Peg Leg Bates

Happy Birthday, Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates...October 11, 1907-December 8, 1998...Dancing was intrinsic to Bates who remembered always wanting to dance from the age of five. While working in a cotton seed gin mill at the age of 12 in his hometown of Fountain Inn, South Carolina, Bates became caught up in the machinery and his left leg was mangled. It was amputated below the knee on his kitchen table at home. Bates was confined to crutches to get around but in his words, "At first I was walking around on crutches and, I started making musical rhythm with them. See, I did not realize the importance of losing a leg. I thought it was just like stubbing my toe and knocking off a toenail that was going to grow back." When his uncle Wit came home from WW1 and found his nephew handicapped, he created Bate's first crude wooden leg.

Bates continued dancing, "It somehow grew in my mind that I wanted to be as good a dancer as any two-legged dancer. It hurt me that the boys pitied me. I was pretty popular before, and I still wanted to be popular. I told them not to be sorry for me." Bates was true to his word. With enormous effort he learned to copy the rhythms steps of the popular tappers of his day, adding his own unique acrobatics and novelty steps. By the age of 15 he was traveling the minstrel show and vaudeville circuits becoming the undisputed king of one-legged dancers. His appearance in Paris in  Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1929 gave him the boost to return to New York in 1930 as a featured tap dancer at the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn and Club Zanzibar.

With his deep toned-toned left leg peg and his higher-pitched metallic right foot tap he rhythmically reinvented popular tap steps like the Shim Sham, Susie-Q and Truckin'. He would perform dive bombing type maneuvers, landing balanced on his peg leg. He owned 13 of them; one to match each of his suits.Unlike many tap dancers, he didn't focus on one style. "Well, I'm into rhythm and I'm into novelty. I'm into doing things that looks almost impossible to do.", he explained. He mastered the styles to surpass two-legged dancers, and he often did. Many tappers became associated with certain big bands as part of the general entertainment. Bates topped them all, dancing with the bands of Jimmy Dorsey, Charlie Barnett, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Erskine Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Claude Hopkins, Billy Eckstine and Louis Armstrong.

Bates tackled the budding television industry full on, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show 21 times, more than any other tap dancer. He often used the show to dance tap-offs with other well known tap dancers. He also traveled extensively and performed for royalty. In 1951, Bates and his wife Alice bought a turkey farm in the Catskill Mountains and turned it into the largest black-owned-and-operated resort in the country. The Peg Leg Country Club catered to a primarily black clientele in a predominantly Jewish resort area, presenting some of the finest jazz musicians and entertainers of it's day. "At first the natives were resentful," Bates told the N.Y. Times in 1969, "But now everything is kosher, beautiful." He ran the resort until his wife died in 1987 and sold it in 1989.

In retirement, Bates spent a good deal of his time performing, teaching and speaking to youth groups, senior citizens and the handicapped, spreading his philosophy of being involved no matter what life brought your way. "Life means, do the best you can with what you've got, with all your mind and heart. You can do anything in this world if you want to do it bad enough." He died at the age of 91 in his home town, just a mile and a half from the place he lost his leg.