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Bunny Briggs [biography]
Dates: 1922-2014
Birth Date: Feb 26, 1922
Death Date: Nov 15, 2014
Place of Birth: New York, NY
Place of Death: Las Vegas, Nevada
Dubbed by Duke Ellington as "the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically-syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist," Bunny Briggs says he was born dancing: "When I finally faced the world, my legs were kickin'. They let me loose, and I just started dancin'. Just started right out dancing.' And been dancing ever since." Born on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street in Harlem, New York, at the age of three, his mother took him to the Lincoln Theatre to see his aunt Gladys, who worked as a chorus girl. After seeing the dapper Bill Robinson perform at the Lincoln Theatre, he went home and said "Mamma, I want to be a tap dancer," and proceeded to show her the steps from the routine that Robinson had performed. While other boys were playing ring-a-levio and hockey, Bunny was busy absorbing tap dance on the streets of his neighborhood. He was soon a member of Porkchops, Navy, Rice, and Beans, a kiddle dance group that performed in ballrooms around the city to such tunes as "Bugle Call Blues."
In the early 1930s, after being discovered by pianist and orchestra leader Luckey Roberts, he joined Roberts' Society Entertainers and, at the the age of eight, he began performing in the homes and mansions of some of America's wealthiest people. Among them were the Astors, Wanamakers, and Vanderbilts. Appearing in the film Slow Poke (1933) with the Cotton Club Girls, he also performed at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, where audiences enforced a standard of excellence to which all performers, professional and amateur, aspired to. Briggs recalled remembered performing at the Apollo on a bad day, on the same bill as the renowned team of Stump and Stumpy: "I opened the show and when I finished, on applause. Other acts went on-- no applause. Here comes Stump and Stumpy to close the show. They were the best. And they bombed! We're all in the dressing room, and hearing nothing from the audience. They they came off the stage and Big Stump (James Cross) said, ‘Lord knows I tried!'"
When he was twenty, in the early 1940s, Briggs began touring with the big bands and swing orchestras of Earl Hines, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Charley Barnet, and Count Basie. He was able migrate from band to band because he was musically versatile and could improvise. With the influence and help of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, he adapted his style to the music of bebop. He also created his own style of sixteenth-note paddle-and-roll tapping that included pantomime: "I was always an improvisation dancer," he explained. "I never danced to the same tune more than two or three times. My style is carefree. It's carefree and hard, but I try to make it look easy." He made his Broadway debut in the musical comedy Are You With It (1945), with musical staging by Jack Donahue, and appeared in the Universal two-reeler King Cole Trio with Benny Carter and his Orchestra (1950). On television in the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared on Cavalcade of Bands, the Ed Sullivan Show, Johnny Carson Show, and such television specials as Apollo Uptown, Monk's Time, and The Duke/An Evening with Duke Ellington (CBC-TV, 1965).
After appearing at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1960 with the Duke Ellington band, Briggs became "Duke's dancer" and was the chosen soloist in Ellington's 1965 masterwork, Concert of Sacred Music, which premiered at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on September 16. Ellington's historic first concert at a house of worship combined his orchestra with the Herman McCoy Choir, the Grace Cathedral Choir, and vocalists Jon Hendricks, Esther Morrow, and Jimmy McPhail. He had Briggs tap dance to "David Danced before the Lord" (Ellington's "Come Sunday" theme, from his jazz composition Black, Brown, and Beige), in which Briggs executed a series of rapid soft-shoe steps, backed by soft organ chords, a muted trumpet, and a children's choir. Briggs continued to perform "David Danced before the Lord" when Concert of Sacred Music had its East Coast premier in New York at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (December 26, 1966), Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. (December 5, 1967), Cathedral St. John the Divine (January 19, 1968), and other venues.
At the Newport Jazz Festival in 1962, which marked the ascendancy of tap dance in popularity, with Baby Laurence, Charles Honi Coles, Pete Nugent, and Cholly Atkins dancing with the Ellington band, jazz critic Whitney Balliett described Briggs as an "airborne dancer whose steps and motions are an exquisite balance of comic exaggeration and almost fussy precision. In the paddle-and-roll, he began with a long sequence of abupt, irregular heel beats, punctuated by silences and quick, stiff head-and-arm motions, broke into a barrage of military-type flam strokes, and settled into soft, dizzying heel-and-toe beats (his torso and head now motionless) that carried him smoothly all over the seemingly ice-coated stage."
The decade of the eighties was a re-blossoming of Briggs' career, beginning with his being featured, along with Howard Sandman Sims and Chuck Green, in the George T. Nirenburg's film documentary No Maps on My Taps (1979); performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Steps in Time (1979) with the Nicholas Brothers and members of the Copasetics; and dancing a duet with Gregory Hines and teaching master class at the historic By Word of Foot Tap Festival (1980). The decade continued with performances in Europe with Sweet Saturday Night, and peaked in1989 when Briggs was one of the featured dancers in PBS/Great Performance's Tap Dance in America, and appeared, along with other elder tap masters, in the film, Tap, starring Sammy Davis, Jr. and Gregory Hines. That same year, Briggs starred on Broadway in the Oscar Award-winning musical Black and Blue, in which he performed "In A Sentimental Mood" in his inimitably carefree style of paddle-and-roll tapping, a relaxed upper body, and immaculate footwork.
"There was never any problem keeping Bunny Briggs on stage," Brenda Bufalino recalled. "He kept dancing his riff walks and quick turns, flipping his head, and whipping his hair. He stopped short to give the audience a chance to applaud in the middle of his solo, and finally, when he brought the whole house to its feet, he would walk over to the microphone and tell them how much he loved them."
In 1999, Briggs received the Flo-Bert Award from the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day. In 2002, he received an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts in American Dance by the Oklahoma City University. "I'm blessed," says Briggs, "I danced in hallways, I danced in hot-dog stands, I danced for society."
[Sources: Rusty Frank, Tap!; Brenda Bufalino, Tapping the Source; Whitney Balliett, "Duke Ellington," New Yorker 9 November 1981; Whitney Balliett, "The Inheritors" The New Yorker, July 21, 1962, 64-68; Constance Valis Hill, Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History; Rusty Frank, Tap!; Sally R. Sommer, "Hearing Dance, Watching Film" Dance Scope (vol. 14/No. 3, September 1980, pp. 52-62); Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010). Briggs on film can be seen Duke Ellington, The Sacred Concert; and No Maps On My Taps.]