"Shim Sham Shimmy" originator dies

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Leonard Reed, 97; created famous tap dance routine
By Lewis Segal, Los Angeles Times, 4/9/2004

LOS ANGELES -- Tap dance pioneer Leonard Reed, a versatile, influential performer, producer, and teacher, died of congestive heart failure Monday at a hospital in Covina, Calif. He was 97.

Mr. Reed is best known as the originator, with partner Willie Bryant, of the Shim Sham Shimmy, a now-classic tap format that began as a flashy finale to their dance act in the late 1920s.

In the book "Jazz Dance," Marshall and Jean Stearns define the Shim Sham Shimmy as "a one-chorus routine to a 32-bar tune with eight bars each of the Double Shuffle, the Crossover, the Tack Annie (an up-and-back shuffle) and Falling Off a Log." That sounds impossibly complex but "can easily be faked," the Stearns wrote.

"The movements are easy enough to where a beginning dancer can learn them, and anyone who has danced a lot can pick them up in minutes," said Gracey Tune, artistic director of the Fort Worth, Texas, organization Arts on Tap. "Now it's been passed all around the world. . . . It's become the national anthem of tap."

Mr. Reed was born in Lightning Creek, Okla., with a mixed heritage from black, white, and Choctaw tribe descendants.

"My mother died of pneumonia when I was 2," he told the Fort Worth Star Telegram a year ago. "I knew who my father was, but I never knew him. He raped my mother."

He attended Cornell University but, after winning a Charleston contest on a bet, left school to start his dancing career.

Picking up tap skills, he teamed with Bryant in a successful vaudeville act promising "Brains as Well as Feet," an act in which he and Bryant passed for white.

"When I was with Willie, everything was white," he said in an interview for the book "Tap" in 1988. "But after that, I never did work white again. That was 1933."

The following year, Mr. Reed became a producer, working in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York with some of the era's best-known black performers. He staged shows at Manhattan's famed Cotton Club and later managed the Apollo Theater, where he also served as master of ceremonies for 20 years. He also developed his talents as a songwriter, arranger, bandleader, and comedian.

In the 1960s, he worked for record companies, producing acts, choreographing dance numbers, and helping launch the career of singer Dinah Washington. He also wrote songs and taught dance in his Southern California dance studio and in master classes coast to coast.

He received a lifetime achievement award from the American Music Awards in 2000; two years later, he received an honorary doctor of performing arts degree from Oklahoma City University.

At that time, he told the Sunday Oklahoman that his long, active life could be credited to "women, golf, and show business . . . but not necessarily in that order."

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