Tap Shoes thru the Years

The type of tap dance we would recognize today was introduced in the 1920s when tap shoes were first created. The first tap shoes were built by nailing or screwing small pieces of metal to the toes and heels of dance shoes.

Who invented the first tap shoes?

A unique style was invented by one of tap’s greatest dancers, Clayton (“Peg Leg”) Bates. After losing his leg at age 12, he reinvented tap to fit his own specifications—a peg and a shoe with two taps.

Tap dancing en Pointe dates back to the days of Vaudeville and was considered a novelty act. Without any negative connotation, Toe Tap, as it was called, was classified in the same group as the stair dance, the chair dance, the cane dance, and tap dancing on roller skates. Each one of these kinds of routines added variety to the form of tap dancing. Whether what the new kind of routine added to the craft was considered novelty for novelty’s sake, or truly innovative was left to the opinions of the audiences, critics, and ultimately history.