{
download_links:[
{
label:'MODS Bibliographic Record',
link: 'mods.xml',
meta: 'XML'
},
{
label:'METS Object Description',
link: 'mets.xml',
meta: 'XML'
}
]
}
Billie Mahoney [biography]
Dates: 1927-
Birth Date: Nov 23, 1927
Place of Birth: Kansas City, Missouri
Billie Mahoney, tap dancer and teacher who helped to transform tap dance into modern jazz dance, was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, of Irish parentage. Her father, Francis H. Mahoney, was the circulation manager for the Kansas City Star; her mother, Roma Bowing, was a dressmaker. She was enrolled at age four in the Kelly Mack dance school, taking fifteen minutes each of ballet, tap, acrobatics, and expression (singing), and began her professional career at age fourteen, performing at conventions, Army Camps, and Midwest fairs. Her specialty was a six-minute tap routine that began with double-wing time steps and included the Cincinnati, leading into a backbend, and then splits, during which she twirled two batons.
In 1950, after having earned a B.A. degree in dance at the University of Kansas City, Mahoney made her way to New York by way of a summer of modern dance study at Connecticut College. Arriving in New York in the fall of that year, she made the rounds of agents she found in the phone book and immediately found work at the club Bal Tabarin, tapping and twirling batons. Thus began a steady stream of jobs in and around the city, a good many of which were bookings in small clubs on weekends, which had a "colored" tap team-- generally a comedy or flash and acrobatics act such as Stump and Stumpy, the Chocolateers, Moke and Poke, and Tip, Tap & Toe. Not much attention was given to footwork in Mahoney's repertoire, since tap dance was merely the vehicle for performing with her batons-- such as leading the St. Patrick's Day Parade with her baton twirling on the Arthur Godfrey and Friends television show. She used the money from her television gigs to pay Harry King (of the renowned class act of King, King and King) to stage a class act for her. King immediately separated the baton twirling from the tap dancing, structuring a routine that began with a blues strut with top hat and cane, into which was integrated high kicks, splits, and a walkover, followed by a "battle of the tempos," in which she danced to a metronome that was placed on a pedestal in front of the microphone. As an encore, she returned with the baton-twirling portion of her former act for a sure-flash finish. Although King staged the act with metal taps on her shoes, it was difficult to hear the taps. Mahoney found a way of moving her feet as if she was doing tap steps, but with no sound. Variety later described it as an "uneducated shuffle" which, Mahoney says, was "a forerunner to jazz dance, with a lot of leg-o-mania and fancy footwork." In the fall of 1951, the act Mahoney had been working on for a year was finally ready, but the New York theaters for which it had been prepared were closing down. In a short time, there would only be the stage shows at the Roxy and Palace theaters and Radio City Music Hall, with its Rockettes-- a ballet corps and tap-dancing, high-kicking chorus.
In 1953 in Buffalo, Mahoney saw a dance act staged by Jon Gregory that was neither ballet nor modern, nor tap, nor ballroom, but seemed to use the elements of all these dance forms. She visited Gregory in his Roseland Building in New York and saw a studio filled with dancers executing movements to the music of the Big Bands. "It was like the modern dance I loved, but to the jazz beat that I knew so well through tap dance," she said. "This was one the first modern jazz dance classes in New York." Trading in her flat-heeled black pumps for two-inch Cuban heels, and then three-inch heels-- it was the look, not the sound, of the act that mattered-- she worked her way up to being assistant in Gregory's modern jazz classes, confident that "those with tap in their background were better at the fast footwork and casual down to earth style required for the new jazz dance, than those with ballet only." By 1960, there would be three main "modern jazz" dance teachers in New York: Billie Mahoney, Matt Mattox, and Luigi, each one had come from a tap-dancing background.
(Sources: Billy Mahoney, "What We Tap Dancers Were Doing in the 1950s," International Tap Association Newsletter (March/April 1995, 3-7); "Did Tap Ever Really Die? Tap: From 1960 to 1980, from ‘Entertainment' to Art Form," International Tap Association Newsletter (November-December 1996, vol. 7, No. 4, 3-7); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, Cultural History (2010)]