Tap got its start in the 1600s and 1700s on Caribbean sugar plantations, where African slaves and Irish indentured servants worked together. The groups exchanged parts of their cultures, including their dance traditions.

African flat-footed stepping, called gioube, was combined with Irish step dancing and migrated to the United States in the 1800s, forming the American jig and juba. These dances became known as jigging, which continued into the early 1900s.

These elementary forms of tap dance used body movements to create sound, mainly through percussive footwork.

“This idea about tap dance ... doesn’t really come into fruition until the ‘20s or ‘30s, when metal plates come on the shoes,” said Constance Valis Hill, a dance professor of dance at Hampshire College in Amherst. “But there was this long tradition of percussive stepping that comes way before the metal plates go on.”

The jazz age, and with it, jazz tap dancing, was popularized in the U.S. in 1921 in New York City with “Shuffle Along,” an all-black jazz tap musical starring Josephine Baker, Fredi Washington, Charlie Davis and Florence Mills.

“That was the first time ... tap dancing on the concert stage really became popular,” Hill said. “Tap had this long heyday of popularity on the American stage in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s.”

The live-performance tap-dance boom continued in the 1930s, particularly in New York City’s Harlem. In Hollywood, musical films were all the rage, and provided another opportunity for tappers.

But, Hill says, tap dancing was inherently linked to racist black stereotypes and minstrel entertainment, so it did not gain the prestige of other dance forms, like ballet.

In the 1950s, tap began to lose its popularity. A cabaret tax that went into effect in 1944 didn’t help: It imposed a 30 percent excise tax on venues that allowed dancing. That, coupled with a waning popularity of musical films in Hollywood, contributed to the near-demise of tap performance.

Only TV shows continued to offer a venue for tap acts, and it looked like the industry might sink into oblivion. Until two decades later, that is, when an unlikely group of dancers came to the rescue during what Hill calls “a tap-dance renaissance.”

“In the 1970s, believe it or not, white female modern dancers begin to hook up with these old black masters,” Hill said. “We really have this resurrection of tap dance on the American stage.”

Since then, tap has risen in the ranks of performance art. For example, in 2014, the duo Sean & Luke made it to the quarterfinals of NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” combining tap dance with hip-hop and pop music. And this year, in a showstopping scene in Universal Pictures’ “Hail, Caesar!,” Channing Tatum channeled his inner tapper in a throwback to 1950s Hollywood.

Though these new performances aren’t always traditional, Hill says they are breathing new life into the field.

“There is always going to be the purist,” she said, “but … for me it’s all good.”

— JENNA CARERI

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