Tap dancing began in Africa with religious dance rituals, where dancers moved in a circle and shuffled their feet, clapped their hands, and patted their bodies to the rhythm of drums. In the 16th century, West African slaves aboard ships across the Atlantic were forced by their transporters to exercise by dancing. Onboard, these men and women had no traditional drums, so they used upturned buckets and tubs as well as their feet to produce a rhythm.
Once they arrived in America, African slaves fused European dances with African rhythms. In the 1740s, slave codes forbade drums for fear of uprisings, so percussive footwork developed as an alternative. According to Hill, buck dancing, the oldest style of percussive stepping, featured flatfooted, shuffling, steps similar to modern tap. This shuffle step, the most basic step in tap, features a rapid, rhythmic brushing of the foot on the floor and is common in all forms of tap, from the earliest styles to today's technique.
Thousands of Irish men and women were enslaved and deported to the Caribbean in the 1650s. Hill writes that they worked alongside African slaves on English sugar plantations, and the two groups fused their forms of music and dance. Both styles focused on footwork with little upper body movement, and the combination produced "jigging," a new American percussive dance style that developed around 1800. Jigging featured a body bent at the waist, with little movement of the torso and arms, jumping, springing steps, and rapid rhythmic shuffling of the feet. Jigging competitions were popular with slaves as well as riverboat men.
On the minstrel show stage, jigging was performed by white actors in blackface makeup throughout the 19th century. Dancers used hard-soled shoes, clogs, or hobnailed boots to produce percussive sounds. By the 1840s, minstrel shows were the most popular form of entertainment in America, but they were still exclusively white. William Henry Lane was the first black man to tour with a minstrel group, after he beat the era's leading Irish dancer in a contest in 1844. Lane kept the African style central to jigging by grafting African rhythms and a loose body style into his technique. This blend produced a new method that is considered the earliest form of American tap dancing.
After the Civil War, more black performers gained access to the minstrel stage, and they infused new steps, rhythms, and structures that developed from African American social dances. Unlike ballet, tap dancing never had a formal technique that had to be learned in a studio. The genre developed from people listening and watching each other dance in the street, club or hall. From the beginning, tap steps were shared, copied and reinvented. This communal aspect of tap developed into the dance challenge, which was hugely popular from the plantation to the street to the club to the stage. Every minstrel show closed with the "walk-around finale," a dramatic dance competition between two actors.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, jazz-infused tap was featured in traveling medicine shows, carnivals and circuses. When ragtime music emerged, tap underwent a significant transformation by absorbing ragtime and jazz syncopated rhythms to become jazz tap, which emphasized precision, lightness and speed. In 1914, several all-black revues were staged in Harlem, featuring tap and lindy hop dancing. Florenz Ziegfeld, of the Ziegfeld Follies, saw the revues and brought tap dancing to Broadway in 1914. Broadway dancers were the first to add metal plates called "taps" to their shoes at this time.
With the Jazz Age of the 1920s, tap evolved in direct relation to jazz music. The drum style, featuring a more upright body, emerged as the fastest tap method yet. In the 1930s and 1940s, tap dancers often performed in front of jazz or swing bands. Tappers gathered at places like the Hoofer's Club in Harlem to practice steps and compete. Tap continued to be popular on Broadway and in the new medium of film. Since black dancers were denied access to the white film industry, two convergent tap styles developed in the 1940s: a black rhythmic style epitomized by Bill Robinson, and the more balletic style exemplified by Gene Kelly. In the late 1940s, as swing music gave way to bebop, modern jazz tap developed with more full body movement and soft-soled shoes.
As Hill writes, tap dancing declined dramatically in the 1950s with the demise of vaudeville and the variety show. With a shift to ballet and modern forms of dance on Broadway and the end of the Big Band era, tap was almost lost as an art form. In 1963, tap experienced a revival at the Newport Jazz Festival with the Old Time Hoofers Show, which featured traditional styles of tap. A television special and several off-Broadway shows brought tap back to the forefront of pop culture. In the 1970s, tap made a shift back to the concert stage as part of the postmodern dance movement, and a renaissance of interest blossomed in the 1980s with tap's return to Broadway as well as tap festivals across the country.
A resurgence of percussive dance forms arose in the 1990s with the advent of stepping: a military style line dance with body slapping and feet stomping made popular by black fraternities. In 1996, tap virtuoso Savion Glover choreographed the Broadway hit "Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk." Glover's new style of tap dancing infused hip-hop rhythms, and the popularity of the show, along with its many accolades, "made tap cool again," according to Hill. New technologies for amplifying sounds and embellishing rhythms have added to the popularity of tap dancing, as it continues to be a favorite of audiences everywhere.