Buddy Bradley’s Legacy of Dance

Buddy Bradley with the English actress Patricia Burke, in December, 1942.Photograph by Kurt Hutton / Hulton Archive / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Around a century ago, in New York, a white starlet named Irene Delroy got a hot tip from her maid, who was Black. The place to get new steps, Delroy learned, was a studio near Times Square, and the man to see was a dancer named Buddy Bradley. For a modest fee, Bradley created a new routine for Delroy, tailored to her abilities, incorporating the still trendy Charleston and other saucier moves popular in Black dance halls and night clubs in the mid-nineteen-twenties. When she débuted it, in the musical revue “The Greenwich Village Follies,” she stopped the show, and the next day six other women in the production arrived at Bradley’s door. To meet the ensuing demand, the studio where Bradley worked expanded from a small room to two floors of the building. He gave private lessons all day long, two at a time, shuttling between rooms. Soon, he later said, he was pulling down a thousand dollars a week (around twenty thousand dollars in today’s money). Not bad for a twenty-year-old Black man from segregated Alabama.

Bradley’s roster of clients was the A-list—and the B-list, too—of the era’s stars of musical theatre and revues. They came to learn the Mooch and the Sugar Foot Strut, how to drum the floor and roll their hips in the rhythm of the era: jazz. Broadway producers also caught on to Bradley’s abilities, and hired him to fix dud numbers and even whole shows. In an interview decades later, he would claim that practically every show on Broadway in the late twenties featured some of his work. But the printed programs told another story, omitting his name and crediting some other choreographer, who was always white.

That changed in 1930, when Charles B. Cochran, London’s leading impresario, hired Bradley as the dance director for the Rodgers and Hart musical “Ever Green.” Cochran gave Bradley credit for that London show and many more that followed, putting him together with Noël Coward, the young George Balanchine, and the man who would become the foremost progenitor of ballet in Britain, Frederick Ashton. Over the next decade or so, Bradley, having moved to London, also choreographed a series of British film musicals, many starring Britain’s top song-and-dance actress, Jessie Matthews.