The New England Dance

Our dance must have started out with a big handicap in the first year of the settlement of the New England colonies. Those sturdy Puritan gentlemen who implemented the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter were a grim lot, believing, as they evidently did, that what was gay and light-hearted was also sinful. They had packed up many of their simple happinesses and hidden them away some time before, to please General Cromwell; and, when they came across the sea during the first half of the 17th century, they simply left the whole lot behind. They left the May-pole, that lovely totem of English dancing, and the dances that had encircled it. They left the great bonfires of Midsummer Eve, and the wild, weaving lines of shadowy figures that danced around them. They even left Christmas, with its carols and its wonder. (It took us 300 years to get the carols back) Fortunately, the Puritan influence was soon diluted. Men who were tolerant as well as wise and courageous came from all walks of English life, not only into the New England colonies, but also into Virginia and the Carolinas and Maryland. An American aristocracy of the mind and spirit developed, and it brought its social graces into the ballroom as well as the convention hall. It is difficult to get anyone to say how much of the "New England dance" came from the now-declining English Country Dance, and how much from the ballrooms of London and Paris.

During Revolutionary times, evidence favours the ballroom. General Washington, dressed elegantly in fitted black, with a powdered pigtail and white silk stockings, danced a very acceptable minuet, you may be sure, and a courtly quadrille, and a dignified contra. But when did those simpler New England folk outside the ballroom get started on their wonderful succession of contras and quadrilles that are the very backbone of our current square dance? For the square dance began here as truly as it did in the mountains of Kentucky and the Carolinas, and perhaps a little earlier.

The names of some of the dances tell a story. Green Mountain Volunteers - remember them, and Ethan Allen? (Pre-Revolution, from Vermont). Jefferson and Victory, Washington's Quick Step, the Beaux of Albany, Old Zip Coon, Boston Fancy, Pop Goes the Weasel - how American they sound! Hull's Victory and Sackett's Harbour - two of the very great "triples", are named out of the War of 1812. Commodore Hull was the commander of the frigate "Constitution" and, as for "Sackett's Harbour", which is on the east shore of Lake Ontario in upper New York State, the motions of the dance make a graphic picture of the see-saw battle that went on for months for control of the fortification there. And yet, many of these "American" dances were really old patterns loved long before in England or Scotland, given American names; just as we set our American hymn to the tune of God Save the King, and our National Anthem to a German tavern song. When it came to dancing, we were adapters rather than creators, and some of our adaptations were marvels to behold.

The Singing Quadrille

One of our great adaptations was the "singing quadrille", which seems to belong in this period. Quadrilles thrived for so long in America! And you could get such variation into the music. A five-part quadrille permitted you to use five different but related tunes; for instance, the famous "Caledonian Quadrille" contained parts danced to five beloved Scottish tunes, including The Campbells Are Coming and My Love is But a Lassie Yet. The "Verdi Opera Quadrille" used two arias from "Traviata" and three from "Il Trovatore". The "Columbian Quadrille" used the following tunes: Star Spangled Banner - Red, White and Blue - Adams and Liberty - Hail Columbia - Yankee Doodle.

This sounds either very lively or very stuffy, and, after you have read the instructions for the figures, you decide that stuffy is the word. They were unimaginative, commonplace and all alike.

It was a period of too many dances, which were consequently doomed. But out of it grew the simple, integrated, freely-moving and melodious singing squares set to American folk tunes, beloved of the people: Captain Jinks, Darlin Nellie Gray, The Girl I Left Behind Me, The Flower Girl Waltz, Oh Susanna - direct forerunners of such dances as Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Red River Valley, Alabama Jubilee, Smoke on the Water and Kingston Town. There are dozens and hundreds of these old singing quadrilles, as much fun to do as they always were. And there were "plain quadrilles", danced to the same type of old Scottish or English or even Irish music that was used for the contras. These were square dances in the current sense with:

• an opening chorus,
• a figure, twice or four times repeated,
• a closing chorus.

The commonest chorus was then, as now -"allemande left and grand right and left." Ralph Page says that the contribution of the French Canadians who came seeping into New England during the past century, is not, as one might expect, French contra patterns, but a gaiety and joy in life that resulted in the "long swing" so typical of New England square dancing. We once watched a dance in Bethlehem, Connecticut that was 60% swing. Taking a tight waist-hold, but holding their heads and shoulders far out from each other, doing a lightning-fast buzz-step, the partners, when instructed to "swing!", swung for literally minutes, like so many tops, and then staggered to the open window, where they hung out, gasping, while the next couple took their turn.

No doubt about it - the wandering square dance had come out of the ballroom and back again to the people during the late 19th century. The polished quadrille got involved with the country dance of the backwoods area. The gay Quebec swing got all mixed up with the uproarious New Hampshire contry; a circle mixer from Maine made an alliance with a longways dance from New York State. A true "American hybrid" was being developed.