Aida Overton Walker
Born on Valentine’s Day in 1880, dancer, choreographer, actress and vaudeville performer Aida Overton Walker started out singing and dancing in musical theater. She was a sensation from the get-go. She met and married comedian George Walker and together, with his partner Bert Williams, international stars were born.
For five years, she, Walker, and Williams worked together creating hit musicals. “In Dahomey,” 1903, toured two seasons in England and introduced elite white society to the cakewalk, an elaborate promenading dance originally created and danced by enslaved people to mock the airs and pretensions of whites. Walker’s modern cakewalk choreography was central to its cross-over success.
Following George Walker’s illness and death, in 1911, she kept working, frequently in drag, performing her husband’s numbers in tribute.
She created choreography for Black dancers including the Happy Girls and Porto Rico Girls, groups that produced future star dancers including Lottie Gee – “Shuffle Along” 1921 – and Elida Webb, a Cotton Club star in the 1920s.
People gushed for years about the spectacular “Salome” Overton Walker performed in 1912 in Hammerstein’s Paradise Roof Garden in New York.
James Weldon Johnson gushed about her singing: She “had a low-pitched voice with a natural sob to it, which she knew how to use with telling effect in putting over a song.”
Carl Van Vechten gushed about her cakewalking: “The line, the grace, the assured ecstasy of these dancers, who bent over backward until their heads almost touched the floor, a feat demanding an incredible amount of strength, their enthusiastic prancing, almost in slow motion, have never been equaled in this particular revel, let alone surpassed.”
In 1914, the last year of her short life, Overton Walker took up the tango. At a tango picnic, in July of that year, she and partner Lackeye Grant, danced a smoldering Argentinian dance to much acclaim. The tango picnic was Overton Walker’s last public appearance. She died in October of 1914 of kidney disease.
