Thank you, thank you, thank you Threepenny Review and Arts and Letters Daily.

The Red Reporter with a "Utility Belt"?

Yeah, more like a dance belt and a tube of chapstick:

At the beginning, both the name and the maneuver it labeled were a kind of gimmick, something to set him apart from the hundreds of tap dancers still flooding show business. In another way, Slyde was already unlike most of the other black hoofers of his generation and older. Their motto was "Never took a lesson in my life"; he learned his craft in a dancing school.

It wasn't just any dancing school. Located across the street from the New England Conservatory of Music, where young Jimmy took violin lessons, Stanley Brown's school was a hub of the black entertainment world. The greatest dancers of the age—Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, John Bubbles, and others—came by to visit, observe, teach a little, inspire. The students were required to practice tap fundamentals and take ballet, and the recitals were like professional shows, with agents in the audience.

One of the regular instructors, "Schoolboy" Eddie Ford, was a specialist in slydes, and he put together an act for Slyde and another student, Jimmy "Sir Slyde" Mitchell. As the Slyde Brothers, the two teenagers did flips and splits in the manner of the Nicholas Brothers, but slydes were their trademark.

via i15.photobucket.com

Wife? Children? A life beyond his mother's basement and Gregory Hines' jealous gaze?

Piffle:

Offstage, he was a private man, close to his parents until their deaths, ever the gentleman but a little slippery, reclusive, difficult to know. (The missing fingers on his right hand added to the mystery.)

He was fond of word play and tended to speak metaphorically, often in little tap koans that could sound like platitudes but would work in the minds of his pupils like slow-release pills, gradually gaining resonance, or time bombs, long opaque then making sense in a flash.

Lessons about the dance resonated as lessons about life: "You've got to fall," he'd say, "and you've got to learn how to get up, gracefully. Like you never fell. Everybody slydes sometime."

The shockingly truthful shocking video of truth!

via www.traditionintap.org