Alice Barker

Alice Barker was a chorus line dancer during the Harlem Renaissance of the the 1930s, 40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and 2000 - 2016. She danced at clubs such as The Apollo, Cotton Club, The Zanzibar Club, and on Broadway—with legends including Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Although she danced in numerous movies, commercials and TV shows, she had never seen any of them, and all of her photographs and memorabilia had been lost over the years. After years of searching we found three "Soundies".

Alice passed away peacefully on Wednesday, April 6th, 2016. She spent the last day of her life in good spirits, enjoying listening to music. A little more about the who's who here: "We" are friends of Alice who searched for the films and made this video. I'm David Shuff, a volunteer who visits the home with my therapy dog Katie, and have known Alice for 8 years. The woman in the video is Gail Campbell, a recreation therapist (and an amazing one at that!). She never gave up on finding Alice's films, and uncovered the first piece of the puzzle that lead to us finding them, which was Alicia Thompson; a historian of black female performers who had been looking for Alice for years. She told us that Alice was in films called 'soundies'. Using that clue I found jazz historian Mark Cantor of http://jazz-on-film.com and he was able to send us three of Alice's soundies from his collection. Shortly afterwards Alicia got us a few more films.