Bill Bailey's 1955 Apollo Theater Backslide, Decades Before the Moonwalk

Bill Bailey was already a fixture of Harlem’s Apollo Theater when he closed out a 1955 routine by gliding backward across the stage, feet skating in place as if the floor itself were moving under him. He called the step the Backslide, and it survives today only in a scrap of footage, but tap historians treat it as one of the clearest documented performances of the move a young Michael Jackson would make world-famous nearly 30 years later as the moonwalk.

Bailey, born Willie Eugene Bailey on December 8, 1912, in Sedley, Virginia, grew up partly in Newport News and Philadelphia before a talent scout, Lew Leslie, discovered him at 18 and put him in the revue “Blackbirds of 1930.” He toured Europe with Duke Ellington’s band in 1933 alongside dance partner Derby Wilson and came up idolizing Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, whom he later credited as a mentor. By the 1940s Bailey was ranked among the era’s sharpest rhythm dancers, and it was in that stretch of his career, in the 1943 MGM musical “Cabin in the Sky,” that he became the first performer captured on film doing the backward glide he named the Backslide. The 1955 Apollo footage shows him repeating the same signature exit more than a decade later, this time live before one of Harlem’s toughest crowds.

Bailey was not the first person to move that way on a stage. Cab Calloway later said he and his band were doing a version of it in the 1930s, when they called it the Buzz, and mime performers and film choreographers had used similar backward-glide illusions even earlier. What set Bailey apart was that his performances were captured on camera and can still be traced directly, step for step, to what audiences would later call the moonwalk. Bailey largely left show business in 1946 to study religion and lead a Harlem congregation, turning down a 1949 film offer to play Robinson before eventually returning to the stage to support his younger sister, singer and actress Pearl Bailey. He died in Philadelphia on December 12, 1978, four days after his 66th birthday.

Michael Jackson had no documented connection to Bailey’s specific 1955 performance, and dance historians are careful not to claim direct lineage between the two. But when Jackson spun backward across the stage during “Billie Jean” at NBC’s “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever” special, taped in Pasadena on March 25, 1983, and broadcast to more than 47 million viewers that May 16, he introduced the world to a step Bailey, and dancers before him, had already been performing for decades under a different name.