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Transcription: [00:31:52]
{SPEAKER name="Jones"}
But he died about two weeks later than that but he left me a living.
[00:31:55]
{SPEAKER name="Interviewer"}
That's one thing that you rarely see at a folk festival--or you rarely hear tell of, that of a professional entertainment tradition being passed on within the entertainment form.
[00:32:06]
Really the way that most of our entertainers in this field learned and stayed in it, it wasn't that they were learning from parents or necessarily older people, it's often that they were learning from people who were the immediate generation above them in the entertainment field--
[00:32:23]
people with whom they worked as colleagues on the stage and from whom they learned the older traditional routines.
[00:32:30]
So that now when you see Willie doing comedy here what you see is really his version of a number of the routines done by Willie Earl and the older comics who in turn had performed those on minstrel stages and traveling tent shows and medicine shows stages and learned them from older comics before them.
[00:32:50]
So, it's an entire hidden tradition, a tradition that finds its expression only on the stage and found its development really in black traditions of entertainment and the black traveling stage.
[00:33:03]
Are there any questions before we close out the workshop for Willie?
[00:33:09]
{SILENCE}
[00:33:12]
If there aren't, I'd just like to mention that following this workshop immediately we're going to stay in the vein of performance traditions of the black stage with a workshop on the art of tap dancing.
[00:33:26]
Appearing on the stage will be Master Tapper LaVaughn Robinson, 57-year-old tap dancer who learned on the streets of Philly and got quite a lot of experience in Vaudeville and in the late Vaudeville in nightclubs
[00:33:38]
and his two accompanists colleagues who once were students Germaine Ingram and Sandra Janoff.
[00:33:44]
So while we wait for them to come on over and get the stage setup for the next workshop, let's please have a hand for Willie "Ashcan" Jones.
[00:33:53]
[[applause]]
[00:33:56]
{SPEAKER name="Unknown"}
The dance tradition