, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

After serving in the army during World War II, he returned to the United States at a time when opportunities began to decline for tap dancers. He began working with the U.S.O. as a solo act, telling stories, tapping, and playing the trumpet; he also began arranging and writing music. In 1952 he joined the Copasetics Club, a fraternity of mostly black tap dancers dedicating to preserving the memory of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and with them danced on the Dick Cavett Show, as well as traveling throughout the country with them, teaching at colleges and giving master classes.

Gaines' style of tap dancing was determined by his sense of rhythm and the feeling of free flow from the body. "All the colored guys-- none of us sound alike. Everyone has his own sound. Because we didn't learn in mass or in a school . . . we learned how to dance and applied the feeling to the rhythm," he told Linde Sigmyd in an interview. "Dancing is a rhythmic flow of the body. Your body must be saying something, not just your feet. Your body must be saying something . . . like an expression."

In 1973, when Honi Coles brought Bubba Gaines and Charles Cookie Cook to Brenda Bufalino's dance studio in New Paltz, New York (these visits would later recorded in her 1977 documentary Great Feats of Feet), Bufalino remembered that "Bubba was the only one of the three who had been dancing steadily for all these years. He had been traveling with the USO and was in great shape." In the 1980s Gaines found a new partnership when he began working with the young dancer Deborah Mitchell. He also appeared in nightclub acts and in revues that included Black Broadway, a 1980 retrospective of black musical entertainment, created for the 1979 Newport Jazz Festival, whose cast also included Nell Carter, Gregory Hines, and Bobby Short. He also appeared with the Copasetics in Tappin' Uptown: A Tap Dance Musical (1982). Writing in the New York Times, John S. Wilson described his routines as "brilliant combinations of footwork, timing, and working an audience." Well into his sixties, Gaines was one of the few tap veterans not to be surprised to find an enthusiastic audience for tap. Audiences went crazy watching him perform the rope in single and double time. "He effortlessly included wings and delicate ‘pull-up time steps' in his routines," wrote Brenda Bufalino. "His edge was still sharp. I loved to watch the gleeful expression of his upper body as he went into his toe stands, his shoulders lifted, arms thrown back, hands outstretched as if to shout hallelujah." Gaines' turns with the rope brought people to their feet. Out of breath, but ecstatic with the warm applause, he would exclaim, "If you keep encouraging me like this I'll completely destroy myself." Then with an impish feigned humility, he announced, "I will attempt to do the rope . . . double time. After that . . . that's all." He then looked to the band. "Takin' off fellas . . . down to the runway and here we go." And he always delivered.

Gaines was not only flash. "Even though he thought he had to do his novelty of the rope each time he performed, it was his beautiful rhythms and graceful delivery of a dance to the music of ‘Poor Butterfly' that lit up the documentary Great Feats of Feet, which captured Bubba in the prime of his dancing," remembered Bufalino. Gaines was also most supportive of his peers. "You pay too much attention to your critics," he told Bufalino. "Remember, they're not going to understand what you're doing until you're dead." What Bufalino learned from Gaines was not to hold onto her first idea, to give herself value as the composer, and to always create her own arrangements.

Gaines will always be remembered for his clean footwork and articulation, and elegant style of dancing, as well for his virtuosic tap-rope dancing-- and for his endearing expression to his audience-- "I'm not all out of breath, the breath is all out of me, but if you encourage me like that, I will completely destroy myself."

[Sources: Great Feats of Feet (1977), film documentary directed and produced by Brenda Bufalino; Brenda Bufalino, "Memories of ‘The Great Feats of Feet' of Leslie ‘Bubba Gaines," International Tap Association Newsletter (vol. 8, no. 4, November-December 1997, p. 23); Arthur "Pie" Russell, "The Three Dukes," International Tap Association Newsletter (vol. 6, no. 5 January-February 1996, pp. 3-4); Delilah Jackson, ""Leslie Gaines," International Tap Association Newsletter (vol 8, No. 3, September-October 1997, 5;) "Cookie and Bubba Keep Steppin' Out in Style," Fort Collins Coloradian (June 19, 1977); Linde Sigmyd, "Interview of Bubba Gaines," Sally Sommers archive of tap dance); "Leslie Gaines, 85, a Leading Tap Dancer," New York Times (July 5, 1997); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]