![]() He spent most of his energy “trying not to look shocked,” he said. Marshall Stearns himself could remember his embarrassment when, as a white college student in the late-1920s, he took a date to hear Ellington’s band at the Cotton Club and encountered the “murderously naughty” Tucker. ![]() The best information about Tucker comes from the interviews with black entertainers that Marshall and Jean Stearns conducted in the 1960s for their seminal book “Jazz Dance” (1968). (His death may have been shrouded in euphemisms, too “mysterious illness” was sometimes code for syphilis.) It took a French critic - who was less squeamish about sex and had different attitudes about race - to hail Tucker as “a marvelous artist who knows all the dances of the universe.” Reviewers tended to describe Tucker’s “double-jointed” dancing with euphemisms or expressions of disbelief. No matter how violent it may appear to the beholder, every posture gives the impression that the dancer will do much more.” She used both as exemplars of the “lack of symmetry that makes Negro dancing so difficult for white dancers to learn.”īut it’s easy to imagine that Hurston was still thinking of Tucker when she wrote: “Negro dancing is dynamic suggestion. Zora Neale Hurston, in her now-canonical 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” cited only two dancers by name: Robinson and Tucker. That low-down quality was in contrast to the upright tapping of the show’s star, Bill Robinson. The addition of sleigh bells to the bouncy music underlined the idea. In the film “Crazy House,” Tucker does his shaking while rubbing his hands together, as if he were shivering in the cold while skating on ice. Tucker’s trembling was most likely related to dances of spiritual possession, which became part of Pentecostal, Sanctified and Holiness traditions. Tucker was, in fact, discovered in Maryland, dancing in the streets of Baltimore, and Ellington’s claim is probably accurate in other ways: What Ellington called “pagan rituals,” scholars would identify as African spiritual practices that informed African-American culture. (This gender distinction still held when Elvis came on the scene, prompting hostile journalists to liken him disparagingly to burlesque ladies doing the hoochie coochie.)ĭuke Ellington, who hired Tucker to dance with his band at the Cotton Club and elsewhere, once speculated that Tucker had come from “tidewater Maryland, one of those primitive lost colonies where they practice pagan rituals and their dancing style evolved from religious seizures.” He could also tap dance and do the Charleston, but it was the hip rotations and the shaking that distinguished him from black male dancers of his day, in part because the moves were associated with the sexually charged ones of female dancers “shake” dancers were known to shimmy and grind. Some hip-hop dancers who came across video footage of Tucker were said to have experienced a shock of recognition: This guy was doing some of their steps decades before they were.Įven if these dancers didn’t imitate Tucker directly, they drew on a style that he had heightened and popularized. Later, Tucker’s loose kicks and unwinding spins found an echo in the signature moves of Michael Jackson. Elvis the Pelvis also took on the moniker “Ol’ Snakehips.” Elvis Presley, who was born two years before Tucker died, probably never saw him dance, yet he scandalized 1950s America with a more timid version of Tucker’s below-the-waist action, making girls in the audience scream. Tucker’s influence didn’t end with his death. Back then, obscurity wasn’t unusual for black entertainers, but the articles praised him as one of the most imitated artists of the day. The cause, as described in his obituary in The Baltimore Afro-American, was a “mysterious illness.” Neither that obituary nor those in other African-American newspapers - the mainstream press did not report the death - included many biographical facts about Tucker. He died on May 14, 1937, when he was just 31. By the time he appeared in the film, Snakehips Tucker was already a name attraction in Harlem nightclubs like the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn, and he had appeared to acclaim on Broadway and in Paris.
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