Master Juba
At the height of his American career, Juba's act featured a sequence in which he imitated a series of famous dancers of the day and closed by performing in his own style.
Existing documents offer confused accounts of Juba's dancing style, but certain themes emerge: it was percussive, varied in tempo, lightning-fast at times, expressive, and unlike anything seen before.
[7] Showman Michael B. Leavitt wrote in 1912 that Juba came from Providence, Rhode Island,[8] and theater historian T. Allston Brown gives his real name as William Henry Lane.
[11] In this environment, Juba learned to dance from his peers,[6] including "Uncle" Jim Lowe, a black jig and reel dancer who performed in low-brow establishments.
The letter further accuses Barnum of entering Juba-as-Diamond in rigged dance competitions against other performers: The boy is fifteen or sixteen years of age; his name is "Juba;" and to do him justice, he is a very fair dancer.
[30] According to an undated reference by Leavitt, Juba lost one challenge, at the Boylston Gardens in Boston, but records show that he beat Diamond in all other competitions.
Instantly the fiddler grins, and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the landlady; new confidence in the landlord; new brightness in the very candles.
[27] An undated excerpt from the New York Herald describes Juba's appearance with a minstrel troupe at Pete Williams' dance hall on Orange Street: ... [T]hose who passed through the long hallway and entered the dance hall, after paying their shilling to the darky doorkeeper, whose "box-office" was a plain soap box, or a wooden one of that description, saw this phenomenon, "Juba," imitate all the dancers of the day and their special steps.
James W. Cook writes, "in a sense, the Imitation Dance served as a powerful act of defiance from someone who, more typically, would have lacked any means of broader representational control".
[22][44] He played a character named Ikey Vanjacklen, "the barber's boy"[45] in a piece called "Going for the Cup, or, Old Mrs. Williams's Dance", one of the earliest known minstrel sketches.
The company had performed in England two years prior, when they had made minstrelsy palatable to middle-class British audiences by adopting refinements such as formal wear.
Mr. Dickens, in his 'American Notes,' gives a graphic description of this extraordinary youth, who, we doubt not, before many weeks have elapsed, will have the honor of displaying his dancing attainments in Buckingham Palace.
Out of compliment to Dickens, this extraordinary nigger is called 'Boz's Juba,' in consequence, we believe, of the popular writer having said a good word for him in his American Notes: on this principle we could not mention the Industrious Fleas as being clever without having those talented little animals puffed all over London as being under the overwhelming patronage of the Showman.
Juba's talent consists in walking round the stage with an air of satisfaction and with his toes turned in; in jumping backwards in a less graceful manner than we should have conceived possible; and in shaking his thighs like a man afflicted with palsy.
As a last resource, he falls back on the floor ...The piece goes on to describe a drunken man the critic met after Juba's performance: When again we saw him he was labouring (like a horse—or, rather, an ass) under the influence of champagne.
This "phenomenon" (as the bills describe him) is a copper-coloured votary of Terpsichore,—the Monsieur Perrot of Negro life in the southern states; and possesses the additional attraction of being a "real nigger," and not a "sham," like his vocal associates.
The Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser on November 30, 1850, wrote, "The performances of Boz's Juba have created quite a sensation in the gallery, who greeted his marvellous feats of dancing with thunders of applause and a standing encore.
[63] During January 1854 the English newspaper Northern Daily Times carried adverts for a show at the Royal Colosseum Theatre in Paradise Street, Liverpool, featuring "the celebrated Boz's Juba, immortalised by Charles Dickens in his notes on America".
[66] "Bois Juba" was registered as having died in the fever ward of the Brownlow Hill infirmary in Liverpool, and was buried on 6 February 1854 in the free part of the cemetery of the nearby church of St Martin's.
[50] However, a review from Manchester, England, implies that it was the former: With a most bewitching bonnet and veil, a very pink dress, beflounced to the waist, lace-fringed trousers of the most spotless purity, and red leather boots,—the ensemble completed by the green parasol and white cambric pocket handkerchief,—Master Juba certainly looked the black demoiselle of the first ton to the greatest advantage.
The playing and singing by the serenaders of a version of the well-known negro ditty, furnished the music to Juba's performance, which was after this fashion:-Promenading in a circle to the left for a few bars, till again facing the audience, he then commenced a series of steps, which altogether baffle description, from their number, oddity, and the rapidity with which they were executed ...
"[71] A London audience member who saw Juba at the Vauxhall Gardens wondered, "How could he tie his legs into such knots, and fling them about so recklessly, or make his feet twinkle until you lose sight of them altogether in his energy.
"[72] The Mirror and United Kingdom Magazine declared, "Such mobility of muscles, such flexibility of joints, such boundings, such slidings, such gyrations, such toes and such heelings, such backwardings and forwardings, such posturings, such firmness of foot, such elasticity of tendon, such mutation of movement, such vigour, such variety, such natural grace, such powers of endurance, such potency of pastern.
"[73] The Manchester Examiner captured something of the rhythm of Juba's performance: Surely he cannot be flesh and blood, but some more subtle substance, or how could he turn, and twine, and twist, and twirl, and hop, and jump, and kick, and throw his feet almost with a velocity that makes one think they are playing hide-and seek with a flash of lightning!
[82] Juba was heir to the traditions of free northern black people,[57] and Johnson has pointed to evidence that he was performing "a quite specific, African-infused plantation dance".
[6] Descriptions of his dance hint that Juba performed black steps such as the walk-around, the pigeon wing, a primordial Charleston, the long-bow J, trucking, the turkey trot, the backward spring, the wailing jawbone, and tracking upon the heel.
"[6] Juba was in a white-dominated field playing for largely white audiences; he likely compromised his culture's music and dance in order to survive in show business.
[83] One London observer in the 1840s who witnessed slave dances on a South Carolina plantation called them "poor shufflings compared to the pedal inspirations of Juba".
Dickens's piece on the New York dancer, describing leg movements only, points to the Irish jig, but he also refers to Juba performing the single and double shuffle, which are black-derived steps.
In so doing, Juba, according to Winter, reclaimed for African Americans elements that had been stolen in the racist culture of 19th-century America and, in the process, invented tap dancing.
