Tap Dancing

choi

Tap dancing | It’s Got That Swing; An engaging history of one of America’s great creative inventions. Economist, Nov 21, 2015
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... tions-its-got-swing
(book review on Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hear; A History of tap dancing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

Note:
(a) "Closely associated with jazz music * * * According to one dancer, tap was 'one of [America’s] two really indigenous forms,' with jazz the other. As late as the 1950s that statement certainly held true.  This complex history needs unpicking. * * * A history of tap dancing is thus what EP Thompson, a Marxist historian, called a 'history from below' at its most extreme."
(i) unpick (vt): "to undo (as sewing) by taking out stitches"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unpick
(ii) EP Thompson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson
(Edward Palmer Thompson; 1924 – 1993; British)

(b) "Tap also drew inspiration from slavery. Africans, transported across the Atlantic alongside Irish people who had been press-ganged into naval service, swapped moves and rhythms on deck. * * * James Smith, a slave in the 1860s. One of Smith’s companions could 'make his feet go like trip hammers and sound like [a] snaredrum.' " (brackets original)
(i) impressment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment
(colloquially "press gang")
(ii) trip hammer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip_hammer

宋应星  天工开物
(iii) snare drum
(A) snare (n): " 'string across a drum,' 1680s, probably from Dutch snaar 'string,' from same source as snare (n.1 ['noose for catching animals']). From 1938 as short for snare-drum (1873)"
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=snare
(B) snare drum. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated.
http://www.britannica.com/art/snare-drum
the beating of the upper head 鼓面 transmits vibrations via air to the lower head -- the latter has snares/ strings across the surface)
(C) Grover Pro G3™ Standard Snare Drum
https://drummersworld.com/store/ ... tandard-snare-drum/
(photo of the drum displaying the bottom head)
(D) 小鼓
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/小鼓
(具有响弦 snare 横置在鼓面)

choi

(c) “As tap dancing became more popular, it held an ambiguous relationship with American racial politics. On the one hand, tap dancing (and an associated act, minstrelsy) could reinforce the subjugation of black people, especially when whites used burned cork to darken their faces and then impersonated them. Discrimination ensured that white performers (like Astaire, Kelly and Rogers) took the lion’s share of the fame, even though, in the words of Miles Davis, a jazz musician, ‘they weren’t nothing compared to how [black] guys could dance.’  On the other hand”  (brackets original)
(i) minstrelsy (n) : "the singing and playing of a minstrel”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minstrelsy
(ii) minstrel (n):
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minstrel
(iii) Miles Davis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Davis
(1926 – 1991; an American jazz musician)

(d) “Such interpretations are helped along by Mr Seibert’s excellent writing. He liberally employs the lingo of whatever period is under discussion. He describes one actor in the post-Depression era as specialising in playing ‘hayseeds’ (a derogatory word for a yokel)”

yokel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokel
(e) “Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, perhaps the greatest ‘hoofer’ ever, died in 1949”
(i) hoofer (n): “dancer”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hoofer
(ii) hoof (v): " 'having hoofs (of a specified kind),' c. 1500 in compounds, from hoof (n). Meaning 'to walk' (as in hoof it) is from 1640s; slang meaning 'to dance' is 1920, American English (implied in hoofer)"
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Hoofer

(f) Bojangles “Robinson, who danced with a bullet from a cop’s gun lodged in his arm”

I fail to find anything about it.