"Peg Leg" Bates: Monoped Master

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Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates: Monoped master of the art of tap dance

Vaughn, Carol Blair, M.A.

The American University, 1991

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

CLAYTON "PEG LEG" BATES: MONOPED MASTER

OF THE ART OF TAP DANCE

by Carol B. Vaughn

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements of the Degree of

Master of Arts

Dance

Signatures of Committee

Chair

o o an ofI the College illl Date

1990

The American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

TEE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (c) COPYRIGHT by

CAROL B. VAUGHN

1991

Page ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

Chapter

1. AFRICAN-AMERICAN ROOTS OF TAP DANCER CLAYTON BATES ...... 1

2. FROM AMATEUR DANCER TO THE PROFESSIONAL STAGE . 20 3. BATES TOURS HIS WAY TO NEW YORK C I T Y ...... 36

4. BROADWAY AND BLACKBIRDS OF 1928 57

5. TELEVISION AND THE PEG LEG BATES RESORT .... 75 Appendix

1. TOTAL SLAVE IMPORTS INTO THE AMERICAS ...... 91

2. DRAFT LEGISLATION: NATIONAL TAP DANCE DAY . . . 92

3. LIST OF APPEARANCES ON THE "ED SULLIVAN SHOW" . 94

4. LIVE INTERVIEW WITH CLAYTON "PEG LEG" BATES . . 95

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 129

i ABSTRACT

CLAYTON "PEG LEG" BATES:

MONOPED MASTER OF THE ART OF TAP DANCE

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates (born 1907) developed as one of tap dance's most important artists during the period 1920 through 1960. This paper will address the dual intertwined questions of the relationship between the socio-economic and cultural changes in the Black American community in New York and Washington, D.C. during that time, and the nature of

Bates' creative pioneering as a disabled but brilliant tap dancer.

Bates' life and the context of the development of his career have never before been documented in writing. His life illustrates the development of tap dance as one of

America's few indigenous art forms, the development of the

Black Broadway Vaudeville Circuit, the empowerment of the

Black businessman, the creative potential of handicapped people everywhere, and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

A critical analysis of the life and work of Clayton

"Peg Leg" Bates is important as it documents new material related to the history of tap dance and the context of its development in the twentieth century. Clayton "Peg Leg"

Bates is acknowledged as one of tap's most creative and heroic pioneers. He is considered a maverick of television dance, ah inspiration for handicapped artists of all disabilities, a dissolver of cultural barriers between races, a first-rate performer, and a model for Black business entrepreneurs. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks go to the Canadian Arts Fund for their

support, to Nicola Daval and the Tap America Project for

their help, to Dr. Naima Prevots for her patience and encouragement, and to Clayton Bates for sharing his life story. Thank you all. CHAPTER 1

AFRICAN-AMERICAN ROOTS OF TAP DANCER CLAYTON BATES

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was a brilliant tap dancer whose career spanned the 1920s through the 1960s. His work on the Broadway stage, as well as on the television screen, earned him widespread critical acclaim as well as the outspoken admiration of his peers. And yet, this noted comedian and dancer "is probably the only man on the stage who has scaled the heights of fame and fortune with only one leg."* He was known as the "king of the one-legged 2 dancers" and has become a symbol for the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

The Encyclopedia Americana defines tap dance as "an indigenous American step dance form, usually in complex syncopated rhythms and executed audibly with the toes and

1 Cunard, Nancy, ed., NEGRO; An Anthology (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1970), 191. 2 Frank, Rusty E., TAPi The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories. 1900-1955 (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1990), 46.

1 3 heels of the feet m specially designed shoes." This definition goes on to point out that tap dance was born out of adversity, the first tap dancers probably having been African slaves who were brought to America against their will. These slaves danced to please their masters, to

exercise their bodies, and to maintain a spiritual and 4 rhythmic tie to their heritage.

Tap dance is the expression of a spirit which refuses

to be enslaved and emerges stronger for its ordeals.

Clayton "Peg Leg” Bates embodies that spirit. He represents

the heretofore little documented contribution of the

African-American to our cultural heritage, a contribution which was often made anonymously and almost always at great personal expense to the artist. To trace the development of

Clayton Bates from handicapped sharecropper's son in

Fountain Inn, South Carolina to the stages of Australia,

France, Italy, Singapore, and Broadway, is to trace the development of tap dance from a little recognized folk art

3 Hering, Doris, "Tap Dance" (Danbury, CT: Grolier Inc., 1989), S.V. eds. Encyclopedia Americana. Vol. 26. 4 Ploski, Harry A. and James Williams, eds., The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the Afro-American (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1983), 1115, Fourth edition. of immigrants to its recent Congressional acknowledgement as 5 "America's gift to dance."

Clayton Bates (born 1907) is descended from slaves brought to South Carolina, probably in the late 1700s, to

provide manpower for labor intensive crops such as tobacco 6 and rice. The majority of slaves bound for the American

colonies arrived between 1741 and 1810, with slaves arriving 7 at the rate of over 5,000 per year between 1741 and 1760. It was during these decades in South Carolina that rice

production increased substantially and the black population

of South Carolina grew until it finally surpassed the white

population. By 1739, South Carolina contained roughly 8 39,000 blacks and 20,000, or barely half as many whites.

5 U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, H.J. Res. 131, "National Tap Dance Day," 1989. This bill was signed into law by President Bush on November 7, 1989 and designated May 25, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's birthday, as National Tap Dance Day. See Appendix for complete text. 6 Johnson, Daniel M. and Rex R. Campbell, Black Migration in America. A Social Demographic History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 11. 7 Thernstrom, Stephan, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 6. 8 Low, W.A. and Virgil A. Clift, eds., Encyclopedia of Black America (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 19 ), 16. See Table 1. This was the year of the first federal census and blacks g nationwide numbered 757,000, 700,000 of whom were slaves.

It is difficult to determine what part of Africa Bates' ancestors were from as evidence is scarce and most slavers did not keep accurate records. To further complicate the problem, European record-keepers were unperceptive about the subtler differences between Africans and often only notated their port of embarkation, not their tribe or country of origin. Statistically, it is most likely that Bates' people hailed from the West Coast of

Africa, where natives were already cultivating rice along the riverbanks.^

West African slaves were prized by South Carolinians because they possessed skills and strengths which were ideally suited to work in the Carolina lowlands. Frank J.

Klinberg, in The Negro in Colonial South Carolina, explains:

West Africans, like Sicilians and others who have lived in malarious climates for centuries, had retained a high incidence of sickle-cell trait, a genetic characteristic the negative side effects of which were balanced by its positive contribution: the ability to inhibit malaria among humans constantly exposed to infectious mosquitoes, as was the case among the swam£j and marshes of the Carolina rice country.

9 Johnson and Campbell, 11.

10Low and Clift, 15. 11 Klingberg, Frank J., The Negro in Colonial South (Footnote Continued) Although we cannot be sure what port Bates' people

departed from, it is very likely that they arrived and were quarantined briefly at Sullivan’s Island on the northeast end of the Charleston, South Carolina harbor, not far from

Clayton Bates' birthplace of Fountain Inn. Sullivan's

Island is often viewed as the African-American Ellis Island because more African-Americans first stepped onto American 12 soil here than at any other port. Before reaching port, Bates' ancestors would have had to endure the one-month nightmare "middle passage" sea journey from West Africa to South Carolina during which it was commonplace for nearly fifty percent of the slaves to 13 die in the cramped and disease-ridden hold. Only one out of every six or eight slaves leaving Africa ever landed in

America, and it is said that schools of sharks often followed slave vessels,* well fed by the poor souls who succumbed en route.14

(Footnote Continued) Carolina (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, 1941), XVIII. 12 Wood, Peter H., Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Random House, 1974), XIV. 13 Thorpe, Edward, Black Dance (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1990), 10. 14 Low and Clift, 8. In the book Black Maaic by Langston Hughes and Milton Metzer which describes the early history of Black

entertainers, the authors document that the "first stage for

the captive Africans was the open deck of a slave ship.

There, on the way to the Americas, Blacks in chains, when

herded up on deck for exercise, were forced to sing and 15 dance m the open air for the amusement of the crew."

Because slaves were shackled during the voyage, this

"dance" must have been not much more than a painful shuffling in chains. Those who did not perform well were flogged. It was believed that this "dancing of the slaves" helped to keep them healthy, or at least provided time for the crew to hose down their quarters with sea water.

Despite this inauspicious birth of slave dance, the on-ship exchange of rhythms and steps between slaves of different tribes and the British sailors became the roots of what we now consider early tap dancing.

Historians note that in addition to the cultural exchange between sailors and slaves, there was an exchange of language which resulted in a "pidginized" English being used by slaves in South Carolina within the first century of 16 settlement. "Pidgin" is a term applied to any speech

15 Ploski and Williams, eds., 1077.

16Wood, 173. evolved from several languages and used by speakers for whom 17 it is not the primary tongue. Mastery of this language was an essential survival skill for the new immigrants, and slaves who were knowledgeable of "pidgin" English became more valuable for their skill.

A word which Clayton Bates employed in discussing his pre-vaudeville career was "pickaninny" or "pick," which derived from the Portuguese phrase "piqueno-nino" (little boy) and is one of the many "pidgin” English words that is 18 still used today. "Picks" were Black children who travelled the vaudeville circuit, usually with a white star, and worked to put the act over by singing and dancing sensationally. For young entertainers, this was a way to play the top circuits and earn a steady, albeit meager, paycheck.^

It is clear that the physical environment which shaped Bates'and other African-Americans' ancestors was brutal and in its own way crippling. Surely these harsh environmental conditions were responsible for the

17 Hall, Robert, Pidgin and Creole Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 9. 18 . Dillard, Charles, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 110. 19 Stearns, Marshall and Jean, Jazz Dance. The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988), 80. characteristic African stoicism "...— that willingness to celebrate life in the face of extreme suffering— which

European observers so frequently mistook for docile 20 accommodation or mindless hedonism." Indeed, it seems as

though the ability to prevail over overwhelming obstacles

came to Clayton Bates as his legacy from his ancestors, only

three generations removed.

One of the most historically significant events to

influence the development of tap dance in America occurred

in South Carolina on Sunday, September 9, 1739. The Stono

Slave Insurrection took place twenty miles south of

Charleston on the plantation of Stono and was the largest 21 Black uprising in colonial North America. Several black slaves surprised and killed two guards at a warehouse and stole guns and ammunition to aid them in their escape to

Florida and freedom. Rumors had been spreading northward among slaves that St. Augustine, Florida welcomed escaped slaves who could live freely under the still existing 22 Spanish government.

20 Thernstrom, ed., 8. 21 Miller, Randall M., and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 26. 22 Klingberg, 68. 9

This small outlaw band of slaves marched southwest,

fueled by stolen liquor and the promise of freedom. While

en route, the outlaws burned and plundered several white homes and killed all whites who interfered. The leaders of

this raggedy group of insurgents spurred them on by beating

two drums to set the marching pace. In quoting B.R.

Carroll's Historical Collections of South Carolina, this historical episode receives a full description. A number of negroes having assembled together at Stono, first surprised and killed two young men in a ware house, and then plundered it of guns and ammunition. Being thus provided with arms, they elected one of their number captain... marching towards the south-west with colours flying and drums beating... In their way they plundered and burnt every house... Governor Bull returning to Charlestown from the southward, met them, and observing them armed, quickly rode out of their way... By a law of the province all planters were obliged to carry their arms to church... The women were left in church trembling with fear, while the militia, under the command of Captain Bee, marched, in quest of the negroes, who, by this time...had marched above twelve miles. Having found rum in some houses and drunk freely of it, they halted in an open field and began to sing and dance, by way of triumph... the militia discovered them, and stationed themselves... to prevent them from making their escape... One party advanced into the open field and attacked them, and, having killed some negroes, the remainder took to the woods, and were dispersed. Many ran back to their plantations in hopes of escaping suspicion from the absence of their masters; but the greater part were taken and tried. Such as had been compelled to join them contrary to their inclination were 10

pardoned, but all the chos^ leaders and first insurgents suffered death.

The Stono Slave Insurrection of 1739 led to a

revision of the South Carolina slave code. The new code

curtailed African importations and prohibited, among other

things, slaves from assembling,, beating drums, owning

weapons, receiving an education, and moving about without 24 permission of their masters. It is believed that these

laws were greatly responsible for the development of tap dance by forcing slaves to express their rhythmic abilities by beating out phrases with their feet rather than on drums.

It is interesting to note that the South Carolina Stono

Rebellion of 1739 predated Nat Turner's Virginia Rebellion 25 by almost one hundred years.

It was the fate of Black slaves to dance on board ship, on the auction block to prove their vitality, and at the command of their white masters. For Blacks, dance became a link with their free past and a temporary escape from their ugly present. Dance had always been an integral part of Black culture and that didn't change in the new

23 Carroll, B.R., Historical Collections of South Carolina (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969), 332-333. 24 Bergman, Peter M., The Chronological History of the Negro in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 378. 25 Ploskx and Williams, eds., 1258. 11 26 world. Although slave owners forced slaves to adopt a new language and religion, the art of dance remained one of the few uniquely African cultural traditions. It was through dance that Blacks could continue the celebration of their rich cultural heritage.

According to the Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, "The collective memory of the importance of music and dance and the role of the musician and dancer withstood the ravages of enslavement better than any other element of 27 African life.” The dances Clayton Bates' ancestors probably brought with them to South Carolina from West

Africa were rhythmically complex and stylistically sophisticated. The South Carolinian poet Sidney Lanier wrote of slave dances which were "quite complex successions of rhythm, not hestitating to syncopate, to change the rhythmic accent for a moment, or to indulge in other 28 highly-specialized variations of the current rhythmus."

A former slave by the name of Elijah P. Marrs wrote of South Carolinian plantation dances:

26 Fisk University, Social Science Institute, Social Science Source Document No. 1, Unwritten History of Slavery. Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Washington, DC: NCR Microcard Editions, 1968), 64. 27 Miller and Smith, eds., 26. 28 Lanier, Sydney, The Science of English Verse (New York, 1880), 186-187. 12

These dances were individual dances, consisting of shuffling of the feet, swinging of the arms and shoulders in a peculiar rhythm of time which developed into what is known today as the Double Shuffle, Heel and Toe, Buck and Wing, Juba, etc. The slaves became proficient in such dances, and could play a tune with their feet, dancing largely to an inward ^jsic, a music that was felt, but not heard.

Clearly, Elijah P. Marrs was describing the beginnings of

American tap dance.

South Carolinian plantation dance had direct African

counterparts in dances that imitated animals. Some of these

were the buck, pigeon wing, buzzard lope, turkey trot, snake 30 hips, fish tail, and the camel walk. The format often

employed to showcase these steps was the challenge dance, a

format which also has African parallels, in which one dancer

tries to outdo the other by dancing faster, wilder, or by

reworking the other's rhythms into something more pleasing

to the audience.31

Other influences on the early dances of African-

Carolinians were their religious beliefs, first tribal

African, then Methodist, and finally Baptist as Baptist

29 Blassingame, John Wesley, The Slave Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 45. 30 Thorpe, 27.

31Frank, 279. 13 32 planters dominated the region in the 1830s. The Baptists erected numerous praise houses on the various plantations with the objective of "spreading the word" as well as preventing the slaves of one plantation from mingling with slaves from other farms. These praise houses rang with

"prayer songs" or "shout" songs which spoke of faith as well as dreams of freedom.

The following African-American prayer song was recorded by the journalist Charles Nordhoff in 1863 in Port

Royal, South Carolina:

Jesus made de blind see, Jesus made de cripple walk, Jesus made de deaf to hear. Walk in, kind Jesus! __ 33 No man can hinder me.

This song clearly speaks to the miraculous powers of the

Christian God and a defiant, prideful confidence in man's ability to survive and persevere. Certainly, an important part of Clayton Bates' heritage, this proclivity for rising above near-tragic situations formed part of Clayton Bates'

African-American heritage and staunch Baptist upbringing.

Holloway, Joseph E., ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 71. 33 Nordhoff, Charles, "The Freedmen of South Carolina," in Papers of the Day. Frank Moore, ed. (New York: C.T. Evans, 1863), 10. 14

In observing the courage and ability to endure pain of the South Carolinian soldiers of the Union Army, the surgeon in

Higginson's Black regiment referred to them as "natural 34 transcendentalists." In fact, the motto of the State of

South Carolina is "Dum spiro spero," or "While I breathe, I 35 hope."

Unlike the earlier Methodist missionaries, Baptist

planters did not try to destroy the black religious

societies, but sought instead to organize them into plantation churches. New members to the church fellowship were admitted through baptism which was followed by the

traditional "ring shout." Sterling Stuckey, in Slave

Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black

America, describes the "ring shout" as follows:

This counterclockwise dance involves people moving around in a circle, rhythmically shuffling their feet and shaking their hands while bystanders outside the ring clap, sing, and gesticulate. This religious dance is a spiritual ou£gouring which symbolizes community integration.

34 Higginson, Thomas W., Army Life in a Black Regiment (NY: Collier, 1962), 235-238. 35 Sachs, Moshe Y., ed., Worldmark Encyclopedia of the States (NY: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1981), 487. 36 Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (NY: Oxford University Press, 1987), 85. 15

Edward Thorpe described "ring shouts" in his history of African-American dance Black Dance as follows:

The dancers formed a ring and proceeded with a step that was half shuffle, half stamp, and much pelvic swaying. It is interesting to note that it survived partly by accident: the Baptist church forbade drumming and dancing which was considered too indecorous for religious worship. However, the definition of dancing included the 'crossing of the legs' and as the ring shout was performed to hand-clapping and with a shuffling step it was deemed permissible. It is ironic that the church authorities should proscribe movements in which the legs were crossed when, in some of the most "pagan" Black dances, such as in the shango cult, the belief was that anything crossed, i^luding the legs, would keep the gods away.

As the "ring shout" was cannabalized for use as a grand finale curtain call for minstrel shows, and as Clayton

Bates got his performance start in southern minstrels, it is likely that Bates carried on his South Carolina Baptist tradition which can be traced directly back to the African

Circle Dance. Jean and Marshall Stearns write in Jazz

Dance. The Story of American Vernacular Dance.

Perhaps the most clear-cut survival of African dance in the United States is the Ring Shout, or Circle Dance, with its combination of African elements from the counterclockwise movement of the group, through the stiff shoulders and outstretched arm and h a ^ gestures, to the flat-footed shuffle.

3^Thorpe, 29-30, 38 Stearns, 13. 16

Another dance form which emerged on the plantations during the early nineteenth century as a result of the ban on drumming was called "patting juba" or simply "Juba.”

Dancers would accompany themselves by clapping, stamping, 39 and patting the arms, torso, and thighs. The dance was usually accompanied by rhythmic verses performed in a call and response format such as:

Juba circle, Raise de latch

Juba dance dat Long Dog Scratch 40 -Juba! Juba!

or,

Juba dis and Juba dat, Juba kill a yaller cat. Juba up |£d Juba down, Juba runnin' all around'.

The dance critic of the New York Herald Tribune.

Marian Hannah Winter, ascertained in 1948 that "the juba dance (simplified from Giouba) was an African step-dance which somewhat resembled a jig with elaborate variations, and occurred wherever the Negro settled, whether in the West

39Thorpe, 30-31. 40 Stearns, 28. 41 Thorpe, 31. 17 42 Indies or South Carolina." The melody of Juba was

composed of only two notes and it is believed that it was

based on an old African melody about a ghost named Juba.

Quoting from Chronicles of the American Dance.

Substitutions for the forbidden drum were accomplished with facility— bone clappers in the manner of castanets, jawbones, scrap iron such as blacksmiths' rasps, hand clapping, and foot beats. Virtuosity of footwork, with heel beats and toe beats, became a simulacrum of the drum. In modern tap dancing the "conversation" tapped out by two performers is a survival of African telegraphy by drums. Since African dance had already developed rhythms stamped or beaten out by dancers as counterpoint to antiphonal musical accompaniment, and solo dances set against the communal ring-shout, the formal source^aterial surmounted any restrictions.

Margaret Just Butcher, in the Negro in American

Culture, eloquently summarizes the development of Black dance from its African roots, to its foothold in America, to its recognition by Congress as a major contribution to this country's artistic and cultural heritage:

The racial mastery of rhythm is the one characteristic that seems never to have been lost. When customs were lost and native cultures cut off in the rude transplantings of slavery, when languages and rituals were forgotten and nature-worship displaced, rhythm memories and rhythmic skill persisted, later to merge with and transform whatever new mode of expression the Negro took on. For just as

42Stearns, 28. 43 Magriel, Paul, ed., Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 40. 18

music can be carried without words, rhythm can be carried without the rest of the music system, so intimate and instinctive is it. From a kernel of rhythm, African music has sprouted in strange lands, sending out offshoots of folk song and folk dance, going through the whole cycle of musical expression as far as jlje soil of the cultural conditions permitted.

Thus, the dances and rhythms that African-Americans brought with them to the new world nutured them through the early transition to American life and served as a link to their African past. Dance helped relieve the frustration of their inferior caste position and functioned as a tool of socialization. Dance served as entertainment within the slave community for both slaves and white onlookers. In fact, dancing was the most popular and widely practiced 45 pastime of the African-American slaves of the 1700s. A century later, the slaves were freed and many became sharecroppers, as was the case for the family of

Clayton Bates. It is necessary to examine the events after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to fully understand the development of the amateur slave entertainment into the professional arena. It was within this context that Bates' career was born and nutured along with that of numerous

44 Butcher, Margaret Just, The Negro in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 97. 45 Miller and Smith, eds., 174. 19 other Black artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

/ CHAPTER 2

FROM AMATEUR DANCER TO THE PROFESSIONAL STAGE

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves still in

Confederate hands, and the 13th Amendment completed their 1 emancipation in 1865. With the resulting collapse of the slave economy, much of Black labor was redirected into the cotton-tenancy or sharecropping system of the New South. In the late nineteenth century, nine out of every ten American

Blacks lived in the South.2 Most southern Blackls were relegated to a subordinate position as the southern states struggled to reconstruct under presidential orders. The sharecropping system rivaled slavery in legal and economic bondage and southern Blacks found their circumstances little improved at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The plantation system did not disappear after slavery, but rebuilt on the ruins of slavery as more and more land was joined into even larger plantation units, and

1 Ploski and Williams, eds., 21. 2 Low and Clift, eds., 355.

20 21 3 by 1880, the South was producing more cotton than ever.

Free labor under the tenant farmer system became just as

profitable as slavery. The sharecropping system involved a tenant paying a share of the crop instead of cash for land,

housing, and equipment, and this method worked extremely 4 well in the cash-poor post-Civil War era.

In the early 1890's, the United States experienced an • ^ 5 economic depression. In the South, this depression was made worse by a devastating drought and a debilitating infestation of boll weevils. The solution for many southern

Blacks was simple: migration. Five hundred thousand Blacks 6 migrated northward between 1916 and 1918 alone, and the immediate cause was certainly economic. Other significant causes were the greater employment opportunities now available in northern cities due to the cutting off of immigration from Europe to the U.S.A. in 1914, and the general dissatisfaction with living conditions in the South: low wages, bad treatment, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and a lack of educational opportunities.

3 Encyclopedia Americana. "Negro in America," Vol. 20, 72. 4 Encyclopedia Americana. Vol. 20, 72. 5 Thernstrom, ed., 15. 6 Adler, Mortimer J., ed., The Negro in American History (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp., 1969), 49. 22

Blacks received scandalously unfair treatment at the hands of the police and later in the courts, and Blacks were totally excluded from serving in the jury box. Inter marriage was prohibited in all southern states, yet sexual exploitation of Black women by white men was widely tolerated. The Reconstruction Era occurred during the years

1865-1876, and it was during those years that the Ku Klux

Klan and other vigilante organizations flourished. In short, all arrows for the Black citizen of the early 1900s pointed northward.

The Encyclopedia Americana describes the condition of southern Black citizens at the turn of the century:

Throughout the South, blacks became by law limited citizens. Custom and the temper of the times operated to keep blacks in a subordinate position as a normal condition. Lynchings by hanging, shooting, and burning were an important instrument of control on the part of the dominant white group. The number of lynchings annually averaged 166 between 1890' and 1900 and continued at a relatively high point, being 76 in71919. After 1920 they began slowly to decline.

A Black man from Sumter, South Carolina made this statement in 1917, "The immediate occasion of the migration is, of course, the opportunity in the North, now at last open for us, for industrial betterment. The real causes are

7 Johnson, Charles S., "Patterns of Negro Segregation," Encyclopedia Americana, "Negro in America," Vol. 20, 72. 23 g the conditions we had to bear because there was no escape."

The Columbia, S.C., State newspaper asked, "If you thought

you might be lynched by mistake, would you remain in South 9 Carolina? Ask yourself that question if you dare."

W.E. Burghardt DuBois reported in 1917 in Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP):

It takes, perhaps, a special kind of person to make this separatxon, and the Negroes who left the rural South in the hope of becoming a part of the urban North were no exception. Free to move now, and the war having created economic opportunities, this was a new Negro, by 1920 over 100,000 strong in six major cities, whose migration m a ^ e d a new phase in the struggle for freedom.

Before 1900, Blacks in the United States were primarily southern and rural. Up to this time the movement of American Blacks had been southwestward toward better cotton lands. In the early twentieth century, this migration of the Black population changed radically toward the North and the city. The Encyclopedia Americana noted the following about the Great Migration,

The period of World War I witnessed the first substantial northward migration and the first spectacular urbanization of blacks. Depressed economic conditions in the Southern cotton

8 DuBois, W.E.B., "The Migration of Negroes," The Crisis, June 1917, 65. 9 Adler, ed., 53.

^DuBois, 65. 24

industry, combined with unprecedented wartime prosperity in the North and a sharp drop in European immigration, created irresistible forces for northward migration. By 1920, 34% of the black population was urbanized,^lthough 85.2% of blacks remained in the South.

The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups describes

the effect this migration had on the Black population of the U.S.A. as follows:

...the Great Northern Migration during and after World War I permanently transformed Afro-Americans into a predominantly urban people and profoundly affected both their destinations in the North and the communities they left in the South. The southern migrant came North to fill jobs made available to him through the virtual cessation of foreign immigration after 1914. The movement continued through the 1920s, diminished briefly during the Great Depression, resumed during World War II, and continued for three decades more. The demographic impact on northern black communities was immense; 554,000 blacks left the South, followed by 902,000 more during the next decade. The black population of the eastern north-central states increased 71 percent and of the Middle Atlantic states 43 percent compared with an increase of less than 7 percent in the nation as a whole. Black communities in Pittsburgh and New York absorbed substantial increases of 47 and 66 percent, and Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, judged 148, 307, and 611 percent, respectively.

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was the quintessential

African-American male of the early twentieth century and his

11 Encyclopedia Americana. "Negro in America," Vol. 20, 74. 12 Thernstrom, ed., 15. 25

life history parallels the previously discussed trends within the Black American community. His early years were

influenced by sharecropping, cotton farming and processing, Southern rural life, the Baptist church, and the preservation of African-American traditions through plantation music and dance. Bates shared many issues with fellow African- Americans transitioning from a rural people to the sophisticated pioneers in literature, music, and dance of the New Negro Renaissance (1915-1925).

Clayton Bates was born on October 11, 1907, in

Fountain Inn, South Carolina, to a poor sharecropping couple. "We were sharecroppers raising cotton, corn, and vegetables. We were poor, very poor. Had to reach up to 13 touch bottom." His father abandoned wife Emma Bates and their only son when Clayton was three years old. Emma Bates struggled to support herself and her son by working in the cotton fields when the weather permitted, and taking in laundry and cleaning houses when it rained.14

When Bates was twelve years old, during World War I, women and children were recruited for work in the cotton factories. On Clayton Bates' third day of work in a dark.

Frank, 48. 14 Bates, Clayton, interview with author, tape recording, Kerhonkson, New York, August 22, 1990. For complete transcript, see Appendix. 26

unfamiliar cottonseed gin mill, he stepped into an open cotton auger which mutilated his left leg and two fingers of

his left hand. The auger was like a giant corkscrew which

separated the linseed oil from the cotton. In Bates' own

words:

One night around three o'clock in the morning, a light went out in the back. I'd only been working there for three days, and I went in the back to see why the light was out. Not knowing where I was going nor what I was doing, I stepped.in the open conveyor. It started chewing my leg up. There was one other person in the building, and when he heard my £greams, he ran over and stopped the machinery.

That fellow worker, Corley Franks, remained Clayton

Bates friend throughout the remainder of Franks' life, and

Bates credits him with having saved his life. Franks carried Bates home on his back to his mother Emma's house.

Bates never lost consciousness. Upon arriving at Emma's door, Franks knocked loudly and Emma called down, wondering who could be knocking at her door in the middle of the night. Bates' grandmother seemed to guess immediately that it was grandson Clayton and that he must be injured or in trouble. Bates' devout Baptist mother had prayed over her decision to let Bates go to work at such a young age. When the knock came that fateful night, Emma Bates was stricken

*^Frank, 48. 27 with guilt that she had misunderstood God's response. Bates

today maintains that Emma had understood God's will exactly because had she not allowed the underage boy to go to work in the mill, there never would have been a ''Peg Leg" Bates.

When the doctors arrived at 9:00 the next morning, it was determined that the left leg was too mangled to be saved and they amputated Bates' leg right on his mother's kitchen table. The leg was severed about eight inches below the knee, which later allowed him greater articulation of the peg leg and more artistic versatility as a tap dancer.

Bates remembers waking up at 2:00 in the afternoon after the amputation and finding his mother sitting on the edge of his bed. "She was crying. Crying as though her 16 heart would break.” When Clayton inquired why his mother was crying so, she responded that the doctors had cut off his leg. His response to her was, "Oh mother, don't worry 17 about that. I'll find some way to take care of you." And

Bates insists that this goal of taking care of his mother was a dominant factor in his life and his success as a performer. He wished only to provide for her, whether with loose change he earned shining shoes in Fountain Inn, or top dollar earned on national television.

^Bates/Vaughn interview. 28

Clayton Bates can remember dancing as early as five years of age. He recalls,

I've been tap dancing since I was five years old, before I even knew that I was tap dancing. I used to tap dance barefoot, making noise with no shoes on at all! Not having any music, we would just clap our hands, and that's whe^g the rhythm came from at that particular time.

In an interview with the author on August 23, 1990 in

Kerhonkson, New York, Bates described his earliest dance memory as follows:

I was dancing since I was five. I remember one time when I was five years old, my mother had bought me a little red coat... and I took this little red coat and put it on. And I went into the little village of Fountain Inn and I was in one of the white barber shops, and the white men was clapping their hands and I was dancing. And it was on a Saturday, and somebody told my mother (she was in town) that I was up there dancing. My mother come up and pulled me out of there; and the white men got mad because they wanted to see me dance. My mother said, "If you want somebody to be dancing, you go and get your own kids to dance. I don't want my kid dancing." And she pulled me out of there. And that I remember Y§rY» ver? well, and I was only five yeairs old.

Despite the loss of the leg, Clayton Bates* love for rhythm and dance lived on. Evidently, in Bates' young mind, the loss of the leg was a temporary condition; he assumed that the leg would eventually grow back. As he recalls:

18 Frank, 48. 19 Bates/Vaughn interview. 29

See, I did not realize the importance of losing a leg. I thought it was just like stubbing my toe and knocking off a toenail that was going to grow back. Being a kid, and a dumb kid at that, I didn't realize the importance gg losing my leg. And I guess that was helpful.

Almost immediately, he began creating new steps and

syncopations with his remaining foot and two crutches.

Bates' uncle, Whitt Stewart, a serviceman and amateur

dancer, returned home on furlough and discovered his nephew beating out jazz rhythms with his crutches. Stewart

encouraged young Clayton to add the sound of his remaining right foot and fashioned a crude peg leg for his left foot.

As Bates describes his conversion to the peg:

I was pretty rough on the peg leg. When he (Stewart) came home on furlough one time, he saw me dancing, making rhythm, with crutches under my arm. He liked what I was doing and he got an idea, and he made me a peg leg— that's where the peg leg came from. He made me a peg leg; then he got me two chairs so I could balance myself and then said, "Now the same beat that you made with the crutches and that good leg, make it with the peg leg." And he would cut a couple steps and showed me, and I liked it! I was very interested. So t^t's where I started dancing on the peg leg.

As Bates recalled in a recent interview,

I just wanted to dance. It was just something that I liked and something that I wanted to do. And at school, the more active I was on the peg

20 Frank, 48. 21 Bates/Vaughn interview. 30

leg, more compliments I got from my school chums.

Surprisingly, the peg leg was a source of pride for Bates, a feature which made him stand out from the crowd and popular with his schoolmates, especially the girls. He had been a good athlete prior to losing the leg, and with the encouragement of his buddies, that hobby continued. He pushed himself as a swimmer, runner, horseback rider, 23 baseball player, and bicyclist. It was surely that early training and muscle development which helped develop the young Bates into someone who could withstand the vigors of a strenuous acrobatic tap act, complete with leaps, turns, and floorwork akin to today's breakdancing. His early training was similar to that of a young ballerina who is trained for steely strength and endurance — qualities needed for both stage work and the legendary abuses of touring under punishing physical conditions.

A major factor in Bates' development as a dancer was his appetite for challenge of his physical abilities. As he described a particular incident in Fountain Inn with a schoolmate by the name of Carry Lundsford, he remembers telling his friend:

Don't you be feeling sorry for ja§. because I only got one leg! I can beat you right now,

22 Frank, 48. 23 Ibid, 48. 31

doing anything you want to do." So being a kid, he took me up on the challenge. He wanted to run, to race, me on the crutches and him on his two legs. So I guess we ran about 10 or 15 feet, the crutches slipped out from under me. I fell, scarred up my face, and everybody laughed. I went home and told my mother about it and my mother gave me a licking! The reason why she gave me a licking, was to think that I had one leg and I was gonna challenge someone with two legs. So I said to my mother, "Mother, you can whip me all you want, but one of these days I'm going to i^gat that boy, doing anything that he wanna do."

Bates was a self-taught dancer, "...never took a 25 dancing lesson in my life." Of course, the 1920s was the

Jazz Age when swing was king and nearly everyone participated in dance as an audience member or amateur enthusiast, especially in Black southern cities and towns like Fountain Inn. According to A History of Popular Music in America. "The decade between 1910 and 1920 can be identified primarily as the period in which America went 26 dance mad." It is very likely that Bates and other children of his era grew up imitating the latest dance trends, many of which harked back to African dances which imitated animals. The turkey trot, grizzly bear, chicken

^Bates/Vaughn interview. 25 Frank, 48. 26 Spaeth, Sigmund, A History of Popular Music in America (New York: Random House, Inc., 1948), 369. 32 scratch, and monkey glide, all dances of the Jazz Age, fell 27 into that category.

The Encyclopedia of Black America maintains that

"Wherever black people gathered to dance, white people came to be entertained. Soon white performers were imitating 28 black dancers." Soon white dancers were engaging in the

Turkey Trot which Jazz Dance: The Story of American

Vernacular Dance documents "...consisted of a fast, marching one-step, arms pumping at the side, with occasional 29 arm-flappings emulating a crazed turkey." These "animal dances" were simple to the point of plodding clumsiness; their main attraction seems to have been a new-found social acceptance among whites of "lingering close contact" between 30 dancers, a precursor of the "dirty dancing" of later years.

In Down Memory Lane, the authors Sylvia Dannett and

Frank Rachel recall:

A Paterson, New Jersey, court imposed a fifty-day prison sentence on a young woman for dancing the turkey trot. Fifteen young women were dismissed from a well-known magazine after the editor caught them enjoying the abandoned dance at lunchtime. Turkey trotters incurred the condemnation of churches and respectable

27 Stearns, 95. 28 Low and Clift, 299-300. 29 Stearns, 95-96. 30 Ibid, 96. 33

people, and in 1914 an^fficial disapproval was issued by the Vatican.

A 1910 New York Committee of Amusement and Vacation

Resources of Working Girls pamphlet condemned the Turkey 32 Trot as "vicious" and Harper's Weekly published an article that same year titled, "Where Is Your Daughter This 33 Afternoon?," warning parents that their daughters could be at some lascivious afternoon tea, Turkey Trotting themselves into disrespectability.

The Turkey Trot certainly owed a great debt to the 34 Buzzard Lope performed by southern Blacks and Clayton

Bates undoubtedly saw and perhaps even danced both dances.

At the time of the Vatican's "official disapproval," Bates was seven years old. Interestingly, the buzzard is native to both West Africa and the South and the Buzzard Lope was a close imitation of the movements of the bird. In They All

Played Ragtime, by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, the Buzzard

Lope was described as follows: "That dance had arms high and wide like the wings of a bird, along with a cute shuffle

31 Dannett, Sylvia G.L. and Frank R. Rachel, Down Memory Lane (New York: Greenberg Publishers^ Inc., 1954), 75.

32Ibid, 96. 33 Ragtime Years. KRMA-TV, Denver, CO (National Educational Television), April 1961, Max Morath, commentator. 34_ Stearns, 96. 34 35 and a hop." By the early twentieth century, the Buzzard Lope had been supplanted by the more sophisticated Eagle

Rock which could more easily be enjoyed at crowded urban

rent parties. Both the Eagle Rock and Buzzard Lope made the

transition from country to town, like the dancers, but white 36 people seldom danced either one.

The Buzzard Lope, Turkey Trot, Chicken Scratch, and

Eagle Rock are all of special interest in discussing the dancer Clayton Bates for two reasons: these dances most likely derived from Black vernacular dances during Bates' formative dancing years in the South, and the bird-like

"flying" motion of the arms was a signature port de bras for

Bates, both as a stylistic device and as a method of balancing atop his peg. Bates later contemporized this arm gesture and called it his "jet plane," but the bird-like quality was never really lost.

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was born in 1907, the year of 37 the first American Black Rhodes Scholar Alain L. Locke, the last year Bill "Bojangles" Robinson worked as a waiter

35 Blesh, Rudi and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1950), 82-83, from a biography of Louis Gottschalk by Henry Didimus (Henry Edward Durrell). 36 Stearns, 26-27. 37 Sloan, Irving J., ed., The Blacks in America. 1492-1977. A Chronology and Fact Book (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1977), 25. 35

in Richmond, Virginia, and the year the Supreme Court upheld the right of railroads to racially segregate passengers traveling between states, even when this ran counter to the 38 laws of states in which the train was traveling. His left leg was a casualty of the cotton culture of the segregated

South and he, like many of his people, migrated from rural

Fountain Inn, S.C., to the more urban Greenville, S.C. in

1921 during the period known as the Great Migration. His formative dance influences were already absorbed and his ambitions to make it as a one-legged dancer were just awakening. He was well on his way to escaping the shackles of tenant farming, lynchings, illiteracy, and racial poverty.

The great flowering of Black arts in the first two decades of the twentieth century could only take place in the cities where there were theaters, producers, and other working artists. But the seeds for this flowering were planted in the latter half of the nineteenth century when

Black slaves and later tenant farmers gathered to dance for the white man and for each other.

Negro Almanac, citing Chiles v. C & 0 Railroad. 1907, 24. CHAPTER 3

BATES TOURS HIS WAY TO NEW YORK CITY

By the time Clayton Bates was born, white minstrels had all but disappeared, having endured from the 1840s to 1 the 1890s as America's most popular entertainment.

Minstrelsy had begun as a performance vehicle for white men who used blackface characters, achieved by rubbing their faces with burnt cork, to parody Blacks for the entertainment of white audiences. These minstrel shows were enormously popular and were incorporated into circuses, medicine shows, showboats, county fairs, and even between acts of regular plays. The burnt-cork specialists borrowed freely from African-American rhythms, music, humor, and especially dance. Summarizes Robert C. Toll in Blacking Up:

The Minstrel Show. "Although no other area of early minstrelsy was as strongly indebted to blacks as the dance,

^Miller and Smith, eds., 473. 37

it is clear that minstrels borrowed other material as

well."2 Most minstrels were Northerners or European-born immigrants and many had had little or no contact with Blacks

and no first-hand knowledge of African-American folk 3 sources. The great centers of minstrelsy were the

northeastern cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and

Providence. However, many dancers and dance scholars believe that all across America, minstrel shows did more to

stop the clock of the progress of race relations than any other single factor. African-Americans were portrayed as dialect-speaking, ignorant, dishonest, lazy, hard-drinking, gambling, and womanizing sloths. These stage Blacks exhibited nearly every negative stereotype available to their white creators. It was an easy laugh and a particularly easy way to soothe the tensions of the post-Civil War era. Above all, it brought great success and popularity to its small- minded creators.

Mabel M. Smythe in The Black American Reference Book writes, The white minstrel performers developed so broad a burlesque of what the general public took to be "Negro life" that their shows

2 Toll, Robert C., Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 44. 3 Miller and Smith, eds., 474. 38

created a stereotyped concept of black Americans which is with us to this day. The sooty burnt-cork makeup, the exaggeratedly wide lips, the gold teeth, the gaudy clothing, the loud jokes, the fantastic dialect, the watermelon and razor props, and the dice that continue right down to "Porgy and Bess," became so much a part of commercial theater in the United States that black performers themselves, in order to be successful, felt.impelled to 4 imitate these blackface whites.

A man many consider to be "the father of minstrelsy, 5 the first real prince of burnt cork," was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, the supposed inventor of the dance Jim Crow. Legend holds that during the summer of 1828, the N.M. Ludlow

Theater Company was summering in Louisville, Kentucky. When not on stage, the entertainers amused themselves by watching the comical, pathetic walk of a slave named Daddy Jim Crow.

Allegedly, Jim Crow suffered from a deformed right shoulder and a crippled left leg. He would hobble around, singing the following little song:

Step first upon yo' heel An' den on yo' toe. An' ebry time you turns around You jump Jim Crow. Next fall upon yo' knees Then jump up and bow low An' ebry time you turn around

4 Smythe, Mabel M., ed., The Black American Reference Book (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), 687. 5 Nathan, Hans, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 27. 39 6 You jump Jim Crow.

Thomas Rice stole this little rhyme, upped the tempo, exaggerated the distorted dance, blacked up, and debuted the Jim Crow song and dance for the Louisville audience. To say the act was a hit is to underestimate the impact of the theft— Rice was called back for twenty curtain calls on the very first performance. Jumping Jim Crow was soon an international dance craze, first as a performance piece and later as a social dance. "The stereotype developed by minstrelsy has been one of the greatest influences on the life of the black 7 American," according to The Encyclopedia of Black America.

With the character of the crippled Jim Crow being one of the most lasting images of the period, it is almost impossible to imagine what effect that character had on the life of

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates. The effect on its white creator,

Thomas Dartmouth Rice, is easier to ascertain: he became 8 the highest paid minstrel in the country, and he was certainly not the first to "borrow" from Black acts.

Probably the earliest widespread discrimination against

Blacks in the American theater for both audience and

6 Smythe, ed., 686-687. 7 Low and Clift, eds., 300.

^Stearns, 42. 40 performer began with the minstrels. Minstrels played theaters in which the Black entertainers they imitated could not even buy a ticket.

There was so much money to be made and opportunities to be had by blacking-up for minstrel shows, that eventually

African-Americans themselves participated. At least by the

1860s when Blacks entered minstrelsy, they had an audience waiting for them. Charles Hicks' Georgia Minstrels. Callender's Consolidated Spectacular Colored Minstrels, and the Richards and Pringle Minstrels, to name but a few, toured extensively in the latter part of the nineteenth century.9

As the Anthology of the Afro-American in Theatre: A

Critical Approach sums up the entrance of Blacks into minstrelsy,

By the time Negro minstrels entered show business on a substantial scale in the late 1860's, the pattern of minstrelsy had been set by white minstrels who borrowed from the songs and dances of the slave performers and exploited this material commercially. The Negro professional minstrels conformed to the pattern, blackening their faces, but at the same time bringing new freshness and vitality to the minstrel stage. Minstrelsy left a damaging imprint on entertainment in the United States because it caricatured Negro life and pictured the Negro as an irresponsible, grinning, banjo-playing and dancing type devoid of dignity and depth...For nearly a century, Negro entertainers strove to rid themselves of

9 Smythe, ed., 687-689. 41

the s£^gma symbolized by the mask they had to wear. A particularly well-known African-American minstrel

performer was William Henry Lane, "Master Juba," who turned

the tables on whites by imitating the Irish jigs he had

learned in the Five Points district of New York City. He

imitated them so successfully that he was able to get top billing with four white minstrel men, although this was probably both a "first” and a "last" for an African-American minstrel performer. Because of the shortage of work for

African-American performers, minstrelsy lasted longer among Black entertainers. Some acts toured well into the twentieth century.

Charles Dickens describes viewing a Lane performance in the Five Points district as follows:

Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut: snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man's fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs— -all sjjts of legs and no legs— what is this to him?

10 Patterson, Lindsay, ed., Anthology of the Afro-American in Theatre: A Critical Approach (Conwells Heights, PA: Publishers Agency, 1976), 4. 11 Dickens, Charles, American Notes. Vol. I (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 218. 42

The comparison of Lane's dancing to "fingers on a

tambourine" is one of the most meaningful to this author, as

it relates to Clayton Bates and his variety of leg movements

and rhythms.

Clayton Bates and his mother left Fountain Inn in

1921 for Greenville, South Carolina. Although his parents never formally divorced, Emma Bates never remarried and

Bates' father moved to Ohio. Emma Bates got a job with a white doctor named R.C. Bruce and she worked for him for twelve years. Dr. Bruce had three children with whom Bates 12 became very close: Bob, Nancy, and Martha. Clayton Bates never returned to school, having completed the sixth grade, and unbeknownst to his mother, having set his sights on a dancing career. It was in Greenville, South Carolina, that Clayton

Bates began to dance in amateur shows at the age of fourteen. By the time he was seventeen, he was winning all amateur contests at the Liberty Theatre in Greenville. As he describes his early success, In the amateurs, I won all the contests. That came about funny. Every contest I won, and then all the other amateurs did not want to appear because they wasn't going to win because I was going to win. The manager of the theatre said, "I want you to be on the show, but you will not be one of the contestants. You will be an 'extra, added attraction'. So we will

12 Bates/Vaughn interview. 43

pay you $10 every time that you appe^." So that was the beginning of my career. When asked what Bates' mother thought of his dancing career, he replied, My mother did not want me to be no dancer. I remember one time, the lady that used to take the tickets at the Liberty Theatre...Right below my home town, which was Fountain Inn, was a place called Mount Carmel. They had a county fair there every year. And this lady that took the tickets, she produced the show from the amateurs and took it to this fair, and I was honored! So I was on the ballyhoo...A ballyhoo is the platform outside the tent, and the performers come out, sing a few words or tell a joke, or cut one little step, just a little sample then they'd go back in. Then the barker, the ticket seller, would say, "All that's going on on the inside." So I remember I was out on the platform, ballyhooing, and a neighbor recognized me. Now my mother didn't know I was there. A neighbor went and told my mother. And the curtain rose up there on that ballyhoo. So Mother come up there and the neighbor said, "Miss Emma, is that your son up there?" She said, "No, that ain't joy son...I ain't never seen him £|fore." She disowned me, right then and there.

Those days Bates refers to as his "apprentice days," a dance apprenticeship which he had to hide from his mother who strongly disapproved. Bates supposed that her disapproval was based partly on her Baptist beliefs and partly on an upwardly mobile desire to see her only son succeed as a doctor or a lawyer. It wasn't until Bates had

13.., Ibid.

14Ibid.t w 44

moved to New York that Ms. Bates came around and voiced

support for "Peg Leg" Bates' career.

In discussing the early development of his tap technique, Bates reminisces:

I never took a dancing lesson in my life. If I saw a two-leg dancer doing a step, I would copy that step. But I would do it with one leg, which made it look like an entirely different step than what the two-leg dancer was doing. And I loved novelty things. I loved to Jj>g up in the air! I loved a lot of legomania. I was very ambitious when I was dancing. And the reason for these different styles— the acrobatics, the rhythm, the legomania— was I wanted to be so good, I wanted to surpass the two-J^g dancers! And in a lot of cases I did.

Without any dance training, Bates probably learned by emulating other tap dancers, by "stealing steps." What is so remarkable, is that each step had to be modified for a one-legged individual. Since the technique of tap dance is based primarily on shifting weight back and forth from one leg to another, the success of Bates the dancer was nothing short of miraculous. Where other tap dancers had four taps, two on each foot. Bates had two taps on his right foot and only a peg on the left. Each step or stunt had to be specially customized for those limitations. With only three points of contact on the floor, "Peg Leg" Bates was the king

15 Legomania was a form of "rubber legging," or use of wild and wiggly leg movements.

I6*Frank, , 48.,o 45

of balance. Bates was a mentor to a handful of one-legged dancers who followed in his footsteps, but really had no one

to help him in his developing years.

About once a month, the Liberty Theatre in Greenville would host a "tab" show. "Tab" shows (short for tabloid) were truncated vaudeville shows. These shows were also referred to as "tom" shows due to their frequent reworking of Uncle Tom's Cabin or "plant" shows because of their 17 inevitable plantation setting. It was customary on Friday night to include local dance talent in these shows in the form of a dance contest which was open to all comers.

Legend holds that it was in the "tom" show In Old Kentucky that the practice of having three judges for a tap contest was born. One judge watched from out front, one from the 18 wings, and one listened from under the stage.

One year, the Black "tab" show Rastus and Marie came to Greenville and when they left, Clayton Bates went on with them. He was probably only fifteen or sixteen years of age.

As Bates remembers his escape:

There was a show called Rastus and Marie, a Black musical comedy show. I left with that show from the Liberty Theatre and the show got stranded. And my mother had to send fojjrgme to come back home...She gave me a licking!

17 Stearns, 75.

18Ibid, 75. 19 Bates/Vaughn interview. 46

About six months later, the show Shufflin' Sam From

Alabam* played the Liberty, and once again Bates left with them when they moved on. This show fared better. By their return engagement three months later at the Liberty, Bates had worked himself up to near-soloist and since Greenville was his home town, the producers decided to let Bates star.

Bates recalls,

That was the first time my mother saw me dance...It (Shufflin' Sam) had a story line and I did a specialty in the show, I wasn't of the story line. I played "Peg Leg" Bates!

When asked at what point in his career people began to refer to him as "Peg Leg" Bates rather than Clayton

Bates, he replied that he really couldn't say for certain.

"Somebody said 'Peg Leg' Bates and it stuck!" He went on to explain that the term was a term of affection rather than derision.

Following his triumphant return home as a "specialty act," Bates continued to tour the country, primarily in the

South, doing carnivals, minstrels, and medicine shows. In short, Bates accepted almost any performance work which would support him while he continued to evolve as a dancer and which would spare him the humiliation of having to send home to his mother for money to return home to Greenville.

These shows played all-Black theaters for all-Black

20 Ibid. 47

audiences with an all-Black cast. The only white players were the theater owners.

African-American vaudeville had its own chain of theaters during the middle teens and early twenties all

through the South and Southwest, and even in several

Northern cities. This chain was called the Theater Owners' 21 Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). Shows would discover and

incorporate new talent along the way in the villages and

towns they played. That is how Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was recruited. Playing the T.O.B.A. circuit was often referred

to as "doing toby time" and the working conditions were deplorable. Not only did performers do three and four shows a day in theaters which were often poorly heated and poorly maintained, but finding a hotel that accepted Blacks in the days of racial segregation was a never-ending challenge.

The T.O.B.A. became known as "Tough on Black Artists."

Nonetheless, many of the best dancers of the early twentieth century cut their teeth on this circuit. Bill

Robinson, King Rastus Brown, Eddie Rector, the Berry 22 Brothers, and Pet Nugent all did "toby time." By 1923, at the age of sixteen, Bates had "gotten serious about show business" and had joined the T.O.B.A. Each show lasted

21 Stearns, 78.

22Ibid, 79. 48

approximately 45 minutes, following a usually trite story line with a cast of 35 or so people. Many artists were still working in blackface (not Bates). A small band travelled with the show with their own charts, but the plot had to be adapted to whatever scenery was available in the hosting theatre. T.O.B.A. shows travelled light: no sets.

Transportation was booked on the day coach train so that artists couldn't recline and rest properly. In 1926 at age nineteen, Bates was stranded for the final time in Fayetteville, North Carolina. While he was dancing in a carnival, a storm came up and blew the tent down, destroying the entire carnival. Hearing that there was a show that might hire him in Winston-Salem, North

Carolina, Bates set off hitchhiking the 100 some odd miles to the new theater. The show was one of the usual "tab" variety of all-Black entertainment and was touring under the name Eddie Lemon's Dashing Dinah Revue. As Bates recalls,

I started hitchhiking, I'm on the road, at night, me and the trombone player, about 8 or 9 at night, I'm hitchhiking...All of a sudden a bus pulls up beside me and stops. It's Eddie Lemon's bus! They had been to play a benefit at an army installation and were going back to Winston-Salem...So they put me on the bus. They asked me where I was going and what I did. I told them I was a dancer. They said, "You're a dancer with one leg?" I said "yes.” I asked them for a job. They responded, "Well, we got rehearsal tomorrow and we'll see." In rehearsal the next day, Lemon said, "Did you say last night you were a dancer?" I said yes. He asked, "What kind of dance do you do?" I said, a tap soft shoe... "We'll tell the piano player what you wanna do." I did an audition at the rehearsal. Stopped the show cold. He 49

hired me right on the spot. Three weeks lat|£, I was the star of this show. This was 1926. Bates by this time had played many major cities

including Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. He had yet to play to a white, or even integrated audience.

In 1927, The Dashing Dinah Revue was floundering.

Business was off. It was the custom in that era for the audience to throw nickels and pennies onto the stage to reward an artist who had especially pleased them. This practice was undoubtedly treacherous for a one-legged dancer/stuntman dancing on a heavily raked stage, but because of his popularity, Bates' piggy bank never went empty. When the show was about to close, Bates turned over his coins to the manager who was able to just cover the cost of getting the show to the next town. In this particular case, the next engagement was the Standard Theatre in

Philadelphia, next to last stop before New York's famed

Lafayette Theatre. The Lafayette was at 133rd and 7th Avenues, just a few blocks from the Apollo Theater, and was owned by the 24 same owner/manager: Frank Schiffman. Eddie Lemon, the

23 Bates/Vaughn interview. 24 According to Bates, Lemon had been a semi-successful comedian in New York City. He was probably (Footnote Continued) 50 producer/director of The Dashing Dinah Revue had been

telling Bates:

"Peg, we’re gonna play the Lafayette Theatre in New York. And once you get to New York, brother, ain't no looking back 'cause you are a gift! You will stop anybody's show just like you've been stopping these shows here. When you get to New York, that's it!" So I believed him and I put all my trust in Eddie. And I put all my trust in he was telling me about Frank Schiffman.

Schiffman came to Philadelphia to preview the show and see the fantastic monoped dancer Lemon had been telling him about. Since Bates' dressing room was right next-door to Lemon's, Bates was able to hear Schiffman's after-show reaction right through the walls. Schiffman was yelling,

"How dare you? How dare you wanna bring a 'thing' like this to play the Lafayette Theatre? You are out of your mind. 26 Eddie!"

Poor Lemon had hoped that Bates would be his trump card to get Schiffman to advance him the money to get fresh costumes, a few new acts, and a big name to open with in New

York. Lemon's faith in Bates' talent was so complete that he thought surely a big-time producer like Schiffman would

(Footnote Continued) 42 at the time, and knew the ropes of getting an act to New York. 25 Bates/Vaughn interview. see the potential money to be made booking an act with the novelty potential of Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates.

Schiffman's reaction, however, according to Bates was, "You mean that one-leg boy? I wouldn't let him walk across my stage!" Bates remembers his own reaction:

Well, when I hear that, that broke my heart. That night, I tried to slip my baggage out of the dressing room. Someone told Eddie about it, and Eddie came to stop me, 'cause next we're gonna play a Black theater in Newark, New Jersey...Eddie says, "Don't you pay attention to what Schiffman says. You're gonna make it, and you're gonna go to New Yg^k if I have to kill you to take you there."

The next stop for The Dashing Dinah Revue was Newark

New Jersey. When they finished that engagement, the show was left with no future bookings and no money in reserve.

Eddie Lemon felt that since Newark was so close to New York

City, he owed it to Bates to take him into the city. The first place Bates wanted to visit was the Lafayette Theatre

Bates remembers that he was standing in front of the theater reading the marquee when he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. The stranger inquired whether he was "Peg

Leg" Bates and when the answer was affirmative, declared,

"I've been looking all over for you!" Apparently the manager of the Lafayette Theatre, a man named Leonard

Harper, had heard about Bates from the Newark engagement.

27 Ibid. 52

Harper was going into the Lafayette in four days with a new

show and was looking for fresh acts. The show was at that very moment in rehearsal at the Black club, Small's

Paradise, and the stranger would be happy to show Bates where that was. Bates at this point had only been in New

York for three hours]

Bates recalls: I went down there, and met Leonard Harper, and, man. I never seen such beautiful people and nice things!...So, Leonard had me to come to rehearsal the next day— he didn't hire me right there. The next day he had me to do an audition at rehearsal, a^ again, I stopped the show cold. He hired me.

The star of this new show was going to be a "big name,” according to Bates, a "pantomime artist" by the name of Johnny Hudgins who had just returned from Paris where he had been starring for six months. As Bates recalls the financial arrangements agreed upon between Harper and him,

"I got seventy-five dollars. That was the most I had ever 29 made at that point. And that was a fortune!"

Jean and Marshall Stearns in Jazz Dance. The Story of

American Vernacular Dance, note that Johnny Hudgins was an

"eccentric" dancer who in 1923 starred in the Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle sensation Shuffle Along. Hudgins had

28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 53

started as a stagehand in Baltimore and then developed a 30 sort of Black Charlie Chaplin pantomime act. Shuffle Along was one of the most memorable shows of the New Negro Renaissance period and set the standard for all

African-American shows of the 1920s. It featured the first

sixteen-girl Black chorus line, a "speed dancing" tempo to erase the image of Blacks as lazy, and launched the careers of Blake, Sissle, and the clownish chorine Josephine

Baker.3^

After the show many felt that, "The first reportorial responsibility of any reviewer who goes to a Negro musical 32 is to say whether or not it is as good as Shuffle Along."

The mid-twenties were fairly devastating for African-American productions. Just before his success in

France, Hudgins had appeared in the disaster Lucky Sambo in

1925. This show was so awful, it only lasted nine performances.33

Apparently, the producer Leonard Harper saw something special in Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates. As Bates describes the opening scene of the new show,

30 Stearns, 146.

31Ibid, 146.

32Ibid, 138.

33Ibid, 149. 54

This was the end now, the end of World War I. He built a scene where we're supposed to come off the battlefield to a little commissary and do a U.S.O. thing, and whatever's wrong with you, you go entertain, go do something. This was in the very opening, along with other artists, and again, I stopped the show cold. Had to take two encores there! O.K.! Then when I gotta come back midway through the show to do my specialty, it really hit th^fan. I took four encores with my specialty!

News spread fast around Harlem that there was a hot new dance act at the Lafayette Theatre. Bates recalls, "All you hear in Harlem was 'Peg Leg’ Bates, that one-leg dancer! 35 'Peg Leg1 Bates, 'Peg Leg' Bates, was all you could hear!"

Soon, Frank Schiffman, the empresario who had said he wouldn't let Bates even walk across his stage, sent for

Bates to come to his office. This was only four days into the new show with Leonard Harper. Bates had still not met

Schiffman at this point.

Schiffman complimented Bates by telling him he was very good. Then he inquired if Bates was working the next week. Bates replied that he didn't know, his manager had not yet confirmed anything. Schiffman inquried who Bates' manager was and the response was Eddie Lemon, the man who had brought Bates to New York after The Dashing Dinah Revue.

Schiffman then said that he wished to speak to Lemon and

^^Bates/Vaughn interview. 55

discuss arrangements for keeping Bates in New York rather than sending him on tour with the Harper show. Being "held over" was a triumph in those days, and when Bates told Lemon that Schiffman wanted to keep him in

town, Lemon replied, "This is it! I told you you'd get to

New York and that would do it. Now I'm gonna get you some

money...If they wanna hold you over, it'll cost them $200.00."

Bates had felt that $75 a week was "raising sand" and

became very nervous that Lemon was asking for the

impossible. He remembers saying to Lemon, "Eddie, don't

bother, don't bother, that's all right, Eddie! I'm happy with the $75." Lemon ignored Bates' pleas and negotiated a

$200 contract for Bates to stay over. Bates thinks he was probably the first act to have been held over at the

Lafayette in twelve years, and at the princely rate of $200.

As Bates recalls, "I was on my way!"

Like many African-Americans of his era, Clayton "Peg

Leg" Bates had migrated from dirt roads, kerosene lamps, bad schools, lynchings, and low pay, to the excitement of the

New York City of James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean

Toomer, and Langston Hughes. In 1928, Bates was invited to join the cast of "Blackbirds of 1928" and assumed his rightful place among the pioneers of the New Negro

Renaissance, helping to cultivate the flowering of 56

African-American talent in the arts centered in new York

City in the 1920s. CHAPTER 4

BROADWAY AND BLACKBIRDS OF 1928

As a resident of New York City in 1928, Bates

contributed to the phenomenal growth of the Black population

in Harlem as it went from 50,000 Harlem Blacks in 1914, to 1 80,000 m 1920, to 200,000 m 1930. Harlem was home to the

most prominent Black literary figures, theater

personalities, dancers, singers, and musicians of the era.

Despite incredible strides Northward geographically and

upward in artistic prominence in the U.S.A.,

African-Americans were still living their lives along

rigidly segregated color lines, even in New York City.

The expansion and increased prosperity of New York's

Black middle class created a milieu in which theater could

flourish. The importance of New York City as a center for

Black theater is confirmed by both first-person accounts and

by statistics. By 1910, the number of Black actors in New

*Emery, Lynne Fauley, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Co., 1988), 221.

57 58 2 York City had nearly doubled over the 1890 figures, not only because of the general increase in the Black population, but because of the large number of Black musical comedies using New York City as home base. The New York theater critics were the most experienced and discriminating in the country, and since African-Americans had been active 3 in theater in New York City since at least the 1820s, New

York held the most promise for continued growth in that tradition. New York City provided the financial base and educational apparatus, as well as social networks and diverse audiences necessary for the success of African-

American musical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s.

In his last novel, The Sport of the Gods. Paul

Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) captured the probable dream of

African-Americans, actors or otherwise, who arrived in New

York City during the New Negro Renaissance:

They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard of it, and it seemed to them the centre of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world. New York. It had an alluring sound. Who would

2 By 1890, the federal census reported a total of 1,490 Negro "actors and showmen” in the U.S., none of whom were appearing in legitimate dramatic productions. The 1910 census showed that the total number of professional entertainers had risen to 3,088, most of whom were employed in all-Negro musicals. 3 Ploskx and Williams, 1116. 59

know £hem there? Who would look down upon them?

The reality of Harlem life was probably not quite as glamorous as had been expected. Job opportunities for

Blacks were still limited. Housing and sanitation for many were deplorable. Wallace Thurman, a writer of the period, described "tenements like crowded dungheaps festering with 5 poverty-stricken and crime-ridden step-children of nature."

During the twenties in Harlem, 2,000 Black families were destitute, the average income was $18 a week, and residents were crowded in 233 people to an acre as opposed to 133 per 6 acre in other neighborhoods in Manhattan.

These conditions, however, did not deter the congregation in Harlem of some of the finest African-

American artists of the era. The term "Harlem Renaissance," often used to describe this era between 1917-1935, is a misnomer. This rich surge of African-American arts and letters was not limited to a few blocks north of 125th

Street in New York City, but could be felt in all American

4 Riis, Thomas L., Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York. 1890 to 1915 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 30. 5 Thurman, Wallace, Negro Life in New York's Harlem (Girard, KA: Haldeman-Julius, 1928), 8. 6 Kellner, Bruce, ed., The Harlem Renaissance. A Historical Dictionary of the Era (New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987), xviii. 60

cities with large African-American populations: Chicago,

Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New 7 Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, and Atlanta. The poet Langston Hughes described the era as "When Harlem Was

m Vogue...8

The godfather of the New Negro Renaissance, Alain Locke, wrote in 1926:

But the real mine of Negro dramatic art and talent is in the subsoil of the vaudeville stage, gleaming through its slag and dross in the unmistakenly great dramatic gifts of a Bert Williams, a Florence Mills or a Bill Robinson. Give Bojangles Robinson or George Stamper, pantomime dancers of genius, a Bakst or an expressionist setting; give Josephine Baker, Eddie Rector, Abbie Mitchell, or Ethel Waters a dignified medium, and they would be more than | sensation, they would be artistic revelations.

Locke was a philosophy professor at Howard University in

Washington, D.C. and coined the term "New Negro” in an essay by the same name in 1925. The term was frequently used by the African-American writer and leader Marcus Garvey and had been in casual usage since 1920. The number of African-Americans who came forth in the

1920s to write about the plight of their race is a clear

7 Smythe, ed., 57. 8 Hughes, Langston, "When Harlem Was m Vogue," Town and Country. July 1940, 64. 9 Smythe, ed., 57. 61 indication of the intellectual achievements which had been made. The writings of W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson,

Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name but a few, are all filled with wonderful images of the era and the magnetism of the

"New Negro" of the 1920s.

"Black Broadway" boasted many artistic and financial triumphs, such as Shuffle Along (1921), Runnin' Wild (1923),

Chocolate Dandies (1924), and Blackbirds (1928, 1930). Many of the acts for these shows had been developed in the exclusive entertainment venues where all-Black casts entertained all-white audiences such as the Savoy and the

Cotton Club, or clubs like Small's Paradise where Blacks entertained Black audiences and where "Peg Leg" Bates did his first New York audition.

The dance styles, and even sometimes the steps employed in the choruses and choreography of these shows, had originated in the South in honky-tonks and dance-halls.

When Southern African-Americans moved North, they brought their dances with them. The Big Apple, Charleston, Black

Bottom, Lindy Hop, Jitterbug, Suzy-Q, Truckin', and Camel

Walk all sashayed from Southern dance halls to the big

Harlem ballrooms. These dances were then snagged by

African-American entertainers for their acts and disseminated through the white audiences to the world at large. The signature step of the era, the Charleston, 62

originated in the teens in the South, was introduced to the

white public in the show Liza” in 1922, and soon became the

most popular dance of the decade. The Broadway show which set the standard for the

African-American musical of the 1920s was the 1921 smash hit

Shuffle Along. Bruce Kellner documents in The Harlem

Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary of the Era.

Shuffle Along has been cited often as the true, single impetus for the period: the first black Broadway show of the twenties. It set a pace and style during a period eager for novelties, and after the first week's run business was so heavy that the street on which it was playing had to be designated for one-way traffic. Shuffle Along opened with no advance sale and little backing, in a seedy lecture hall in need of renovation; certainly, the ca^£ did not anticipate a long run, and Blake recalled that everyone connected with it was afraid that the love story, in which a black boy kisses a black girl, on stage, in public, would get them all thrown in jail. Instead, its enormous popularity made it a mod|^ for most of the shows that followed....”

One of the shows that patterned itself after Shuffle

Along was Blackbirds of 1926. This show was written especially for Florence Mills, the Harlem diva and Shuffle

Along graduate, and was produced by the white producer Lew

10 Consulted Theatre Arts, "The Negro in the American Theatre,” Brenda Dixon-Stowell (New York: Theatre Arts, Inc., August 1942, Vol. xxvi, No. 8), 13. 11 Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and lyrics for Shuffle Along.

12Mitchell, 79. 63

Leslie to open at the Alhambra Theatre at 126th and 7th 13 Avenues in New York City. After six weeks, Leslie took the show to Paris for six months and then to London where 14 the Prince of Wales saw it sixteen times. Miss Mills made both herself and the song famous by singing, "I'm a Little

Blackbird Waiting for a Bluebird." Regrettably, Miss Mills died suddenly of appendicitis before the Blackbirds 15 reopening. Lew Leslie (Lev Lessinsky, 1886-1963) was scouting talent for the New York City reopening when he heard of the amazing talent of the latest tap dancer to hit Manhattan:

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates. Leslie sent his brother to check out Bates' act at the Lafayette Theatre and the brother returned with a good report. An audition was set up and

Bates once again won everyone over. During the 1920s, there were no open auditions for African-American shows: one had to be invited to audition and Bates seemed to get every job he tried out for.

Blackbirds of 1928 was a big gamble for Lew Leslie.

The first talking picture, "The Jazz Singer," had been

13Kellner, ed., xix. 14 Mitchell, Lofton, Black Drama: The Story of the American Nearo in the Theatre (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967), 79. 15 Ibid, 79. 64

released in 1927 and smart theatrical producers could

plainly see what lay ahead. Leslie's star Florence Mills

was dead and Leslie was on a tight budget for this show. He wisely chose to spend what little money he had on first-rate

songwriters. The team he picked was Jimmy McHugh as 16 composer and Dorothy Fields as lyricist. Blackbirds of

1928 was the first complete score written by this white duo and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby"; "Diga Diga Do"; "I Must Have That Man"; and "Magnolia's Wedding Day" 17 were four of the strongest tunes born of this pairing.

Jimmy McHugh (1894-1969) had made his name as the resident composer in the whites-only Cotton Club. There he had introduced such songs as "When My Sugar Walks Down the

Street" and "I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me."18

It was at the Cotton Club in 1927 that McHugh first met and collaborated with lyricist Dorothy Fields.

Fields (1905-1974), who had begun writing floor show material for the Cotton Club at the age of twenty-one, was the daughter of the famous vaudeville team Weber and

16 Haskins, Jim and N.R. Mitgang, Mr. Boianqles. The Biography of Bill Robinson (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1988), 185. 17 Johnson, James Weldon, Black Manhattan (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times. 1968), 212-213. 18 Haskins and Mitgang, 185. 65 19 Fields. She and McHugh had originally written "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby" for Harry Delmar's Revels of 1927. Although she wrote lyrics for other

African-American shows, her work with Jerome Kern, Cole

Porter, Sigmund Romberg, and other white musical comedy 20 artists is what really made her famous.

Leslie chose singer Adelaide Hall to replace Florence Mills. He also cast another fine singer, Aida Ward, who had just graduated from being the pit piano player in stock theater in Kansas City. For male talent, Leslie selected a comedian and ex-prize fighter named Tim Moore. Moore is better known today for his role as Kingfish in Amos *n'

Andv. George W. Cooper was also cast. Cooper had been Bill "Bojangles” Robinson's former vaudeville partner. Johnny

Hudgins, the "pantomime artist" Bates had worked with in the previous show at the Lafayette Theatre, rounded out the list of headliners. These artists were backed by "The Plantation

Orchestra," Allie Ross, conductor.

The show began previews in April 1928 at the Liberty

Theatre in Manhattan. Despite beauty, humor, fine singing, and superlative songwriting, Blackbirds of 1928 lacked the magic touch to make it a smash hit. Lew Leslie was nervous.

19 Ibid, 185. 20 Kellner, ed., 122. 66

Three weeks into previews, Leslie had the brainstorm of

adding Bill "Bojangles" Robinson to the cast. Robinson 21 joined the cast as a special favor to Lew Leslie. At the time of his Broadway debut, Robinson was fifty years old.

By opening night, May 9, 1928, Blackbirds of 1928 was a polished onyx gemstone of a show.

According to David Ewen's Complete Book of American

Musical Theater. Blackbirds of 1928 was one of the most successful all-Negro revues produced on Broadway— and one performer above all others helped to make this so: "Bojangles" Bill Robinson, here achieving his first Broadway stage success. He did not appear until the second half of the revue. But from the moment he came on the stage to sing and dance in “° 0 1 2 i the New Low Down," the audience was his.

James Weldon Johnson in Black Manhattan testified that: Blackbirds set a pace for all revues, white as well as black. The show became a sort of New York institution; and out-of-town visitors came to the city with the convictiog^that was something that had to be seen.

Although Bill Robinson had been a headliner on the

African-American T.O.B.A. circuit for many years, he was a new talent to the white audiences at the Liberty Theatre.

21 Haskins and Mitgang, 183. 22 Even, David, The Complete Book of American Musical Theater (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), 206. 23 Johnson, 212. 67

Again quoting James Weldon Johnson on Robinson's success in Blackbirds of 1928:

He was immediately pronounced the greatest tap-dancer in the world, and in a few weeks, he was one of the most widely known men in the city. His stunt of dancing up and down a set of stair steps— a stunt that has since been much imitated— was acknowledged as a demonstration of the utmost perfection in tapping out intricate rhythms. The nicety with which each group of rhythms was executed was marvellous and never failed to give the listening spectator pleasurable surprise at the accomplishment of the feat.

The plot, such as it was, of Blackbirds of 1928 incorporated the usual racial stereotypes of "darkies" portrayed as happy-go-lucky fools: playing poker, getting scared in graveyards, and dancing mindlessly. This unfortunate situation was counterbalanced by the sensational band, a wonderful ensemble of dancers, and the talents of several African-American artists who were just hitting their stride, among them Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates.

As Bates described his Broadway debut at the age of twenty-one in late May of 1928, ...Lew had come up with this terrific idea. He put three other dancers with me and called us "The Four Bad Men from Harlem." All different dancers, different kind of dancers. Blue McAllister, he's a very tight rhythm dancer, very tight. Reminded me a lot of Harold Leroy. Also, Crawford Jackson, who did the "Flying Tap Charleston," which is like the tap Charleston I did with Harold Leroy. And there was a "knee

24Ibid, 214. 68 25 dropper" by the name of Lloyd Mitchell. He did a lot of stuff on his knees, and then myself. The hit song of the show was "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." "Diga Diga Do" was our entrance. The idea of it was, we would come on the stage, the one man, Blue McAllister, opened it up, did two choruses, very tight. It went well. Then came Lloyd Mitchell with his knee drops. He did this and then stepped back in line. Then came Crawford Jackson with his "Flying Tap Charleston," and he would step back in line. Now while all these are doing their dancing and step back in line, there's this one-leg boy standing up there looking at all this. So when the third one did his thing and stepped back in line, all three of them looked at the one-leg boy and pointed their fingers and then said, "Come on!" Then I danced to the hit number of the day, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love"....I did four steps and the applause come, and you j£gver heard such applause in all your life!

When asked how Bates and Robinson got along, because

Robinson's nasty temper and competitive nature were legendary, Bates reminisced about his first night on the stage with "Bojangles":

On the first night (we opened the show incidentally), after the curtain closed in the finale, Bill Robinson said, "Hold it! Don't nobody leave the stage! Hold it right there!" Everybody looked at one another and said, "What's wrong with Bill?" So he told the stage manager, "Tell Lew Leslie to come back here." Lew was out front, checking the box office. And Lew stopped what he was doing and come on backstage and said, ''What's the matter, Bill?" Bill said, "Lew, who's the star of this GD show?” Lew said, "Why, vou are, Bill. Everybody knows you're the star of the show.

25 A "knee dropper" is a dancer who does floor work similar to breakdancing. 26 Bates/Vaughn interview. 69

Your name is on the marquee as the star of the show." Bill said, "Well, if 1 am the star of the show, I don't want a& dancing until 1 have done my specialty, especially that one-leg SOB over there!" That wag^my introduction to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

From those shaky beginnings built a solid friendship between Bates and Robinson which endured until Robinson's death. Bates fondly remembers the creation of the Bates/Robinson "three-leg routine." One night after the show, Bates was surprised at the boarding house where he lived by a phone call from Robinson, inviting Bates back to the theater. Since Bates knew almost no one in New York

City, he was grateful for the company. Upon his arrival,

Bates found Robinson in rehearsal clothes, working steps.

The following exchange ensued:

He did a step and said, "Peg, can you do this?" I said, "I think so." He said, "Let's see you." I did the step, the same step that he did. He did about four or five steps: "Think you can do this?" "I think so." Beat for beat, step for step, I did it all. "That's good, I like that." That same night, when I took my third encore, Bill Robinson came out on the stage and applauded me and said "Ain't he great? But now m s . are going to show you something you have never seen before. We gonna to show you a three-leg routine"....We stopped the show, he^gnd I.... We did that until the show closed.

27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 70

Bates maintains that "Bojangles" was the only tap

dancer who ever taught him dance steps. Blackbirds of 1928 ran for 518 performances, based in large part on the

strength of Robinson's popularity. Ethel Waters wrote in

her autobiography, "Harlem was crazy about

Bojangles...Everybody in Harlem said Bojangles was a 29 magnificent dancer and they were certainly right." Bates remembers Robinson realistically: Bill had a very mean attitude. He wasn't well liked by Black people, although he did a lot of good for Black people. He opened a lot of doors, and when he died. Bill Robinson had the greatest funeral of any dignitary in or out of the business that ever happened. They were lined from Harlem to Broadway on both sides of the street when he passed. He was big man, did a lot of^good, opened a lot of doors, a big, big man.

The extended stay in New York City by Bates in

Blackbirds of 1928 served several purposes. This was the first time Bates had ever danced for an all-white audience and he proved to himself and others that he could be accepted, despite being Black and one-legged, as a dancer of the first caliber. His Broadway debut and resulting success helped to resolve his conflict with his mother over his chosen career. The protracted exposure to the best

29 Fox, Ted, Showtime at the Apollo (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), 218. 30 Bates/Vaughn interview. 71

African-American entertainers of the New Negro Renaissance was both educational and inspirational. Bates was soon a full-fledged Harlemite with all the accompanying

sophistication and elan.

In 1929, Blackbirds moved on to Paris, France for

eighteen weeks with Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates as a headliner.

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson declined to go along, probably 31 because Lew Leslie didn't offer enough money. In

Robinson's place, Lew Leslie cast Eddie Rector, "Mr.

Bambalina." Stearns and Stearns declare of Rector: "Of all the soft-shoe dancers, Eddie Rector was unquestionably the greatest soloist and the major influence on the class-act 32 teams." Rector had worked out a specialty routine to the song "Bambalina" which he danced in top hat and tails— all sartorially color-toned in sophisticated pearl-gray. Lew

Leslie had wanted Rector to do Robinson's stair dance in

Paris, and Rector complied, despite Robinson having sent him 33 a telegram saying: "DO MY STAIR DANCE AND YOU DIE."

The posters and programs of the Paris tour of

Blackbirds were filled with cartoons of "darkies" engaged in stereotypical behavior framed by a backdrop of a grinning

31 Haskins and Mitgang, 191. 32 Stearns, 288. 33 Haskins and Mitgang, 191. 72

African-American child eating a huge slice of watermelon.

This denigrating treatment of the African-American image seemed to have been ignored by the press with the exception of a newspaper probably not read by whites: The Baltimore

Afro-American. A Fisk University contributing correspondent wrote from Paris about Blackbirds: "All in all, Blackbirds 34 is probably doing more harm than good."

Bates’ memories of Paris are as follows: I was very, impressed with Paris in 1929 because there was no prejudice there. That impressed me tremendously, because in 1929 it was still very, very prejudiced right here in New York, not only down South. Black people couldn't go to white theaters in 1929 here in New York, much less down South. Black people could not go to the Capital Theatre, Radio City Music Hall, all that stuffIn Paris you could go where you wanted to.

Upon his return to New York City in late 1929, Bates was signed by the William Morris Agency. Not only did they help with his bookings and his career, but they had a profound effect on his lifelong ambition to "eliminate the sympathetic appeal." Bates had never wanted to be pitied because he was a monoped. In fact, he refers to his disability as "a gift from God." But it was a comment from the William Morris Agency that set the tone of the Clayton

34 McMillan, L.K., Baltimore Afro-American. August 24, 1929. 35 Bates/Vaughn interview. 73

Bates this author met in 1990: an elegant, nattily dressed class act.

The William Morris office, the one that booked me, said that the reason why I was getting so many applauses was because of sympathy. People felt sorry for roe because I had only one leg. And I really didn't start dressing until I came to New York. So, I got the idea to eliminate the sympathetic appeal and again this came from God. How do you get people to stop feeling sorry for you? That wasto make them admire you. So I got to find a way now for people to admire me. So what I did was I learned— I don't know where I got it from— I used to dress immaculately. If I had on a white suit, I had a peg leg to match. If I had on a blue suit, I had a peg leg to match, brown suit, peg leg to match....I had to find a way to stop people, to eliminate the sympathetic thing. The one way was the dress, and the next way, I got a little recitation that I did, and it went like this:

Don't look at me in sympathy I'm glad that I'm this way. For I feel good, and I'm knocking on wood as long as I can say: You just watch me peg it, and you can tell by the way that I leg it, that I'm "Peg Leg" Bates, the one-leg dancing man. I mix light fantastics up with hot gymnastics I'm Peg Leg Bates, the one-leg dancing man. Now you may think that having just one leg is tough, but when I do my stuff (dance break) one leg is enough! When I start in tapping anything can happen. I'm "Peg Leg" Bates, the one-leg dancing man. Let me show you what I mean!

36 Ibid. 74

Having conquered the Broadway stage, Paris audiences,

"the sympathetic appeal," and the challenge of being an

African-American male with only one leg, Bates returned to New York City to begin another tremendously important epoch in his life: a 44-year relationship with the love of his life and the mother of his child. CHAPTER 5

TELEVISION AND THE PEG LEG BATES RESORT

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates returned to New York City

from Paris in late 1929, having followed in the footsteps of many other important figures of the New Negro Renaissance who crossed the Atlantic to spread the vitality of Harlem to

another continent. Among those 1920s exporters of great

African-American talent were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, 1 Walter White, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes — all of whom visited Paris at the same time Bates was having his successful eleven-month run at the Moulin Rouge as a headliner in Blackbirds. The "Harlem Renaissance" spread to and was fed by the excitement and racial tolerance

African-Americans found in the culturally sophisticated

French capital.

Phyllis Rose, in her biography of the legendary

American entertainer Josephine Baker, Jazz Cleopatra, says:

But the real renaissance in Harlem was taking place in Small's Paradise, Connie's Inn, and the Cotton Club, and the real innovators and

*Rose, Phyllis, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 80.

75 76

cultural giants were Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller. Not only was jazz the best thing in black cultural life in the twenties; jazz may have been the best thing happening in American culture. From the point of view of most informed Europeans, it was American culture. When Europeans thought of America, they thought of black musicians, black singers, and black dancers— certainly not of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein who lived in their midst without affecting them. Until the twenties, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, with a few picturesque exceptions like Buffalo Bill and Mark Twain, America had no cultural heroes. When it finally turned a face to Europe, that face was black.

Paris in 1929 was both "black happy" and "tap happy." The American jazz voice was heard, not so much through the music and lyrics, but through the body via dance. Louis

Roubard wrote from Paris in 1929, "C'est dans les jambes qu'il faut avoir de la voix aujourd'hui," which translated, 3 means the voice has to be in the legs today. Agnes de

Mille further explains in America Dances;

These tapping men and women became heroes of the entire world, spreading the American cult everywhere. Tap dancing became universally popular. It is hard to exaggerate th| enthusiasm for it that seized people.

2Ibid, 80. 3 Roubard, Louis, Music Hall (Paris: Louis Querelle, editeur, 1929), 57. 4 De Mille, Agnes, America Dances (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1980), 40. 77

The voice which Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates manifested in

his dancing was the voice of the spiritual emancipation of

the New Negro Renaissance. A chance, as Alain Locke explained, for African-Americans "to repair a damaged group 5 psychology and reshape a warped social perspective." Bates

and other African-American artists of this renaissance

seized the opportunity to convert a defensive into an

offensive position, a handicap into an incentive, an attitude which became a Bates trademark throughout his

entire life.

Upon his return to New York City, Bates joined the

vaudeville circuit as a soloist. He played the white Loews

Circuit and Keith Circuit, and the independent white circuit 6 of Fanchon and Marco. Vaudeville was a stage entertainment

consisting of several unrelated acts and was also referred

to as "variety." These shows were highly diversified and

could include songs, dances, animal acts, magic acts, 7 juggling, and dramatic and burlesque sketches.

Vaudeville was supplanted in the 1930s by radio and movies and soon thereafter by television. The character and nature of t.v. variety shows, like Ed Sullivan, came

5 Thernstrom, ed., 16.

6Frank, 50. 7 Matlow, Myron, "Vaudeville," Encvlopedia Americana. Vol. 27, 914. 78 directly from the vaudeville stage. Bates was one of many artists to have developed his craft, first on the vaudeville circuit, and later on the television screen.

When not out on tour in the 1930s, Bates entertained at the great uptown Harlem clubs like Small's Paradise, the

Cotton Club, Club Zanzibar, and Connie's Inn. It was at Connie's Inn in 1933 during a run of Hot Chocolates that

Bates first laid eyes on his one true love, Alice Bates, a chorine in the same show. "Peg Leg" Bates was 26 years of age, Alice was 25, and heremembers he "took one look at her 8 then, and hasn't taken his eyes off her since."

As Bates describes their first meeting:

One day I was walking up 7th Avenue, I don't remember where I was going, I saw a very pretty young girl with a bicycle; she was not riding the bicycle, just walking with the bicycle. I got fresh with her. I said, "Hey, little girl, give me a ride on your bicycle." She said, "You can't ride my bicycle, Mr. Bates, I got a flat tire." I said, "Oh, you know who I am?£ She said, "Everybody knows 'Peg Leg' Bates!"

Much to Bates' surprise, at rehearsal later that evening, as he was scanning the chorus line to see who he would flirt with next, his eye fell on none other than "Miss Flat Tire."

Bates made his move:

It was the second show, I passed by and knocked on the door of the dressing room. She says,

8 Goldberg, Jane, Bv Word of Foot, videotape interview with Bates, Changing Times Tap Company, 1983. 9 Bates/Vaughn interview. 79

"Come in." I says, "Can I ask you a question?" She says, "What?" I say, "All the rest of the girls, in between shows, they're running out to the bar and having a good time, why don't you run out to the bar and have a good time?" She says, "I don't need to run out to the bar and have a good time. I'm sitting in the dressing room, reading my book, minding my own business. Do you mind, Mr. Bates?" "Well, no, I don't mind. Will you have supper with me tonight?" She thought about it. "Yes, I'll have supper with you." That nigh|Qwe had supper and that was it. That was it! By this time, Bates had already perfected his incomparable tap act. Unlike other artists who specialized

in soft shoe, or buck and wing, or legomania, Bates excelled

at all tap styles. He explains: "I was very ambitious when

I was dancing. I wanted to be so good, I wanted to surpass 11 the two-leg dancers! And in a lot of cases I did.

Not only was Bates unique in his versatility as a tap performer, he, above all else, had a distinctive sound to his taps. The peg hammered out the bass line with a strong,

clear, resonant sound, while the right leg, with its two

taps, embroidered the rhythm with off-beats and syncopations. The outside of the peg was encased in rubber which gave him traction on slippery floors and allowed him

to balance atop the'peg with seemingly wild abandon and yet perfect control. All of Bates' tap dance contemporaries interviewed for this study commented on his musicality and

11 Frank, 46. 80 unusual tonality. Walter Terry in Dance in America declared that Bates had "transformed a handicap into a special virtuosity. To this author, the miracle of "Peg Leg" Bates' dancing is the marvelous lightness and speed of his taps, two qualities seldom associated with "handicapped" people.

He achieved lightening-fast fouettes, often working in profile to the audience, and changing quickly from one facing to the other, one foot to one peg. At no time is the audience moved to experience pity because of a clumsy weight shift or awkward transition. His movements were graceful and elegant, his sounds concise and clear. This overall effect was furthered by the sound of what Fats Waller would have called "pedal extremities" of gold.

Choreographically, Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was an artist who knew his own limitations: almost none. He was the consummate soloist showman who took possession of the stage and filled it with balletic "en pointe" perches and spins, intriguing rhythmic changes, a soaring eagle-like carriage of his upper body, and an ever-present good humored rapport with his audience. Both his musicality and sense of humor were used to great advantage in his invention of steps and phrases. His was a dance of joyous courage which was

12 Terry, Walter, The Dance in America (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1956), 256. 81 enjoyed first by all-Black audiences and later in the 1930s and 1940s, increasingly by white fans.

Quoting Margaret Just Butcher in The Negro in American Culture:

The realization that for many years the Negro dancer could not aspire above the vaudeville level is a sorry one. His accomplishments, within such a narrow medium of footwork and eccentricity were possible only through sheer genius. What Stella Wiley, Ada Overton, Florence Mills, "Peg Leg" Bates, Pete, Peaches, and Duke, the Berry Brothers, and Bill Robinson could have done in a freer medium with m o | | artistic background can only be imagined.

But "sheer genius" always wins the day and "Peg Leg”

Bates' career was really only just beginning. He was soon to meet a man who had a tremendous impact on Bates' career and personal life. As Bates recalls the beginning of his friendship with the television producer Ed Sullivan:

It was during the 1930s that I first met up with Ed Sullivan. At that time he was a newspaper man, and he used to emcee the Harvest Moon Ballroom. They had amateur contests there and he would take the winners on the Loews Circuit. At that particular time, I was booked from the William Morris office. He wanted a strong act to open his show, but he couldn't find anybody to really open the show, to get it off. So he got hold of the William Morris office. He had some friends in there, and asked them about an opening act. William Morris office said, "I got just the man for you. Got a man that, matter of fact, he is an opening act. Peg Leg Bates, a one-leg dancer." Ed hired me, saw to it that my salary was

*3Butcher, 236. 82

raisecL .and used to divulge his entire column to me!

It was during the mid 1930s that Bates really made a name for himself in the white entertainment world as, with

Ed Sullivan's help, he was booked with headliner status on the white Keith and Leows Circuits. In 1938, Bates was booked for a ten-week run on the Australian vaudeville circuit called the Tivoli Circuit. Here, as in France,

Bates was accepted and adored for his talent, despite his handicap and/or ethnic heritage. Bates recalls:

In 1938, I went to Australia and played the Tivoli Circuit, their big-time vaudeville circuit. Unlike American vaudeville circuits, which only kept an act in a theater for one week or a split week, the Australians would keep a vaudeville show in one theater for five weeks at a time! I was in Australia for ten weeks, five weeks in Melbourne, and five weeks in Sydney. The Australians had no color barrier and were very fond of blacks. They showed strong appreciation for my talent, and I was always invited to their homes and to parties. Remember that w|g 1938, and I was the only black on the Tivoli.

Bates' next performance triumph was back in the

United States in 1941, when he starred with "Crip" Heard, another monoped dancer, in the show Here "Tis. The libretto for Here *Tis was written by the dancer Jesse James, who

14Frank, 50. 15 . Ibid, 50. 83 16 also danced in the show. Jesse James had become known as a dancer through his roles in Harlem Scandals of 1934 and 17 Brownskin Models (1938). James was known as a "one-leg crutch dancer." He was a polio victim and had one usable leg and one-leg which just dragged behind him. He was able to tap dance on his good leg and augment his sounds with the 18 tapping of his crutches, much in the way Bates had as a youth back in Fountain Inn. "Crip" Heard, the other monoped star of Here 'Tis. was missing both an arm and a leg, and yet was well known for his Truckin', Hucklebuck, and Suzy Q tap variations.

Jack Schiffman writes of "Crip" Heard and Leroy Strange, another dancer of the period with only one leg and one arm:

They made you ashamed, they made you proud. Ashamed that you could complain about your situation at all; proud that a couple of men were courageous and skillful enough to go beyond the normal demands of the human spirit... handicapped dancers who were able to do more with damaged bodies or missing limbs than most dances could manage with two good arms and legs.

16 Sampson, Henry T., Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980), 514.

17Ibid, 513. 18 Schiffman, Jack, Harlem Heyday (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), 180.

19Ibid, 180. 84

A two-legged dancer in Here 'Tis who also helped write the music and lyrics was Eddie Hunter. Hunter had made his name in Harlem via a show at the Apollo Theater called How Come which played only 32 shows, but htelped to further the career of comedian Eddie Hunter as well as that 20 of the jazzman Sidney Bechet. The remarkable dancing cast of three handicapped dancers— Bates, Heard, and James— was backed by Joe Jordan and his orchestra. Despite this incredible mix of exotic ingredients, Bates was unable to 21 remember any details of Here *Tis in an interview in 1990.

In 1944, Bates was the featured headliner at the grand opening of Club Zanzibar in Harlem. He also performed that year at the Paradise Restaurant in Harlem and was billed as "Harlem's sensational one legged tap dancer." A film clip of Bates performing at the Paradise exists in the archives of tap dancer "Toes" Tiranoff and was viewed by the author for this paper. The clip shows the usually dapper

Clayton "Peg Leg” Bates dancing athletically in a white suit, amid swank club surroundings, backed by a chorus of 22 Black female dancers.

20 Stearns, 144. 21 Bates/Vaughn interview. 22 Zukor, Adolph, producer, Broadway Highlights, "Intimate News of the Gay White Way,"; Ted Husing, narrator, date unknown. 85

In 1946, Bates starred in Atlantic City Follies of

1946. The producer was Joe "Ziggy" Johnson, with Bates as

his production consultant. The band was Coleridge Davis and his orchestra and Bates shared billing with two other 23 African-American stars: Marva Louis and Hortense Allen.

Marva Louis was a singer and the wife of the famous 24 prizefighter Joe Louis. The show, according to Bates, went out on tour and although they didn't make much money, they had a lot of fun.

During the early forties, Bates developed a mock ferocious stage presence which he employed for many years, that of Captain Long John Silver. This character emerged in a touring show called Ken Murray's Blackouts and it was during this show that Bates went beyond "extra added attraction" and became a full-fledged part of the plot.

This required him to memorize lines and to dance, backed by a chorus of sabre-wielding dancing girls. Bates can still remember his entrance lines which would scatter the girls to the wings. They were as follows:

...Long John Silver, they call me. And every saltwater man agrees, that I'm the roughest, toughest pirate that sailed the seven seas! When I first signed the boarder log, they told me to shake a leg. I must have shook it too hard and wound up with this peg! But mates, don't give up the ship, although you seem to

23 Sampson, 513. 24 Bates/Vaughn interview. 86

lose the fight, 'cause life mean do your best with what you got, with all your might. I'm not sorry nor unhappy that I lost this leg, so please don't sympathize with me, for I enjoy my peg! I got to give up this pirate stuff. I got another plan. My heart just in it, 'cause I'm a one-leg dancin' man."

In 1948, Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was invited to appear on the third Ed Sullivan "Toast of the Town," thereby becoming the first African-American to appear on that television show. Bates remembers that the dance act which was supposed to have performed that night injured themselves in rehearsal. Sullivan called upon an act he knew to be a sure hit, his friend from the Harvest Moon Balls: Clayton

"Peg Leg" Bates. Ed Sullivan had long been a champion of African-

American rights and employed many Blacks in both his early variety shows and on television. According to J. Fred

MacDonald in Blacks and White T.V.:

Sullivan felt that by bringing black personalities directly into the homes of Americans, TV would undermine racism. He believed that white adults and children, seeing and appreciating black talent, would be forced to reassess racist stereotyping and their own prejudices. Sullivan was particularly sensitive to the impact such images would have upon children, for it was they, he suggested, "who would finally lay Jim Crow to rest."

2Stk.„ Ibid. 26 MacDonald, J. Fred, Blacks and White T.V. (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1983), 13. 87

When southern stations tried to persuade Sullivan to

limit the number of African-American guests on any given

show, Sullivan steadfastly refused to comply and insisted on using as many talented guests of any color as he chose.

Sullivan received periodic letters of criticism from prejudiced viewers and advertisers, but continued to invite

anyone he wished onto the show.

During those early years of "Toast of the Town," and later on the "Ed Sullivan Show," Sullivan featured the following African-American artists:

-Sarah Vaughan

-Ella Fitzgerald

-Harry Belafonte

-Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham

-Marian Anderson -"Peg Leg" Bates

-Bunny Briggs 27 -Will Mastin Trio with Sammy Davis, Jr.

Ed Sullivan (CBS-1V) was not the only variety show on television to feature African-American entertainers. The

"Milton Berle Show," the "Arthur Godfrey Show," and the

"Steve Allen Show," on which Bates also performed, all

27 Ibid, 13. 88 hosted Black talent. Sullivan, however, was one of the 28 earliest shows to break the color barrier.

America was still a few years away from the transition of African-Americans out of the traditional guise of song-and-dance performers and into dramatic roles on television. In the early 1950s, "Beulah," "The Great

Gildersleeve," and the unfortunate "Amos 'n' Andy" appeared with their stereotypic "darkie" characters and dialogue.

For Bates, it was better to be dancing free and proud than to be forced into the role of butler or maid on an unrealistic white sit-com.

Bates performed twenty-one times on the Ed Sullivan 29 show, more than any other dancer, white or Black. The exposure Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates received through the "Ed

Sullivan Show" made him famous nationwide. Viewing the videotapes of the ”Ed Sullivan Show" between 1948 and 1963 which include Bates, makes one marvel at the breadth of his talent. He choreographed all his own material, and yet each segment is fresh and energized. The rhythms seldom repeat.

The fashions change, but the respectful introduction by

Sullivan and the sheer brilliance of Bates' creativity are monuments to the "King of the One-Legged Dancers."

28 Patterson, ed., 270. 29 See Appendix for complete list. 89

As Bates describes his dancing,

I had to be satisfied with it myself. It had to be pure— it had to be foolproof. I was an ad-libber, but I had to have some set things. I had some novelty steps that I knew was going to get applause, and I would ad lib around that. If I saw that something was not working, then I threw in a couple of my steps that I knew was going to get applause.

I'm into rhythm. Well, I ’m into rhythm and I'm into novelty. I'm into doing things that it looks almost impossible to do. I guess that's the best that I can describe it. I loved the compliments. I loved the applause. And it all came through tap dancing...I t h i ^ that's the best way that I can describe it.

The biographies of other performing artists of

Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates' era are full of sad stories of people earning and then squandering fortunes during their lifetimes. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson died so penniless that his friends had to take up a collection for his coffin.

Many perfomers succumbed to drugs, alcohol, or gambling.

There were tap dancers who spent their last days working as doormen, janitors, or were simply unemployed.

Fortunately, Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates' life story is the exception to the rule. In 1952, Bates bought a 65-acre tract of land in the Catskill region of New York and opened the "Peg Leg" Bates Resort and Country Club. The resort is still in operation today, complete with a small performance venue for shows, and has become a summer oasis for

^Frank, 51. 90

African-Americans yearning to escape the stresses of urban life in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, and even points farther south.

Alice Bates, whom Bates credits with the success of

the resort, died on July 7th, 1987. "Peg Leg" Bates has

sold the resort, but still lives on the property nearhis daughter Melodye Ann and his son-in-law. Tourists still follow hand-painted signs tacked to trees to get to Bates' front door to snap a photo of his house and wave at him on his porch.

In 1991, Public Broadcasting System will air a one-hour documentary on Bates. Gregory Hines, the reigning tap dance super-nova, calls the 84-year old Bates "the man. one of the greatest contributors to the art form of tap and 31 one of the greatest dancers alive today."

Bates' life and context of the development of his career have never before been documented in writing. His life illustrates the impact of socio-economic changes on the cultural development within the Black community, the development of the Black Broadway vaudeville circuit, the empowerment of the Black businessman, the creative potential of handicapped people everywhere, and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

31 . Live interview with Hines, February 9, 1991. APPENDIX 1

Total Slave Imports into the Americas, 1640-1870, in Thousands (add 000)

Region and country Total British North America 399.0 Spanish America 1,552.1 British Caribbean 1,665.0 Jamaica 747.5 Barbadoes 387.0 Leeward Islands 346.0 St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Tobago, and Dominica 70.1 Trinidad 22.4 Grenada 67.0 Other BWI 25.0 French Caribbean 1,600.2 Saint Dominique 864.3 Martinique 365.8 Guadeloupe 290.8 Louisiana 28.3 French Guiana 51.0 Dutch Caribbean 500.0 Danish Caribbean 28.0 Brazil 3,646.8 Old World 175.0 Europe 50.0 Sao Thome 100.0 Atlantic Island 25.0

Total 9,566.1 Annual average 22.8

Source: Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969. APPENDIX 2

DRAFT LANGUAGE: NATIONAL TAP DANCE DAY

To designate May 25, 1989, as "National Tap Dance Day.

Whereas the multi-faceted art form of tap dancing is a manifestation of our cultural heritage, reflecting the

fusion of African and European cultures into an

exemplification of the American spirit, that should be,

through documentation, archival, and performance

support, transmitted to succeeding generations;

Whereas tap dancing has had a historic and continuing

influence on other genres of American art forms

including music, vaudeville, Broadway musical theater,

and film, as well as other dance forms;

Whereas tap dancing is perceived by the world as a uniquely

American vernacular art form;

Whereas tap dancing is a joyful and powerful aesthetic force

that provides a source of enjoyment and an outlet for

creativity and self-expression for Americans on both

the professional and amateur level;

92 93

Whereas Bill "Bojangles" Robinson made an outstanding contribution to the art of tap dancing on both stage

and film through the unification of diverse stylistic

and racial elements, and as May 25 marks the

anniversary of his birth, it is an appropriate day on

which to refocus the Nation's attention on American tap dancing;

Whereas it is in the best interest of the people of our

Nation to preserve, promote, and celebrate this

uniquely American art form, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That May 25, 1989, hereby is designated "National Tap Dance Day," and the President of the United States is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such a day with appropriate ceremonies and activities. APPENDIX 3 LIST OF BATES' APPEARANCES ON THE "ED SULLIVAN SHOW'

All but six of Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates' appearances on the "Ed Sullivan Show" are the property of Andrew Solt Productions, 9121 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, where they are housed in an archive obtained from Ed Sullivan's estate.

The following is a list of those appearances:

August 13, 1950 "Toast of the Town" August 5, 1951 "Ed Sullivan Show" March 15, 1953 "Ed Sullivan Show" September 6, 1953 "Ed Sullivan Show" March 14, 1954 "Ed Sullivan Show" June 20, 1954 "Ed Sullivan Show" October 17, 1954 "Ed Sullivan Show" March 13, 1955 "Ed Sullivan Show" May 22, 1955 "Ed Sullivan Show" January 12, 1958 "Ed Sullivan Show" July 17, 1960 "Ed Sullivan Show" May 13, 1962 "Ed Sullivan Show" September 16, 1962 "Ed Sullivan Show" April 26, 1964 "Ed Sullivan Show" August 22, 1965 "Ed Sullivan Show"

Although the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City has many ”Ed Sullivan videotapes, none of them feature Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates.

94 APPENDIX 4

TRANSCRIPT OF LIVE INTERVIEW WITH CLAYTON "PEG LEG" BATES

Wednesday, August 22, 1990

CV: I would like start with biographical information. According to the Directory of Blacks in Performing Arts, you were born October 11, 1907 in Greenville, South Carolina..

PL: Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

CV: ...According to the Dictionary of Dance, you were born in Fountain Inn in 1908. So what's the true story?

PL: October 11, 1907 in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

CV: And you can remember back to being five, can't you?

PL: Yes. I was dancing since I was five. I remember one time when I was five years old, my mother had bought me a little red coat and I took this little red coat and put it on. And I went into the little village of Fountain Inn and I was in one of the white barber shops, and the white men was clapping their hands and I was dancing. And it was on a Saturday, and someone told my mother (she was in town) that I was up there dancing. My mother came up and pulled me out of there; and the white men got mad because they wanted to see me dance. My mother said, "If you want somebody to be dancing, you go and get your own kids to dance. I don't want my kid to dance.” And she pulled me out of there. And that I remember very, very well, and I was only five years old.

CV: What were your feelings?

PL: I don't know what my feeling was at that particular time. I couldn't answer that truthfully.

CV: Were you disappointed that the show was over?

PL: Well, I was a five year old kid. And there's a lot of things I do remember, but that's one that I don't remember.

95 96

CV: What kind of family were you from? What did your dad do? What did your mom do? PL: We were sharecroppers, farmers. My dad deserted my mother and I when I was three years old. And they never did get back together.

CV: Did you know him, though?

PL: I remember him very, very well...right up to when he died, which was around 1940, in Ohio.

CV: So, after he left you and your mom, he moved to Ohio? PL: He did.

CV: And then would you go visit him in Ohio, or no?

PL: Well, uh, I didn't see him until after I was an entertainer and was in New York. See, he was in Columbus, Ohio, and I played Columbus. That's when I saw him.

CV: And he came to see you in the audience?

PL: Well, I knew that he lived in Columbus. He and my mother had been corresponding in the later years, and I knew he was in Columbus. And I went and had dinner with him at his house and we became very close.

CV: Did he remarry?

PL: He lived with another woman but he never did remarry.

CV: What about your mom, did she remarry?

PL: My mother never did remarry either. Neither one. They never did divorce, but they never did remarry.

CV: Did you have brothers and sisters?

PL: No, I am an only child.

CV: A solo act from the start!

PL: (Laughs)

CV: Do you have memories of Fountain Inn when you were a kid? Was it predominantly Black?

PL: Fountain Inn? No it was not predominantly Black. And I have tremendous memories of Fountain Inn. Fountain Inn was where I lost my leg. Fountain Inn is where I was until 97

I was about fourteen years old. Then is when I moved from Fountain Inn to Greenville. Greenville is about 18 miles north of Fountain Inn. What little schooling I got was in Fountain Inn. Most of my school chums were from Fountain Inn, because by the time I was sixteen, I was dabbling around in show business.

CV: So school went by the wayside?

PL: Yes.

CV: I think what I need to hear next is about the loss of the leg. There are conflicting histories of that, too. 1 heard three different accounts. In the Harlem Renaissance Dictionary it says you lost it in a car accident. I read in two places that you lost it in a cotton gin accident. PL: A cotton gin is correct. I don't know where the car accident came from. You know, people tell their own side sometimes, not knowing what they're talking about. When I was twelve years old, this is 1918 during World War I. All of the men was in the service. And, as I said before, we were sharecroppers. We was farmers and they were hiring children and women there at the cotton gin...

CV: 'Cause the men were at war?

PL: Yes. So I was only twelve years old and I asked my mother if I could work there. And she said I was too young. And I bugged her for about three months to let me work there. And she was strictly against it, but finally I bugged her so much that she said, "See me tomorrow. I ’ll ask the Lord if you should work there or not." And the next day when I come home from school, I said, "Mother, what did the Lord say?" She said, "Well, yes, the Lord told me in a prayer last night. I prayed, and the Lord answered and told me that, yes, I should let you work there."

CV: Was she already working at the cotton gin?

PL: No, she never did work there. So, Mother was, besides working in the cotton field and being a farmer, she also worked for families, washing, ironing, cooking, sewing. And this was during the off-season from the cotton field, or inbetween when it was raining or when you couldn't be in the field, she would work as housekeeper. So when I come home and asked mother about this, if I could work there and she told me, yes, the Lord said she should let me work there. I said, "Well, mother, you'll have to tell a little white lie. And she said, "Why?" And I said, that in order to work there you got to put my age up to fifteen. They won't hire anyone under fifteen. So she said all right. 98

CV: Did you look like you were fifteen? Were you a big kid?

PL: Yeh. She went and signed me in, and signed my age in as fifteen. I had only been working there for three days. And the job that I had was in the cotton seed gin, and I worked in the gin mill where they took the seeds from one part of the building into another part of the building to be made into linseed oil. And my job was to take a pitchfork and lift these seeds from a pile and put them into an auger. An auger is like a corkscrew. It takes these seeds from one part of the building into the other part of the building. Well, the third night one of the lights went out in the back, and I was not familiar with the building 'cause I only had worked there for three days. And I went in the back to check on the light and I stepped into an open conveyor. Well, the auger and conveyor means the same thing. I stepped into the open auger or conveyor, and it started chewing my leg up. It just so happened that the boy that worked there— there was only one other person working there. He was familiar with it and he knew what to do... CV: He cut it off?

PL: He took a stick and knocked off the belt that controlled the auger and that's what stopped it. He called the authorities, or somebody. I never lost consciousness. They took me over to the office. I lived two and a half miles away. He put me on his back...

CV: This friend of yours put you on his back?

PL: Yeh. His name was Corley Franks. He put me on his back and took me home at 3:00 in the morning, knocked on the door. And my mother says, "Who's that knocking on the door this hour of the morning?" My grandmother who lived with us at that time said, "Ain't nobody out there but that Clayton, who's half dead. Go out there and open the door." She said, "Oh, mother, shut up." By this time Corley says, "It's me, Miss Emma. I got Clayton out here and he's been hurt.” She almost fainted then. When she opened the door and saw me on his back, she say, "Oh, my goodness, I misunderstood the Lord." What she meant by that was, she had prayed and asked God to let me work there. Well seeing that I had gotten hurt working there, she said she had misunderstood... 'Course, she did not know it at that time, but the Lord told her right to let me work there, cause had I not worked there, and my life turned out the way it did, there would never have been a "Peg Leg" Bates. So that's how the leg was lost.

CV: Do you still see Corley Franks? Is he still alive? 99

PL: No, he's deceased.

CV: Did you two stay friends after that incident?

PL: At that time Corley Franks was a grown man and I was a twelve year old kid. We knew each other, we were friendly with one another, but we had nothing in common. He was a grown man and I was a twelve year old kid. But in later years, before he died, we got reacquainted and we really became closer then than at the time he saved my life.

CV: So then you moved to Greenville?

PL: Well, there was a lot that happened afterI lost the leg. CV: Did you get medical treatment right away for the leg?

PL: Yeh. The doctor came over and shot some pain killer in my leg about 3:00 in the morning. And then about 9:00 the next morning three doctors came and amputated my leg on my mother's kitchen table. I never went to the hospital. They put me to sleep. I was asleep, as a matter of fact, when they come the next morning. I had known nothing about it. Apparently they gave me ether while I asleep to amputate the leg. I remember waking up about 2:00 in the afternoon when my mother was sitting on the side of the bed and she was crying and crying as though her heart would break. I said, "What in the world are you crying about?" She said, "Son, I hate to tell you; they cut your leg off. You only got one leg." I didn't take her seriously. I looked up at her and said, "Oh, mother, don't worry about that. I'll find some way to take care of you.” I really think that that was the predominant factor in my life: to keep my promise...of taking care of my mother. So even after I lost the leg and I went back to school, I shined shoes on Sunday, and whatever money I made I gave to my mother. And then also, if I wasn't in the cotton field, I was working at a grocery store delivering groceries. Any money I made from that I gave to my mother.

CV: You lost your two fingers in that same accident?

PL: Yeh. In the meantime, I had started learning how to dance. I learned how to dance before we moved from Fountain Inn.

CV: With the one leg...because you'd danced before that as a little kid.

PL: So, my uncle, who was in the service, he was a dancer, not professionally. His name was Whitt Stewart. 100

CV: What did he do in show business?

PL: He wasn't in show business; I just said that. He didn't dance professionally. He was also a farmer. When he come home on furlough one time, I was pretty rough on the peg leg. And he came home and he saw me dancing, making rhythm, with crutches under my arm. He got an idea, he liked what I was doing, and he made me a peg leg— that's where the peg leg came from. He made me a peg leg; then he got me two chairs so I could balance myself and then said, "Now the same beat that you made with the crutches and the good leg, make it with the peg leg." And he would cut a couple steps, and showed me. And I liked it! I was very interested. So that's when I started dancing on the peg leg.

CV: Did your friends make fun of you? Did they laugh at you?

PL: Yes. They made fun of me, not with the peg leg, but with the crutches when I went back to school. There was three kids; we used to challenge dance. All this was happening when we were kids, now, not show business. This is just at home when kids challenge danced, just for the fun of it. No show business or career was involved in this. And then, before I lost the leg I was also on the baseball team, a good swimmer; I could run fast.

CV: So, you were an athlete.

PL: Yes, that's the size of it. And I remember being at school and I was the pitcher. During recess— I guess this was about the third time I went back to school after losing the leg, on crutches— I wanted to pitch. Hell, they didn't want me to pitch. They said, "No, you be the umpire. He don't want you to pitch; we don't want you on our team.” So 1 took them at their word. But the little girls was...I was the most popular before losing the leg! The other guys was a better dancer than I was, with the two legs, but after I lost the leg, then the little girls went over to— on account of the sympathy situation— went over to the other guys. So the other little guys were eating it up. So I heard them saying, "He don't want him on our team with one leg. He only got one leg, he's goin' to slow us down." And I heard this and said to one of them, his name is Carry Lundsford, I said, "Don't you be feeling sorry for me because I only got one leg. I can beat you right now, doing anything you want to do." So being a kid, he took me up on the challenge. He wanted to run, to race, me on the crutches and him on the two legs. So I guess we ran about 10 or 15 feet, the crutches slipped out from under me. I fell and scarred my face up, and everybody laughed. I went back home 101

and told my mother about it and my mother gave me a licking! The reason she gave me a licking was to think that I had one leg and I would challenge someone with two legs. So I said to my mother, "Mother, you can whip me all you want, but one of these days I'm going to beat that boy, doing anything that he wanna. That was another driving force that was in my life, keeping my promise to my mother. I had promised my mother that I just was going to beat that boy. And it just happened that I did. As a matter of fact, when he died, I helped bury him, in later years. And after that is when we moved to Greenville. My mother got a job working for Doctor R.C. Bruce and he had three children: Bob Bruce, Nancy Bruce, and Martha Bruce.

CV: Here they white? PL: Yeh. And they became very very good friends. As a matter of fact, my mother worked for them for twelve years. Even after I left and went into entertainment, my mother was still working for them. That's what I did. I didn't go back to school after that. I quit school when I was in sixth grade. Hhen I got to Greenville, I was ready now for amateurs.

CV: Boy, you moved through that beginning phase quick!

PL: Hell, it wasn't that quick...I guess it was quick at that. Because by the time I was fourteen is when I went into the amateurs. By the time I was seventeen I went into the amateurs. I lost the leg when I was 12, left Fountain Inn when I was 14, and by the time I was 17, I was dancing with the peg leg in amateurs.

CV: In Greenville? Is that where the Liberty Theatre is?

PL: Yes.

CV: And that's where you began...semi-professional?

PL: Yeh.

CV: So, we your getting paid, or not?

PL: Hell, no. In the amateurs, I won all the contests. That came about funny. Every contest I won, and then all the other amateurs did not want to appear because they wasn't going to win because I was going to win. The manager of the theater says, "I want you to be on the show, but you will not be one of the contestants. You will be an 'extra, added attraction'. So we'll pay you $10 every time that you appear." 102

CV: And what were the others getting?

PL: Well, they were drawing first, second, and third prize. CV: And those were all cash prizes?

PL: Yeh. So even for that prize I was paid cash. No check and all that. So that was the beginning of my career.

CV: What did your mother think about that when she saw you were starting to win all these contests?

PL: My mother didn't know about it at that time. My mother did not want me to be at that show. In other words, I am doing this dancing behind her back. She didn't know anything about that. A lot of the time, Mother thought I was somewhere working, but I was somewhere dancing on the street corners, picking up nickels and dimes...no, pennies and nickels at that particular time. And when I'd take money home, she thought I was working someplace.

CV: Dancing is work!

PL: Well, mother didn't want me to be no dancer. I remember one time, the lady that used to take the tickets at the Liberty Theatre...right below my home town, which was Fountain Inn, was a place called Mount Carmel. They had a county fair there every year. And this lady that took the tickets, she produced the show from the amateurs and took it to this fair, and I was honored. So I was on the ballyhoo...

CV: What does that mean?

PL: A ballyhoo is the platform outside of the tent, and the performers come out, sing a few words or tell a joke, or cut one little step, just a little sample. Then they'd go back in. Then the barker, the ticket seller, would say, "All that is going on on the inside." So I remember I was out on the platform, ballyhooing, and a neighbor recognized me. My mother didn't know I was there. A neighbor went and told my mother. And the neighbor said, "Miss Emma, is that your son up there on the ballyhoo?” She said, "No, that ain't my son...I ain't never seen him before." She disowned me right then and there. As a matter of fact, when I got home she gave me a licking!

CV: I'll bet she did!

PL: For slipping off down there. Well, all of that was part of my apprentice days, getting experience. 103

CV: Was she against your dancing for religious reasons?

PL: I assume so. She was a Baptist, and the Baptist religion in the South is against dancing. So I assume she was against the dancing on account of that. And another reason, too, was that mother wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or a preacher. She was particularly against me being a dancer.

CV: Have you seen the Broadway show, The Tap Dance Kid? A very similar story line. The parents want the kid to be a professional in the straight sense.

PL: Same story.

CV: But you persevered. PL: Well, I did what I wanted to do. I think that even that goes on today in a lot of families' lives. There are parents who want their kids to follow in their footsteps, who want to lay out the careers of their offsprings, but it just don't turn out that way. I've got a similar problem right here. I wanted my daughter Melody to own the Peg Leg Bates Resort. I'll give it to her, hand it to her, lock, stock, and barrel. But it didn't turn out that way. She didn't want the responsibility; she wanted a 9-5 job.

CV: Was there a point when your mother started to support your dance career?

PL: Not until later years. I had come to New York; I was on Broadway before my mother really started supporting my dance.

CV: What do you think changed her mind? The fact that you were successful?

PL: Yes. That's precisely it. Because I started sending money, and the publicity, how well I was doing, the publicity of my success. I think the first time that Mother really appreciated my dancing was really before I got to Broadway. This Liberty Theatre I was telling you about in Greenville had little Black "tab" shows that came down, oh, about once a month. And I ran away from home with one of those— the first time I really ran away from home.

CV: How old?

PL: I guess I was about thirteen...oh, fourteen, fifteen.

CV: 'Cause the Dictionary of Biographical Dance says that it was when your were sixteen. 104

PL: Could've been.

CV: We were discussing what age it was that you ran off, and with which show...

PL: I think I was fourteen or fifteen, could have been sixteen. There was a show called Rastus and Marie, a Black musical comedy show. I left with that show from the Liberty Theatre and the show got stranded. And my mother had to send for me to come back home.

CV: She sent you money to come back home?

PL: Yeh. She give me a licking.

CV: Still, at that age...

PL: Oh, sure. My mother spanked me...she licked me until after I was a grown man. And I didn't resent it! And I thank God for it because it made me the man that I am. I came home and I was home, oh, I guess about six months. Another show came in and I slipped away from home again. This time I was a little more fortunate. This show came back about three months after that and played the Liberty Theatre again on the return engagement. When they first played there I was not with the show. On the return engagement I was with the show. As a matter of fact, simply because they were playing the Liberty Theatre where I first joined the show, they made me the star of the show because I was playing my home town. That was the first time that my mother saw me dance.

CV: Was that Rastus and Marie?

PL: No, that was Shufflin' Sam from Alabam'.

CV: And you were Shufflin' Sam?

PL: No, I was "Peg Leg" Bates. The name of the show was Shufflin* Sam. And it had a story line, but I just did a "specialty" in the show. I wasn't part of the story line.

CV: At what point did people start calling you "Peg Leg" instead of Clayton?

PL: I couldn't answer that truthfully. I just know that it came, somebody said "Peg Leg" Bates, and it stuck. 105 CV: Was it affectionate, or...

PL: Affectionate, yes, very much so. Because people always always did like me. I was fortunate in that respect. I was not a sassy person, I wasn't mean, I wasn't nasty, I wasn't swell-head, I was always humble, 'cause I wanted people to like me, not hate me. I wanted people to admire me and not feel sorry for me.

CV: Tough...

PL: It isn't easy. So, I could see the change while I was home. And I travelled with that show. And that show got stranded, too. In other words, I started out in 1923, when I really got serious and sort of said, "well, I'm gonna choose this as a career." Because during the interim of that, I was playing carnivals, minstrels, medicine shows, anything that I could play as long as I could keep working to keep from sending for my mother as my mother sent for me to come back home.

CV: Were these shows with white directors and white producers, and white financial backing?

PL: No. The only thing white in it was, we were playing Black theaters that was white-owned. That was the only thing that whites was involved. There was no white audience, no white managers„ no white artists in the company. But the theaters that we would play was Black audience, Black shows, but white-owned. This was all inthe South.

CV: Here these TOBA theaters?

PL: That's exactly what it was, precisely. Theater Owners' Booking Association...

CV: "Tough on Black Artists"...

PL: (Laughs). Yup. Now, I got stranded the last time in a little town, Fayetteville, in North Carolina. And I was gonna hitchike, and I decided to hitchhike from Fayetteville, North Carolina to Winston-Salem, NC. This is now up to 1927. I got to Fayetteville and I got stranded on a carnival. A storm come up and blew the tent down, destroyed the entire carnival. Now all of us was stranded! I hear that there is a show in Winston-Salem, which is a 100 and some odd miles from Fayetteville, a Black show at a Black theater by the name of Eddie Lemon's Dashing Dinah Revue. So I started hitchhiking, I'm on the road at night, me and the trombone player, it was oh about 8:00-9:00 at 106 night. All of a sudden a bus pulls up beside me, sees me hitchhiking, pulls up, and it’s Eddie Lemon's bus. They had been to play a benefit at an Army installation somewhere in North Carolina and they was going to Winston-Salem.

CV: God wanted you to dance, Peg Leg!

PL: I told you; I explained that to you. My life is a gift from God. So Lemon put me on the bus, asked me where I was going, what I did. I told him I was a dancer. He said, "You're a dancer with one leg?" I said, "yes, sir." He said, "all right." I asked him for a job. He said, "Well, we got a rehearsal tomorrow, and we'll see." So at rehearsal the next day he says, "Did you say last night that you're a dancer?" I said, "Yes, sir." So he says, "What kind of dancing do you do?" I said, "I do a tap soft shoe." "Tap soft shoe? Well, tell the piano player (I had no music); hum what you wanna do.” At that time I was dancing to a tune called "The Doll Dance." (Hums tune.) I did an audition at the rehearsal, stopped the show cold. He hired me right on the spot! Three weeks later, I was the star of that show. This was 1926. OK, during those days they used to throw nickels and dimes and pennies and quarters and things to performers on the stage. We were not playing to any white houses. I had never played to a white audience. We were only playing Black theaters, Black audiences, not even integrated audiences at that particular time. I didn't play to a white audience until after I reached New York. However, during that time, the Lafayette Theatre was going in New York, and we're playing the Black theaters in the big cities in the North, like Cleveland, mostly Ohio, and we did get to Detroit, we got to Michigan. But we weren't doing any business and many times that show should have been stranded. I took the money that I used to pick up on the stage and gave it to the manager to help move the show to the next town. Well we traveled by train. We didn't have a lot of baggage and scenery or things like that. We used the scenery that each theater had. The manager would call ahead and let them know what kind of scenery we needed and the theater would supply the scenery. And we would work with whatever... And we would travel by train in the day coach.

CV: Which means that you couldn't sleep, lie down...

PL: No. I didn't know what sleeping was. OK, Eddie Lemon had a booking at the Lafayette Theatre. Frank Schiffman, who is deceased now, owned the Apollo. The Apollo came after the Lafayette.

CV: Now was the Lafayette a nightclub or a theater? 107

PL: A theater. It was on the same order as the Apollo, owned and run by the same man, in the same neighborhood. The Lafayette was on 133rd St. and 7th Ave., which is now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. And the Apollo is 125th St., so it was no more than 8 or 10 blocks apart. Well, we get ready to play the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, a Black house. Eddie had been telling me, "Peg, we're going to play the Lafayette Theater in New York. And once you get to New York, brother, ain't no looking back! 'Cause you are a gift. You will stop anybody's show, just like you been stopping these shows here. When you get to New York, that's it!" So I believed in him, and I put all my trust in Eddie. And I put all my trust in what he was telling me about Frank Schiffman.

We're playing the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia__ Schiffman came over from New York to catch the show at the Standard Theatre. My dressing room was next door to Eddie Lemon's. When Schiffman came over and saw the show, he came back and he ripped into Eddie Lemon saying, "How dare you? How dare you wanna bring a 'thing' like to play the Lafayette Theatre! You are out of your mind. Eddie." And Eddie says, "Well, Mr. Schiffman, I thought that maybe I could get an advance and some fresh costumes, and maybe put in somebody else...a better name" Schiffman said, "You are out of your mind." Eddie said, "Then what about my dancer, there?" Schiffman said, "You mean that one-leg boy? I wouldn't let him walk 'cross my stage!” Well, when I hear that, that broke my heart. That night, I tried to slip my baggage out of the dressing room. Somebody told Eddie about it and Eddie come and stop me. 'Cause the next week we're gonna play a Black theater in Newark, New Jersey. It was 1927 that I'm talking about. He said, "Peg, just don't pay any attention to what Schiffman says. You're gonna make it, you're going to New York if I have to kill you to take you there!"

CV: How much older was Eddie Lemon than you?

PL: Eddie was about 42 and he was a seasoned man; he was a comedian, and he knew all about New York. He had been in New York before, although he had never hit it big. But, he did all right for himself and he was the producer and owner of the show. So we got to Newark. We played Newark. When we closed in Newark, they got no more bookings. Eddie said, "I'm gonna take you to New York. You're this close to New York, I'm gonna take you there. You ain't got no booking but I'll find something for you to do." I was in New York three hours, I'm in front of the Lafayette, looking at the marquee, when a man come and tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, boy, your name 'Peg Leg' Bates?" I said "yes." He 108 said, "I been looking all over for you!" He says, "I work for Leonard Harper. Leonard Harper was the producer (he's Black), and he was the producer of the Lafayette Theatre. He says, "Leonard Harper is looking for you because he heard about you in Newark." And you know how close Newark is to New York. He says, "Leonard is now down at Small's Paradise (it was a nightclub). He's down there rehearsing now and he's gonna go into the Lafayette four days from now. So come on, I'll take you down to meet him." I went down there (I'm only in New York three hours), I met Leonard Harper. And, man, I never seen such beautiful people and nice things!

CV: This was at night? PL: In the afternoon. So, Leonard had me to come to rehearsal the next day. He didn't hire me right there. The next day, he had me to do an audition at rehearsal. At the end, I stopped the show cold. He hired me. The star of the show was going to be Johnny Hudgins. Johnny Hudgins was a pantomime artist that was a big name and he was returning after six months from Paris to New York. He was the star of the show. I got $75.

CV: Was that the most you had ever made until that point?

PL: Yes, maam! And that was a fortune. So, my name was like this (indicates small letters). Johnny Hudgins was up there (indicates capital letters). Leonard saw something. This was the end of World War I. They built a scene that we're supposed to come off the battlefield and come to a little commissary and do a USO thing, and whatever is wrong with, you're gonna entertain, you gonna do something. This was in the very opening— they put me in there along with other artists and again I stopped the show cold. I had to take two encores there. O.K.! Then when I got to come back in the middle of the show to do my specialty, it really hit the fan! I took four encores with my specialty.

CV: How did you organize the band to play what you wanted them to play? Did you have rehearsal time?

PL: Oh yes, we had to rehearse. I didn't have no music, I just hummed what I wanted them to play and maybe I'd pick a number or two that I could dance to. Tell them about the tune and also the leader would pick it up at that particular time. Okay, the fourth day that I was there, all you could hear in Harlem was "Peg Leg Bates, that one-leg dancer." "Peg Leg Bates" is all you could hear. At that particular time there was a show on Broadway called Blackbirds. with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Tim Moore, Adelaide Hall, 109

Mantan Moreland. First of all, Frank Schiffman, who wouldn't allow me to walk across his stage, he sent for me to come to his office. This was the third or fourth day now. He says, "You're very good." Now, mind you, I didn't meet Frank Schiffman when he was in Philadelphia with Ed Lemon. He says, "You're very good, are you working next week?" I said, "I don't know. My manager hasn't said anything to me." He says, "Who's your manager?" I says, "Eddie Lemon." "All right, tell Eddie I want to see him." He says, "If you're not working next week, I'd like to hold you over here." I went and told Eddie that the man wanted to hold me over, and Eddie said, "This is it!"

CV: Well, that was the end of his big show, right?

PL: The show had closed in Newark. We had nomore bookings, that was the end of the tour. Eddie said, "This is it! I told you to get to New York, and now I'm gonna get you some money." "What do you mean 'get you some money'?" Cause I thought making $75 I was raising some sand. He said, "If he want to hold you over it's going to cost him $200." I said, "Eddie, don't bother, don't bother, that all right, Eddie. I'm happy with the $75.” He said, "Peg, shut up!" Well, he saw I was held for the next week; he and I was the first act to be held over in twelve years! And for $200! And I was on my way. I will explain what I mean by "on my way” to you at the next session.

CV: August 22, 1990, interview with Mr. "Peg Leg" Bates. We were talking about how you got into Blackbirds of 1928.

PL: Well, when Schiffman held me over for another week, then the word got around concerning me, and Lew Leslie, who had Blackbirds of 1928 sent his brother up to see me. Evidently his brother gave him a good report because... CV: This was at the Lafayette?

PL: That was at the Lafayette, on the second week that I was there. Then I went down to see Lew Leslie and he hired me.

CV: Lew was white?

PL: Right. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was the star of the show, Adelaide Hall, Tim Moore, Mantan Moreland...

CV: It's my understanding that it had originally been written for Florence Mills, right? She died? 109

PL: This was the show after Florence Mills. There were various editions of Blackbirds. I was in the 1928 edition. Florence Mills had just died about a year or a year and a half prior to this edition. Well, Lew had come up with this terrific idea. He put three other dancers with me and called us "The Four Bad Men from Harlem." All different dancers, different kind of dancers. Blue McAllister, he's a very tight rhythm dancer, very tight. Reminded me a lot of Harold Leroy. Also, Crawford Jackson, who did a "Flying Tap Charleston," along the order of the tap Charleston. And there was a "knee dropper" by the name of Lloyd Mitchell. He did a lot of stuff on his knees, and then myself. The hit song of the show was "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." "Diga Diga Do" was our entrance, for these "Four Bad Men From Harlem." The idea behind it was, we would come on the stage, the one man, Blue McAllister opened it up, did two choruses, very tight. It went well! Then came Lloyd Mitchell with his knee drops. He did this and then stepped back in line. Then came Crawford Jackson with his "Flying Tap Charleston," and he would step back in line. Now while all these are doing their dancing and step back in line, there's this one-leg boy standing up there looking at at all this. So when the third one did his thing and stepped back in line, all three of them looked at the one-leg boy and pointed their fingers and then said, "Come on!" Then I danced to the hit number of the show, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love."

CV: Oh, vou danced to that? I didn't know that. How fast? (Hums tune.)

PL: No, not quite that fast. (Hums tune.) All right, I did four steps and the applause come, and you never heard such applause in all your life! At the end of the second chorus, they did a break with me and we went off the stage.

CV:. And who choreographed all that?

PL: Lew, himself. Lew wasn't a dancer. As a matter of fact, he choreographed all the chorus girls scenes, but he wasn't a dancer. He'd do a step and show you how he wanted that step done. He was a fantastic producer. O.K.! We would go off the stage then I would come back and do an encore. I'd do one chorus, off the stage, and have to do another encore. Different steps, and each one .getting tougher and tougher. I did three encores there. On the first night that I was in the show (now Bill Robinson was the star of the show), keep in mind, I had never met him before. But I knew who Bill Robinson was. The first night after the curtain and the finale, Bill Robinson said, "Hold it, hold it, don't nobody leave the stage! Hold it right 110 there!" Everybody looked at one another and said, "What's wrong with Bill?" So he told the stage manager, "Call Lew Leslie. Tell Lew Leslie to come back here." Lew was out front, checking the box office. And Lew stopped what he was doing and come on back stage and said, "What's the matter, Bill?" Bill said, "Lew, who's the star of this GD show?" Lew said, "Why vou are, Bill. Everybody knows you're the star of the show. Your name is on the marquee as the star of the show." Bill said, "Well, if X am the star of the show, I don't want dancing until I have done my specialty, especially that one-leg SOB over there!" That was my introduction to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

CV: Oooo! He had a nasty temper, didn't he?

PL: Yeh. CV: This was in front of you that this happened? You were standing there?

PL: Everybody. everybody was on stage! I was the most unhappy person in the world. I started crying. Tim Moore, who in later years became Kingfish of the "Amos 'n' Andy" show, and Mantan Mooreland, a man who used to do all the Chinese things, the foo-man-chu. He used to be the comedian and get scared and all that. They talked to me. They said, "Don't pay no attention to Bill; he's that way." Lew said, "Okay, Bill, there won't be no dancing until after you have done your specialty."

CV: Which was what, the "Stair Dance?"

PL: Yeh....well, that led into the "Stair Dance.” The next night we closed the show, not opened the show, we closed the show. But it didn't make no difference. The same results, still stopped the show! So, 'bout the fourth or fifth night I noticed that Bill was in the wings. He called me up, got my number where I was staying. I was staying in a rooming house. He called me up and asked what I was doing. I said, "I'm not doing anything." Because I was new to New York; I didn't know what to do, where to go, had no friends yet. He said, "Come down to the theater, I want to talk to you.” So I came down to the theater and he was in his rehearsal clothes. He was rehearsing. So he did a step and said, "Peg, can you do this?" I said, "I think so." He said, "Let's see you." I did the step, the same step that he did. He did about four or five steps; "Think you can do this?" "I think so." Beat for beat, step for step, I did it all. "That's good, I like that." That same night, when I took my third encore, Bill Robinson came out on the stage and applauded me and said, "Ain't he great? But now we are Ill

going to show you something you have never seen before. We gonna show you a three-leg routine... CV: But you hadn't rehearsed it!

PL: I know. So, the only one I ever told about this is in the documentary. So we did the thing together, what he had showed me, the three-leg routine. All right, we stopped the show, he and I. And right after that was the finale. We did that until the show closed. Then the show went to Paris in 1929.

CV: Did you go?

PL: Oh yeh. But Bill didn't go. All the rest of the cast went but Bill didn't go. In place of Bill was Eddie Rector, "Bambalina." And we went to Paris for 18 weeks, come back, and then is when I went with the William Morris office and that is when I went into vaudeville.

CV: Was Blackbirds of 1928 the big break for "Bojangles?" Was that his first big show?

PL: Oh no. Bill had been around for quite awhile.

CV: Because I had read someplace that he was so nervous when he opened in that show that he forgot the words to "Doin' the New Low Down."

PL: Well, he did the "New Low Down" in this edition. He did the "Bill Robinson Stomp” and the "New Low Down."

CV: So after that, did the two of you do that new finale each time?

PL: Yeh, until the show closed here. Bill and I never worked on the same show again after that. What Bill would do, if Bill had to do a benefit, he'd call me to go with him. I did many a benefit with Bill; and we'd do the "three-leg routine." And we become friends after that, very good friends. I knew him, and I knew him well.

CV: What about the three other "Bad Men from Harlem?" Did you become close to them?

PL: No, I was his ("Bojangles'”) trouble. Lloyd, Blue, and Crawford Jackson— they were two-leg dancers. He didn't have any problem with them. X was the one giving him problems. But Bill had a very mean attitude. He wasn't well liked by Black people, although he did a lot of good for Black people. He opened a lot of doors, and when he died, Bill 112

Robinson had the greatest funeral of any dignitary in or out of the business that ever happened. They were lined from Harlem to Broadway on both sides of the street when he passed. He was a big man, did a lot of good, opened a lot of doors, a big, big man. And you know where the word copasetic comes from? CV: Did you see the button I gave you?

PL: Yeh. When he died, I was in Chicago, at the Wrigley Theatre. I went to a nightclub that night, and there were about six or eight dancers in town, and all those got up on stage and did imitations of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. I don't know if that was the night he died or the night he was buried. I don't remember which one. But I do remember that very, very well. CV: Talk to me about costume. What would you perform in? Did you have a standard suit?

PL: Well, I used to be quite a snappy dresser. The reason for that was, the William Morris office, the one that booked me, said that the reason why I was getting so many applauses was because of sympathy. People felt sorry for me because I had only one leg. And I really didn't start dressing until I came to New York. So, I got the idea to eliminate the sympathetic appeal, and again this came from God. How do you get people to stop feeling sorry for you? There's only one way: that was to make them admire you. So I got to find a way now for people to admire me. So what I did was I learned— I don't know where I got it from— I used to dress immaculately. If I had on a white suit, I had a peg leg to match. If I had on a blue suit, I had a peg leg to match, brown suit, peg leg to match.

CV: Who made these pegs for you?

PL: Various carpenters. Any carpenter could make a peg leg. Only take the pattern from him. These peg legs are four different parts, they're not just one piece. The reason for that is so if I broke one, or part of the peg leg, I wouldn't have to make the whole peg leg all over again. Just make the piece to replace the broken part. Any carpenter could make it if he's a good carpenter.

CV: I talked to someone named Charles Cassell, who's the head of the Charlin Jazz Society in Washington, and he has a very clear memory of your coming to the Howard to perform, and dancing in a white suit...This is before white suits were in vogue...and the next day, all up and down 7th and U (which is where the Howard is), everyone was dressed out in 113 their white suits. It was like the whole city suddenly went "ga-ga" for white suits. All the men were wearing them. PL: Oh yes, I used to be quite a dresser. And it worked! It worked because I used to get an ovation and hadn't cut a step..just for making the entrance. People used to dress good in those days. And not just how they dressed on the stage...they dress out in the street. If I came out of my house and I walked up 7th Avenue this morning and I went back into my house and come back out again that afternoon, I changed clothes. Not only me, but that was the vogue then. That's how people did. Dressing was the style, that was it. That's the way you impressed people, the wayyou dressed, during those days.

CV: So how many weeks did you play in that show in New York before you went to Paris?

PL: Well, we went to Paris in 1929.

CV: So you had done a full year?

PL: Urn hm.

CV: Somewhere I have a clipping of your joining the show from The New York Times. When you were in New York, where did you stay? Did you have family there or you stayed in a boarding house?

PL: When are you talking about?

CV: Blackbirds of 1928.

PL: I stayed in a rooming house on 118th St. between 7th Avenue and either 5th or Lenox.

CV: A "show people" boarding house?

PL: No, this was a private family. I don't know how I was fortunate enough to get there but I stayed there the whole time I was in Blackbirds. During those days, Blacks could not stay at white hotels. But we had nice Black hotels at that particular time— the Theresa Hotel, the Douglass brother had a hotel, and there was another Black hotel on Lenox Avenue. I had to find a way to stop people...to eliminate the sympathetic thing. The one way was the dress, and the next way, I got a little recitation that I did. I used to do a recitation that went like this:

Don't look at me in sympathy I'm glad that I'm this way. 114

For I feel good and I'm knocking on wood as long as I can say: You just watch me peg it, and you can tell by the way that I leg it, That I'm Peg Leg Bates, the one-leg dancing man. I mix light fantastics up with hot gymnastics. I'm "Peg Leg” Bates, the one-leg dancing man. Now vou may think that having just one leg is tough! But when I do my stuff, (dance break) One leg is enough! When I start in tapping, anything can happen. I'm "Peg Leg" Bates, the one-leg dancing man. Let me-show you what I mean...

And then I would go and do my first routine.

CV: So you'd enter out on stage and do your "tap rap."

PL: Right, when I was in variety and vaudeville. And then in later years, when I played Blackouts, and also I played Radio City Music Hall, I did a pirate character— Long John Silver. And that was very, very popular. I think I'm the only Black that ever done Long John Silver and then really made him look like Long John Silver. And I always wound up doing the dance.

CV: Did you sing as well as dance?

PL: I really didn't pick up singing until I retired.I wanted to still dabble in show business, so I had to find something to replace the dancing.

CV: Did you have lines to do in Blackbirds?

PL: No, not in Blackbirds, but in Blackouts I did, when I did the pirate character. The girls were in back of me and they were dressed in pirate costume, swords and things, and they did routines to the music of "Sabre Dance." And their lines was:

"Ahoy there, you landlubbers! Stand by, we're coming aboard. We're the roughest, toughest buckaneers and handy with the sword. One morn' we'll sail the briny deep, to loot, steal, and pilfer, with our bloody skipper. And here he comes— Long John Silver!" And then I would come and say "Avast, avast, avast!" And then they would scatter. And I would say, "Long John Silver, they call me. And every 115 saltwater man agrees that I'm the roughest, toughest pirate who sailed the seven seas! When I first signed the boarder log, they told me to shake a leg. I must have shook it too hard, and wound up with this peg! But mates, don't give up the ship, although you seem to lose the fight, 'cause life mean do your best with what you got with all your might. I'm not sorry nor unhappy that I lost this leg, so please don't sympathize with me, for I enjoy my peg. I got to give up this pirate stuff. I got another plan. My heart just ain't in it, 'cause I'm a one-leg dancin' man." And then I'd go into a routine.

CV: Did you write that?

PL: No.

CV: What about Dashing Dinah? Weren't you in that show?

PL: Yes, that's the show that brought me to New York. That was Eddie Lemon's Dashing Dinah.

CV: What about Here 'Tis. 1941. I read that you were in that show.

PL: I don't remember. CV: What about The Atlantic City Follies of 1946?

PL: Well, that was '43, not '46. In 1943 I was at a club called Club Paradise, and when they closed for the season, me and three other partners— Ziggy Johnson and somebody else— we produced the show and took it on the road, called it Atlantic City Follies. Marva Louis was the star of the show. Marva Louis was Joe Louis' first wife. And she was a singer.

CV: Joe Louis, the fighter?

PL: Yes. She was his wife when we took the show on the road. We didn't make any money but we had a lot of fun.

CV: What about Bronze Follies?

PL: Doesn't ring a bell. Don't know anything about Bronze Follies.

CV: Tell me about Paris. How long were you there and what were your impressions?

PL: Well, the first time I was in Paris, I went there with Blackbirds. and we were there 18 weeks. I was very 116 impressed with Paris. I guess the reason I was impressed with Paris in 1929, was because there was no prejudice there. That impressed me tremendously, because in 1929 it was still very, very prejudiced right here in New York, not only down South. Black people couldn't go to white theaters in 1929, here in New York, much less down South. Black people could not go to. the Capital Theatre, Radio City Music Hall, all that stuff. In Paris, you could go where you wanted to go.

CV: Has Paris the first time you had played to a white audience?

PL: No. The first time I played to a white audience was Blackbirds in 1927..'28. CV: The audience was all white?

PL: All white. Urn...it was during my career, I went back to Paris two or three times in different shows. The last time I was in Paris was in 1956 and I did the pirate character there in a show at the Circle Medrano and I was there for six months in '56...no that was in 1950. And the next time I was in Paris was in 1956, I was there with Louis Armstrong. And the last time I really was in Paris was when I was billed with Johnny Ray. Johnny Ray took a show to Europe. He went to the Far East, to Singapore, to Australia, went to Manila, to Tokyo. That was the last time I visited with Johnny Ray.

CV: Hho invented the pirate character for you? Did you, or was it some director? PL: The pirate character came from Lew Leslie, for the road show.

CV: Did you become friends with Lew Leslie?

PL: Oh yes, yes. He were great friends, even after he closed his shows, he became an agent. He was my agent.

CV: Hhen you would do these dance numbers, you would create the actual steps for them, right? But you never had tap dance classes.

PL: I never had a lesson in my life! Only one ever showed me a few steps was Bill Robinson.

CV: Do you know Gregory Hines? 117

PL: Oh, yes. About three months ago, he put a show on at Carnegie Hall, all-dancing show, all dancing. And he was the star, and it was his show. So I read about it in the paper and I went down with some friends of mine plus my documentary people went, and I wanted Gregory to know that I was there. So I was out front, getting ready to meet some other people there and I wrote him a note and in that note I said, "Dear Gregory, a lot of luck to you and to the rest of the cast tonight. I would love to stop backstage and say hello briefly with your permission, if it's convenient. Lots of good luck. Peg Leg Bates.” Just so happened, that while I was standing outside, waiting for these people, along come Arthur Duncan— he was in the show.

CV: I think you look like him.

PL: So, however, I hadn't seen Arthur since I was in Blackouts. this is 1950 when I was in Blackouts and he was with Lawrence Welk. So we hugged and said hello, and I said, "Are you going backstage?" And he said, "Yeh, I'm going backstage now." I said, "Well, instead of me going backstage and leaving this note, will you take this backstage for me and give it to Gregory, and that way I'll know that he got it.” "Sure, Peg, I'll be happy to." So he took the note back and five minutes later, somebody in the back of me tapped me on the shoulder, and who was it but Gregory himself. So we hugged and I told him I'd come to see him and he thanked me for coming. All right, the show goes on and it's a beautiful thing. Every act is a dancing act, all kinds of tap, with their own style. Jimmy Slyde was in this show. Bunny Briggs was supposed to be in the show but he didn't show that night. Everybody else was there...Steve Condos was there. So Gregory closed the show, I'm in the middle of the fourth row. He did his first routine and now he's into his tacit, ad lib...

CV: "Improvography," he calls it...

PL: He says, "I've got to do something right here, he says, "I've got a friend of mine that's sitting out there somewhere, I don't know where he is, but I'll mention his name. I know that all of you know him. He's retired now, he's got a resort up in the Catskill Mountains, but I saw him out front and I know he’s in there, and I know that you folks would like to say hello to him. His name is 'Peg Leg' Bates." Hhen he said that there was a tremendous applause and I stood up and the light searched and saw me, he saw me and saw that I was on the fourth row, he jumped off the stage, come into the audience, hugged me and then there was a standing ovation! That was the greatest feeling that I've ever had in my entire life! So it was about two weeks after 118 that, my documentary people interviewed him. I got a thing on tape where they interviewed him, where he was talking about me for a half hour. Great man. Great, great man.

CV: Is your documentary going to be a half hour in length or an hour? PL: It's going to be a full hour. So, I'm a great admirer of Gregory. I think he's going to develop into one of the greatest Black actors of all time because he's a serious man and his dancing is just out of sight, out of sight! And besides, he's clean, a really wonderful guy. I don't know what happened between him and his brother Maurice, but I do know they're not close. I don't know what his brother is doing now. CV: I think he's in Europe.

PL: Could very well be. But Gregory is doing wonderful and I'm just so pleased, because he deserves that and more. A hard worker and very serious man, a man that not only the Black race is proud of, all races are proud of.

CV: What other tap dancers today have you been following? Savion Glover?

PL: Yes, I think he has a tremendous future. I just sit back and watch him; I've seen him in about two or three shows, and he was in that show (Carnegie Hall).

CV: Have you seen Black and Blue?

PL: Yes. He's in Black and Blue. Got a couple of young dancers in Black and Blue that's coming up. They'll come along great. And I'm pleased to see it, they've got some young dancers that are dancing now. You see, during my time tap dancing got lost. I don't know why, but every tap dancer had something special they would give, I mean, you didn't just have to go out there and do a couple of steps, a couple of poses and interpretive and that sort of thing— you had to dance. Bill Bailey, Pearl Bailey's brother, was one of the greatest. There's a guy that don't get much credit, but can still dance now, that's Harold Nicholas. Used to be guy by the name of Derby Wilson, he was great. There used to be three white boys called Three Rhythym Kings. I got a film clip there of practically all the dancers. Rusty Frank sent it to me. Did I hear you say you knew Rusty?

CV: Yeh. Last year when we had National Tap Dance Day, we invited Rusty Frank to sit on a panel with Norm Mitgang, 119 who's Bill Robinson's biographer, Rusty Frank, and Brenda Bufalino. PL: Brenda's good, she can dance...

CV: As a woman, she's my inspiration! PL: Well, she had a good teacher, Honi Coles. Brenda's been on my stage here. She had a dancing school in New Paltz, which is less than an hour from here.

CV: You're kidding?

PL: She's been here two or three times.

CV: How often did you dance on your stage here?

PL: Well, we only did two shows a week, midweek on Wednesday and we did a show on Saturday. Right up until the last three or four years I was in my show, dancing.

CV: Is it a good wood floor? PL: Yes, good wood.

CV: I hope you can turn it into a dancer's paradise. The New York Arts Council should jump on it!

PL: Would be nice. I'd like to see it.

CV: Did you ever teach?

PL: No.

CV: Did you ever want to?

PL: No.

CV: Certain people must have a'sked you...

PL: Oh, I had a lot of requests for it. No, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I know a lot of dancing school teachers. Well, that man there is...(indicates photo of Henry LeTang).

CV: I've studied with that man there. He was supposed to open a West Coast studio. Do you know if he has? PL: I don't know. He's a good friend of mine, been up here three or four times. I used to get acts from him. 120

CV: When is Rusty Frank's book coming out, because you're in it, right?

PL: Supposed to be coming out this year, end of the year.

CV: Tell me how you met your wife.

PL: There is a nightclub called Connie's Inn which was at 133rd Street and 7th Avenue which is now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, owned by George and Connie Immerman. When that nightclub closed, one of the brothers, George, took the show on the road, called Connie's Inn Hot Chocolates. One day I was walking up 7th Avenue, I don't remember where I was going, I saw a very pretty young girl with a bicycle, she was not riding the bicycle, just walking with the bicycle. I got fresh with her. I said, "Hey, little girl, give me a ride on your bicycle." She said, *You can't ride my bicycle, Mr. Bates, I got a flat tire." I said, "Oh, you know who I am?" She said, "Everybody knows 'Peg Leg' Bates." I said, "Thank you." She said, "Well, I can't give you a ride on my bicycle, bye bye.'' I was getting ready to go on the road show of Connie's Inn Hot Chocolates. Four days later I had a rehearsal at Academy Music Hall, 14th Street, New York. Me and my valet come to rehearsal... Well, during those days I was quite a lady's man.

CV: You had a valet?

PL: Oh yes, I always had a valet, a chauffeur and valet. So me and my valet, we come in, he got my briefcase in, to rehearse. Now my idea was, I am going to pick out one of the gals in the line, see which one I'm going to hit on. So when I scanned up there, who do I see in the line but the girl on the bicycle, with the flat tire. So, boy, I can't believe this! However, she said hello to me and I said hello to her. We did the first day, second day. In between shows— we were doing four shows a day— all the girls were running out to the bars, having a drink or seeing somebody. Now, the men's room is right below the ladies' dressing room. I got to pass by the ladies' dressing room to get to the men's room or to get a drink of water... I never drink so much water in all my life! Each time that I passed by there, who's in the room sitting there, reading a book! On the third day I couldn't take it no longer. I just say hello to her and she says hello and keep on going. It was the second show, I passed by there and knocked on the door. She says, "Come in." I says, "Can I ask you a question?" She says, "What?" I say, "All the rest of the girls, inbetween shows, they're running out to the bar and having a good time, why don' t you run out to the bar and have a good time?" She says, "I don't run out to the bar, to have a 121

good time. I'm sitting in the dressing room, reading my book, minding my own business. Do you mind, Mr. Bates?" "Well, no, I don't mind. Will you have supper with me tonight?" She thought about it. "Yes, I'll have supper with you." That night we had supper and that was it. That was it! CV: How much of an age difference was there between the two of you? You were married a long time!

PL: 44 years. One year difference.

CV: That's a miracle in and of itself.

PL: Well, we were together 44 years. We courted and we even "shacked up" together before we were married. We were actually married 32 years.

CV: And what did your mother think of that?

PL: Mother didn't live here with me, mother still stayed down South. CV: You didn't tell her what you were doing, though?

PL: Mother met six or eight women. Like I said, I used to be quite a lady's man. I'm not bragging, this is the truth. I used to have a girl in every town. When I met her, I had 19 gals stretched out in different cities. And I'm very happy to say, she shot them all down, one by one. Not putting any pressure on me, but just by being nice. And she told me, before we got married, "I know you got lots of girls.” She said, "Mr. Bates, one of these days, I'm going to be your wife. And when I do, I'm going to be a good wife.” And she wasn't lying.

CV: So the peg was never a problem in terms of your social life?

PL: The peg was never a problem to me in anything! The peg was the greatest thing that ever happened to me! The greatest thing that ever happened to me was losing this leg! See, God took this leg from me and then showed me what to do with it. This was a blessing in disguise. This is God's work.

CV: At what point did you realize that? I mean, initially you must have been devastated.

PL: Well, Eddie Lemon was the one who started me to realize, this in 1926-27, because he told everybody that I 122 had a gift, a blessing in disguise. He turned a tragedy, a handicap into an asset. And then I started realizing. But truly speaking, the peg has never really been a handicap to me. Because I did the same thing with the one leg and more than I did when I had two legs. Up until later years, I horseback ride, I swim, I box, I ran, everything I did with a peg leg. That's why people admired me. It wasn't just admiring me on account of my dancing, but because of the man that I am. Well, I started saying the man that I was, I would even go so far as to say, the man that I am. And I was mean, nasty, arrogant, just a man. And I went out to make friends, not enemies. Never mind the peg leg, that's nothing. I'm a human being; I just lost a leg. That's all. Everything else is there.

CV: Did you ever try anything other than a peg? Because they make prostheses now...

PL: Yup. Before I went to Paris in 1929 I bought an artificial leg and my mother was in Greenville at that time. I had my mother to come up here when we got on the boat to go to Paris and she didn't know anything about the artificial leg, because I bought the artificial leg just before going to Paris. While in Paris I tried to learn how to walk on the artificial leg and I was doing pretty good with it.

CV: Was it painful? PL: No, not painful, just two different walkings. You notice, on the peg leg, the stump is bent back. And you got to develop strength in the knee, not only just to walk, but to do the dancing and everything I did. So you can't do both. You got to walk on the peg leg, or you got to walk on the artificial leg. You can't do both. So, in Paris when I discovered that I couldn't do both. I wasn't too happy with the artificial leg, so I wanted to try something. It interfered with my work. So when I come from Paris, had Mother to come up from the South to meet me at the boat when we come back. She didn't know anything about the artificial leg. So I put the artificial leg on when I got off the boat and passed right by my mother and Mother didn't recognize me. So when that happened, out went the artificial leg and I haven't had it on since 1929.

CV: I have a quote from Honi Coles, from Harlem Hayday. Have you seen that book?

PL: No. 123

CV: It says: "There were times when Peg would sit in his dressing room and cry with the pain he experienced with his dance routines, but it never stopped him from performing them." Is that true, is it that painful?

PL: No, that is not true. CV: He goes on to say that your signature step, the "jet plane," is one that especially gave you a great deal of pain.

PL: Yes, I have gotten hurt, but I never sit in the dressing room and cry from pain. That is what I am saying is not true. Yes, I have gotten hurt, many times. You see that slide that I did on the floor on the thing there? (Referring to T.V. clip) That's where I learned how to do that step. Sometimes the stage might be a little slippery and I'd slip and fall. If I'd slip and fall, I'd turn it into a step, that's where that step comes from. And I developed it into something.

CV: Did you associate with other one-legged tap dancers? "The Big Crip?"

PL: "Big Time Crip" and I were very good friends.

CV: LeRoy Strange and "Crip" Heard?

PL: "Crip" Heard in Chicago, we were good friends, knew him very well.

CV: What about Jesse James?

PL: Jesse James, knew him very well. We were all good friends.

CV: Did you consider what you were doing "exotic" dancing?

PL: No. Unless I misconstrued the meaning of exotic. CV: No, the way tap dancers are categorized usually is they do flash, or they do hoofing— close to the floor dancing— or they do exotic, like Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker. Those are people you knew well, right? PL: No. You see what I did. That's a perfect example of what I did, right there.

CV: Have you read Jean and Marshall Steam's book, Jazz Dance? Because you're mentioned in that also. 124

PL: No.

CV: Are you keeping an archive of press clippings and photographs...

PL: I got them from here to China! I got a tremendous amount, I got all kinds of scrapbooks.

CV: I think what I'd like to hear about next is the resort, the club. I also want to hear about how you got into television, how you got on to Ed Sullivan, and you were on the Mike Douglas show, and other things. And then I want to hear about how the club got started.

PL: Well, let's take the Mike Douglas show first. I was on the Mike Douglas show three times in Philadelphia and once in Cleveland. Nothing spectacular. But Ed Sullivan was different. I knew Ed before television. Ed used to em cee the "Harvest Moon"— they had another name for it— I forget now.

CV: "Toast of the Town?"

PL: "Toast of the Town" was the name of his column and was also the name of his TV show. The Harvest Moon Ball dances was ballroom dancing and they used to have contests at the place where they used to have all the fights....Madison Square Gardens. So he used to em cee the dances there and he would take the winners of the fox trot— but not tap dancing— all ballroom dancing. He would take the winners and take them on tour and he wanted a pro to open his show, to put the audience in the right frame of mind. There was an agency by the name of the William Morris Agency. He had a friend in the William Morris Agency by the name of Harry Lanesca. He told Harry that he wanted an act, a dancer to open his show, but a good dancer. I was working with the William Morris Agency and Harry Lanesca told him about me. He hired me. And he was very happy with me.

We did the Loews Circuit, we did twelve weeks. We opened at Loews State, which is 47th Street and 7th Avenue. We opened there; on the third day he called me to come to his dressing room. I went to his dressing room and he (Ed Sullivan) said, "Peg, how much money do I pay you?" I said, "You pay me $250. You know what you pay me." "Is that right," he said. "Next week I'm going to the Valencia Theatre in the Bronx, in the Grand Concourse and I want you on my bill. The week after next. I'm going to call the Morris office and request you. Now, when they call you and tell you I want you, you tell them you want $500 a week." I couldn't understand why he would do that. But that time my 125

salary was raised from $250 a week to $500 a week; 'cause he was so happy with me, liked me so much, he wanted to establish a permanent salary. O.K. After that, any place I played in the theater, my salary was $500 a week.

How I happened to be the first Black to play his television show. They have a theater here on 50th Street and 7th Avenue called the Roxy Theatre. I was playing the Roxy. I think this was his third telecast and he was doing telecasts on Sunday. He had a dance team called "Sally and Tony DiMarco." They were very close, too. They was in his show and during the rehearsal, Sally sprained her ankle and she couldn't work Sunday night. Now this is Sunday, all the booking agencies is closed. He was stuck for an act. He had remembered that I was just around the corner. He called me and said, "Peg," and told me what had happened and how much he needed me. He says, "If I can arrange with the Roxy people for you to come over and appear on my show, would you do it?" I said, "You know I would, Mr. Sullivan, all you got to do is say so."

I was doing five shows a day. So he sent Ray Block over. Paul Ash had the band at the Roxy. Ray Block was his band until he died. He sent Ray Block over to copy my softshoe middle number, "Sleep." So I went over between shows and did it, on the third telecast. I was the first Black to be on his TV show. And that's how we really tightened up. And anytime Sullivan was gonna go on the road— he went on the road quite a bit— he even got some film people out of Hollywood. They weren't big stars, but Hollywood actors then, he took them on the road. I was the only one in the show who was not a television star. That's how close we was, right up until the time he died. I even went to his funeral when he died. That's the Ed Sullivan situation.

CV: I have a great quote from him, saying he felt very strongly that to break down the walls of racial segregation, it was important to get the best Black talent into white people's homes on a nightly basis. He said it better than that. He was a wonderful man.

PL: Oh, he made a lot of people, not only me, he made a lot of people. I'll never forget that show.

CV: You really feel that he made you?

PL: Yes, he did make me.

CV: But you had a whole stage career that preceded the television career! 126

PL: Yes but you must understand. You reach a different audience, a different amount of audience. You reach more people on one telecast that you would in five years on the stage. That's the difference.

CV: Did you retire from your television work after you retired from the stage?

PL: No, both about the same time. I used to travel with the Harlem Globetrotters for three years.

CV: One of them managed the "Peg Leg" Club, right?

PL: Yeh, he was the manager of the Harlem Globetrotters— Parnell Hoods, the number one team. His wife and he both worked for me. The last TV show I did was the Sullivan show in '67 and the last road show I did was with the Harlem Globetrotters in '68. And I didn't do any serious theater work after that. I devoted the rest of the time here. I was still dancing here but I had made up my mind, I was not going to go on the road and leave this undone. I would live here.

CV: Hhen you danced here, you danced twice a week?

PL: Hednesday and Saturday.

CV: Hould you do the same routine?

PL: Practically.

CV: So you weren't having to rehearse a lot, you would just slip in and do it.

PL: Sometimes I would rehearse.

CV: Did you have a band here?

PL: Oh, yeh. I had a band, comedian,and another dancer. I had another one-leg dancer here. His name was Pegleg Moffet. I had him here for three years. He was a protege of mine.

CV: So you taught him steps?

PL: Yeh, I taught him how to dance. Hell, I taught him stuff. He could dance.

CV: Hhat's happened to him? 127

PL: I don’t know. I wish I could answer that question. I think he hurt himself, 'cause about six years ago he was supposed to come back. See, we closed every year, you know, for the winter, and opened Memorial Day weekend and closed right after Thanksgiving. And we stayed closed until Memorial Day, so all the employees and the staff, and so forth, they cpuld go on about their business. Oh, about six years ago, he was supposed to come back to work. He said he was going in and that he had a growth on his neck and he was going in the hospital and have the growth operated on. And as soon as he got through with that, why he would be back to work. I haven't heard anything from him since. I called the number he had given me twice. He lived in Pritchett, Alabama. I called his number two or three years, say he didn't live there. I was trying to get him, to locate him.

CV: How old is he?

PL: Younger than I. I had some stuff that I wanted to throw his way, you know, some work for him. Couldn't locate him. CV: Are there any one-legged tap dancers today that you know of?

PL: No. No, he was the last one. "Crip" Heard is given up. I know that Big Time Crip is deceased. Jack Joyce, who is an Englishman, he's been given up. And Jimmy Ballentine, he give it up. He's an agent now. You'll see a picture on the wall over there, if you look on the Pros Gallery, in the club. CV: Is the club open? PL: Yeh, sure. We got guests over there. We got a group in from Baltimore, Maryland.

CV: Are you familiar with the expression, "Monoped?" Because as a group, one-legged tap dancers are often referred to as monopeds. Have you heard that before?

PL: Yeh, monoped. Monoped is one leg.

CV: You don't find that term offensive?

PL: No. If I find monoped offensive, I find one-leg offensive. It's one and the same.

CV: When National Tap Dance Day rolls around on May 25th, would you consider being our honored guest and spokesman? I think Washington, D.C. would go wild if you would. 128

PL: May 25th?

CV: Yeh. Bojangles' birthday.

PL: I'd be flattered, if my schedule allows. CV: Mr. Bates, I can't thank you enough for sharing your time so generously with me...for your sharp memory and easy interview style! This has been the thrill of my graduate school career.

PL: Thank vou for giving me my bouquet while I'm still around to smell the blossoms! BIBLIOGRAPHY Adamczyk, Alice J. Black Dance, An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989.

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