Reginald Reggio The Hoofer Mclaughlin

Reginald McLaughlin, known professionally as Reggio "the Hoofer" McLaughlin, is a Chicago tap dancer, improviser, choreographer, musician, and teacher who has sustained and transmitted the city's rhythm-tap tradition across five decades. Born in 1953 on Chicago's South Side, McLaughlin first encountered tap as a second-grade student and was captivated by the form. Before establishing himself as a dancer, he worked as a rhythm-and-blues musician—an experience that sharpened the rhythmic hearing he would bring to the tap floor and to his later teaching.

McLaughlin's decisive apprenticeship came with Chicago tap master Jimmy Payne Sr., a crucial link to an earlier generation of Black vaudeville and club tap. He also honed his craft in public space, dancing in Chicago subway stations, where performances demanded projection, responsiveness, and the ability to build a rhythmic argument without theatrical scenery or a fixed score. That street knowledge became foundational to his artistic voice and his later work as an educator.

He brought his accumulated practice into the classroom through Urban Gateways and, over roughly three decades, through the Old Town School of Folk Music. In those settings, McLaughlin teaches vocabulary and technique while helping students hear themselves as musicians: steps become phrases, pauses carry weight, and call-and-response turns a solo form into social exchange. His approach treats tap as Black musical knowledge carried through bodies and relationships rather than merely as a sequence of named steps.

In 1994 McLaughlin met Ernest "Brownie" Brown, a veteran of the vaudeville duo Cook and Brown. They performed together for nearly two decades, an extraordinary intergenerational partnership that brought Brown's repertory and theatrical knowledge into direct conversation with McLaughlin's Chicago practice. McLaughlin's holiday production *The Nut Tapper* similarly remade a familiar seasonal framework around tap, humor, community performers, and the city's living tradition.

Recognition from both educational and national institutions followed his sustained work. In 2015 he received a Distinguished Teaching Artist Award. The Old Town School of Folk Music named a studio for him in 2021, and that same year the National Endowment for the Arts selected McLaughlin as a National Heritage Fellow, placing his local work within the country's most prominent program honoring traditional and folk artists.