Coles, Charles (“Honi”)

(b. 2 April 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d.11 November 1992 in New York City), only tap dancer to be honored with both Tony and Drama Desk Awards.

Coles was one of three children born to George and Isabel Coles. His father was a jack-of-all-trades who owned a pool hall and a barbershop at various times. His mother was a domestic servant. His older sister gave Coles the nickname “Honey Boy” when he was a child and it stuck. He was teased about it and later changed the spelling to “Honi.” He grew up when fast dancing was a ticket to fame and fortune for young blacks, and he learned to tap-dance on the streets of Philadelphia, first watching and then joining in the time step “cutting” contests, in which one youth competed to beat another’stime for doing a particular set of steps. By his late teens, Coles had determined to make a career in show business, practicing alone for a year to enhance his speed, his number of taps per beat, and his complicated patterns. Although he was taller and lankier than the average tap dancer, he made his physical characteristics work for him. His fellow tapper Pete Nugent said that he did “centipede steps,” in which his legs and feet seemed to pull in opposite directions.

In 1931 at the age of twenty, Coles joined two brothers, Danny and George Miller, to form the Three Millers and traveled with them to New York City. They appeared at Schiffman’s Lafayette Theater in Harlem, performing on narrow planks five feet above the stage. The group was unable to get further bookings, and Coles returned to Philadelphia while the Miller brothers continued as a duo. Coles returned to New York the following year and worked with a variety of acts, including a comedy routine with Bert Howell at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. At the Hoofer’s Club, Coles further developed his own unique style. He considered John Bubbles his mentor, not Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. From 1936 to 1939, Coles was a member of the Lucky Seven Trio, who performed on large cubes painted to look like dice. The group changed their name to the Three Giants of Rhythm while Coles was a member. The group went through ten costume changes in the course of its act and was much in demand to appear on variety bills with big bands. As Coles once explained to a reporter for the New York Amsterdam News, the tap dancer “was the best dressed, the most conditioned, the most conscientious performer on any bill, and in spite of being the least paid, he was the act to ’stop the show.’”

In 1940 Coles finally landed a steady gig as a solo dancer with Cab Calloway’s big band, which played Harlem’s famed Cotton Club frequently. There Coles met Charles “Cholly” Atkins, who was a member of the Cotton Club Boys. A native of Buffalo, New York, Atkins was an expert wing dancer (a dancer who specializes in a step described as a hop with one foot flung out to the side) who had already appeared in eleven major films. As was the custom of the day, however, his dancing spots in those films were easily excised by vigilant southern censors charged with sparing southern white audiences from film portrayals of blacks as other than servants.

Both Coles and Atkins served in the military during World War II. Coles served in the U.S. Air Force Special Services in China, Burma, and India, achieving the rank of sergeant before being discharged in 1946. On being discharged, Coles and Atkins returned to New York and decided to form a dance team. Frank Schiffman, owner of the Apollo Theatre, gave them their first booking. This was where Coles had met Marion Evelyn Edwards, a dancer in the Apollo’s Number One chorus. They had met in 1936, when she was just beginning her career as a ballroom dancer. They were married in 1944, settled in East Elmhurst in the borough of Queens in New York City and had a son and a daughter. Their son died of spinal meningitis at the age of two. Coles already had a son by a previous relationship with a woman named Celeste.

Coles and Atkins developed a highly successful seven-minute act that began with a fast number, continued with a precision “swing dance,” and then moved on to a soft-shoe number for which they became famous. The act ended with a challenge dance featuring each man performing his own specialty. They appeared with nearly all the major big bands between 1945 and 1949 and made a triumphant tour of England in 1948. In 1949 they joined the cast of the Broadway show Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, regularly stopping the show with the Jule Styne number “Mamie is Mimi.” By the time the show closed after two years, tap dancing had fallen from favor, and jobs for tap dancers were scarce. Coles and Atkins, who were known as the last “class act,” traditionally reopened the Apollo Theater at the beginning of every fall season with the vocalist Billy Eckstine throughout the 1950s. In the meantime, Coles partnered with his fellow tap dancer Pete Nugent to open the Dance-craft studio on West Fifty-second Street in New York, which they operated from 1954 to 1955.

The team of Coles and Atkins finally broke up in 1960. While Atkins went on to choreograph for the record producer Berry Gordy’s young singing acts at Motown Records in Detroit, Coles worked as production manager at the Apollo Theatre. He also served as president of the Negro Actors Guild and was associated with the Copasetics, a tapping fraternity he helped establish in honor of Bill Robinson after his death in 1949. When the tap revival of the 1970s occurred, Coles was at the forefront. He joined the touring company of Broadway’s Bubbling Brown Sugar in 1976 and subsequently performed as a soloist at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Town Hall and with Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet. He was featured in the films The Cotton Club (1984) and Dirty Dancing (1987) as well as in numerous documentaries. In 1983, at the age of seventy-two, Coles won both the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best featured actor and dancer in a musical for the Broadway hit My One and Only. Other accolades followed: the Dance Magazine Award in 1985, the Capezio Award for lifetime achievement in dance in 1988, and the National Medal of Arts in 1991. Coles died from cancer at home in 1992. He is buried in Pinelawn Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.

Coles believed that tap dancing was the only dance form America could claim as its own. Through its time out of fashion and during its renaissance, he kept the form alive with his work with the Copasetics, master classes, and artistic consultancies, adjusting his style as he aged. In an interview in 1983, he explained, “Things happen with me now from the knees down, nice and easy.”

For information on tap dance, Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1994), is an invaluable reference. Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo: 50 Years of Great Entertainment from Harlem’s World-Famous Theatre (1983), gives the flavor of the New York entertainment world for African Americans in Coles’s time. James Haskins, Black Dance in America: A History Through Its People (1990) approaches the subject of black dance through biographies of its most noted practitioners. An obituary is in the New York Times (12 Nov. 1992).

Jim Haskins