Famed tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was born in Richmond, Va., on May 25, 1878. By age 5, he was busking. He began his professional career at age 12 in the pickaninny chorus of Mayme Remington’s touring troupe. When Robinson arrived in New York in 1900, he beat star tapper Harry Swinton in a dance contest, which launched his vaudeville career. He first teamed with George W. Cooper but went solo in 1915, becoming one of the first performers to break vaudeville’s two-colored rule.
By 1918, he had popularized his signature “stair dance” and become one of vaudeville’s biggest earners, as well as one of the first Blacks to headline at New York’s Palace Theatre. Broadway fame came with the all-Black revue Blackbirds of 1928, where he introduced “Doin’ the New Low Down,” which you can listen to below. He had a cameo in the short The Delicatessen Kid (1929) and made his feature debut in Dixiana (1930), from which you can watch him dance “Mr. and Mrs. Sippi” below.
https://youtu.be/YFUOgOoDNSc
Over the next decade, Robinson remained busy on stage, film, and record. He appeared in the 1930 Broadway musical Brown Buddies, recorded “Keep a Song in Your Soul” (1931) for the Brunswick label (which you can listen to below), and starred in Harlem Is Heaven (1932), the first film with an all-Black cast (which you can watch below in its entirety).
In all, Robinson made about a dozen films, but his best known are those he appeared in with Shirley Temple, including The Little Colonel (1935), in which they became the first interracial dance partners in Hollywood history. Below are Robinson and Temple in the film’s “stair dance.” Their second teaming was in The Littlest Rebel (1935), from which you can watch them below in the film’s busking “street dance” routine.
In 1938, Robinson and Temple appeared together for the third and the final times in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Just Around the Corner. Below is the “Toy Trumpet” finale from the former and the “Brass Buttons and Epaulettes” number from the latter.
Robinson returned to Broadway in The Hot Mikado (1939) and All in the Fun (1940), then made his final film appearance in Stormy Weather (1943), partially based on his own life, and his final Broadway appearance in Memphis Bound! (1945). Below is a rare silent clip of the original The Hot Mikado cast performing at the New York World’s Fair and the “sand dance” from Stormy Weather.
Robinson died on Nov 25, 1949, in New York. Forty years later, the U.S. Congress declared his birth date as National Tap Dancing Day.