Legacy and historiography

Juba likely influenced the development of modern dance forms, such as step dancing.

The terms juba dancer and juba dancing became common in variety theaters after Master Juba popularized them. Actors, minstrels, and British clowns inspired by Juba and other minstrels adopted blackface and performed dances similar to Juba's as a stage character called the "Gay Negro Boy". The character spread to France (from 1860) and Belgium (from 1865) when British circuses toured there. Elements of these dances were still found among British whiteface clowns as late as the 1940s.[49][79] Juba's rave reception in Manchester may have presaged that city's later status as the center of dance in the United Kingdom.[80] Less happily, Juba reinforced the racist caricature of the naturally musical black among white audiences.[81]

While the name Juba passed into dance history, for many decades the man himself did not. For over 90 years after his death, Juba was largely forgotten by dancers and historians, appearing only in brief, racist passages in sources such as histories of minstrelsy.[82] Stephen Johnson has postulated that this indicates that either white entertainers and historians consciously downplayed Juba's significance, or that Juba was simply not that influential.[3] Even black historians ignored Juba until the mid-20th century, preferring to focus on Juba's older and more obviously respectable contemporary Ira Aldridge, an African American actor who became a leading light of the European stage.[7][83]

In 1947, dance and popular culture historian Marian Hannah Winter began the resurrection of Juba's reputation with her article "Juba and American Minstrelsy". Juba, according to Winter, surmounted the hurdles of race and class to succeed as a professional dancer. Winter was the first to write of Juba as a man who introduced elements of African dance to the Western lexicon and thus fostered the creation of a distinct American dance idiom. In so doing, Juba, according to Winter, reclaimed for African Americans elements that had been stolen in the racist culture of 19th-century America and, in the process, invented tap dancing.[47] In short, Winter "made [Juba] significant".[3]

When Winter wrote her article, there was little scholarship in African American studies, dance history, or minstrelsy studies. Winter based her article on, at most, six sources. Nonetheless, later writers have largely accepted and echoed her thesis.[3] As recently as 1997, musicologist Dale Cockrell wrote that "[t]he best treatment of Juba, though it is shot through with errors, is still Winter 1948".[35] Winter's view that Juba was the "most influential single performer of nineteenth-century American dance"[83] is now the consensus. His career shows that black and white people actually did collaborate to an extent in blackface minstrelsy.[31]

Scholars in recent decades have repeatedly pointed to Juba as the progenitor of tap dancing and, by extension, step dancing.[70][84] Winter wrote that "[t]he repertoire of any current tap-dancer contains elements which were established theatrically by him".[83] Dancer Mark Knowles has echoed this assertion, calling Juba "America's first real tap dancer".[85] Music historian Eileen Southern calls him the "principal black professional minstrel of the antebellum period (and) a link between the white world and authentic black source material".[86] Scholars point to Juba as the first African American to insert aspects of authentic black culture into American dance and theater.[87] In so doing, Juba ensured that blackface dance was more authentically African than the other elements of the minstrel show.[79] Wallace has gone so far as to call Juba "the pater alios of black masculine dance history, and the 'initiator and determinant of the form itself,' a form which lends visible expression to the difficult dialectics of black masculinity".[57] Johnson, however, has cautioned against this interpretation. His reading of the primary sources sees more evidence of eccentricity in Juba's dance than of a proto-tap or -jazz.[3]