Cholly Atkins.

Cholly Atkins, 89, a legendary tap dancer and choreographer for Motown Records, died April 19, 2003, in Las Vegas, where he lived.

In his youth, Atkins worked as a Cotton Club chores tapper, in an act with his first wife Dotty Saulter, and as a freelance dancer-choreographer, performing at New York's Apollo Theater, on Broadway, and in films. After a World War II Army stint, he formed a long-running act with tapper Honi Coles.

Atkins remained active even during the "Great Tap Drought," as it was known in the hoofing community, of the 1950s-1960s. As a freelancer, he worked with Katherine Dunham, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Gary Moore, Redd Foxx, Sammy Davis Jr., and Stevie Wonder. But he also suffered many indignities; the show stopping "Mamie Is Mimi" number he and Coles choreographed for the 1949 Broadway show Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was widely credited to Agnes de Mille. And Motown producer Berry Gordy failed to credit Atkins for creating routines for Motown recording artists The Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. Atkins had hung up his tap shoes by the 1960s, but tapper Dianne Walker persuaded him to help choreograph the Broadway hit Black and Blue in 1989, for which he shared a Tony Award Scholar/writer Jacqui Malone collaborated with him to chronicle his remarkable career in the 2001 book Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins.

In his final years, he taught at many national tap festivals and universities. During an especially memorable New York University master dance class in the 1990s, the octogenarian Atkins taught his "vocal choreography" to Aretha Franklin's "Respect." Even the department chair, not prone to swiveling her hips, was up and swinging, cheering at the end of the two-hour session with the seventy-five students.