What the Eye Hears

"The first authoritative history of tap dancing, one of the great art forms--along with jazz and musical comedy--created in America. Most dance arises from an interaction between music and movement. Tap is both dancing to music and dancing as music. We don't just watch it; we hear its rhythms and feel them in our muscles and bones. Like jazz, tap was born in the United States. It's a hybrid of traditional African dances brought over by slaves and jig, clog, and other folk-dance forms from the British Isles. Brian Seibert's magisterial history illuminates tap's complex origins and its theatricalization in blackface minstrelsy. He charts tap's growth in the vaudeville circuits and nightclubs of the early twentieth century, chronicles its spread to ubiquity on Broadway and in Hollywood, analyzes its post-World War II decline, and celebrates its reinvention by new generations of American and international performers. It is a story with a huge cast of characters, from Master Juba (whose performance Charles Dickens described) through Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, to Gregory Hines and Savion Glover.

Prize history

• National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

  2015 · awarded 2016

  Finalist