Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (born Luther Robinson; May 25, 1878 – November 25, 1949), was an American tap dancer, actor, and singer, the best known and the most highly paid black entertainer in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. His career began in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway theatre, the recording industry, Hollywood films, radio, and television.
According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, "Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it on its toes, dancing upright and swinging," adding a "hitherto-unknown lightness and presence." His signature routine was the stair dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent. He is also credited with having popularized the word copacetic through his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances.
He is famous for his dancing with Shirley Temple in a series of films during the 1930s, and for starring in the musical Stormy Weather (1943), loosely based on his own life and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. He used his popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers. Robinson was one of the first minstrel and vaudeville performers to appear as black without the use of blackface makeup, as well as one of the earliest Black performers to perform solo, overcoming vaudeville's two-color rule. Additionally, he was an early black headliner in Broadway shows. Robinson was the first black performer to appear in a Hollywood film in an interracial dance team (with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, 1935), and the first black performer to headline a mixed-race Broadway production.
Robinson came under heavy criticism for his apparent tacit acceptance of racial stereotypes of the era, with some critics calling him an Uncle Tom. He strongly resented this, and his biographers suggested that critics were underestimating the difficulties faced by black performers engaging with mainstream white culture at the time, and ignoring his many efforts to overcome racial prejudice. In his public life, Robinson led efforts to persuade the Dallas Police Department to hire its first black policeman; lobby President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II for equal treatment of black soldiers; and stage the first integrated public event in Miami, a fundraiser which was attended by both black and white city residents.
Robinson was a popular figure in both black and white entertainment worlds of his era, and is remembered for the support that he gave to fellow performers, including Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Lena Horne, Jesse Owens and the Nicholas Brothers. Sammy Davis Jr. and Ann Miller credited him as a teacher and mentor, Miller saying that he "changed the course of my life." Gregory Hines produced and starred in a biographical movie about Robinson for which he won the NAACP Best Actor Award.
Despite being the highest-paid black performer of the time, Robinson died penniless in 1949, his funeral paid for by longtime friend Ed Sullivan. In 1989, Congress designated Robinson's birthday of May 25 as National Tap Dance Day.
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was born Luther Robinson in Richmond, Virginia on May 25, 1878, to Maxwell, a machinist, and Maria Robinson, a church choir director. He and his younger brother William were raised in Richmond's Jackson Ward neighborhood. His grandmother Bedelia Robinson, formerly enslaved, raised him after both his parents died tragically in 1884: his father from chronic heart disease and his mother from unknown causes.
Details of his early life are known only through legend, much of it perpetuated by Robinson himself. He claimed he was christened Luther, a name he disliked. He suggested to William that they should exchange names, and eventually they did.
William subsequently adopted the name Percy and achieved recognition as a musician under that name.
At the age of five, Robinson began appearing as a "hoofer" or busker in local beer gardens and in front of theaters for tossed pennies. A promoter saw him performing outside the Globe Theater in Richmond and offered him a job as a "pick" in a local minstrel show. At that time, minstrel shows were staged by white performers in blackface. Pickaninnies were cute black children at the edge of the stage singing, dancing, or telling jokes.
In 1890, the 12-year-old Robinson ran away to Washington, D.C. where he did odd jobs at Benning Race Track and worked briefly as a jockey. In 1891, he was hired by Whallen and Martel, touring with Mayme Remington's troupe in a show titled The South Before the War, performing again as a pickaninny despite his age. He travelled with the show for over a year before growing too mature to play the role credibly. He later teamed up with a young Al Jolson, with Jolson singing while Robinson danced for pennies or to sell newspapers.
In 1898, Robinson returned to Richmond and joined the United States Army as a rifleman when the Spanish–American War started. He received an accidental gunshot wound from a second lieutenant who was cleaning his gun.
On March 30, 1900, Robinson entered a buck-and-wing performance contest at the Bijou Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, winning a gold medal and defeating Harry Swinton, star of the show In Old Kentucky and considered the best dancer of his day. The resulting publicity helped Robinson to get work in numerous travelling shows, sometimes in a troupe, more frequently with a partner, though not always as a dancer (Robinson also sang and performed two-man comedy routines).
Robinson was a partner in a tap-dancing and comedy duo with George W. Cooper from 1902, booked on both the Keith and Orpheum Circuits with their final performance together in 1916. Vaudeville performer Rae Samuels, who had performed with Robinson, convinced him to meet with her manager (and husband), Marty Forkins. Under Forkins' tutelage, Robinson matured and began working as a solo act, increasing his earnings to an estimated $3,500 per week. Forkins accomplished this by inventing an alternate history for Robinson, promoting him as already being a solo act. This technique succeeded, making Robinson one of the first performers to break vaudeville's two-coloured rule, which forbade solo Black acts.
When the U.S. entered World War I, the War Department set up a series of Liberty Theatres in the training camps. The Keith Circuit and Orpheum Circuit underwrote vaudeville acts at reduced fees, but Robinson volunteered to perform gratis for thousands of troops in both black and white units of the expeditionary forces. He received a commendation from the War Department in 1918.
Throughout the early 1920s, Robinson continued his career on the road as a solo vaudeville act, touring throughout the U.S. and most frequently visiting Chicago, where Marty Forkins lived. From 1919 to 1923, he was fully booked on the Orpheum Circuit and was signed full-time by the Keith Circuit in 1924 and 1925. Besides being booked for 50 to 52 weeks (an avid baseball fan, he took a week off for the World Series), Robinson did multiple shows per night, frequently on two different stages.
In 1926 Robinson made a short tour of UK variety theatres, headlining at the Holborn Empire and, during the week of July 19, the Brighton Hippodrome.
As mentioned, the chapter of Stearns' Bill Robinson: Up on the Toes titled Jazz Dance (1966) describes how Robinson introduced dancing "up on the toes" to tap dance. This was a new addition to King Rastus Brown's popular "flat-footed wizardry." Moving primarily from the waist down, Robinson maintained impressive control of his body. Pete Nugent is said to have remarked "Robinson was the absolute tops in control." That Robinson infrequently dropped his heels marked a significant change in popular tap technique. Due to his adroit ability to be both light on his feet and distinct in his percussive taps, Robinson was called the "Father of Tapology."