From the Daily Telegraph:
Leonard Reed, who died on April 5 aged 97, was one of the greatest tap dancers of the 20th century, and the creator, with his partner Willie Bryant, of its most widely popularised form, the Shim Sham Shimmy. Reed’s professional career was short, lasting only from 1922 until 1933. The tremendous success that he achieved in that period, and the reason it came to an end, had a common origin: the tall, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed Reed was in fact of mixed black and white blood. Until he was exposed, he was able to pass for both races and, in the age of segregation, worked both the black theatres that were the laboratories of tap, as well as the more lucrative - but white - vaudeville venues.
Reed started working for the Whitman Sisters, who were acknowledged to have the best black revue, and formed a partnership with the similarly light-skinned Willie Bryant: “Reed & Bryant - Brains as well as Feet”. In about 1930, Reed and Bryant devised a new finale for their eight-minute show, a step of simple heel-and-toe combinations danced to four eight-bar choruses - tunes such as Tuxedo Junction or Ain’t What You Do. Like most forms of tap, it was probably an adaptation of an earlier dance, but at some point Reed, who always retained traces of his flamboyant Charleston style in his taps, added a shimmy of the shoulders, perhaps at the prompting of the Whitman girls. His elegant, spacious tap style remained the dominant influence on such dancers as Maceo Anderson and the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, whom Fred Astaire considered to be the greatest exponents of the form and who, in the 1940s, would immortalise many of Reed’s own moves in the Hollywood films in which they starred.
Leonard Reed was born in a tepee at Lightning Creek, Oklahoma, on January 7 1907. His mother, who died when he was two, was half-Choctaw Cherokee Indian and half-black. . . Soon Reed was good enough to win local Charleston contests and spent the summer of 1922 as the barker for a black “tent show”, or travelling revue. He began to work for the likes of Travis Tucker in his holidays and then, at 18, while in New York visiting his prospective university, Cornell, entered and won a Charleston competition for whites. The victory proved to be his passport to the white theatres as well. After the discovery of his racial origins, Reed turned to production and choreography. In 1934, he staged Rhythm Bound, with 40 singers, at the Harlem Opera House, and from the mid-Thirties worked in-house at the Cotton Club, arranging music and producing shows for Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday and the Nicholases.