The Archive · Legacy
Gregory Hines
The Man Who Saved Tap Dance
1946 – 2003
Dance Mogul Magazine · Legacy Series
Introduction
By the mid-1970s, tap dance was dying. The vaudeville circuit that had sustained it was long gone. The great tappers of the mid-century — Robinson, Bubbles, the Nicholas Brothers, Davis — were retired, aging, or dead. The form had no institutional support, no media visibility, and no obvious successor. Then Gregory Hines showed up.
Hines, born in New York in 1946, almost single-handedly revived tap dance in the American popular imagination. Through Broadway shows, Hollywood films, television appearances, and his own relentless advocacy, he brought the form back from the edge of cultural extinction and passed it to a new generation. Without Hines, the tap tradition that runs from Master Juba to Savion Glover might not have survived the twentieth century.
Historical Context
Hines began performing at age two with his older brother Maurice as the Hines Kids, later becoming Hines, Hines and Dad when their father Henry joined the act. He was trained in the old school tradition — learning directly from the surviving masters of the vaudeville era. He studied with Henry LeTang, the legendary tap choreographer, and absorbed the styles of Robinson, Bubbles, and the Nicholas Brothers through direct mentorship and observation.
In the early 1970s, disillusioned with show business, Hines left performing and moved to Venice, California, where he played guitar in a rock band. His return to dance came in 1978 when he was cast in the Broadway musical Eubie!, a tribute to the Black composer Eubie Blake. The show reignited Hines’s passion for tap and launched his second career. He followed with Comin’ Uptown (1979), Sophisticated Ladies (1981), and ultimately Jelly’s Last Jam (1992), for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.
In film, Hines appeared in over forty productions, including The Cotton Club (1984), White Nights (1985) — in which he danced alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov — and Tap (1989), a film specifically designed to showcase tap dancing and to introduce audiences to the surviving old masters. Hines used his film career not just for personal success but as a platform to restore visibility to the entire tap tradition.
Hines used his career not just for personal success but as a platform to restore visibility to the entire tap tradition. He didn’t just revive the form. He reconnected it to its history.
Cultural Impact Across Generations
Hines’s most significant contribution may have been his role as a bridge between the old masters and the new generation. He was personally close to the Nicholas Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr., Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde, and other surviving tappers of the mid-century era. He brought these artists back into public view, featuring them in his shows, advocating for their recognition, and ensuring that the new generation of dancers knew who had come before them.
His most important protege was Savion Glover. Hines recognized Glover’s talent when Glover was still a child, cast him in the film Tap and the Broadway show Jelly’s Last Jam, and explicitly passed the torch to him as the future of the form. Glover went on to choreograph Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk (1996), the show that redefined tap for the twenty-first century. That show does not exist without Hines’s mentorship.
Stylistically, Hines modernized tap by incorporating elements of jazz improvisation, R&B rhythms, and an informal, conversational performance style that made the form feel contemporary rather than nostalgic. He danced in sneakers, jeans, and untucked shirts. He improvised openly, treated the audience as collaborators, and brought an energy to the form that connected with younger audiences who might have dismissed tap as old-fashioned.
Key Legacy
Gregory Hines revived tap dance in the American popular imagination through Broadway, film, and advocacy. He reconnected the form to its living masters, mentored Savion Glover as his successor, and modernized tap’s aesthetic to ensure its survival into the twenty-first century. Without Hines, the direct lineage from Master Juba to the present might have been broken.
Value to Society
Hines died of cancer in 2003 at the age of fifty-seven. His death was mourned throughout the dance world and beyond. In his relatively short life, he had revived an entire art form, connected three generations of practitioners, and established tap as a living tradition rather than a historical curiosity.
His legacy speaks to the fragility of oral traditions. Tap dance nearly disappeared because the infrastructure that sustained it — vaudeville, the TOBA circuit, the nightclub circuit — collapsed, and no institutional replacement was built. Hines rebuilt that infrastructure through sheer personal effort. He showed that a single committed artist, with enough talent and enough determination, can rescue a tradition from extinction. That is an extraordinary achievement, and it should be taught as such.
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