Buddy Bradley: Unsung Hero of the British Musical Stage

Published version available from Black Ink, Issue 4, 20 September 2023

By Annette Walker, August 2023 (unedited)

In 2020, Buddy Bradley’s name appeared several times during my research on tap dance history in the UK and I was intrigued about how this American became the first Black choreographer of British musical film in the 1930s. How is it that hardly any dancers (including myself) had heard of him? The more I learned about Buddy, the more widespread I found his influence to be and by summer 2021, I was writing a research project proposal in order to recover the missing story of his contribution to British dance practice.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Constance Valis Hill1, Stephen Bourne2 and Sarah Whitfield3 are just some of the historians who highlight that there are hundreds of black practitioners who have been marginalised and “invisibilized” from history. The aim of my research is to reclaim the work of Buddy Bradley (1905-1972) as dancer, choreographer and dance coach, and so demonstrate the significance of Black jazz dance and its practitioners for British musical theatre history. This article outlines Buddy’s work and the challenges and revelations of studing his story.

African American choreographer and dance instructor, Buddy Bradley, was one of the leading influences in dance on the musical stage from the mid-1920s through to the early 1970s. He specialised in tap dance and other jazz dances with an Africanist aesthetic4 that were popular in the twentieth century (e.g. the Charleston and Lindy Hop) but also worked widely with ballet and modern dance. His contemporaries, Frederick Ashton, Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine, learned directly from his work, yet whilst they are remembered and celebrated as key choreographers of their generation, Buddy’s name has faded from memory. I’ve created a database of his work and found he has over one hundred credits in British theatre, film, radio and television.

Buddy’s success began with coaching white stars at the Billy Pierce Dance Studio that was located off Broadway during the mid-1920s when black jazz dances, including tap dance, were becoming increasingly popular5. His reputation as a coach grew rapidly and he was regularly hired to restage dances for Broadway shows although racial segregation meant he was often unable to patronise those theatres. It wasn’t until he was working in the UK that his production credits became more easily identifiable. 

Buddy’s UK credits began with Charles B. Cochran’s 1930 production, Ever Green, that starred Jessie Matthews. Following its success, Buddy stayed in the UK to work on further musical productions and expanded into film, radio and television. His first film credit was for Evergreen (1934), the retitled adaptation of the stage production. Although most of his dances would have been for the live stage, footage from surviving film and television productions demonstrate Buddy’s work and can be used to analyse it, especially his approach to “stage dancing”.

However, uncovering Buddy’s work involves navigating references of negative racial tropes and stereotypes. For example, he arranged dances for Revels in Rhythm (1933) and I was stunned to find a behind-the-scenes clip showing a white chorus dancer wearing a blackface head mask that was zipped up before running onto the stage for the finale. Although minstrelsy was popular at the time, I had not previously come across the use of full head masks for it.

In the early 1930s, Buddy opened a dance studio in the heart of London’s theatre district and ran classes until the late 1960s. He became “known throughout Europe as the No. 1 dance teacher of musical revue stars”6. Some of Buddy’s students included John Mills, Audrey Hepburn, Bruce Forsyth and David Essex.

Many performers, including dancers from the Royal Ballet, were sent to Buddy’s dance school to learn tap dance and modern jazz. Some students also went on to set up their own dance schools and so his dance lineage continues with those whose teachers were taught by him. The American choreographer, Henry LeTang, had his early tap training with Buddy in New York. Diane Hampstead was a tap student of the late Connie Turner in Tonbridge, who studied with Buddy in London, and can spot a “second generation” Buddy student by their dancing. She once took a class with Henry and recognised something about his style before they eventually worked out the connection was Buddy.

Occasionally, references to Buddy appear in articles or obituaries on dancers, actors, models or singers and several can also be found in biographies of his students and collaborators. The full scale of Buddy’s influence is unknown but it extends internationally across several generations.

In April 2023, Maureen Footer, author of the forthcoming biography on Buddy7, invited me to join her for an afternoon talking about him at a restaurant with retired performers, Ralph Tobert and Frank Coda. It had taken two years of intensive international research for Maureen to discover Ralph and Frank who are just two of the hundreds, or more likely thousands, of performers who trained at the Buddy Bradley School of Stage Dancing in central London. Ralph and Frank met in class as young men during the 1950s and have remained the best of friends ever since.

Ralph remembers Buddy as a quiet man with a calm temperament who wore blue suede tap shoes. Buddy hardly spoke during class and did not use counts or the names of steps. He began with a warm up followed by exercises and focused on using rhythmical phrases to teach steps. Both Ralph and Frank remember that Buddy had a series of at least six numbered tap routines. Each routine was arranged to a different jazz tune and increased in difficulty with the highest level being reserved for selected students.

I was thrilled to spend the afternoon talking about Buddy with nonagenarians, Ralph and Frank, and their life in showbiz. The evening was topped off with Ralph and I dancing a “soft shoe” version (in our everyday shoes) of the Shim Sham routine in the restaurant. Ralph then taught me a short phrase he had recently remembered from Buddy’s class. Shortly afterwards, as the evening was winding down, I spotted Ralph and Frank (without his walking stick) dancing side by side. I realised they were going over one of Buddy’s routines and I swiftly attempted to capture the moment on my phone. It reminds me of how dance history is essentially ingrained in embodied practice but I wonder how studying Buddy Bradley from interviews, film clips, photographs and articles might also influence one’s own tap dancing and continue his legacy.

Footnotes

1 Hill, C. V. (1992) ‘Buddy Bradley: The Invisible Man of Broadway brings Jazz Tap to London’ in Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars, Fifteenth Annual Conference, edited by Christena L Schlundt, 77–84. University of California

2 Bourne, S. (2021) Deep Are the Roots: Trailblazers Who Changed Black British Theatre. The History Press

3 Mayes, S. and Whitfield, S. K. (2021) An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 – 1950. Bloomsbury

4 Gottschild, B. Dixon (1996) Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Greenwood Press

5 Stearns, M. and Stearns, J. (1994) Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. De Capo Press (first published 1968)

6‘Buddy Bradley Tours Europe’ in Ebony, November 1954, Volume 10 Issue 1, 135–138. Johnson Publishing Company

7 Footer, M (2026) Buddy Bradley, Feel the Floor: The Life and Legacy of Jazz Choreographer Buddy Bradley. Beacon Press


View draft PDF


Tagged with: , ,
Posted in All News & Announcements, Articles, Research & Publications