Mojo Nixon . NYT (archived)THR .
“Before ‘Elvis is Everywhere’ there were just a lot of dudes at the Mojo show,” Nixon said. “It’s a sausage fest, and the women that are there are there in protest. ‘Yes, I’ll go and drive your drunk ass home if you go and watch this Jodie Foster movie with me.’ But after ‘Elvis Is Everywhere’ actual women came on their own, not coerced by their drunk husbands.”
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Nixon summed up his career thus: “Mojo Nixon wanted to be Richard Pryor. He’s like Richard Pryor’s stupid cousin if he was white and played in a rockabilly band. I’d say things that simultaneously shocked people and spoke the truth.
Here’s a live version of one of my favorite Mojo songs, from 1989:
VIDEO I’ve written a couple of times about the NYT ‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. Here’s another interesting one: Henry Heard, tap dancer .
Of course, there’s more to the story than that.
He learned to dance at age 6 and was performing in clubs by the time he was 14. On Jan. 7, 1939, the car he was riding in with his group, the Three Dots, was struck by a train at an unguarded crossing in Memphis. Everyone in the car was killed except Henry, who suffered devastating injuries that necessitated the amputation of his right arm and right leg. After multiple surgeries, he thought his life as a dancer was over and was tempted to give up. But he resolved not to. “I’d seen the blind and the crippled standing on street corners with their tin cups and pencils,” he told The Columbus Star in 1958, “and decided that I wanted to do more with my life than be the object of public curiosity and pity.”
He learned how to dance again, on one leg.
His innovative dancing was on display in “Boarding House Blues,” which starred Moms Mabley as the owner of a cash-strapped boardinghouse. To raise money, the tenants hold a show, and Heard is the opening act. He starts by using his crutch as he dances a Charleston step accompanied by Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra. He then slides his crutch offstage at the end of a turn and keeps on dancing, sculpting accents in the air with his free arm and punctuating a drum break with backward steps.
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Wherever he traveled, Heard entertained patients at hospitals, including veterans hospitals, refuting the prevalent attitude that people with disabilities were charity cases to be pitied. He appeared at community events held by the N.A.A.C.P. as well as at Democratic Party fund-raisers, and he founded a long-running annual Christmas benefit for children at the Illinois School and Rehabilitation Center in Chicago, often using his own money for gifts and dinner and dressing as Santa. Heard was one of a number of African American tap dancers, like Peg-Leg Bates, Big Time Crip and Jesse James, whose artistry made percussive use of a mobility aid.
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On the TV variety show “You Asked for It,” Heard peppered three rapid-fire numbers with pyrotechnics: in the first, he interspersed double-time steps with triplets and trenches; in the second, he finger-snapped his way through a joyous rumba. For his finale, he tapped up and down stairs à la Bill Robinson.
He also did a lot of work with disability organizations, while at the same time being highly critical of them:
“They’re all very polite and want me to volunteer my services,” he told The Defender in 1971. “But no one is interested in hiring me to work full time with the people who need help. In fact, there just aren’t any substantial programs moving in that direction, and the handicapped, as a result, continue to struggle for the few ‘charity’ jobs they can get.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2024 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Elvis , Music , Nixon , Obits . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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