Kansas City can claim the ‘prince’ of cakewalking, the viral dance trend of the 1890s | KCUR

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One sunny May afternoon 119 years after Doc Brown’s death, a couple dozen people gathered to celebrate the Kansas City dancer who shot to national fame in the 1890s.

Beneath the trees in the segregated part of historic Union Cemetery, away from the large monuments marking the graves of Kansas City’s founding families, a ragtime duo played tunes on the grassy hillside.

Until recently, Brown was buried in an unmarked grave. Now, thanks to donations from fans, a new monument has been unveiled.

“ He was a star here in Kansas City,” Galen Wilkes, a ragtime enthusiast from Los Angeles, read from his notes. “But he was also known throughout Missouri, the Midwest and even to the East Coast.”

William Henry Joseph Cutter Brown, better known as the famous cakewalker Doc Brown, was born into slavery in Arrow Rock, Missouri. After emancipation, he moved to Kansas City and gained wide renown as a performer.

He took his cakewalk to Washington, and won the world championship at Madison Square Garden in 1893. During his lifetime, he was a celebrated dancer and inspired at least one famous song.

“He did probably hundreds of cakewalks over the years, winning many of them,” Wilkes said.

‘He looked kind of like a minstrel’

Brown has also inspired award-winning poet, activist and Kansas City educator Glenn North, becoming an important part of his work and life.

“He’s been following me around for quite a long time now,” North said with a laugh.

North is director of inclusive learning and creative impact at the Kansas City Museum, where a large picture of Brown, painted by Millard C. Haywood in 1896, hangs on a wall.

“It’s a Black man dressed in a tuxedo, but he’s kind of bent over and he’s got his top hat tipped,” North said. “And he’s got this really kind of friendly smile.”

When he first saw it 12 years ago, North wasn’t sure what to think about the painting, or Brown.

“I immediately thought he looked kind of like a minstrel,” North said.

At the time, Kansas City Museum did not have a lot of artifacts on the Black experience in their collection, so North decided to look a little deeper.

He found out Brown was born into slavery around 1835, and owned by Meredith Miles Marmaduke, the eighth governor of Missouri. Brown grew up on the Marmaduke plantation near Arrow Rock, in the “Little Dixie” region along the Missouri River, settled by Southerners before the Civil War.

“He was enslaved there for 30 years,” North said. “But during that time, he had become known as a very proficient cakewalker.”

A subversive dance gone viral

The cakewalk was one of the first dance crazes in the U.S. It started toward the end of slavery, and became wildly popular after the Civil War. Across the country, massive cakewalk contests were important events that were covered by newspapers of the era.

But the cakewalk was also a subversive performance with roots in Black resistance.

Black people on Southern plantations, which included Missouri, a slave state, were exposed to formal European dances like waltzes by watching white people. In turn, they’d imitate and parody the dances they saw, mimicking the way a slave owner might promenade at a formal ball.

A 30-second film of the dance from 1903 in the Library of Congress shows a handful of Black men and women dressed in their Sunday best — fancy jackets with tail coats, top hats, and frilly dresses with puffed sleeves — prancing around, twirling their canes and doing high kicks.

White people became fascinated with the imitations, which got their name because the couple judged best dancers were awarded a prize cake.

“When I realized that even the cakewalk itself was kind of this subversive kind of dance, in a way, for people who are enslaved to kind of poke fun at the slave owners,” North said, “I was able then to view Doc Brown differently.”

“My inclination was then to celebrate him, rather than to feel shame about him and who he was,” he said.

North marveled that a man from a small town in Missouri, who was born on a plantation, would eventually achieve national celebrity.

“Black folks have always been able to take whatever it is that we’ve been given, and to make something new,” North said.

“We still are singing songs and reading poetry and studying art that came out of that era because that was one of the few things that we had agency in,” he said. “And I think that definitely Doc Brown is an example of that.”

A winning personality

Brown moved to Kansas City from Arrow Rock after emancipation in 1865, when the town was booming.

By 1869, Kansas City opened the first permanent rail bridge across the Missouri River, which quadrupled its population over the next 50 years. And the Kansas City Stockyards were the country’s second-largest meat packing industry.

People were hungry for entertainment.

“Doc Brown came to Kansas City, and won this huge cakewalking contest and went on to national celebrity,” North said. “It just really speaks to how charismatic he must have been.”

The Colored American, the first illustrated African American newspaper published in Washington, featured a large photograph of Brown when he performed at Convention Hall in November 1900 — “one of the most amusing features of the evening,” they wrote.

Among the many medals Brown wore on his frock coat, the 1893 World’s Championship medal awarded at Madison Square Garden was the most cherished.

In 1899, Brown inspired the ragtime tune “Doc Brown’s Cake Walk,” written by Kansas City composer Charles L. Johnson. It was one of Johnson’s first big hits, and fans could buy the sheet music for 15 cents.

As a performer, Brown had many nicknames: Professor Doc Brown of the Sugar Heel, Champion of the Sponge-Cake Amble, Prince of the Mincing Step, King of the Order of Mixed Gaits, Cakewalk Champion of Missouri and the World.

“I am the originator of the cakewalk in all of the United States and Missouri,” he once boasted.

More often, though, he was just “Doc,” a title bestowed by friends.

As a headliner, Brown was often quoted by the press.

But North said, when he reads the articles today, they sound condescending. Reporters would often quote Brown in dialect, North said, though his personality still shines through.

“While he might not have spoken the King’s English, when you read those quotes, you can still kind of capture some of his swag and some of his panache,” North said.

North’s research inspired him to write a play, North’s first, about Brown’s life. He even got an artist’s residency to write it in Brown’s birthplace.

The original play debuted in May to a packed theater in Arrow Rock. New York actor Darryl Reuben Hall played Brown, and will be reprising the role in Kansas City in August.

“Glenn’s work brought the humanity of this man’s life from the page to the stage,” said Hall, best known for his roles in the movies “Hitch” and “Men in Black 3.”

Hall is also the founder of Stage Aurora Theatrical Company, which he said has a mission “to enlighten the mind by way of the arts through the African American experience.”

“I love Black history, and there are so many stories that need to be told,” Hall said. “That’s all a part of the American fabric.”

Marking Doc’s grave

Galen Wilkes’ efforts to secure a headstone for Brown started last fall, when he posted a flier in Union Cemetery with a QR code link to a GoFundMe page.

Unfortunately, Wilkes said, it’s a familiar story.

“They were artists, performers,” he said. “They fell on hard times or they just didn’t have much money to begin with.”

Many stars of the ragtime era died in poverty, and even the great Scott Joplin’s grave went unmarked for decades.

And while some may remember ragtime because of its resurgence in the 1970s, Wilkes said people have forgotten about the cakewalk.

But the music and the dance have influenced American culture in so many ways.

“Everybody’s probably heard the expression ‘that takes the cake,’” Wilkes said, “meaning ‘that wins the prize.’”

“That’s where it comes from. It goes back to the cakewalk,” he said.

Wilkes has been involved in ragtime music for more than 45 years now. He’s organized ragtime dances, a ragtime orchestra, a ragtime festival in New England, and even composed a few tunes himself.

But Wilkes is particularly passionate about preserving the history of the genre.

“Over 40 years ago, some of the ragtimers began marking the unmarked graves of some of the composers,” he said.

Wilkes has helped mark the graves of some of the biggest composers of the era like Arthur Marshall and James Scott — most of them right here in Missouri.

It’s one way Wilkes and other enthusiasts keep the genre in the spotlight.

“There’s probably around 10 tombstones that have been put up since the ‘80s,” he said.

In Kansas City’s Union Cemetery in May, before a new gravestone was unveiled for Doc Brown, guitarist Kevin Sanders and violinist Pat Ireland played cakewalk tunes like “Smoky Mokes,” “Careless Sam,” and, of course, “Doc Brown’s Cake Walk.”

After a ceremony, the small crowd gathered for glasses of punch and pieces of a two-tiered cake topped with an image of the famous cakewalker. Short silent films of cakewalks played on a glowing flatscreen TV. Everyone raised their glasses to Brown.

“Here’s to Doc,” Wilkes toasted. “Long may he cakewalk.”

Glenn North’s “Consummate Showman,” starring Darryl Reuben Hall, runs one night only at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 16, at Community Christian Church, 4601 Main St., Kansas City, Missouri 64112. Admission is free. For more information, go to ArrowRock.org.

This episode of A People’s History of Kansas City was reported by Julie Denesha. It was produced and mixed by Mackenzie Martin and Celia Morton, with editing by Luke X. Martin and Suzanne Hogan.