The Modern Square Dance

During the half century that bracketed the American Revolution and the War of 1812, this was a more dancing nation than it is today. Everybody danced, and continued to dance during the decades to follow. Everybody grew up dancing, for those were the days when the babies went in baskets, and the small fry formed a set in the corner and stomped away, until a dancing master got hold of them and polished up their steps. (Dancing masters were a dime a dozen.)

And an "ordination ball" was held when the new minister was installed! Where did they dance? In taverns, in town halls, in barns, at husking bees, roof-raisings, sheep-shearings. Don't think, when you build a hall in your basement or your garage, or a "slab" in your yard, that you are doing something new and unusual. They did that, too. They built dance halls right onto their houses. If they didn't have anything better, they danced in the kitchen, and Ralph Page describes the fiddler sitting in the kitchen sink in order to leave room for the dancers on the floor.

Nothing New

Don't think, when you get a "Knothead" badge for travelling in a set-size group for a hundred miles or more to a square dance, that you are "modern". More than a century ago they were doing that too. They went in a sleigh or a hayrack instead of a 1975 Buick, but the objective was the same. I have no doubt that there were "idiots" who wakened their caller in the wee small hours, and demanded a dance.

There is really nothing essentially modern about the behaviour of the current caller, who works at a job all day and calls square dances half the night, burning his candle so hard at both ends that it is a bit hot in the middle. They did that, too! Many men, especially teachers and, occasionally, ministers, both of whom were underpaid then as now, augmented their salaries by teaching or prompting dancing - square dancing in its broad sense. Some even fiddled. They did it economically, by having a two-hour teaching session followed by a three-, or four-, or even fivehour dance.

They called to their dancers to line up for a grand march. The instrumentalist tuned up. The dancers marched, elegantly, joyously, delightedly onto the floor until finally the line of couples found itself in a circle around the hall.

"Hold your places for 'Sicilian Circle'!" The fiddler swung into A Hundred Pipers but he didn't stay with it long - he kept happily changing tunes. Round and round they went, in the patterns you do at every square dance. "Promenade off the floor!" And then, they formed sets for a plain quadrille: "First four, right and left through - and right and left back!" The great American square dance was in motion.

The Development of the Current Hybrid

Americans have always been a people on the move. From the first potential colonist set down in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1584, they have been reluctant to stay put, and have vanished into parts unknown, taking their customs with them. You have only to take the wanderings of one great pioneer to have a prototype for them all - take Daniel Boone, born in Pennsylvania of an immigrant English father, moved at 18 into the mountains of western North Carolina, went at 26 to explore the head waters of the Tennessee River, set out at 35 to explore the border regions of Kentucky, settled there and practically built Kentucky, lost his lands through defective titles and headed west at the age of 60, settling near what is now St.Louis! He was only one of thousands like him. And they 'danced'. They danced and they sang, and by their songs and dances we track them backward from the 20th century. Study the dances of any area, and you will find who brought them, and whence. It is not surprising therefore, that the Appalachian dance turned up in the American south-west, in the middle-west, in Oklahoma, and in Texas. It came with a singular purity into Texas and promptly took on something new - the charming little Texas two-step with its birdlike lift. Where did "that" come from? Over the border from Mexico, most likely.

The Play Parties

In the middle-west the dance encountered a puritan influence again and could not persist as a dance at all. So it became a "play-party". Dances were done as if they were children's games, to singing and to clapping of the hands. The tunes and words go back so far that they bring tingles to your scalp - back farther than Playford, back through Tennessee and Kentucky to goodness knows where. Play-party manners were simple, but deportment was important. There was no drinking, and young ladies and gentlemen were wonderfully controlled. No young man put his arm around a girl's waist.

Even in Texas, where dancing was dancing, there were barriers. Hence, the old call "Meet your honey, pat her on the head, if you can't get biscuit, give her corn bread". "Biscuit" was a waist-swing, "corn bread" was a decent two-hand swing, and if you "must" pat her, pat her on the head! Our square dance was developing - at once demure and vigorous.

The Dance Preserved

Where simple pioneering people (seeking isolation) went, you found, for the most part, the single-visitortype dance of the Appalachian mountains. Where more sophisticated groups (bent on establishing a farther frontier for American culture and government and backed by organized financing) went, you were likely to find the New England quadrille type of dance. Where a dedicated group, (like the Mormons) went, you found a fusion at a very high level. No group did a better job of carrying the best of American culture across the continent than the Mormons; and they hung onto it long and well.

Where great financial opportunities presented them- selves, as in the successful gold-mining camps of the west, you had people from all walks of life -well-to-do promoters and hard rock miners; merchants and bankers and professional people. Here we had the truest synthesis of the American folk dance. Nothing mixed people up like the mining camps of the western United States. If you went to a dance in the pioneer farming country of Nebraska, you would find something like a country dance, but a program for an 1870 dance in Central City, Colorado, reads like a lay-out of the middle section of our chart:

quadrilles and lancers, contras and circles, waltz, polka and schottische.

Oddly enough, a program from a dance in the Town Hall of Kingston, N.H., reads much the same except that there were more contras. The dance remained remarkably stable for many decades - some things expanded here, some things squeezed out there.

Next - The Contra

What finally got crowded out was the contra, most important ancestor of them all. Perhaps it is well enough for it to live on in almost every move we make on the dance floor, but millions of people must have missed this exciting and beautiful of dances, as it dwindled down to three or four routines that people remembered, and finally expired in an emasculated "Virginia Reel" that any good contra dancer would have looked upon with dismay.