{
download_links:[
{
label:'MODS Bibliographic Record',
link: 'mods.xml',
meta: 'XML'
},
{
label:'METS Object Description',
link: 'mets.xml',
meta: 'XML'
}
]
}
Ernest "Brownie" Brown [biography]
Dates: 1916-2009
Birth Date: Apr 25, 1916
Death Date: Aug 21, 2009
Place of Birth: Chicago, IL
Place of Death: Chicago, IL
Ernest "Brownie" Brown, tap dancer known for his slapstick comedy, high-energy dancing and acrobatic numbers, danced professionally as a child. At the age thirteen, he met the twelve-year-old Charles Cookie Cook, who would become his longtime dancing partner. They performed with Garbage and His Two Cans (in which they played the garbage cans) and toured on the black vaudeville circuit as pickannies with Sarah Venable's Mammy and Her Picks. In 1930, the two formed the dance team Cook & Brown and played the College Inn in Chicago with the Ben Bernie Orchestra. Theirs was a knockabout comedy act that combined acrobatic stunts and grass-roots humor with eccentric dancing. The short-tempered, six-foot tall Cook, known for his Russian floor dancing, played foil to the diminutive five-foot tall Brown who, when knocked down, slid the full length of the stage and bounced up in a reverse split, thumbing his nose and ready for more abuse. In 1934 they opened at the uptown Cotton Club and quickly became highly popular comedic performers, despite the Great Depression. Comedy dancing was at its peak in the early thirties with so-called two-man teams blending tumbling and acrobatis with superb dancing. Cook and Brown were among the finest of these teams which were forced to continue the tradition of "blacking up" with burnt cork long after that makeup ceased to a requirement for black performers. Cook and Brown were asked to black up for their performance at such theatres as the Fox Theatre in Washington, D.C., but they generally avoided the practice that had its roots in minstrelsy when white performers blacked up in imitations of black American entertainers. For over forty years, Cook and Brown headlined in vaudeville, playing New York's Palace, Palladium, Apollo, Roxy Theatre, Radio City Music Hall, and the downtown Cotton Club,and at London's Palladium and the Latin Casino in Paris. They also appeared in the Dorothy Dandridge 1942 "soundie" Cow Cow Boogie.
On December 5, 1949, Brown became a founding member of the Copasetics, a fraternity of tap dancers and musical artists dedicated to preserving the memory of the great Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who died on November 25, 1949. The club's motto was "Everything's Copasetic"—the Bojangles expression for fine, okay, grand. The Copasetics remained a vital social force in the Harlem community, with boat cruises, annual balls, and charitable performances, in a period of time in which the world had turned its back on tap dancing and turned its attention to ballet and modern dance on the Broadway stage. Brown, however, continued to perform. On Broadway, Cook and Brown performed as specialty dancers in the 1952 revival of Kiss Me Kate, choreographed by Hanya Holm; performing in the musical for seven years, they stopped the show with their routine to "Too Darn Hot." In 1963, Brown was one of the dancers (along with Cholly Atkins, Honi Coles, Cookie Cook, Chuck Green, and Pete Nugent) performing at the Newport Jazz Festival's Old Time Hoofers (6 July 1963); that historic performance, narrated by Marshall Stearns, was credited with sparking the revival of tap dance after a fifteen-year decline. He appeared in the film documentary Great Feats of Feet (1977), performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's dance festival, Steps in Time (1979), and taught at the historic By Word of Foot tap festival at the Village Gate (1980).
In the 1980s, at the height of the tap dance renaissance, Brown appeared in the film The Cotton Club (1984), starring Gregory and Maurice Hines; and performed at the1984 Summer Olympic Games, and at the 92nd Street Y in Fifty Years of Tap Dancing. He also performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Tappin' Uptown: A New Tap Musical; at City College's Aaron Davis Hall in An Evening with Charles Cook and Friends (1984); at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in Jane Goldberg's Shoot Me While I'm Happy (1985), at the Boston Opera House in The Great Tap Dance Reunion (1988), and at the Studio Museum of Harlem in Cookie and Friends (1989).
In 1996, at the age of eighty, Brown formed a new partnership with Reggio "The Hoofer" McLaughlin, who was almost half his age; one of their first performances as a team was at the Chicago Human Rhythm Project (1997). In 2006, Brown was honored by Avi Miller and Ofer Ben's Tradition in Tap: The Cook and Erown Experience, in New York City. McLaughlin would remain his partner for the next thirteen years.
In 2004, Brown was the recipient of the American Tap Dance Foundation's Hoofer Award. One of his last performances were at the 2008 Tap City Festival in New York City with Mr. McLaughlin; with whom he also appeared in the Chicago Human Rhythm Project Emmy-nominated documentary, JUBA — Masters of Tap and Percussive Dance.
Brown died in Chicago in 2009. Tap performer and historian Jane Goldberg wrote in an e-mail message reported in The New York Times obituary: "[Brownie] had an amazing sense of ‘entitlement' in a good way. He always felt he belonged on the stage, shaking his shoulders in that jazzy, goofy move he was known for, even while Honi Coles was cutting Gregory Hines in a tap battle, or other of the greats were there. I don't think Brownie was tap as much as jazz, and he had a wonderful feeling for jazz."
[Sources: Tap Dancing America Database]