Charles Coles

Charles “Honi” Coles (April 2, 1911 – November 12, 1992) was an American actor and tap dancer, who was inducted posthumously into the American Tap Dance Hall of Fame in 2003. He had a distinctive personal style that required technical precision, high-speed tapping, and a close-to-the-floor style where "the legs and feet did the work". Coles was also half of the professional tap dancing duo Coles and Atkins, whose specialty was performing with elegant style through various tap steps such as "swing dance", "over the top", "bebop", "buck and wing", and "slow drag". He appeared in the films The Cotton Club and Dirty Dancing, as well as the documentary Great Feats of Feet. Coles was also a tap-dancing companion of tap dancer Brenda Bufalino, the founder and director of the American Tap Dance Foundation. During his career, Coles was awarded the Dance Magazine Award in 1985, the Capezio Award for lifetime achievement in dance in 1988, and the National Medal of the Arts by President George H. W. Bush in 1991. He was a tap mentor who believed, "If you can walk, you can tap." Coles advocated for the development of tap dance and often claimed that "tap dance was the only dance art form that America could claim as its own". Early life Charles “Honi” Coles was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 2, 1911. He was the son of George and Isabel Coles. George Coles was an owner of a pool hall and a barbershop, while Isabel Coles was a domestic servant. When Coles was a child, his sister took care of him and gave Coles the nickname “Honey”. Later, when he was around 14 or 15 years old, Coles belonged to a club called the Jolly Buccaneers and changed the spelling of his nickname to “Honi”. This nickname became a crucial part of Coles’s life, in which his teachers also used to call him Honi. As a child, “Honi” Coles could not afford to go to dancing school, so he figured out a different way to learn how to tap dance. Coles and his friends gathered around the street corner of Philadelphia in the summer months to dance as a form of recreation. Later, other guys from different neighborhoods joined Coles and his friends, which created various competitions among young tap dancers. Billy Bailey, a talented dancer coming from another neighborhood, also competed on the street corner.