Black Canadian Tap Dancer Joey Hollingsworth: Sounds of Memory

Joey Hollingsworth (b. 1936) is a tap dancer, creative force and one of the first Black performers on CBC television.

Joey danced in the era of medicine shows, big bands and civil rights. He was backed by the Samuel Hershenhorn Orchestra on CBC (1954), directed by Norman Jewison – CBC Special Christmas with the Stars (1956); and acted with black opera singer Portia White – Playdate: In the Good Time (1961), appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show (1962), and was the dancing salesman on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He collaborated with major talents like jazz guitarist Lenny Breau and Metis singer Ray St. Germain. But like many Black Canadians the details his life and contributions were largely neglected in dominant sites of culture and collective memory.

After recording the first of many oral histories with Joey Hollingworth in February 2022 – now a person who is blind, in his late 80s, in a nursing home, sitting across the table tapping rhythm patterns with his fingers adorned with large gold rings, I felt an urgency to preserve his story. He spoke with humor and details as smooth and precise as his tap.

Joey grew up in London, Ontario in the 1930s in a three-room apartment:

We shared the bathroom with the people downstairs. They had eight people living downstairs… they were Irish … there was just one toilet … we were poor. But I grew up [not realizing] … because my dad had a car, and he had white walls … he kept it spotless … I always wanted a car without a running board [laughs] … my mother wanted a tap dancer – and lessons, at that time, were 25 cents … I started when I was three and a half. When I was ten, Bill Bojangles Robinson came … he called me from onstage to come backstage … He didn’t dance with taps on his shoes, he danced with wooden soul shoes. It was wood on wood.

Joey lived in Black London which was often distinct from the White London. He acquired Black style tap on his own, but he learned school tap at Holloway School of Dance (London). He was the only Black child amongst ninety white girls.

I was the star of the shows … they wouldn’t allow me to tap dance with … any white girls. And so, I was always by myself … My father made me an Uncle Sam outfit … And, I had a line of girls behind me. They had brown outfits on with little guns … I was always out in front … they weren’t going to allow black and white to dance together … my mother got Vi Douglas [her Black friend] to get her daughter … and she became my partner.

Isolated from other dancers, Joey learned Afro-diasporic rhythm and soul from his grandpa Huskey Henderson, railway porters, jazz drummers, and Black tappers. Born in 1866, his grandfather lived in Ingersoll, Ontario, and sang him songs with rhythm and soul:

My grandpa used to sing, [Joey sings] ‘Well, I don’t mind playin’ anytime y’all can make me drunk. But Mr. Pinetop is sober now. Now I’ve been playin’ the Blues around here the whole night long, and you ain’t brought me the first drink somehow. Now if the house catch on fire, and there ain’t no one around, mammie, throw out the jug and let the shack burn on down.’

Joey embodies the Black Atlantic. Tap is a form of intangible heritage with rhythms passed through the dispersal of enslaved Africans. In conversation, Joey said, the “dancer always puts down rhythms … Gregory Hines [master tap dancer] puts down the rhythms … Teddy Hale [master tap dancer] made innovations that no drummer can do.” Tap transmits Afro-diasporic knowledge.

Through Joey’s perspective we glimpse London’s Beth Emmauel Church, a Black Church built in the 1860s, now vacant. He discusses Black Opera singer Garnet Brooks grandmother playing a ‘rockin’ gospel piano:

It’s got to be rooted in black history and black feelings. Gospel is, you know? And blues and rhythm is and that’s where we get our roots from … we get our roots from the rhythms of tap dancing – I mean from the drumming of Africa … we get the rhythms, they’re all intertwined.

Joey’s memories speak of a Black presence in London that has fallen into an archival silence at the verge of erasure. At the London Arena, Joey saw the Nat King Cole Show with legendary tappers like Peg Leg Bates, who lost his leg in cotton gin, and Teddy Hale. 

Now stories of the London Arena focus on sport but Joey tells a different story. Similarly, his parents took him into a local swanky night club, the Brass Rail.

My mum and dad used to work at the Brass Rail, they were washroom attendants … I used to sit a lot with the waitresses, and they used to give me grenadine drinks … I saw Roy Ranker and the Three Peppers … some of the drummers tap danced at one point in their life, and they would show me little steps, yeah.

Joey was immersed in a Black experience. He speaks of performers not typically recalled in the cultural memory of Londoners like dual trumpeter Frank Motely with black transgender performer Jackie Shane and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. 

Joey would become an international tap dancer, sent to places like Japan and Peru to by government to represent Canada.

From a line of freedom seekers, he danced in civil rights performances sharing the bill with the likes of Oscar Peterson, Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory. I asked Joey why he did the civil rights shows. He recalls a Black woman he met in London from Selma Alabama:

Mary Lamar was her name … She said, ‘I’ll die before I give up my voting rights’ … she was the same age as my mother, I couldn’t imagine my mother getting beat up because she wanted to vote … I know my father he’d be dead because he’d fight so hard … They’d kill him. And then it really struck home, the awful thing of slavery …

Joey shares his words with us, so we don’t forget. He’s given us sound and feeling of multi-generations of Black people in Canada that unsettles established memory. He is beginning to get the recognition that his legacy deserves.

Zahra McDoom is a public historian and the TD Curator of Collections at Museum London.