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Feel the Floor: Restoring the Life and Legacy of Jazz Choreographer Buddy Bradley

Feel the Floor: Restoring the Life and Legacy of Jazz Choreographer Buddy Bradley

          
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About the Book

"...An urgent offering that brings forward Buddy Bradley's unlikely achievement as an African American dance artist...A triumph of research and compassion." -Dr. Thomas De Frantz, author of Dancing Many Drums- Excavations in African American Dance The first biography of the deeply influential and unjustly overlooked Black choreographer and dancer Buddy Bradley A stunning resurrection of the visionary choreographer Buddy Bradley whose contributions to rhythm tap and jazz dance in the 1920s and '30s indelibly transformed the way we move to music In Feel the Floor, Maureen Footer shows how Bradley's revolutionary moves electrified Broadway in the 1920s and conquered London's West End in the 1930s, introducing new inflections to the era's tap and jazz dance. His experiments in rhythm and staging would anticipate bebop, and his influence even permeated classical dance, cross-pollinating with ballet choreographers like Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine. Mirroring today's fight for recognition of Black contributors to transatlantic culture, Buddy Bradley's story isn't just one of influence. He created the movement language we still speak today. The white performers Bradley taught to move became legends- Eleanor Powell, Ruby Keeler, Adele Astaire, Jessie Matthews. Bradley was also the first to fuse movement, character, and narrative in the theater, setting the stage for the integrated book musical and the careers of Agnes de Mille, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins. In post-war Great Britain, as Black American dancers and jazz musicians flocked to London (and a congenial base at Bradley's dance school), he danced and choreographed with Baby Laurence, Pete Nugent, Frankie Manning, and Mabel Lee, among others. Footer spent five years in prodigious research, crossing two continents, tracking ancestral history in the Deep South, and enlisting private investigators to uncover Bradley's buried legacy. Feel the Floor corrects the false narratives that have erased Bradley's influence, revealing how one man's genius transformed musical theater, shaped modern ballet, and rewired the very DNA of American dance.

Table of Contents:
Introduction

PART 1: SOUTHERN RHYTHMS, 1838–1920

CHAPTER 1
Ancestral Whispers

CHAPTER 2
Fathers and Sons in the Black Belt of Alabama

CHAPTER 3
Post-Reconstruction: Explorations Beyond Home

CHAPTER 4
An Observant Child in Birmingham

CHAPTER 5
Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line to Harrisburg

PART 2: NEW YORK JAZZ, 1921–1930

CHAPTER 6
Harlem Chorus Boy

CHAPTER 7
Celebrity Dance Instructor on Broadway

CHAPTER 8
A Black Choreographer on the Great White Way

PART 3: LONDON CALLING, 1931–1932

CHAPTER 9
Ever Green and Affirmation

CHAPTER 10
Appraising London

CHAPTER 11
Expatriation

PART 4: THE EXPANSIVE YEARS, 1932–1938

CHAPTER 12
On Pointe with Frederick Ashton and Noël Coward

CHAPTER 13
Ballyhoo to the Folies Bergère

CHAPTER 14
Seduction and the Camera’s Eye

CHAPTER 15
The Gauguin of the Dance

CHAPTER 16
Dancing on the Ceiling

CHAPTER 17
Top Hat and Tails

CHAPTER 18
Follow the Sun to Happy Returns

PART 5: SHIFTS IN RHYTHM, 1939–1960

CHAPTER 19
Dancing in the Blitz

CHAPTER 20
All That Jazz

CHAPTER 21
Jazz Maestro

CHAPTER 22
Troupes, Tours, and Baby Laurence

PART 6: RESOLUTION, 1961–1972

CHAPTER 23
The Swerving Sixties

CHAPTER 24
Back to the Future

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780807045244
  • Publisher: Beacon Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Height: 229 mm
  • No of Pages: 360
  • Sub Title: Restoring the Life and Legacy of Jazz Choreographer Buddy Bradley
  • ISBN-10: 0807045241
  • Publisher Date: 12 May 2026
  • Binding: Hardback
  • Language: English
  • Returnable: Y
  • Width: 152 mm

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