Amidst the singing Mormons and movie stars, the 2011 Tony Awards broadcast featured a disarmingly anachronistic musical number: triple-threat Broadway star Sutton Foster, who would go on that evening to win the award for Best Actress in a Musical, leading the cast of the 2010 revival of Cole Porter's 1934 musical “Anything Goes” in a rousing rendition of the iconic title song. With hair perfectly bobbed and smiles plastered across their faces, Foster and the cast executed choreographer Kathleen Marshall's steps with an almost scary level of synchronicity. Tapping joyfully to the syncopations of Porter's song, the performers seemed to embody the possibility of a simpler, more innocent moment of American entertainment history when nothing could more purely express the unbridled optimism of the American spirit than a chorus of boys and girls hoofing together onstage.

Questions of nostalgia and anachronism are central to Constance Valis Hill's Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History. Tap dancers and enthusiasts have long recognized the problem imposed by devotion to a dance form that reached its popular apogee in the 1920s and 30s: “Tap can't depend on nostalgia, it is innovative,” Jerry Ames—founder of a tap dance company at the center of the so-called “tap revival” initiated in the 1970s—has said. “We can't just lament tap dancing as a lost art” (222). Indeed, the latter half of Hill's book makes an impassioned case for the ongoing relevance of tap as a uniquely American aesthetic form. But reading Hill's book front-to-back, it is hard to avoid the impression that tap enthusiasts have struggled to overcome the loss of the form's Halcyon days, when tap dance performers and choreographers of Harlem, Hollywood, and Broadway directly channeled the throbbing pulse of the American cultural ethos. Despite the work of contemporary innovators like Gregory Hines, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover, it is hard to imagine that tap will ever occupy the cultural centrality that Hill's work documents.

At its best, her book shows how tap dance has reflected and contributed to broader developments in American expressive culture. The history of tap dance, Hill demonstrates, is impossible to unlink from broader contestations around race, class, and gender. As she notes in her Introduction and early chapters, the history of tap has been marked by two distinct, if constantly intertwining, strains: “one based in black vernacular dance and black rhythmic sensibilities, the other in the jig and clog tradition of white Broadway” (4). Tap emerged as a distinct cultural form from the intercultural mixing of black and Irish populations in the American south and, by the mid- to late nineteenth century, in northern urban centers. Hill's book traces the ways that these two strains of tap developed alongside and through each other such that “the distinctions articulated at the turn of the twentieth century were indistinct by that century's end” (4). In this way, Hill offers a crucial corrective to previous histories of tap dance, which have tended to concentrate on the (predominantly white) Broadway/Hollywood, Fred Astaire/Gene Kelly tradition of tap and ignored its deep roots in black cultural dance and music forms.

As in the best cultural history, Hill structures her book around the microhistories of specific dancers, groups, and companies; broader historical trends emerge from the tapestry of individual lives she weaves. The sheer extent of Hill's research, and her attention to the biographies of an astounding range of tap dancers, should make Tap Dancing America the definitive work on the subject. The book's twelve chapters—spanning tap's prehistory from 1650 through 1900; each decade of the twentieth century; and a generous and illuminating concluding chapter on tap in the new millennium—are encyclopedic in scope, but not feel. The book will be invaluable as both a scholarly resource on specific dancers, styles, and movements within tap dance's remarkably diverse purview, and as a compelling history that can be read cover-to-cover by devotees of the form.

Hill's sections on Bill Robinson, probably the most important tap dancer of the first half of the twentieth century, exemplify the nuance with which she approaches her subjects. Hill shows the extent to which Robinson was responsible for fusing the two distinct strains of musical theater dance that established tap dance style as it would subsequently come to be known: “[T]hat Robinson … was both upright and swinging,” Hill explains, “fusing ragtime syncopations with a light-footed and vertical style of jigging, makes his tap dancing the embodiment of Afro-Irish fusions in American tap dance” (66). Equally illuminating is her discussion of Robinson's place as one of the most prominent black entertainers of the twentieth century; his life provides important insight into the contentious history of race and representation in American popular culture. Black theatrical dance in the early twentieth century often reflected the aspirations of urban African American artists and audiences toward “racial uplift,” and used dance and popular performance to imaginatively stage a level of social and cultural advancement that was otherwise unavailable. Robinson established his dance reputation in part by inventing the “stair dance,” in which he would tap up and down a specially constructed staircase. Hill writes that Robinson once explained that the stair dance was inspired by a fantasy that he was ascending stairs to be knighted; Hill argues that “Robinson's dreams of racial uplift were realized by dancing up a real flight of stairs to knighthood” (66). She continues, “Robinson broke with the convention of dancing along the narrow horizontal line of the stage to utilize the verticality of the stage space, thus elevating the dancer to occupy the center of the proscenium frame” (67). Here, Hill demonstrates the way formal innovation was tied to broader issues of race and class as they could be represented in popular representational idioms.

Tap dance reached its formal maturity during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, when “Hundreds of tap dance steps were invented” (79), and a series of musical theater pieces—among them Shuffle Along, Put and Take, and Plantation Review—featuring black performers and themes, dominated New York cultural life. By the 1930s, Harlem hotspots like the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater had become incubators of a distinctively new black aesthetic sensibility of which tap dance and jazz music were the progenitors. In this way, the book makes an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly interest in documenting and interpreting black American performance practices. Hill perceptively argues that “jazz was the quintessential modernist expression of the twenties, and jazz tap dance was a form of expressive production that led to a specifically African American modernism” (90). The jazz tap dancing that developed in this era, in Hill's account, constituted an essential refutation of the earlier forms of black vernacular tap that drew from “darky” stereotypes and minstrel show idioms, in favor of a more formal, abstract, and “high culture” aesthetic. The book's sections on black tap dancers in early Hollywood cinema offer important contributions to our understanding of the history of race on film. Hill describes the way black dancers and vaudeville performers were both instrumental to and limited by the developing studio system's mediation of U.S. race relations.

If the 1920s and 1930s represented the apogee of tap's hold on the popular cultural imagination, the 1950s and 1960s were its nadir. With Broadway musicals displaced by rock and roll and more “difficult” forms of jazz music as the vanguard of popular taste, most tap dancers found themselves forced to abandon the art that had sustained their careers. But it would be inaccurate to simply dismiss this period as devoid of interesting or significant developments in tap style, especially since it gave us the work of such key tap dance performers as Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Jackie Gleason and the June Taylor dancers. But even more welcome than her sections on these star players is Hill's attention to the work of lesser known, though still seminal, black tap innovators from the period. These include Leon Collins, the “bop classicist” who would dance to both Dizzie Gillespie and, “with disarming ease and shimmering speed to such classical compositions as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ and J. S. Bach's ‘Prelude and Fugue in C minor,’” (176) and Jimmy Slyde, who developed a unique approach to tap-dancing-as-bebop. Sammy Davis, Jr. emerges as the figure of this period who most effectively bridged the gap between black jazz and white Broadway/Hollywood tap approaches, though Davis's tap dancing was limited to his popular night club appearances and largely barred by a bigoted Hollywood studio system.

Hill's sections on Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly demonstrate that white Broadway tap dance style also operated along a complicated race/class axis. Astaire, whose fame was established by playing debonair characters in Depression-era musical films, developed a tap idiom that represented the refined, high-class fantasies of an economically depressed viewing public. Kelly, more than a decade younger than Astaire, came into his own as a film icon in the 1950s and embodied a muscular, common-man masculinity. Indeed, Kelly himself framed the difference between their two styles in explicit terms of class: “Fred represented the aristocracy, and I represented the proletarian” (155). Drawing upon Noel Ignatiev's book How the Irish Became White, Hill assesses the ways Kelly's Irish heritage augmented the assimilation of Irish Americans into the white American cultural “mainstream”: “In Kelly, the public saw and beheld an Irish American whose style and background were modern—and in startling contrast to the sort of Irish characters made famous by James Cagney, George Murphy, Ray Bolger, and others…. Such an evolution of the Irish character, from minstrelsy through stage-Irish stereotypes, to the urbane suavity of a Gene Kelly marked a nearly total assimilation of what was distinctively Irish, at least in Hollywood terms” (186). While Hill's argument here is well-made, it feels constrained and foreshortened: one wishes she were more explicit about the political complexities of the kinds of representational evolutions she is tracing. The material she presents cries out for a reading that views this history as more complicated than a simple, triumphalist, and unproblematic progression toward racial assimilation.

The third section of the book is devoted to what has been termed the “tap revival,” a period of reinvigorated interest in tap history as well as of remarkable creative flourishing, albeit, with a few exceptions, in a somewhat more esoteric and academic environment than was the case in tap's heyday. Hill traces the resurgence of interest in tap dance to nostalgia-fueled Broadway revivals in the 1970s of classic 1930s tap-heavy musicals, particularly the 1971 production of No, No Nanette (featuring a 62-year-old Ruby Keeler). The tap craze that followed led to an upsurge in new students and classes—primarily aimed at middle class white women. Hill is also particularly illuminating when tracing the career of Gregory Hines, whom she credits with imbuing the form with a new-found creative energy and freedom that sought to pull tap beyond the trap of nostalgic sentimentality that had plagued the form since its fall from mainstream popularity at midcentury. Hill writes that Hines's character in the film Tap, “chosen by the old hoofers as the disciple who would carry the tradition forward, was in fact emblematic of the role Hines would play in life as a tap artist, producer, promoter, and ambassador of this American vernacular dance form” (248).

The debate over innovation versus nostalgia that has long haunted tap dancers is addressed head-on in Hill's final chapters, though it is here that non-enthusiasts might find themselves skeptical of some of Hill's claims. To be sure, brilliant dancers—foremost among them, of course, would be Savion Glover—continue to push the form in new and innovative directions, and tap continues to attract young and ever more diverse practitioners. But Hill's obvious and infectious enthusiasm for her subject might have usefully been tempered by a more objective approach: the final sections of the book sometimes border on cheerleading. Still, she presents much fascinating material, particularly regarding the evolving ways that contemporary tap dancers are reformulating the gendered dynamics of the form—a continual struggle, especially for female dancers, and one that Hill uses to link generations of female tap performers:

For the amount of material presented, Hill's book is organized with remarkable economy. Especially effective is her choice to begin and end each chapter by recounting a specific tap “challenge”—a performance, event, or rivalry—that took place during the era described in the body of the chapter. This allows her to attend to the challenge facing any dance historian, which is to counter the ephemerality of performance through vivid and visceral descriptions of what watching and (crucial to tap) listening to the dances actually feels like. This Hill accomplishes with remarkable skill. I was particularly taken with her “Challenge!” section on “Begin the Beguine,” a tap duet from the film, Broadway Melody of 1940, featuring Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell: “As they dance the routine with more swinging and casually interloping steps, there is an exchange of glances, as if surprised to be keeping up with each other, yet pleased with their own performance” (131). Later in the book she describes a scene from the 1989 film Tap, in which the Hoofers, made up of old-school members of the jazz tap dancing vanguard, challenge Gregory Hines to a tap-off. Among the Hoofers is Harold Nichols, and of his solo turn, Hill writes: “The flamboyant Nichols moves delicious rhythms from his chattering feet up into his body […] the sixty-seven-year-old takes a flying leap over the backs of the men and lands in a down-and-up-split, with a no-hands assist. Pulling himself up into perfect form, the circle of men triumphantly shout ‘Olé!’” (246). In these sections, Hill's prose brings to life the visceral thrill that a well-executed virtuosic tap routine or improvisation can impart. Her work here will inspire readers—tap enthusiasts, dance historians, as well as nonspecialist scholars and students—to delve deeper into the complicated history of this eminently American dance form.