Sandman sweep off stage

1917-2003

Tap dancer

Howard "Sandman" Sims was a tap dancer, a practitioner of a style of dance in which a beat is loudly, clearly tapped out by a dancer sporting specially-made hard-soled shoes with metal plates, or taps, on their heels or toes.

He developed his own distinctive dance style, in which he tapped on sand, and he was among the legendary black American entertainers whose careers linked nineteenth-century slave and minstrel-show dancing first to the glory years of vaudeville and then to the popularity of such contemporary tap dance stars as Gregory Hines and Savion Glover.

Sims was born on January 24, 1917, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, but he grew up in Los Angeles.

He first tap-danced at age three—and never formally studied tap or any other dancing style. "I was born dancing," Sims told the New York Times's Jennifer Dunning in 1977. Of his childhood, he recalled, "It was just a whole big dancing family." He added, "When I got u