Willie Covan and In Old Kentucky challenge dance Covan, Willie performer Challenge Dance 1915 Willie Covan was sixteen years old when he entered In Old Kentucky's Friday night buck-dancing contest; the touring musical show on the black vaudeville circuit was famous for sponsoring contests between members of the company and local buck-and-wing celebrities. Covan, who was born in Savannah, GA, and raised in Chicago, where he learned to tap dance by mimicking street dancers, had been working up ideas for the event. Assigned a late number in the competition, he noticed that all his predecessors that evening began with traditional time steps in their routines. Each contestant was allowed no more than six minutes onstage. Covan decided to cut the time steps in his routine and instead jumped out with the wings, grab-offs, and rolls that would have ended his routine, squeezing in new variations on these steps before time ran out. He won first prize for the virtuosity of his variations, which undoubtedly had to be improvised. Performing Arts Encyclopedia http://www.loc.gov/performingarts Stearns, Marshall and Jean Stearns: Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan (1968). Watson, Sonny: StreetSwing.com. http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3tap1.htm (). Tap Dance America http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html Willie Covan (biography) loc.music.tdabio.62 tda IHAS 151216 loc.music.tda.1346