Services set for legendary tap dancer Bunny Briggs

Services for legendary tap dancer Bunny Briggs — whose career stretched from the 1920s into the 21st century — will be held at noon Friday at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, 2300 Sunridge Heights Parkway, Henderson.

Visitation, from 11 a.m. to noon, will precede the funeral mass.

Early visitation will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Palm Eastern Mortuary, 7600 S. Easter Ave., Las Vegas, where burial will take place following the funeral mass.

Briggs was 92 when he died Nov. 15 in Las Vegas.

One of tap’s top artists, Briggs said he was born dancing: “When I finally faced the world my legs were kickin’. They let me loose, and I just started dancin’,” according to his American Tap Dance Foundation biography.

Born Bernard Briggs Feb. 26, 1922, in New York’s Harlem, Briggs began performing on the streets at age 5; within a few years, he was dancing regularly with Luckey Roberts and his Society Entertainers.

His made his first movie appearance in the 1932 Stepin Fetchit short “Slow Poke.” Almost 60 years later, Briggs danced and sang “On the Sunny Side of the Street” in 1989’s “Tap,” appearing alongside Gregory Hines, Sammy Davis Jr. and other tap legends.

In between, the fleet-footed Briggs appeared with top ’40s bands led by Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey Erskine Hawkins, Earl Hines and Duke Ellington; Briggs appeared so often with Ellington he became known as “Duke’s dancer,” who described him as “the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist.”

Briggs’ best-known Ellington performance was his solo dance as David in “David Danced (Before the Lord With All His Might)” during Ellington’s 1965 Sacred Concert, which “broke new ground for modern tap dancing on the concert stage,” tap historian Constance Valis Hill wrote in “Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History.” He earned a Tony Award nomination for the 1989 Broadway musical “Black and Blue,” where he soloed to Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”

Briggs also danced at the Monterey and Newport jazz festivals; on television, he turned up on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” and on such PBS programs as “Dance in America” and “No Maps on My Taps.”

Last year, the College of Southern Nevada saluted Briggs at a “Tap in Time” dance program but presented the honor to him at the area assisted living facility where he resided.

The family requested donations to the Tap Legacy Foundation’s Bunny Briggs Memorial Fund, 138 W. 25th St., 10th Floor, New York, NY 10001.