Howard Sims

American tap dancer

Howard "Sandman" Sims (January 24, 1917 – May 20, 2003) was an African American tap dancer who began his career in vaudeville. He was skilled in a style of dancing that he performed in a wooden sandbox of his own construction, and acquired his nickname from the sand he sprinkled to alter and amplify the sound of his dance steps. "They called the board my Stradivarius," Sims said of his sandbox.—at Harlem's noted Apollo Theater, comedically ushering failed acts offstage

Tap dancing lost popularity with audiences beginning in the late 1940s. A number of causes factored into this decline, among them the going out of style of vaudeville style variety shows; a new tax that forced many ballrooms to close and thus closed venues to the big bands with whom tap dancers had used to perform; trends in music that favored smaller, more intimate groups of performers; and concomitant increases in interest among audiences in watching formal modern dance and ballet performances. Sims was quoted as having said of the period that "[t]ap didn't die It was just neglected." With paying gigs harder to find and paying less, Sims turned to other sources of income. Despite not having had any formal instruction himself, he taught dance, including to such later stars as Gregory Hines and Ben Vereen. Tap Happening was popular enough to run for several years. The crescendo of interest in tap dancing continued, and in 1972, Sims danced in the production Best of the Hoofers at the Orpheum Theatre. "Hoofing is not a dying art form," he asserted in 1977, Later that year, Sims was one of the instructor performers of the By Word of Foot "teach in" series, spending a week demonstrating his hoofing techniques for a new generation of tap enthusiasts. A few weeks later, Sims was on stage at the American Dance Festival, dancing both with and without his sandbox. By 1982, Sims was part of a promotional tour reviving interest in No Maps on My Taps with co stars Bunny Briggs and Chuck Green, their pre screening performances backed by Cab Calloway. Even as booked performances were coming more regularly, Sims never stopped participating in street corner challenges, encouraging younger generations of dancers and inviting them to learn his moves. "I thought I was making noise all these years," Sims said of the award. "Now they're calling it culture." Sims loved to teach; his son recounted how Sandman would "stop every kid he saw and show them a step and get them to copy a step. He enjoyed that more than performing in front of an audience."

Meanwhile, Harlem's Apollo Theater, where Sims had served for years as Amateur Night's "executioner", had been closed for most of a decade. Then, following an extensive renovation, the venue reopened in 1985, When The New York Times interviewed him about his "executioner" role, he said of the acts that got booed off, "I tell them to work on their act and come back," encouraging them to try again. He also made a brief appearance in a play based on his life, The Sand Dancer, It's Showtime at the Apollo, a TV broadcast of the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night performances, began broadcasting in September 1987 on NBC stations, bringing awareness of Sims's "executioner" role to a wider audience. A particularly busy year, 1988 saw Sims tour the world as a cultural ambassador on behalf of the U. S. State Department, traveling to over 50 countries in a span of 11 months. Playing a thinly fictionalized version of himself named "Mr. Sims", Sims made a 1990 appearance on The Cosby Show, "Mr. Sims" was the dance instructor the Huxtables signed their young daughter Rudy up with in order to help her prepare for a class assignment about the Harlem Renaissance. During the episode, Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) challenged "Mr. Sims" to a dance off, part tribute to and part parody of Sims's real life tap challenges, which Sims won handily. Later that same year, the Apollo Theater played host to Rat a Tat Tap, another tap dance festival, and the Sandman, "always a deserved audience favorite at tap festivals," was a featured performer there alongside his Tap co stars Savion Glover and Gregory Hines. Sims was a featured performer at the third annual celebration of National Tap Dance Day on May 30, 1993. In 1998, the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day and the Young People's Tap Conference honored Sandman Sims for his contributions to the art of hoofing.