Bill Bojangles Robinson (1997)

Cable TV biography of the dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Shared for historical purposes. I do not own the rights.

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (May 25, 1877 – November 25, 1949) was an American tap dancer and actor, the best known and most highly paid African-American entertainer in the first half of the twentieth century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. He started in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway, the recording industry, Hollywood, radio, and television. According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, "Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging", giving tap a "…hitherto-unknown lightness and presence."[1]:pp. 186–187 His signature routine was the Stair Dance, in which Robinson would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent. Robinson is also credited with having introduced a new word, copasetic, into popular culture, via his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances.

A popular figure in both the black and white entertainment worlds of his era, he is best known today 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 Robinson's own life, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Robinson used his popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers, including becoming the following:

one of the first minstrel and vaudeville performers to appear without the use of blackface makeup
one of the earliest African-American performers to go solo, overcoming vaudeville's two-colored rule [2]
a headliner in Broadway shows
the first African American to appear in a Hollywood film in an interracial dance team (with Temple in The Little Colonel, 1935)
the first African American to headline a mixed-race Broadway production - wikipedia.

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