Billy Pierce (choreographer)

Billy Pierce (14 June 1890 – 11 April 1933) was an African American choreographer, dancer and dance studio owner who has been credited with the invention of the Black Bottom dance that became a national craze in the mid-1920s.

The son of two freedmen, Dennis and Nellie (née Shorter) Pierce, William Joseph Pierce was born in Purcellville, Virginia. His parents were truck farmers, but Billy, an only child, went to college, matriculating first at Storer College and then attending Howard University.

Pierce started out as a journalist, eventually moving to Chicago to write for the Chicago Defender, the premier African American newspaper of its time. He also worked for two Washington, D.C.-based newspapers, the Dispatcher and the Washington Eagle. During World War One, he served with the 8th Infantry Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an all-black unit commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Otis B. Duncan, the highest ranking black officer in the United States Army during the War to End All Wars.

As a journalist, Pierce wrote about the arts, but eventually left his typewriter for a life in the theater. Starting in Chicago, he made his bones as a dancer and trombonist in vaudeville and performed as a banjoist in Dr. Diamond Dick's Kickapoo Medicine Show on the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit of black vaudeville theaters, which took him to New York City. In Gotham, he re-entered the newspaper business. It was while soliciting advertising on Broadway, he decided to become a choreographer. He conceived the idea of a dance studio along with Leonard Harper, who soon lost heart. Pierce brought their idea to fruition when he opened a dance studio in one room on the top floor of the Navex building on 46th Street west of Broadway where he doubled as an elevator operator.

The Billy Pierce Dance Studio flourished and became one of the incubators for the cultural flowering know to posterity as the Harlem Renaissance. By 1929, Pierce's studio—the "largest of its kind" according to the Afro American newspaper—occupied five rooms in the bottom two floors of the building, for which Pierce paid annually $6,000 in rent (equivalent to approximately $83,686 in 2017 dollars).

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