June 21, 2023 • 41 mins
Square dancing has very old roots and has endured as a pastime to present day. Its history, though, comes with some thorns, and scholars don’t even agree on its exact origin.
Research:
- Anderson, Virginia C. “It All Began Anew: The Revival of Folk Dancing.” Western Folklore , Apr., 1948, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1948). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1497379
- Blakemore, Erin. “The Slave Roots of Square Dancing.” JSTOR Daily. 6/16/2017. https://daily.jstor.org/the-slave-roots-of-square-dancing/
- Burger, Hans, complier. “History and Heritage of Modern American Square Dancing.” Phantom Promenaders Munich. European Association of American Square Dance. Via archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20040409113940/http://eaasdc.de/history/shehisto.pdf
- Dallal, Jenine Abboushi. "French Cultural Imperialism and the Aesthetics of Extinction." The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 13 no. 2, 2000, p. 229-265. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/yale.2000.0016.
- Damon, S. Foster. “History of Square Dancing.” Barre, Mass. 1957.
- Gifford, Paul M. “Henry Ford’s Dance Revival and Fiddle Contests: Myth and Reality.” Journal of the Society for American Music (2010) Volume 4, Number 3, pp. 307–338.
- Hunt, Tracie. “Birdie in the Cage.” Produced by Annie McEwen, Tracie Hunte, and Matt Kielty. Radiolab. 10/23/2019. https://radiolab.org/podcast/birdie-cage
- Jamison, Philip A. “Square Dance Calling: The African-American Connection.” Journal of Appalachian Studies , Fall 2003, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 2003). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41446577
- Lovett, Benjamin B. and Henry Ford. “’Good Morning’: After a Sleep of Twenty-five Years, Old-fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford.” Dearborn Publishing Company. January 1926.
- Mangin, Julianne. “The State Folk Dance Conspiracy: Fabricating a National Folk Dance.” Originally published in the Old-Time Herald, v.4(7) p.9-12, Spring 1995. http://juliannemangin.com/the-state-folk-dance-conspiracy/
- MasterClass. “All About Square Dance: A Brief History of Square Dance.” https://www.masterclass.com/articles/square-dance-explained
- Miller, Rebecca S. "Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean." American Music, vol. 28, no. 4, winter 2010, pp. 501+. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A401215265/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=5ce2f07f. Accessed 1 June 2023.
- Nelson, Kevin. "Square Dancing." Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America, edited by Gary S. Cross, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004, pp. 305-307. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3434800241/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=eed3a8c4. Accessed 1 June 2023.
- Optimist Daily. “The history of square dancing in America—part I of True American.” 8/12/2022. https://www.optimistdaily.com/2022/08/the-history-of-square-dancing-in-america-part-i-of-true-american/
- Optimist Daily. “The square dancers of today—part II of True American, a mini-series.” 8/19/2022. https://www.optimistdaily.com/2022/08/the-square-dancers-of-today-part-ii-of-true-american-a-mini-series/
- Quigley, Colin. “Reflections on the Hearing to "Designate the Square Dance as the American Folk Dance of the United States": Cultural Politics and an American Vernacular Dance Form.” Yearbook for Traditional Music , 2001, Vol. 33 (2001). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1519639
- Sabatella, Matthew. “Southern Appalachian Square Dance: A Brief History.” Ballad of America. https://balladofamerica.org/southern-square-dance/
- Szwed, John F. and Morton Marks. “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites.” Dance Research Journal , Summer, 1988, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summe
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In our episode on Scott Joplin, we briefly discussed the
cake walk and its origins is sort of a competitive
entertainment during the era of chattel slavery in the US,
and in that discussion I briefly mentioned that square dancing
also has some thorny backstory, and we immediately got a
(00:39):
lot of email asking for an episode. So here it
is to be clear upfront, square dancing is still a thing.
There are active square dancing clubs all over the US,
as well as some in Canada. There are regional and
national square dancing conventions every year. There are also square
dance organizations outside North America, although it does seem like
(01:02):
some of those have disbanded over the last few years.
At least one of them, like specifically mentioned the effects
of the COVID nineteen pandemic is their reason for disbanding.
So while square dancing is not as popular today as
it was at its peak, we're not talking about a
pastime that's totally gone.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
For anybody that doesn't know. Square dancing is a social
dance in which four couples dance in a square. For
a long time, it was basically assumed that each couple
would be made up of one man and one woman, or,
in the case of gym class, which how a lot
of us got introduced to it, yet one boy and
one girl, unless maybe gym class was not evenly split
(01:44):
into boys and girls. Some square dancing guides written in
more recent years point out that the dancer's gender does
not really matter, and they switch over to using words
like left partner and right partner, or lead and follow.
But a lot of the time the calls, which are
sort of this part of square dancing, still use more
(02:05):
gendered language. It kind of varies a little bit.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Those calls, though, are one of the most recognizable hallmarks
of square dancing. The caller is a person who calls
out the instructions to the dancing couples, usually intertwined with
a sort of pattern. The moves that they are calling
out are known as figures, so for example, the dosy
dough also called the doc doe, or various other like
(02:31):
slight regional pronunciations that comes from the French for back
to back. It's one of several figures whose name does
come from French. So partners face each other, they pass
each other right shoulder to right shoulder, and then kind
of step sideways, so they pass back to back, and
then backwards so that they pass left shoulder to left shoulder,
(02:52):
so they kind of go around one another back to back.
There are dances that use a specific sequence of figures
in a specific order, which dancers can memorize, but a
lot of the time, especially in modern square dancing, the
caller is really the person who's leading the dance, and
the dancers are following the caller's direction. A common theme
(03:13):
in a lot of writing about square dancing is that
it has very old roots. S Foster Damon was a poet,
a William Blake scholar, and a square dancing enthusiast, and
in nineteen fifty seven he published a short book called
The History of Square Dancing, and that book begins quote
anthropologist report that the great apes have been observed dancing
(03:34):
in lines and circles. If this be so, folk dancing
is probably older than mankind. Most other writers don't go
back quite that far. I sort of love that idea, though.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Even with not going back quite that farther, there's this
general sense that we're talking about something with very old roots,
and so a lot of writing about square dancing starts
the story with Morris dancing. That's an English folk dance
that probably dates back to sometime in the mid fifteenth century,
was well established by the mid sixteenth century. This was
(04:10):
traditionally performed by men, although that's not always true today.
Dancers formed two lines facing one another. A lot of
the time they would have bells tied to their lower legs.
This is a really energetic dance, involves a lot of
jumping and leaping.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
A lot of times.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
The dancers have wooden sticks or swords that they tap
together or strike against the ground. There are similar folk
dance traditions in other parts of the world, and Morris
dancing is also likely connected to other traditions like mummers plays.
Not everyone agrees with this connection to Morris dancing, though.
In a two thousand and one paper in the Yearbook
(04:47):
for Traditional Music, Colin Quigley describes the inclusion of Morris
dance in the family tree of modern Western square dance
as rather fanciful Quigly is a professor whose research work
focuses on folklore, ethnomusicology and dance ethnology, and he is
also a fiddler and a dancer himself. But there is
a clearer connection between square dancing and country dances that
(05:12):
were developing in parts of Britain in the sixteenth century.
A lot of country dances also started with people in
rows facing one another, but while the morris dancers were
usually all male, in country dances these were couples, with
the men in one row and the women in the other.
Long Ways dances started with the couple at the head
(05:33):
of the line dancing together, and then the dance moved
down the line from there. Latecomers could join the end
of the lines without interrupting anything, and people who maybe
weren't really all that familiar with the dance could get
the gist of what they were supposed to do by
the time it was their turn.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
There were also country dances in other formations, including squares
and rounds. In sixteen fifty one, John Playford published a
book called the English Dancing Master, or Plain and Easy
Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the tune
to each dance it's usually noted as the first book
to document all these dances. Many editions followed through the
(06:14):
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which included more and more
dances over time. Other dances that evolved during this era
that are sometimes included in the history of square dancing
include maypole dances, Scottish reels, and Irish jigs, and set dances.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
These English country dances were, like their names suggests, associated
with the country. Upper class people did them in their
country homes, while working class people did basically the same
dances in fields or taverns or other gathering places. When
these dances were introduced to France in the early eighteenth century,
(06:51):
the name country dance morphed into contra dance contract meaning
against or opposing, referencing those two lines of dancers facing
one another. That then became contra dance, which still exists today. Meanwhile,
as English country dances were being held in fields and homes,
other styles of dance were being developed in the ballrooms
(07:14):
of France. A court dance called the branles involved a
chain of dancers in a line or a circle. The courtellon,
named for a French word that at the time meant
petticoat was a court dance in which four couples danced
in a square. When the courtillon was introduced into English
speaking areas that name morphed, it got an extra syllable
as cotillion.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Extra eye.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Sometimes it comes out as a syllable, depending on how
southern your accent is. In the eighteenth century, the courtillent
grew into the quadrille, which again had four couples dancing
in a square formation, but tended to be longer and
more complex and intricate than the Courtillan quadrilla was complicated
enough that things like playing cards and fans were printed
(08:00):
that included all the steps.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Of course, when these were introduced into English, it just
became quadrille or quadrille.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I used to have a an acquaintance who I met
through the family who would say quadrille. Sure they got
a very short, clipped version of it, which is ye, yeah,
quite cute.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
There were, also, of course, dances from other parts of Europe,
but the ones that are usually referenced in terms of
square dancing history were mostly from England and France, sometimes
also with the inclusion of Scotland and Ireland, and then
during the colonial era. In the early years in the
United States, a dance or other social event might include
(08:43):
a mix of these and other dances. For example, this
description of a seventeen eighty two ball was written by
a tutor at Yale quote. The ball was opened with
a menuet and a country dance was immediately called. They
succeeded each other till supper, which was a good one,
but plane A few cotillions were then danced with one
or two reels, and the whole closed with a set
(09:06):
of country dances. Broke up around three, and each retired
with his partner. Just a note here, since we talked
about calling earlier. When he says called here, that just
means that somebody called for a country dance to start
the calling out of the figures that is part of
square dancing. Like that was not a thing yet.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yes, that was more like a let's have a minuet.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
In the early nineteenth century, French quadrias started to overtake
English country dances in popularity in the US, again as
a quadrille. Some of this probably stems from the aftermath
of both the Revolutionary War and the War of eighteen twelve.
While there were still pockets of people that felt a
kinship and even loyalty to Britain. There was also a
(09:51):
lot of anti British sentiment. Meanwhile, France had helped the
United States win the Revolutionary War, and in eighteen oh
three the Louisiana Purchase also meant that a lot of
land that had previously been claimed by France instead became
part of the United States.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, that just met.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
More people with more potentially French ancestry and knowledge of
French culture. These dances, of course, also continued to evolve
after being introduced to North America, and we will talk
about that after a sponsor break. English country dances and
(10:33):
French dances like the quadriy continued to evolve after being
introduced to North America, including through influences from outside of
the European colonists who brought them. For example, colonists took
inspiration from indigenous people's round dances, in which a chain
of dancers forms a circle, and ones in which indigenous
(10:55):
dancers formed a line that coiled into the center and
then back out again. There are also letters and journals
from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries written by Europeans that
describe Indigenous people learning European style dances, or Indigenous women
as dancing partners at places like army forts during the
United States westward expansion. Some of these accounts, especially earlier ones,
(11:19):
seem to suggest a cultural exchange between Europeans and Indigenous people,
including descriptions of indigenous communities choosing to do both European
dances and ones from their own cultures and traditions during
their celebrations, But other accounts of this describe it more
as a form of cultural imperialism. For example, Francois de
(11:41):
Chateaubrian's accounts of his travels through North America in seventeen
ninety one include a description of a French dancing master
named Monsieur Violets teaching among the Hedenashone. Taubran's descriptions of
the indigenous dancers are racist and insulting, and he frames
violets teaching efforts as bringing civilization quote even unto the
(12:03):
air and hordes of the New World. Another big influence
on the social dancing of colonial North America and the
early United States came from enslaved Africans. This included ring
dances and ring shouts that originated in Western and Central Africa,
which people continued to do after being brought to the
Americas by force. But the biggest African influences on square
(12:26):
dancing were in the music and the practice of calling.
In that earlier Scott Joplin episode, we talked about entertainment
being one of the few careers during his lifetime that
was open to black people and didn't involve domestic work
or manual labor. Joplin was born after the US Civil War,
but prior to the Civil War it was also extremely
(12:50):
common for enslaved people to work as musicians in the
homes and gathering places of white people, and based on
all the documentation we have, of the first people to
call square dances were black.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
This probably had some roots in the call in response
that was part of both African and African American traditions,
but it also had a really practical use. Black musicians
learned music to play at the homes of white people
who already knew how to do the dances. They had
been taught by a dancing instructor or possibly a family
member or a friend. But when the musicians played these
(13:25):
same songs for their own communities, people did not already
know the steps, so the person playing the fiddle or
the banjo or some other instrument also called out the
figures so that the dancers would know what to do.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
As a note, it is possible that this calling really
got its start among enslaved people in the Caribbean, and
that enslaved people then introduced it to North America from there,
and European dances were introduced of course to the Caribbean
as well. For example, there are a lot of variations
(13:58):
on the quadrille and the Caribbean, with a lot of
different styles, a lot of slightly different names. They vary
a lot from island to island, in country to country,
but like this dance has become a big part of
those cultures.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
S Foster Damon described calling this way, although he credits
it to some smart American, which, given the context he
was writing in, suggests that he thought that this person
was white.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Like all great inventions, it was simple. The fiddler or
the leader of the orchestra merely kept telling the dancers
what to do next. Nobody who knew the six or
eight fundamental calls could go very far wrong. The fiddler
thus ceased to be an accompanist. He became the creator
of the dance. He could vary the figures at any
moment just to keep the dancers on their toes. He
(14:45):
could invent new dances. He could even call at random
anything that happened to pop into his head. These fancy figures,
when nobody knew what was coming next, became popular as
the last dance in a set. The prompter could in
a actually did sing the calls, weaving rude rhymes and
filling out the calls with comments on the individuals present.
(15:07):
Thus the ancient trio of melody, verse and dance was
identified once more, and the collar was the modern equivalent
of the antique corugus. But most important of all, he
kept square dancing alive, fluid growing at the very time
it was becoming formalized in Europe.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's not clear exactly when white musicians or white dancing
instructors started to call dances. The first known reference to
a white collar is from Chicago in eighteen thirty six,
but that was almost two decades after the first descriptions
of black callers at dances. An eighteen forty one book
(15:46):
called The Ballroom Instructor, containing a complete description of cotillions
and other popular dances, mentions Squadrill's being called, so by
that point the practice seems to have become pretty well established,
regardless of who was playing at the dance or doing
the calls.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Although Damon described this as a great invention, a lot
of the people who wrote about it in the mid
eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries were really critical of the
practice of calling. For example, in eighteen fifty six, dancing
master Charles Durang described called dances as annoying and described
calling itself as quote a vile custom marring the melody
(16:25):
of the heirs. This was in his book The Fashionable
Dancer's Casket or the Ballroom Instructor, a new and splendid
work on dancing, etiquette, deportment, and the toilet. In eighteen
ninety three, Gallop, which was a publication of the American
National Association of Masters of Dancing, ran an article that
described the typical caller as quote a very poor musician
(16:47):
with a big voice, who has got all his knowledge
from cheap handbooks. That said dancing was an extremely important
social activity in the nineteenth century when it came to
community gap gatherings, and a lot of the us the
only thing that was more important than a dance was church.
Over time, regional styles of square dancing started to develop,
(17:09):
with different dances and practices in New England, the Southern
Appalachian Mountains, and the western United States. But around the
eighteen nineties, even as the magazine Gallop was complaining about callers,
this type of dancing was starting to wane as a pastime.
People still hosted social dances, but they were more likely
to be dominated by waltzes and two steps. This was
(17:32):
especially true in cities where trends had shifted to other
types of dances, and dancing schools started focusing on those
rather than things like the quadrille. Square dancing and other
similar dances held on in more rural areas, though. From
nineteen sixteen to nineteen eighteen, Cecil Sharp and Maud Carpels
traveled through the Southern Appalachian Mountains as song catchers. They
(17:56):
were collecting and documenting folk songs. This was during the
First English Folk Revival, which stretched from the late nineteenth
through the early twentieth centuries and was an effort to
collect and preserve folk music before it could fade from memory.
Both of these folks were British. Sharp was co founder
of the English folk dance society. In the US, Sharp
(18:18):
and Carpels found areas where folk dances and folk music
were still really popular, and Sharp came to the conclusion
that what he was witnessing was quintessentially American. He also
thought the ballads he heard being performed in Appalachia were
British folk songs essentially unchanged, which were simply no longer
being performed in Britain at all, So there's an irony here.
(18:41):
You could argue that square dancing was quint essentially American
because it incorporated influences from Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples,
becoming its own unique style of social dance. But Sharp
really framed this more as an untarnessed preservation of Anglo
(19:02):
Saxon heritage. He ignored the spirituals and hymns written by
Black people that are also part of Appalachian music, disregarded
any potential influence from indigenous people. S Foster Damon pointed
out that he also disregarded the much more obvious influence
of music and dance from Ireland and France. Sharp and
(19:25):
Carpels did influential and really important work by documenting hundreds
of Appalachian folks songs that might have gone unrecorded if
they hadn't. But this was really skewed, and that skewed
perception fit right into an attempt to revive square dancing
as something quintessentially American, meaning white like in American Country
(19:49):
Dances twenty eight Contra Dances largely from the New England
States by Elizabeth Burschenel, published in nineteen eighteen. The author writes, quote,
this is one of the old, most truly American sections
of our country, where many generations of the same stock
have grown up undisturbed by foreign influences, and where sufficient
time has elapsed since the days of the early settlers
(20:12):
for the building up of certain traditions and customs. The
social group dances which have originated or evolved through common
usage under such conditions in this country are as truly
folk dances as those found in the older countries, and
have elements which are almost universally characteristic of folk dances.
And yet it has often been said that our country
(20:33):
has no folk music or folk dancing of its own
other than that of the American Indian. We are today
a nation of immigrants, not of Indians, and the folk
traditions that are most essentially our own are those which
have developed from traditions brought to us by our early
immigrants into something peculiarly our own. Later on, she specifically
(20:55):
mentions those early immigrants as coming from England, Ireland and Scotland.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
And also this attempt to revive square dancing sort of
the first revival and one that just continued to keep
being re revived. That was happening at the same time
as xenophobia and racism were really escalating in the United States,
and a lot of people really thought these dances were
a return to a forgotten art form that had been
(21:24):
developed by white people and was emblematic of white American culture.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the people who started trying
to introduce square dancing in schools and things like that
doesn't mean that they were explicitly intentionally doing it as
a way to reinforce white identity. But there was definitely
(21:46):
a sense of nostalgia for what people imagined as a
better time using a form of dance that was similarly
imagined as having been created by white European immigrants. We
are going to talk more about all of this after
we pause for a sponsor break. In the nineteen twenties
(22:14):
and nineteen thirties, more and more educators in the United
States started incorporating folk music and square dancing into their curricula.
One person who's often credited with spearheading this is Grace
Laura Ryan, who was a physical education and dance teacher
from Michigan and author of Dances of Our Pioneers, which
(22:35):
came out in nineteen thirty nine. Another big proponent is
Henry Ford. There's spent a lot of popular writing about
him and his advocacy of folk music and square dancing
over the past few years. A lot of this followed
a Twitter thread and a Courts article by Robin Panakia,
and it's included, among other things, a segment on Full
(22:57):
Frontal with Samantha Bee V.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Ford was vocally anti Semitic, and among other things, he
thought that Jewish people had taken over the entertainment industry
to the detriment of American culture. His newspaper, The Dearborn
Independent published a series of essays called The International Jew
that spoken deeply anti Semitic terms about jazz as Jewish
music and described the music itself in terms that evoked
(23:23):
racist stereotypes of black people. Attorney Aaron Sapiro later sued
Ford over material written about him elsewhere in this series,
leading forward to recant and apologize, but Ford also claimed
to have no knowledge of what had been published in
The International jew Henry Ford also did a lot to
(23:43):
promote folk dancing. He was born in eighteen sixty three,
so he was in his teens and early twenties, sort
of at the end of the peak popularity for these dances.
In his late teens, he had joined the Greenfield Dancing Club.
He even met his wife, Claire, at a dance. He
also started playing the violin at age ten, and eventually
(24:05):
bought stratavarius. So Henry Ford's promotion of folk music wasn't
just about jazz. It was about trying to bring back
the pastimes of his youth. In nineteen twenty three, when
he was sixty, Ford bought and restored the Wayside Inn
in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He wanted to host dances there, the
kind that he remembered from when he was young, but
(24:27):
he couldn't remember all the steps. He hired dance instructor
Benjamin Lovett, who went to older dancers and dance teachers
when he didn't know how to do specific dances that
Ford wanted. Eventually, Ford brought Lovett and his wife to Dearborn,
Michigan to teach old fashioned dances there. By late nineteen
twenty five, newspapers in Detroit were reporting on Ford's plan
(24:51):
for a national revival of folk dances. I think at
this point we're on revival number two. Of the many
revivals of folk dancing, the revival, of course, included square dancing.
He built ballrooms, including one named after love It. He
established dancing schools, sponsored folk dancing programs and training programs
(25:12):
for teachers. He donated money to impoverished schools in the South,
and some of that money went to folk dancing, music,
and instructional materials. Ford also bought the Boxford Inn outside
of Detroit and restored it and started trying to rehire
the musicians who had played there forty years before. Many
of those musicians had long since retired or died. He
(25:33):
launched a fiddling contest in nineteen twenty five, although this
quickly grew beyond his control and he wasn't really part
of the national contest that grew out of it. When
more people started having their own radios. At home, Ford
sponsored a radio program called Early American Dance Music. There
are aspects of this that just seemed kind of deranged
(25:54):
to me, Like, well, it's like it's an exemplar of
the danger sick can happen when like wealth and nostalgia
collide in in somebody that has a bias for action. Right, So,
in nineteen twenty six, Dearborn Publishing Company put out a
book titled Good Morning After a Sleep of twenty five years,
(26:15):
Old Fashioned Dancing is being revived by mister and missus
Henry Ford. In addition to including definitions for the most
common figures and music, and diagrams for square dances and
the Virginia reel and waltz's and others, this book also
includes Ford's thoughts on why old fashioned dancing is better.
(26:38):
The writing of this book is actually, I think credited
to Love It, but it's clear that this is like
reflecting Ford's opinions. He wrote quote, unless a dance be sociable,
it cannot live long. Unless it promote the spirit of play,
it will soon weary its devotees. And it is just
here that dances requiring eight or twelve or sixteen persons
(26:58):
as the unit for their performance, make their appeal more
persons thrown together, the spirit of grown up play is irresistible.
And besides, there is a wider scope and a stronger
demand for skill and style. The bane of the modern
dance was its almost utter lack of grace, style, and skill. Oh,
(27:19):
I have so many thoughts. Regardless of how much of
this was specifically about jazz and how much was more
about Ford's own intense nostalgia, these attempts to revive folk
dancing were absolutely connected to his opinion that the United
States was moving in the wrong direction. He was pushing
back against changing social norms and trying to return the
(27:40):
country to what he remembered from his youth, which he
imagined was a better time. Another irony here is that
one big part of all the social and economic changes
that were rippling through the country was the automobile. Yeah,
he did not seem all that critical of his own businesses. Wrong. Oh, No,
transportation evolved, but nothing else so uh.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Interest in square dancing dipped again and then revived again,
this time starting more in the Western United States. A
major figure in this next revival was actually a Chinese
American man named Song Chong, who learned some folk dances
on a ship en route to Europe and then started
a folk dance club in San Francisco after he returned
(28:25):
in nineteen thirty seven. He spearheaded the creation of the
Folk Dance Federation of California, which was formed in nineteen
forty two with Henry buzz Glass as its president. Another
key figure in this revival was Lloyd Shaw, also known
as Pappy. Shaw worked at Cheyenne Mountain Schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado,
(28:46):
and had started encouraging dance as a safer pastime than football.
He also wanted the schools to get away from an
identity that was tightly connected to whether they were winning games.
Shaw started promoting square dances, publishing Cowboys Dances in July
of nineteen thirty nine and establishing a school for square
dance teachers in nineteen forty one. Shaw also established a
(29:08):
summer school for callers in nineteen forty nine. Tracy found
one source saying that Ford, who died in nineteen forty seven,
funded some of Shaw's work, but that is not something
that she was able to confirm. Yeah, I just found
one mention of it in one source. Square dancing's popularity
continued to grow again during the nineteen forties and fifties.
(29:29):
In nineteen forty eight, Bob osgood established a square dancing
magazine called Sets in Order, later renamed Square Dancing, which
ran until nineteen eighty five. A lot of state and
regional square dance associations were established in the nineteen fifties,
and the first national square Dance conventions were held in
the nineteen fifties as well. S. Foster Damon's History of
(29:53):
square Dancing, which we've referenced a few times in this episode,
came out in nineteen fifty seven and it described as
that time as quote a great period of square dancing,
just putting it out there that this great period of
square dancing also included Brown versus Sport of Education in
nineteen fifty four and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in nineteen
(30:14):
fifty five, So the civil rights movement is also part
of the context for the popularity of a dance form.
It was mostly associated with white people, which was widely
imagined as a return to old fashioned Anglo Saxon heritage.
In nineteen seventy one, Bob Osgoode an eleven other callers
established Collar lab to train new square dancing scholars and
(30:37):
to standardize the calls. Collar labs still exist today. Its
twenty twenty three convention was held this past April, and
the twenty twenty four convention is planned for March of
that year in Grapevine, Texas. The International Association of Gay
Square Dance Clubs was established in nineteen eighty three that
also still exists and is hosting a convention in Ottawa
(30:59):
in July of this year and in Durham, North Carolina
next year. Both of these organizations were established during a
movement to name square dancing as the national folk dance
of the United States. A lot of the organizations spearheading
this movement were involved with modern Western square dancing, but
the nineteen fifties, most square dancing had started to fall
(31:20):
into two broad categories. One was traditional square dancing, often
accompanied by a live fiddler, with regional differences in how
dances were done, and the other was modern Western square dancing,
which had really started to coalesce starting in the nineteen fifties.
Modern Western square dancing is more formalized and standardized in
terms of figures and calls, and it's often done to
(31:42):
pre recorded music. There are four main levels, Mainstream plus, Advanced,
and Challenge, and as their names suggest, each level is
a bit more complex than the one before, with more
figures for dancers to learn. Yeah that the musical styles
more often used with traditional folk dancing usually include things
(32:02):
like folk music, fiddle music, what you might describe as
a hoedown, that kind of thing. Modern Western square dancing,
though like uses music across a lot of different genres.
During this campaign, roughly twenty states made square dancing their
state dance, and a handful of others made square dancing
(32:23):
the state folk dance specifically, and the campaign to make
square dancing the national folk dance saw some limited success
in the early nineteen eighties. On June first, nineteen eighty two,
President Ronald Reagan signed a joint resolution naming square dance
as the National Folk dance of the United States for
the years nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
That resolution read quote Whereas square dancing has been a
popular tradition in America since early colonial days, Whereas square
dancing has attained a revered status as part of the
folklore of this country. Whereas square dancing is a joyful
expression of the vibrant spirit of the people of the
United States. Whereas the American people value the display of
(33:06):
etiquette among men and women, which is a major element
of square dancing. Whereas square dancing is a traditional form
of family recreation, which symbolizes a basic strength of this country,
namely the unity of the family. Whereas square dancing epitomizes
democracy because it dissolves arbitrary social distinctions. And whereas it
(33:27):
is fitting that the square dance be added to the
array of symbols of our national character and pride. Now,
therefore be it resolved by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled
that the square dances designated the National Folk Dance of
the United States of America for nineteen eighty two. In
nineteen eighty three, this is just so, Ronald Reagan's yes.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
So.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Other similar mills were introduced unsuccessfully in the years of
five trying to make this like a permanent thing, not
just nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three, and at
various points public hearings were held on the matter. Proponents
of making square dancing the national folk dance talked about
square dancing is something that was cooperative, collaborative, accessible, and
(34:17):
uniquely American. Leon Panetta, who at the time was serving
in the House of Representatives but would later hold a
number of other positions including White House Chief of Staff,
Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Defense, was a
big proponent of this. One of his statements quote, square
dancing is an activity that symbolizes, I think the country's
(34:39):
basic strengths, the unity of the family, and a spirit
of equality in which all people can equally enjoy this
form of dancing. It is truly, I feel, symbolic of
the vitality, diversity, history, and wholesomeness of this country.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
I read that, I'm like how soon. But a lot
of people were opposed to this whole idea, including folklorists,
dance historians, and black, Hispanic and Indigenous dancers. One active
square dancer who spoke in opposition was Bob Dalcimer, who
was not part of the square dancing organizations that were
(35:15):
promoting the bills. Dalcimer objected to the inclusion of clogging,
the Virginia reel, and other dances under the umbrella of
square dance. He also pointed out that rural communities that
had been square dancing for generations aka doing traditional square
dance would probably not recognize modern Western square dance at all.
(35:37):
Some of the testimony against this bill circled back to
some ideas we've already discussed. Raina Green at the time,
president of the American Folklore Society, referenced attempts to force
Indigenous children to assimilate with white culture. We've talked about
a number of those attempts on the show before. Quote,
when my grandmother was a girl, and when my great
(35:58):
grandmother was a child, they were forbidden to speak their language,
forbidden to dance their dances by the American government and
by missionaries in this country. How ironic I think it
would be if my grandmother, who danced the square dance
in school, the only place she ever danced it, but
could not dance her own tribal dances, were now to
(36:18):
be dishonored, and all of our ancestors were to be dishonored,
in fact, with the designation of a dance that represented
the overturn and repression of our own dances and the
oppression of our people. Green also noted that if Congress
were instead to consider an indigenous dance as the National
folk dance, tribal peoples would have difficulty choosing which of
(36:42):
all the round dances it should be, because the round
dances are all different, and the communities involved respect and
honor those differences. And even if there had been more
acknowledgment that European, Indigenous and African influences all played a
part in the development of square dancing, that still left
out a lot of Americans. For example, in the words
(37:03):
of activist Juan Gutierrez during congressional earrings, quote, first of all,
our community doesn't have even the slightest idea of what
square dance is. I am director of a Puerto Rican
folk music group. I respect the traditional square dancing form
as well as others, but I believe in national diversity.
I don't think that square dancing will ever represent the
(37:24):
diversity of people in the United States. Efforts to make
square dancing the national folk dance seem to have fizzled
out in more recent years, and by the late nineteen eighties,
square dancing was also starting to fall out of favor
as part of school pe classes, which again it's where
Holly and I were exposed to it. I'm sure we'll
talk about that more on Friday. As we said earlier,
(37:47):
though there are still local, regional, national, and international square
dance clubs. A lot of the most active square dancers
and callers today are elders, and these organizations are predominant white,
but there are people who are trying to attract younger
and more diverse participants. There's an episode of Radio Lab
(38:08):
called Bertie in the Cage from October of twenty nineteen,
in which reporter Tracy Hunt went to the National Convention
and talked to some square dancers there about, among other things,
how this social dance is trying to evolve. Oh, I'm
very excited for behind the scenes this time around, me too.
(38:28):
Do you have some listener mail to take us out?
Speaker 2 (38:30):
I do this Sister mail is from Vaughn and Von wrote,
Dear Holly and Tracy, I found your episode about knitting,
and I have now listened to all the episodes. You
keep me company as I hike drive to and from
work and while I'm doing things at home. Your sense
of humor, respectful approach to topics, and empathy to all
the topics is so appreciated. I learned so much from
your episodes, and most of the topics don't have relevance
(38:51):
to my working.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Day until Mother Goose.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
I teach kindergarten in the San Francisco area. We use
the Mother Goose poems to teach rhyming. We act out
the poems and draw our own interpretations of them. I've
been meaning to write in when you've done the previous
Mother Goose Impossible episodes, and I'm finally doing it. I've
enclosed the art I use as a sample for Humpty
Dumpty and Jack be Nimble. Also included are the motions
(39:18):
in case you'd like to act out the poems. I
hope you will enjoy the kindergartener's artwork as much as
I do. This Jack be Nimble is from a current student.
I've also enclosed my nine year old pug Finn, who
puts up with me making him wear hats. This one
is an eggplant hat. Thank you again for introducing me
to many new topics and all your hard work. I
(39:39):
wish you continued success, Love Vaughn, So thank you so much,
Vond for these pictures.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Something.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
There's one that's a drawing of Humpty Dumpty. Something about
this drawing of Humpty Dumpty. There is what looks like
a suggestion of legs in blue. But then what I
think is the body of Humpty Dumpty reminds me a
little bit of like like a whole chicken, like with
the two chicken legs sticking up.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
It is adorable. And then the Jackbie Nimble one Check.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Has like a very green head and feet that look
like an anchor to me, so that is fun. And
then of course a pug and a hat with the
like pug tongue lall thing going. So anyway, thank you
so much for sending these adorable pictures.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
That seems like a great way to teach kids about rhymes.
And there are lots of like sort of easy gesture
based dances that you could make to go along with
a lot of these things. So thank you Von for
this note.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com. We're all over social media miss in History.
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you like to get podcasts. Stuff you
(41:15):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
In our episode on Scott Joplin, we briefly discussed the
cake walk and its origins is sort of a competitive
entertainment during the era of chattel slavery in the US,
and in that discussion I briefly mentioned that square dancing
also has some thorny backstory, and we immediately got a
(00:39):
lot of email asking for an episode. So here it
is to be clear upfront, square dancing is still a thing.
There are active square dancing clubs all over the US,
as well as some in Canada. There are regional and
national square dancing conventions every year. There are also square
dance organizations outside North America, although it does seem like
(01:02):
some of those have disbanded over the last few years.
At least one of them, like specifically mentioned the effects
of the COVID nineteen pandemic is their reason for disbanding.
So while square dancing is not as popular today as
it was at its peak, we're not talking about a
pastime that's totally gone.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
For anybody that doesn't know. Square dancing is a social
dance in which four couples dance in a square. For
a long time, it was basically assumed that each couple
would be made up of one man and one woman, or,
in the case of gym class, which how a lot
of us got introduced to it, yet one boy and
one girl, unless maybe gym class was not evenly split
(01:44):
into boys and girls. Some square dancing guides written in
more recent years point out that the dancer's gender does
not really matter, and they switch over to using words
like left partner and right partner, or lead and follow.
But a lot of the time the calls, which are
sort of this part of square dancing, still use more
(02:05):
gendered language. It kind of varies a little bit.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Those calls, though, are one of the most recognizable hallmarks
of square dancing. The caller is a person who calls
out the instructions to the dancing couples, usually intertwined with
a sort of pattern. The moves that they are calling
out are known as figures, so for example, the dosy
dough also called the doc doe, or various other like
(02:31):
slight regional pronunciations that comes from the French for back
to back. It's one of several figures whose name does
come from French. So partners face each other, they pass
each other right shoulder to right shoulder, and then kind
of step sideways, so they pass back to back, and
then backwards so that they pass left shoulder to left shoulder,
(02:52):
so they kind of go around one another back to back.
There are dances that use a specific sequence of figures
in a specific order, which dancers can memorize, but a
lot of the time, especially in modern square dancing, the
caller is really the person who's leading the dance, and
the dancers are following the caller's direction. A common theme
(03:13):
in a lot of writing about square dancing is that
it has very old roots. S Foster Damon was a poet,
a William Blake scholar, and a square dancing enthusiast, and
in nineteen fifty seven he published a short book called
The History of Square Dancing, and that book begins quote
anthropologist report that the great apes have been observed dancing
(03:34):
in lines and circles. If this be so, folk dancing
is probably older than mankind. Most other writers don't go
back quite that far. I sort of love that idea, though.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Even with not going back quite that farther, there's this
general sense that we're talking about something with very old roots,
and so a lot of writing about square dancing starts
the story with Morris dancing. That's an English folk dance
that probably dates back to sometime in the mid fifteenth century,
was well established by the mid sixteenth century. This was
(04:10):
traditionally performed by men, although that's not always true today.
Dancers formed two lines facing one another. A lot of
the time they would have bells tied to their lower legs.
This is a really energetic dance, involves a lot of
jumping and leaping.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
A lot of times.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
The dancers have wooden sticks or swords that they tap
together or strike against the ground. There are similar folk
dance traditions in other parts of the world, and Morris
dancing is also likely connected to other traditions like mummers plays.
Not everyone agrees with this connection to Morris dancing, though.
In a two thousand and one paper in the Yearbook
(04:47):
for Traditional Music, Colin Quigley describes the inclusion of Morris
dance in the family tree of modern Western square dance
as rather fanciful Quigly is a professor whose research work
focuses on folklore, ethnomusicology and dance ethnology, and he is
also a fiddler and a dancer himself. But there is
a clearer connection between square dancing and country dances that
(05:12):
were developing in parts of Britain in the sixteenth century.
A lot of country dances also started with people in
rows facing one another, but while the morris dancers were
usually all male, in country dances these were couples, with
the men in one row and the women in the other.
Long Ways dances started with the couple at the head
(05:33):
of the line dancing together, and then the dance moved
down the line from there. Latecomers could join the end
of the lines without interrupting anything, and people who maybe
weren't really all that familiar with the dance could get
the gist of what they were supposed to do by
the time it was their turn.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
There were also country dances in other formations, including squares
and rounds. In sixteen fifty one, John Playford published a
book called the English Dancing Master, or Plain and Easy
Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the tune
to each dance it's usually noted as the first book
to document all these dances. Many editions followed through the
(06:14):
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which included more and more
dances over time. Other dances that evolved during this era
that are sometimes included in the history of square dancing
include maypole dances, Scottish reels, and Irish jigs, and set dances.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
These English country dances were, like their names suggests, associated
with the country. Upper class people did them in their
country homes, while working class people did basically the same
dances in fields or taverns or other gathering places. When
these dances were introduced to France in the early eighteenth century,
(06:51):
the name country dance morphed into contra dance contract meaning
against or opposing, referencing those two lines of dancers facing
one another. That then became contra dance, which still exists today. Meanwhile,
as English country dances were being held in fields and homes,
other styles of dance were being developed in the ballrooms
(07:14):
of France. A court dance called the branles involved a
chain of dancers in a line or a circle. The courtellon,
named for a French word that at the time meant
petticoat was a court dance in which four couples danced
in a square. When the courtillon was introduced into English
speaking areas that name morphed, it got an extra syllable
as cotillion.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Extra eye.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Sometimes it comes out as a syllable, depending on how
southern your accent is. In the eighteenth century, the courtillent
grew into the quadrille, which again had four couples dancing
in a square formation, but tended to be longer and
more complex and intricate than the Courtillan quadrilla was complicated
enough that things like playing cards and fans were printed
(08:00):
that included all the steps.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Of course, when these were introduced into English, it just
became quadrille or quadrille.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I used to have a an acquaintance who I met
through the family who would say quadrille. Sure they got
a very short, clipped version of it, which is ye, yeah,
quite cute.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
There were, also, of course, dances from other parts of Europe,
but the ones that are usually referenced in terms of
square dancing history were mostly from England and France, sometimes
also with the inclusion of Scotland and Ireland, and then
during the colonial era. In the early years in the
United States, a dance or other social event might include
(08:43):
a mix of these and other dances. For example, this
description of a seventeen eighty two ball was written by
a tutor at Yale quote. The ball was opened with
a menuet and a country dance was immediately called. They
succeeded each other till supper, which was a good one,
but plane A few cotillions were then danced with one
or two reels, and the whole closed with a set
(09:06):
of country dances. Broke up around three, and each retired
with his partner. Just a note here, since we talked
about calling earlier. When he says called here, that just
means that somebody called for a country dance to start
the calling out of the figures that is part of
square dancing. Like that was not a thing yet.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yes, that was more like a let's have a minuet.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
In the early nineteenth century, French quadrias started to overtake
English country dances in popularity in the US, again as
a quadrille. Some of this probably stems from the aftermath
of both the Revolutionary War and the War of eighteen twelve.
While there were still pockets of people that felt a
kinship and even loyalty to Britain. There was also a
(09:51):
lot of anti British sentiment. Meanwhile, France had helped the
United States win the Revolutionary War, and in eighteen oh
three the Louisiana Purchase also meant that a lot of
land that had previously been claimed by France instead became
part of the United States.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, that just met.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
More people with more potentially French ancestry and knowledge of
French culture. These dances, of course, also continued to evolve
after being introduced to North America, and we will talk
about that after a sponsor break. English country dances and
(10:33):
French dances like the quadriy continued to evolve after being
introduced to North America, including through influences from outside of
the European colonists who brought them. For example, colonists took
inspiration from indigenous people's round dances, in which a chain
of dancers forms a circle, and ones in which indigenous
(10:55):
dancers formed a line that coiled into the center and
then back out again. There are also letters and journals
from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries written by Europeans that
describe Indigenous people learning European style dances, or Indigenous women
as dancing partners at places like army forts during the
United States westward expansion. Some of these accounts, especially earlier ones,
(11:19):
seem to suggest a cultural exchange between Europeans and Indigenous people,
including descriptions of indigenous communities choosing to do both European
dances and ones from their own cultures and traditions during
their celebrations, But other accounts of this describe it more
as a form of cultural imperialism. For example, Francois de
(11:41):
Chateaubrian's accounts of his travels through North America in seventeen
ninety one include a description of a French dancing master
named Monsieur Violets teaching among the Hedenashone. Taubran's descriptions of
the indigenous dancers are racist and insulting, and he frames
violets teaching efforts as bringing civilization quote even unto the
(12:03):
air and hordes of the New World. Another big influence
on the social dancing of colonial North America and the
early United States came from enslaved Africans. This included ring
dances and ring shouts that originated in Western and Central Africa,
which people continued to do after being brought to the
Americas by force. But the biggest African influences on square
(12:26):
dancing were in the music and the practice of calling.
In that earlier Scott Joplin episode, we talked about entertainment
being one of the few careers during his lifetime that
was open to black people and didn't involve domestic work
or manual labor. Joplin was born after the US Civil War,
but prior to the Civil War it was also extremely
(12:50):
common for enslaved people to work as musicians in the
homes and gathering places of white people, and based on
all the documentation we have, of the first people to
call square dances were black.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
This probably had some roots in the call in response
that was part of both African and African American traditions,
but it also had a really practical use. Black musicians
learned music to play at the homes of white people
who already knew how to do the dances. They had
been taught by a dancing instructor or possibly a family
member or a friend. But when the musicians played these
(13:25):
same songs for their own communities, people did not already
know the steps, so the person playing the fiddle or
the banjo or some other instrument also called out the
figures so that the dancers would know what to do.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
As a note, it is possible that this calling really
got its start among enslaved people in the Caribbean, and
that enslaved people then introduced it to North America from there,
and European dances were introduced of course to the Caribbean
as well. For example, there are a lot of variations
(13:58):
on the quadrille and the Caribbean, with a lot of
different styles, a lot of slightly different names. They vary
a lot from island to island, in country to country,
but like this dance has become a big part of
those cultures.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
S Foster Damon described calling this way, although he credits
it to some smart American, which, given the context he
was writing in, suggests that he thought that this person
was white.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Like all great inventions, it was simple. The fiddler or
the leader of the orchestra merely kept telling the dancers
what to do next. Nobody who knew the six or
eight fundamental calls could go very far wrong. The fiddler
thus ceased to be an accompanist. He became the creator
of the dance. He could vary the figures at any
moment just to keep the dancers on their toes. He
(14:45):
could invent new dances. He could even call at random
anything that happened to pop into his head. These fancy figures,
when nobody knew what was coming next, became popular as
the last dance in a set. The prompter could in
a actually did sing the calls, weaving rude rhymes and
filling out the calls with comments on the individuals present.
(15:07):
Thus the ancient trio of melody, verse and dance was
identified once more, and the collar was the modern equivalent
of the antique corugus. But most important of all, he
kept square dancing alive, fluid growing at the very time
it was becoming formalized in Europe.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's not clear exactly when white musicians or white dancing
instructors started to call dances. The first known reference to
a white collar is from Chicago in eighteen thirty six,
but that was almost two decades after the first descriptions
of black callers at dances. An eighteen forty one book
(15:46):
called The Ballroom Instructor, containing a complete description of cotillions
and other popular dances, mentions Squadrill's being called, so by
that point the practice seems to have become pretty well established,
regardless of who was playing at the dance or doing
the calls.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Although Damon described this as a great invention, a lot
of the people who wrote about it in the mid
eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries were really critical of the
practice of calling. For example, in eighteen fifty six, dancing
master Charles Durang described called dances as annoying and described
calling itself as quote a vile custom marring the melody
(16:25):
of the heirs. This was in his book The Fashionable
Dancer's Casket or the Ballroom Instructor, a new and splendid
work on dancing, etiquette, deportment, and the toilet. In eighteen
ninety three, Gallop, which was a publication of the American
National Association of Masters of Dancing, ran an article that
described the typical caller as quote a very poor musician
(16:47):
with a big voice, who has got all his knowledge
from cheap handbooks. That said dancing was an extremely important
social activity in the nineteenth century when it came to
community gap gatherings, and a lot of the us the
only thing that was more important than a dance was church.
Over time, regional styles of square dancing started to develop,
(17:09):
with different dances and practices in New England, the Southern
Appalachian Mountains, and the western United States. But around the
eighteen nineties, even as the magazine Gallop was complaining about callers,
this type of dancing was starting to wane as a pastime.
People still hosted social dances, but they were more likely
to be dominated by waltzes and two steps. This was
(17:32):
especially true in cities where trends had shifted to other
types of dances, and dancing schools started focusing on those
rather than things like the quadrille. Square dancing and other
similar dances held on in more rural areas, though. From
nineteen sixteen to nineteen eighteen, Cecil Sharp and Maud Carpels
traveled through the Southern Appalachian Mountains as song catchers. They
(17:56):
were collecting and documenting folk songs. This was during the
First English Folk Revival, which stretched from the late nineteenth
through the early twentieth centuries and was an effort to
collect and preserve folk music before it could fade from memory.
Both of these folks were British. Sharp was co founder
of the English folk dance society. In the US, Sharp
(18:18):
and Carpels found areas where folk dances and folk music
were still really popular, and Sharp came to the conclusion
that what he was witnessing was quintessentially American. He also
thought the ballads he heard being performed in Appalachia were
British folk songs essentially unchanged, which were simply no longer
being performed in Britain at all, So there's an irony here.
(18:41):
You could argue that square dancing was quint essentially American
because it incorporated influences from Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples,
becoming its own unique style of social dance. But Sharp
really framed this more as an untarnessed preservation of Anglo
(19:02):
Saxon heritage. He ignored the spirituals and hymns written by
Black people that are also part of Appalachian music, disregarded
any potential influence from indigenous people. S Foster Damon pointed
out that he also disregarded the much more obvious influence
of music and dance from Ireland and France. Sharp and
(19:25):
Carpels did influential and really important work by documenting hundreds
of Appalachian folks songs that might have gone unrecorded if
they hadn't. But this was really skewed, and that skewed
perception fit right into an attempt to revive square dancing
as something quintessentially American, meaning white like in American Country
(19:49):
Dances twenty eight Contra Dances largely from the New England
States by Elizabeth Burschenel, published in nineteen eighteen. The author writes, quote,
this is one of the old, most truly American sections
of our country, where many generations of the same stock
have grown up undisturbed by foreign influences, and where sufficient
time has elapsed since the days of the early settlers
(20:12):
for the building up of certain traditions and customs. The
social group dances which have originated or evolved through common
usage under such conditions in this country are as truly
folk dances as those found in the older countries, and
have elements which are almost universally characteristic of folk dances.
And yet it has often been said that our country
(20:33):
has no folk music or folk dancing of its own
other than that of the American Indian. We are today
a nation of immigrants, not of Indians, and the folk
traditions that are most essentially our own are those which
have developed from traditions brought to us by our early
immigrants into something peculiarly our own. Later on, she specifically
(20:55):
mentions those early immigrants as coming from England, Ireland and Scotland.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
And also this attempt to revive square dancing sort of
the first revival and one that just continued to keep
being re revived. That was happening at the same time
as xenophobia and racism were really escalating in the United States,
and a lot of people really thought these dances were
a return to a forgotten art form that had been
(21:24):
developed by white people and was emblematic of white American culture.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the people who started trying
to introduce square dancing in schools and things like that
doesn't mean that they were explicitly intentionally doing it as
a way to reinforce white identity. But there was definitely
(21:46):
a sense of nostalgia for what people imagined as a
better time using a form of dance that was similarly
imagined as having been created by white European immigrants. We
are going to talk more about all of this after
we pause for a sponsor break. In the nineteen twenties
(22:14):
and nineteen thirties, more and more educators in the United
States started incorporating folk music and square dancing into their curricula.
One person who's often credited with spearheading this is Grace
Laura Ryan, who was a physical education and dance teacher
from Michigan and author of Dances of Our Pioneers, which
(22:35):
came out in nineteen thirty nine. Another big proponent is
Henry Ford. There's spent a lot of popular writing about
him and his advocacy of folk music and square dancing
over the past few years. A lot of this followed
a Twitter thread and a Courts article by Robin Panakia,
and it's included, among other things, a segment on Full
(22:57):
Frontal with Samantha Bee V.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Ford was vocally anti Semitic, and among other things, he
thought that Jewish people had taken over the entertainment industry
to the detriment of American culture. His newspaper, The Dearborn
Independent published a series of essays called The International Jew
that spoken deeply anti Semitic terms about jazz as Jewish
music and described the music itself in terms that evoked
(23:23):
racist stereotypes of black people. Attorney Aaron Sapiro later sued
Ford over material written about him elsewhere in this series,
leading forward to recant and apologize, but Ford also claimed
to have no knowledge of what had been published in
The International jew Henry Ford also did a lot to
(23:43):
promote folk dancing. He was born in eighteen sixty three,
so he was in his teens and early twenties, sort
of at the end of the peak popularity for these dances.
In his late teens, he had joined the Greenfield Dancing Club.
He even met his wife, Claire, at a dance. He
also started playing the violin at age ten, and eventually
(24:05):
bought stratavarius. So Henry Ford's promotion of folk music wasn't
just about jazz. It was about trying to bring back
the pastimes of his youth. In nineteen twenty three, when
he was sixty, Ford bought and restored the Wayside Inn
in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He wanted to host dances there, the
kind that he remembered from when he was young, but
(24:27):
he couldn't remember all the steps. He hired dance instructor
Benjamin Lovett, who went to older dancers and dance teachers
when he didn't know how to do specific dances that
Ford wanted. Eventually, Ford brought Lovett and his wife to Dearborn,
Michigan to teach old fashioned dances there. By late nineteen
twenty five, newspapers in Detroit were reporting on Ford's plan
(24:51):
for a national revival of folk dances. I think at
this point we're on revival number two. Of the many
revivals of folk dancing, the revival, of course, included square dancing.
He built ballrooms, including one named after love It. He
established dancing schools, sponsored folk dancing programs and training programs
(25:12):
for teachers. He donated money to impoverished schools in the South,
and some of that money went to folk dancing, music,
and instructional materials. Ford also bought the Boxford Inn outside
of Detroit and restored it and started trying to rehire
the musicians who had played there forty years before. Many
of those musicians had long since retired or died. He
(25:33):
launched a fiddling contest in nineteen twenty five, although this
quickly grew beyond his control and he wasn't really part
of the national contest that grew out of it. When
more people started having their own radios. At home, Ford
sponsored a radio program called Early American Dance Music. There
are aspects of this that just seemed kind of deranged
(25:54):
to me, Like, well, it's like it's an exemplar of
the danger sick can happen when like wealth and nostalgia
collide in in somebody that has a bias for action. Right, So,
in nineteen twenty six, Dearborn Publishing Company put out a
book titled Good Morning After a Sleep of twenty five years,
(26:15):
Old Fashioned Dancing is being revived by mister and missus
Henry Ford. In addition to including definitions for the most
common figures and music, and diagrams for square dances and
the Virginia reel and waltz's and others, this book also
includes Ford's thoughts on why old fashioned dancing is better.
(26:38):
The writing of this book is actually, I think credited
to Love It, but it's clear that this is like
reflecting Ford's opinions. He wrote quote, unless a dance be sociable,
it cannot live long. Unless it promote the spirit of play,
it will soon weary its devotees. And it is just
here that dances requiring eight or twelve or sixteen persons
(26:58):
as the unit for their performance, make their appeal more
persons thrown together, the spirit of grown up play is irresistible.
And besides, there is a wider scope and a stronger
demand for skill and style. The bane of the modern
dance was its almost utter lack of grace, style, and skill. Oh,
(27:19):
I have so many thoughts. Regardless of how much of
this was specifically about jazz and how much was more
about Ford's own intense nostalgia, these attempts to revive folk
dancing were absolutely connected to his opinion that the United
States was moving in the wrong direction. He was pushing
back against changing social norms and trying to return the
(27:40):
country to what he remembered from his youth, which he
imagined was a better time. Another irony here is that
one big part of all the social and economic changes
that were rippling through the country was the automobile. Yeah,
he did not seem all that critical of his own businesses. Wrong. Oh, No,
transportation evolved, but nothing else so uh.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Interest in square dancing dipped again and then revived again,
this time starting more in the Western United States. A
major figure in this next revival was actually a Chinese
American man named Song Chong, who learned some folk dances
on a ship en route to Europe and then started
a folk dance club in San Francisco after he returned
(28:25):
in nineteen thirty seven. He spearheaded the creation of the
Folk Dance Federation of California, which was formed in nineteen
forty two with Henry buzz Glass as its president. Another
key figure in this revival was Lloyd Shaw, also known
as Pappy. Shaw worked at Cheyenne Mountain Schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado,
(28:46):
and had started encouraging dance as a safer pastime than football.
He also wanted the schools to get away from an
identity that was tightly connected to whether they were winning games.
Shaw started promoting square dances, publishing Cowboys Dances in July
of nineteen thirty nine and establishing a school for square
dance teachers in nineteen forty one. Shaw also established a
(29:08):
summer school for callers in nineteen forty nine. Tracy found
one source saying that Ford, who died in nineteen forty seven,
funded some of Shaw's work, but that is not something
that she was able to confirm. Yeah, I just found
one mention of it in one source. Square dancing's popularity
continued to grow again during the nineteen forties and fifties.
(29:29):
In nineteen forty eight, Bob osgood established a square dancing
magazine called Sets in Order, later renamed Square Dancing, which
ran until nineteen eighty five. A lot of state and
regional square dance associations were established in the nineteen fifties,
and the first national square Dance conventions were held in
the nineteen fifties as well. S. Foster Damon's History of
(29:53):
square Dancing, which we've referenced a few times in this episode,
came out in nineteen fifty seven and it described as
that time as quote a great period of square dancing,
just putting it out there that this great period of
square dancing also included Brown versus Sport of Education in
nineteen fifty four and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in nineteen
(30:14):
fifty five, So the civil rights movement is also part
of the context for the popularity of a dance form.
It was mostly associated with white people, which was widely
imagined as a return to old fashioned Anglo Saxon heritage.
In nineteen seventy one, Bob Osgoode an eleven other callers
established Collar lab to train new square dancing scholars and
(30:37):
to standardize the calls. Collar labs still exist today. Its
twenty twenty three convention was held this past April, and
the twenty twenty four convention is planned for March of
that year in Grapevine, Texas. The International Association of Gay
Square Dance Clubs was established in nineteen eighty three that
also still exists and is hosting a convention in Ottawa
(30:59):
in July of this year and in Durham, North Carolina
next year. Both of these organizations were established during a
movement to name square dancing as the national folk dance
of the United States. A lot of the organizations spearheading
this movement were involved with modern Western square dancing, but
the nineteen fifties, most square dancing had started to fall
(31:20):
into two broad categories. One was traditional square dancing, often
accompanied by a live fiddler, with regional differences in how
dances were done, and the other was modern Western square dancing,
which had really started to coalesce starting in the nineteen fifties.
Modern Western square dancing is more formalized and standardized in
terms of figures and calls, and it's often done to
(31:42):
pre recorded music. There are four main levels, Mainstream plus, Advanced,
and Challenge, and as their names suggest, each level is
a bit more complex than the one before, with more
figures for dancers to learn. Yeah that the musical styles
more often used with traditional folk dancing usually include things
(32:02):
like folk music, fiddle music, what you might describe as
a hoedown, that kind of thing. Modern Western square dancing,
though like uses music across a lot of different genres.
During this campaign, roughly twenty states made square dancing their
state dance, and a handful of others made square dancing
(32:23):
the state folk dance specifically, and the campaign to make
square dancing the national folk dance saw some limited success
in the early nineteen eighties. On June first, nineteen eighty two,
President Ronald Reagan signed a joint resolution naming square dance
as the National Folk dance of the United States for
the years nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
That resolution read quote Whereas square dancing has been a
popular tradition in America since early colonial days, Whereas square
dancing has attained a revered status as part of the
folklore of this country. Whereas square dancing is a joyful
expression of the vibrant spirit of the people of the
United States. Whereas the American people value the display of
(33:06):
etiquette among men and women, which is a major element
of square dancing. Whereas square dancing is a traditional form
of family recreation, which symbolizes a basic strength of this country,
namely the unity of the family. Whereas square dancing epitomizes
democracy because it dissolves arbitrary social distinctions. And whereas it
(33:27):
is fitting that the square dance be added to the
array of symbols of our national character and pride. Now,
therefore be it resolved by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled
that the square dances designated the National Folk Dance of
the United States of America for nineteen eighty two. In
nineteen eighty three, this is just so, Ronald Reagan's yes.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
So.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Other similar mills were introduced unsuccessfully in the years of
five trying to make this like a permanent thing, not
just nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three, and at
various points public hearings were held on the matter. Proponents
of making square dancing the national folk dance talked about
square dancing is something that was cooperative, collaborative, accessible, and
(34:17):
uniquely American. Leon Panetta, who at the time was serving
in the House of Representatives but would later hold a
number of other positions including White House Chief of Staff,
Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Defense, was a
big proponent of this. One of his statements quote, square
dancing is an activity that symbolizes, I think the country's
(34:39):
basic strengths, the unity of the family, and a spirit
of equality in which all people can equally enjoy this
form of dancing. It is truly, I feel, symbolic of
the vitality, diversity, history, and wholesomeness of this country.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
I read that, I'm like how soon. But a lot
of people were opposed to this whole idea, including folklorists,
dance historians, and black, Hispanic and Indigenous dancers. One active
square dancer who spoke in opposition was Bob Dalcimer, who
was not part of the square dancing organizations that were
(35:15):
promoting the bills. Dalcimer objected to the inclusion of clogging,
the Virginia reel, and other dances under the umbrella of
square dance. He also pointed out that rural communities that
had been square dancing for generations aka doing traditional square
dance would probably not recognize modern Western square dance at all.
(35:37):
Some of the testimony against this bill circled back to
some ideas we've already discussed. Raina Green at the time,
president of the American Folklore Society, referenced attempts to force
Indigenous children to assimilate with white culture. We've talked about
a number of those attempts on the show before. Quote,
when my grandmother was a girl, and when my great
(35:58):
grandmother was a child, they were forbidden to speak their language,
forbidden to dance their dances by the American government and
by missionaries in this country. How ironic I think it
would be if my grandmother, who danced the square dance
in school, the only place she ever danced it, but
could not dance her own tribal dances, were now to
(36:18):
be dishonored, and all of our ancestors were to be dishonored,
in fact, with the designation of a dance that represented
the overturn and repression of our own dances and the
oppression of our people. Green also noted that if Congress
were instead to consider an indigenous dance as the National
folk dance, tribal peoples would have difficulty choosing which of
(36:42):
all the round dances it should be, because the round
dances are all different, and the communities involved respect and
honor those differences. And even if there had been more
acknowledgment that European, Indigenous and African influences all played a
part in the development of square dancing, that still left
out a lot of Americans. For example, in the words
(37:03):
of activist Juan Gutierrez during congressional earrings, quote, first of all,
our community doesn't have even the slightest idea of what
square dance is. I am director of a Puerto Rican
folk music group. I respect the traditional square dancing form
as well as others, but I believe in national diversity.
I don't think that square dancing will ever represent the
(37:24):
diversity of people in the United States. Efforts to make
square dancing the national folk dance seem to have fizzled
out in more recent years, and by the late nineteen eighties,
square dancing was also starting to fall out of favor
as part of school pe classes, which again it's where
Holly and I were exposed to it. I'm sure we'll
talk about that more on Friday. As we said earlier,
(37:47):
though there are still local, regional, national, and international square
dance clubs. A lot of the most active square dancers
and callers today are elders, and these organizations are predominant white,
but there are people who are trying to attract younger
and more diverse participants. There's an episode of Radio Lab
(38:08):
called Bertie in the Cage from October of twenty nineteen,
in which reporter Tracy Hunt went to the National Convention
and talked to some square dancers there about, among other things,
how this social dance is trying to evolve. Oh, I'm
very excited for behind the scenes this time around, me too.
(38:28):
Do you have some listener mail to take us out?
Speaker 2 (38:30):
I do this Sister mail is from Vaughn and Von wrote,
Dear Holly and Tracy, I found your episode about knitting,
and I have now listened to all the episodes. You
keep me company as I hike drive to and from
work and while I'm doing things at home. Your sense
of humor, respectful approach to topics, and empathy to all
the topics is so appreciated. I learned so much from
your episodes, and most of the topics don't have relevance
(38:51):
to my working.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Day until Mother Goose.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
I teach kindergarten in the San Francisco area. We use
the Mother Goose poems to teach rhyming. We act out
the poems and draw our own interpretations of them. I've
been meaning to write in when you've done the previous
Mother Goose Impossible episodes, and I'm finally doing it. I've
enclosed the art I use as a sample for Humpty
Dumpty and Jack be Nimble. Also included are the motions
(39:18):
in case you'd like to act out the poems. I
hope you will enjoy the kindergartener's artwork as much as
I do. This Jack be Nimble is from a current student.
I've also enclosed my nine year old pug Finn, who
puts up with me making him wear hats. This one
is an eggplant hat. Thank you again for introducing me
to many new topics and all your hard work. I
(39:39):
wish you continued success, Love Vaughn, So thank you so much,
Vond for these pictures.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Something.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
There's one that's a drawing of Humpty Dumpty. Something about
this drawing of Humpty Dumpty. There is what looks like
a suggestion of legs in blue. But then what I
think is the body of Humpty Dumpty reminds me a
little bit of like like a whole chicken, like with
the two chicken legs sticking up.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
It is adorable. And then the Jackbie Nimble one Check.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Has like a very green head and feet that look
like an anchor to me, so that is fun. And
then of course a pug and a hat with the
like pug tongue lall thing going. So anyway, thank you
so much for sending these adorable pictures.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
That seems like a great way to teach kids about rhymes.
And there are lots of like sort of easy gesture
based dances that you could make to go along with
a lot of these things. So thank you Von for
this note.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com. We're all over social media miss in History.
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you like to get podcasts. Stuff you
(41:15):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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