Description
"A prodigious feat of research, Feel the Floor is an act of redress that restores Bradley’s life and legacy.… Fresh interviews with still enchanted former students give us a window onto a man who moved so beautifully that it brought people to tears."—The New Yorker
“What Footer does, and smartly, while winding the 20th century’s pop and socio-culturalism into a neat, critically rhapsodic ball, is remind audiences that Bradley did it all, and did it first.”—Jazz Times
A stunning resurrection of the visionary choreographer Buddy Bradley whose contributions to rhythm tap and jazz dance in the 1920s and ’30s indelibly transformed the way we move to music
In Feel the Floor, Maureen Footer shows how Bradley’s revolutionary moves electrified Broadway in the 1920s and conquered London’s West End in the 1930s, introducing new inflections to the era’s tap and jazz dance.
His experiments in rhythm and staging would anticipate bebop, and his influence even permeated classical dance, cross-pollinating with ballet choreographers like Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine.
Mirroring today’s fight for recognition of Black contributors to transatlantic culture, Buddy Bradley’s story isn’t just one of influence. He created the movement language we still speak today.
The white performers Bradley taught to move became legends: Eleanor Powell, Ruby Keeler, Adele Astaire, Jessie Matthews. Bradley was also the first to fuse movement, character, and narrative in the theater, setting the stage for the integrated book musical and the careers of Agnes de Mille, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins.
In post-war Great Britain, as Black American dancers and jazz musicians flocked to London (and a congenial base at Bradley’s dance school), he danced and choreographed with Baby Laurence, Pete Nugent, Frankie Manning, and Mabel Lee, among others.
Footer spent five years in prodigious research, crossing two continents, tracking ancestral history in the Deep South, and enlisting private investigators to uncover Bradley’s buried legacy.
Feel the Floor corrects the false narratives that have erased Bradley’s influence, revealing how one man’s genius transformed musical theater, shaped modern ballet, and rewired the very DNA of American dance.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART 1: SOUTHERN RHYTHMS, 1838–1920
CHAPTER 1
Ancestral Whispers
CHAPTER 2
Fathers and Sons in the Black Belt of Alabama
CHAPTER 3
Post-Reconstruction: Explorations Beyond Home
CHAPTER 4
An Observant Child in Birmingham
CHAPTER 5
Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line to Harrisburg
PART 2: NEW YORK JAZZ, 1921–1930
CHAPTER 6
Harlem Chorus Boy
CHAPTER 7
Celebrity Dance Instructor on Broadway
CHAPTER 8
A Black Choreographer on the Great White Way
PART 3: LONDON CALLING, 1931–1932
CHAPTER 9
Ever Green and Affirmation
CHAPTER 10
Appraising London
CHAPTER 11
Expatriation
PART 4: THE EXPANSIVE YEARS, 1932–1938
CHAPTER 12
On Pointe with Frederick Ashton and Noël Coward
CHAPTER 13
Ballyhoo to the Folies Bergère
CHAPTER 14
Seduction and the Camera’s Eye
CHAPTER 15
The Gauguin of the Dance
CHAPTER 16
Dancing on the Ceiling
CHAPTER 17
Top Hat and Tails
CHAPTER 18
Follow the Sun to Happy Returns
PART 5: SHIFTS IN RHYTHM, 1939–1960
CHAPTER 19
Dancing in the Blitz
CHAPTER 20
All That Jazz
CHAPTER 21
Jazz Maestro
CHAPTER 22
Troupes, Tours, and Baby Laurence
PART 6: RESOLUTION, 1961–1972
CHAPTER 23
The Swerving Sixties
CHAPTER 24
Back to the Future
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
