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Ulysses "Slow Kid" Thompson [biography]
Place of Birth: Prescott, Arkansas
Place of Death: Little Rock, Arkansas
Ulysses "Slow Kid" Thompson, acrobatic dancer, singer, comedian, and tap dancer who got his name for performing an incredibly slow dance routine, and whose career spanned minstrel, medicine, and sideshows, circus, vaudeville, and Broadway, was born in Prescott, Arkansas. Kid Thompson, as he was nicknamed, ran away from home at age fourteen to work with a "doctor" show on a medicine wagon, dancing on a small platform in front of the tent to the accompaniment of hand-clapping and patting juba. In 1904 at age sixteen, he worked in Louisiana with the Mighty Hagg Circus in its winter quarters. The list of his employment is staggering: Patterson's World Carnival, Heger and Hopper stock shows, stock shows in Kansas City, and with the Sells-Floto Circus, Gentry Brothers Dog and Pony Show, Hagenback and Wallace Circus, and the Ringling Brothers Circus. At the end of 1915's Ringling Brothers' season, he joined Ralph Dunbar's Tennessee Ten on the Keith-Proctor circuit. His tap dancing and acrobatic skills were said to be spectacular; he was considered one of the masters of slow-motion dance.
It was a dance director for the Tennessee Ten that he met the young singer and dancer Florence Mills (1895-1927), with whom he fell in love. In 1918 Thompson was drafted by the U.S. military in World War I and served oversees in France with an army band. When he returned to the United States he rejoined the Tennessee Ten on the Keith Proctor circuit for five more seasons, doing forty weeks a year. In 1921, he married Florence Mills. Recognizing her genius, he subjugated his own career to be her manager, promoter, minder and companion. In 1922 Thompson and Mills joined the cast of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along and then both left for the Plantation Club for Lew Leslie's Plantation Revue, which starred Mills. With the Plantation Revue he went to London for C.B. Cochran's From Dover Street to Dixie, a satire of The Beggar's Opera in the first half, and Leslie's Revue in the second half. From London, Thompson and Mills went to Paris in Dixie to Paris, and then back to New York in Dixie to Broadway (1924-1925). In 1926, Thompson returned to Paris for Leslie's Blackbirds of 1926 as a featured dancer with a Mills as star. Mills became sick during the show and in 1927 died of a tuberculosis-related disease.
Though Thompson was distraught losing his beloved Mills, he worked hard to carve a career as an independent dancing talent. His subsequent career through the 1930s saw him as a sterling class-act tap dancer performing world wide, in such distant places as Auckland, Wellington, Bucharest, Budapest, Berlin, Bombay, Manila, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Hawaii, Cuba, and Australia, where he made three tours under the management of George Sorlie. Billed everywhere as "Fleet of Feet," he was lauded as being "The Black Sousa."
In later years Thompson married Dr. Gertrude Curtis, noted in her own right as New York's first black woman dentist (1911). She was also the widow of lyricist Cecil Mack (R. C. McPherson) who contributed the words for many of the Williams and Walker show songs, such as "He's a Cousin of Mine" and "That's Why They Call me Shine" and is best known for the words to "The Charleston." Kid Thompson lived to 101, dying in the home of a relative in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1990.
Ulysses Thompson, wrote Helen Armstead-Johnson, is "unquestionably a brilliant example of transition and continuity" in popular entertainment and black vaudeville who pioneered the transition to a swinging blend of taps, acrobatics and Russian dancing.
(Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Mark Knowles, Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing (2002); Helen Armstead-Johnson, "Blacks in Vaudeville: Broadway and Beyond" in Myron Matlaw, ed. American Popular Entertainment Westport (1979)]