Alice Barker loved to dance from the moment she was born. As she says, dancing was all she ever wanted to do.
For her entire career she worked as a chorus line dancer in New York City, on Broadway and during the Harlem Renaissance of the the 1930s and 40s. She danced at clubs such as The Apollo, Cotton Club, and Zanzibar Club, where she was part of a legendary group known as the Zanzibeauts.
She also danced in numerous movies, commercials and TV shows with legends including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Gene Kelly, and a young Frank Sinatra.
The short musical films we found of Alice are called “soundies,” and they were among the first films that used sound. Typically a soundie would be shot in a popular night club, and feature whatever the hot performer or song was at the time. The films would be distributed in jukebox-like devices that were placed in bars, clubs and racetracks, where people could watch them for a coin[...]
Alice was married twice, and never had any children. She stayed close with many of her dancing friends throughout her life and into her senior years. However an illness and prolonged hospitalization, combined with her relocation to a nursing home, lead to her losing touch with them. Unfortunately, it was simply a time and an age in life when it was a lot easier for people to lose track of each other.
Moreover, all of her photographs and memorabilia from her career had been in the lost in her multiple moves. When we met Alice, she’d not seen any images, nor been able to share anything more than her stories, in over 10 years.[...]
Alice celebrated her 103rd birthday—with a troupe of dancers coming to perform for her—on July 30th, 2015, and continues to delight everyone around her to this day.
This is the latest video posted on the site, a Happy Holidays performance from Alice: