"A white starlet named Irene Delroy got a hot tip from her maid, who was Black. The place to get new steps, Delroy learned, was a studio near Times Square, and the man to see was a dancer named Buddy Bradley. For a modest fee, Bradley created a new routine for Delroy, tailored to her abilities, incorporating the still trendy Charleston and other saucier moves popular in Black dance halls and night clubs in the mid-nineteen-twenties."
"When she debuted it, in the musical revue “The Greenwich Village Follies,” she stopped the show, and the next day six other women in the production arrived at Bradley's door. To meet the ensuing demand, the studio where Bradley worked expanded from a small room to two floors of the building. He gave private lessons all day long, two at a time, shuttling between rooms. Soon, he later said, he was pulling down a thousand dollars a week (around twenty thousand dollars in today's money)."
"Bradley's roster of clients was the A-list-and the B-list, too-of the era's stars of musical theatre and revues. They came to learn the Mooch and the Sugar Foot Strut, how to drum the floor and roll their hips in the rhythm of the era: jazz. Broadway producers also caught on to Bradley's abilities, and hired him to fix dud numbers and even whole shows. In an interview decades later, he would claim that practically every show on Broadway in the late twenties featured some of his work."
"But the printed programs told another story, omitting his name and crediting some other choreographer, who was always white. That changed in 1930, when Charles B. Cochran, London's leading impresario, hired Bradley as the dance director for the Rodgers and Hart musical “Ever Green.” Cochran gave Brad"
A white musical star in 1920s New York learned new dance steps from a Black maid who directed her to Buddy Bradley near Times Square. Bradley tailored routines for her, including the Charleston and other popular moves from Black dance halls and nightclubs. After her debut stopped the show, other women sought lessons, expanding his studio and enabling him to earn substantial weekly income. Bradley taught many musical theatre performers, created or improved numbers and entire shows, and claimed his work appeared widely on Broadway. Printed programs frequently omitted his name and credited white choreographers. In 1930, Charles B. Cochran hired Bradley as dance director for the Rodgers and Hart musical “Ever Green.”
Read at The New Yorker
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