Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - Billy Pierce

Only a few more days are left in February!  Today's figure from the Harlem Renaissance is Billy Pierce. I couldn't find an actual picture of him so I had to settle for the cover of the sheet music above.

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From Wikipedia:

Billy Pierce (14 June 1890 – 11 April 1933) was an African American choreographer, dancer and dance studio owner who has been credited with the invention of the Black Bottom dance that became a national craze in the mid-1920s.

The Billy Pierce Dance Studio flourished and became one of the incubators for the cultural flowering know to posterity as the Harlem Renaissance. By 1929, Pierce's studio—the "largest of its kind" according to the Afro American newspaper—occupied five rooms in the bottom two floors of the building, for which Pierce paid annually $6,000 in rent (equivalent to approximately $82,407 in 2015 dollars

Pierce ran the studio and coached Broadway stars, but did not serve as an instructor for the 27 classes that were given to students in 1929. The Pierce Dance Studio was the professional home of his fellow African American choreographer Buddy Bradley, who devised dance routines for the eccentric dancer Tom Pericola, a white man. Pericola performed the Black Bottom with the Ann Pennington in the musical-comedy revue George White's Scandals of 1926 on Broadway, whereupon it became popular eventually supplanting Charleston on dance floors across America.

Along with the Black Bottom and the Charleston, among the specialities of the Billy Pierce Dance Studio were the Black Bottom with Taps, the Eccentric Buck and the Syncopated Buck, the Devil Dance, the Dirty Dig, the Flapper Stomp, the Harlem Hips, the Jungle Stomp, the Stair Dance, and the Zulu Stomp.

In the United States, African American choreographers like Pierce and Bradley generally worked uncredited. They also coached and developed routines for white performers, such as Bradley had coached Pericola. Before he became an Oscar-winning character actor, Clifton Webb was a song and dance man on Broadway, appearing in many musicals. He honed his dancing skills at Pierce's studio. Pierce developed the "Moaning Low" dance routine for "Cliff" Webb, as he was then known, and Libby Holman for The Little Show in 1931.

Along with Benny Rubin, Pierce did the choreography for the 1927 musical Half a Widow, one of the few Broadway shows for which he received credit. He also created "The Sugar Foot Strut" dance for the smash hit musical Rio Rita (1927) and developed a show-stopping routine for[Norma Terris, who played Magnolia in the original 1927 production of Show Boat and its 1932 revival. He also got credit for choreographing the dances in the 1932 musical revue Walk a Little Faster.

In 1930, he spent eleven months in Europe, working with directors such as Max Rheinhardt.

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Since Billy Pierce was mainly behind the scenes and only known to people truly into the dance of the era, I had not heard of him before. I hadn't heard of the Black Bottom dance either.  I wish there was pictures or film of Billy Pierce himself.