This year’s Super Bowl halftime show was kind of a love/hate thing. If you’re familiar with Kendrick Lamar and picked up on the symbols and allusions he sprinkled throughout the performance, you saw a masterful artist at the height of his powers. If not, you saw a disjointed jumble that was difficult to make sense of.
No matter which camp you fell into, you likely didn’t see Serena Williams’ appearance coming. Almost two weeks later, people are still talking about that surprise cameo and clueing in the clueless (like us) about Williams’ small but enduring role in hip-hop culture. And that conversation led, improbably, to a long-forgotten Black dancer named Henry “Crip” Heard—a bilateral amputee—and two of his role models, Stanley “Big-Time Crip” Holmes and Peg-Leg Bates.
We learned of the connection the Monday after the game, when someone sent us an article from LAD Bible explaining that the dance Williams performed on the Super Bowl stage—an old rap-music staple called the Crip Walk—originated in the 1940s with Heard, who’d lost his right arm and right leg in an auto accident as a teenager. Already an up-and-coming dancer before getting injured, he worked his way back to the stage and eventually reached the big-time theatre circuit, sharing stages with megastars such as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Jordan, and Cab Calloway.
Though his performing career ended in the 1960s, he remained a steadfast advocate for the disability community until his death in 1991. He spent years volunteering with the Illinois Board of Rehabilitation, lobbying for greater investment in job training for people with disabilities and decrying the absence of job opportunities. “There just aren’t any substantial programs moving in that direction,” he told the Chicago Defender in 1971, “and the handicapped, as a result, continue to struggle for the few ‘charity’ jobs they can get.”
Heard’s dancing career might have been completely forgotten if not for his appearance in Boarding House Blues, a 1948 film starring Moms Mabley. That clip, readily available online, marks the earliest known performance of the Crip Walk, according to LAD Bible, which adds that the dance “was later adopted by The Crips, an alliance of California street gangs,” and “over the years has seeped into popular culture through rappers who are closely associated with the Crips.”
That lineage is being hotly debated on Xwitter, Reddit, and other online forums. John Leguziamo claims the dance has Chicano origins; others argue the LA gang’s dance bears no resemblance to Crip Heard’s, and that the supposed link between the two is completely bogus. None of the documentation for any viewpoint is airtight, and the trustworthy archival sources are mum on the relationship between Crip Heard and the Crip Walk, so we’re not choosing sides. All we can add to the conversation is a shout-out to Big-Time Crip and Peg-Leg Bates, whom we can reliably cite as two of Crip Heard’s creative inspirations.
Henry Heard, Big-Time Crip, and Peg-Leg Bates
If you’re a regular Amplitude reader you already know about Bates, a below-knee amputee who began tap dancing professionally in the 1920s, appeared on Broadway, and was just the second Black entertainer to perform at Radio City Music Hall. In the 1930s Bates started mentoring a young one-legged dancer named Stanley Holmes, who performed with a crutch (whereas Bates danced with a wooden prosthesis). In his biography Boy Meets Horn, big-band cornetist Rex Stewart sketches a scene in which Bates (by then an established star) tutors an inexperienced Holmes after hours in the basement of the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi.
Apparently Holmes was a fast learner. By 1939—the same year Crip Heard lost his limbs—he was opening for the likes of Fats Waller, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong. In 1941 bandleader Andy Kirk released a B-side called “Big-Time Crip,” which seems to be dedicated to Holmes. The first line goes: Big-Time Crip is one of Harlem’s finest dancers / Big-Time Crip is one of Harlem’s true romancers. Late that year, Variety offered this review of Holmes’ three-minute opening act at the Apollo Theater (on a bill with Lionel Hampton and Billie Holliday): “One-legged strutter had time to display only sample of his wares when caught at Apollo, but showed enough to click. Works in evening clothes and hoofs with and without crutch. Does taps, acrobatics, and struts, too.”
By 1948, when 24-year-old Crip Heard made his movie debut in Boarding House Blues, Holmes was no longer getting big bookings. We could find almost no biographical material about him on the Internet, so we’re not sure what became of the man. But he was evidently an important bridge between Peg-Leg Bates and Crip Heard, as the first major amputee dancer to perform with a crutch.
So now our Crip Walk lineage extends back nearly a century, from Serena Williams to the LA Crips to Crip Heard, Big-Time Crip, and finally to Peg-Leg Bates. The weak link in this chain, of course, is the one connecting Heard to the Compton gang of the 1980s. If anybody has solid evidence to confirm or refute that relationship, let us hear from you.
