In 1927 the dancing potential of a black east Londoner, Josie Woods, was spotted by Belle Davis, an African-American show business veteran. She arranged for Woods, who has died aged 96, and her brother, Charlie, to join four other girls for training with the Eight Lancashire Lads, the clog-and-tap-dancing team with which, a generation earlier, Charlie Chaplin had started his career.
Davis then took Woods and three other girls, the Magnolia Blossoms, to Paris. There they joined the African American dancer Louis Douglas, star of La Revue Negre, the show which, in 1925, had made Josephine Baker a star. Woods spent two years touring with his troupe in Black People, wearing a costume that still bore Baker's nametag.
Then, in 1932, Woods and Charlie joined the Eight Black Streaks. The Streaks were the first established dance troupe of black Britons, and Woods toured with them for eight years, appearing at the London Palladium and in two films.
Genuine "all-black" shows - and black dances - were becoming popular in Britain but local talent was harder to find, so Woods also taught dance. And with the future comedian and musician Cyril Lagey she toured with the Guyanese bandleader Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, who had been one of her earliest students, demonstrating the latest from Harlem to British audiences. In 1940, at the Astoria Old Kent Road, she and Lagey featured in the jitterbug jamboree, teaching the black dance craze to Londoners.
Woods was born in Canning Town, a dockside area where black people have lived for more than two centuries. Her father was a merchant navy quartermaster from Dominica surnamed Wood - the "s" was a show business addition - and her mother claimed gypsy ancestry.
In "sailortown", poverty united people across the racial divide, although antagonisms could easily surface. Woods grew up with painful memories of the racial riots that had torn through Britain's ports in the aftermath of the first world war and left several people dead. Yet she developed an unquenchable confidence, buoyed by the warmth of the mixed-race families around her. Jewish people helped her to get started, and at 14 she was working for a Jewish tailor in Aldgate.
An abusive marriage in 1933 had left Woods literally fighting for her life, and she vowed never to allow any man to dominate her again. In the early 1940s she began a relationship with sometime teenage singer Eddie Williams. She struggled somewhat to teach him to dance, but as "Eddie and Josephine" they made a glamorous couple and toured widely.
Like many black Britons, Woods wanted to know more about her ancestral continent and the war years provided the chance, with increasing numbers of African seamen arriving. After the war, young Africans - many from the Nigerian elite - came to study. She found them accommodation in Brixton, independent of the settlement of the new wave of Caribbean workers.
Among the Nigerian arrivals was the suave and talented Willie Payne, later a successful actor. Having absorbed her dance lessons, they played nightclubs as Ken Ross and Lucille, and toured with the Jamaican Leslie "Jiver" Hutchinson's band. In 1952, she and Payne visited Nigeria - they planned to open a dance school - but their relationship floundered. Back in London she joined Cab Kaye's jazz septet and sang at the London Palladium. Later she and Kaye became a cabaret act, the Two Brown Birds of Rhythm.
She continued to work into the mid-1960s, which was when I met her. Gregarious, witty and entertaining, she was admired locally for her feisty attitude to authority - something that resonated among the new wave of black settlers, struggling to create a community in difficult circumstances. As interest in black history developed in the 1980s, Woods provided invaluable information about pre-Windrush black settlement in Britain. In 1997, she was the subject of a BBC2 Black Britain documentary.
In 1956 she gave birth to a son, Ralph. His father, an American serviceman, returned to the US. When Ralph was a teenager, Woods sent him to his father in California because she did not want him growing up in Brixton. He became saxophonist Ralph Moore, playing with some of the biggest names in jazz. In 2001 she too moved to California to be near her son, now in Jay Leno's Tonight show band. Ralph survives her.
· Josie Woods (Josephine Lucy Wood), dancer and choreographer, born May 16 1912; died June 28 2008