AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN
There is no doubt Master Juba was a real person; but - like John Henry - it’s possible his legend has transcended anything William Henry Lane could have accomplished in his short twenty-seven year life. Lane was born a free person in Providence RI during the mid-1820s. At the time, the “free-colored” population of the two dozen US states and their territories was about 320,000 (there were 2 million black slaves), with about 45% living in the 12 Northern free states.
We next hear of Lane as an adolescent saloon-dancer in the Five-Points slum of New York, using the name “Juba”. During 1841, he was hired by PT Barnum to replace popular white dancer John Diamond in a blackface act. Over the next few years, the two dancers met for at least a half-dozen “championships” - one was witnessed by writer Charles Dickens (nickname "Boz"), who immortalized Juba in his book American Notes:
“Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-out: snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man's fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs — all sorts of legs and no legs — what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink..."
In 1845, Lane began touring American cities as the top-billed act in minstrel stage-shows. In 1848, a black American dancer identified as “Boz’ Juba” toured Great Britain with a white minstrel troupe for a year and a half. His was the most-acclaimed act of the London theater season. He returned to the US in 1850, was reported in New York in August. November saw him back in England; a report of his death in Dublin in late 1851 was followed a half-year later by another of Juba dying in London. Finally, in February 1854, his demise from cholera was registered in Liverpool.
His dancing efforts left their legacy. A hundred years after his death “Juba dance” was still a popular variety act in the British Isles, France, and the Low Countries. In America, it was ancestor to the hambone, cakewalk, and a major influence on tap-dance.
Lane's own pioneering work in American dance, though, was ignored. Only after WW2 was his significance as the “link between the white world and authentic black source material”(Eileen Southern) acknowledged.
#anamericanmusician
Dramatization of Juba dancing in a competition:
https://youtu.be/hpNdQDWgy7I?si=n2UX8dJpaW22_REQ