Here’s where I’ll be in August: Crosstrail Thru Eugene campsite. Come on out for some camping and dancing!
Here’s a list of mailing lists related to various folk dance forms (yes, square dancing is listed…): ListServs on Folk Dancing May 2000
Just for fun: a little drag and drop poetry.
Musical ideas for the day: today is the anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980 (Blow Your Top Day). Which means it would be a good day to play Volcano (Mountain 118).
Here are the lyrics: I’d Really Love To See You Tonight (Parker McGee)
Looks like John Ford Coley is still performing; I don’t know whether to be embarassed or pleased that I recognize none of his “hits”. I think it mainly shows that I didn’t pay attention to pop music in the seventies (or, for that matter, the eighties and nineties).
Here’s a website that talks about Nat and the song: Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer, and here are lyrics.
This version has a sort of honky-tonk piano style. I could get into it.
The Georgia Online! website’s url is “gomm.com”.
I finally finished listening to May’s Hanhurst tape last night. Which means that I finally got my notes up, for whatever that’s worth. I can’t say I was super impressed by this month’s batch, but there are a few goodies.
I think the MP3 quality is a little lower than the MD quality. Both formats compress the music, but I like the sound of the MDs a little better. However, for pitch shifting, I think using CoolEdit’s non-real-time transformations result in a better sound than the on-the-fly shifting done by pitch-shifting hardware. It takes about 20 minutes for CoolEdit to do its work on my 300 Mhz Pentium laptop.
So I’ll be continuing to record records to my laptop, and continuing to report on how it’s going. Next step: singing calls.
I was very pleased to find that the sd-callers mailing list is being archived on egroups. I’m not quite sure how that came about, since the email list itself isn’t served by egroups, but at least the discussions (some silly, some interesting) are being preserved. The archive started December 30, 1996.
Today is L. Frank Baum’s birthday (you know, the guy who wrote the Oz books). So it’s a good day to do “Over the Rainbow,” the Academy Award-winning song from the movie version of The Wizard of Oz.
On today’s date in 1970, the Carpenters’ album, Close To You, containing the hit single, “Close to You,” was released. As it happens, you can now get a square dance version of “Close to You” as an MP3 file from Shakedown Records, distributed by Supreme Audio.
It’s Bobby Darin’s (“Mack the Knife,” “Splish Splash,” “Dream Lover”) birthday.
In 1958, “Oh Lonesome Me” (Don Gibson) was at the top of the country charts.
Just for fun…got a sweet tooth? Check your candy bar knowledge.
Here’s a great shot of the smoke from the Los Alamos fire (and it shows that we didn’t get smoke in Albuquerque): Los Alamos Fire
Dance sources on line:
Looking for some traditional style square dances? Or maybe some contras? There are innumerable sources on line; here’s one:
American Country Dances On Line
And here’s a list of sources:
Speaking of set dances…
Probably all square dance callers should be able to call the Levi Jackson Rag by Pat Shaw. Why? Because it uses 5 couples. It’s done to set music (you can hear a sample on Michael Barker’s Musical Career page and order a recording from the Lloyd Shaw Foundation’s Recreational Dance Program) and it has set choreography: Levi Jackson Rag. And it’s fun! It moves a little quickly for MWSDers and it definitely needs a walkthru or two or three…
I think there’s room in MWSD for set or pattern dances. I know that I get requests for the Grand Colonel Spin (a 64-count figure) and even for Teacup Chain. Some callers have argued that people like the Plus program because it includes calls like Relay the Deucey and Spin Chain and Exchange the Gears that allow the dancers to just dance for 20 beats or so. Jerry Story did a weekend in Gallup recently, and Albuquerque dancers came back talking about how Jerry wants to get rid of Plus because, after all, one can use Mainstream calls to put together combos that mimic the Plus calls. (I asked if he did that with Relay the Deucey…he didn’t.) But that doesn’t address the “dancing” issue.
An Advanced dancer described a fun figure that he’d done at a contra/traditional square dance, and said he wished we (i.e. MWSDers) would do more of those old-time figures. (This one, called by Doc Litchman, was called something like “Bachelor Shack” and involved lots of stars and arm turns.)
You can find old calls on Jim Penrod’s site. Another place is old square dance records…most use standard 64-count figures, but occasionally you’ll find an older, more circle-figured one.
Today is Stevie Wonder’s birthday. I don’t have any singing call records of Stevie Wonder songs, but I’ve heard callers do “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”
On this day, in 1938, Louis Armstrong recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
In 1954, The Pajama Game made its Broadway debut. “Hernando’s Hideaway” is from that musical.
This is cool: The Period Events & Entertainments Re-Creation Society. I’m not real big on costume events (so it’s not just square dance costumes that I have a problem with), but I like this:
More than anything else, we are dedicated to the idea of entertainment as something for people to do rather than watch.
Their next event is Masque of the Red Death and the one after is The ToonTown Hop. They all sound like great fun!
Here’s a page of RealAudio versions of some old songs: Realaudiopages.
And now, for something square dance related, here’s yet another caller listing: Callers & Cuers. I think it might be a grab of Dave Gipson’s list, back before I added a website to my listing. I didn’t see any info on how to add/modify a listing.
Supreme Audio Digital Square Dance Music page has been improved: they’re using streaming audio now (no more waiting while the whole RealAudio file downloads) and there are four new LouMac songs available. However, I really wish they’d provide an instrumental sample as well as the vocal sample. I’m paying for the music, not the singing, and I’d like to be able to hear what I’m buying.
Heterosexism:
One of the criticisms of MWSD, at least in the U.S., is its “couple” bias. Many clubs are couples only, and at many dance weekends, one might as well not attend if one doesn’t have a partner. Couples tend to dance together for the whole dance (unless one member is physically unable to dance every tip, in which case an available single can sometimes serve as a pinch-hitter). Contra and traditional squares dances, on the other hand, are seen as friendlier to singles: dancers are encouraged to change partners between every dance so that everyone gets a chance to dance, whether they came with a partner or not.
However, contra dance weekends (known as dance camps) are biased against single women. Oh, they don’t say that…they just say they try to achieve “gender-balance”…but it always seems like there’s a waiting list of women, waiting for some single guys to register so they’ll be allowed to come.
For example, from Lexington Traditional Dance Association:
The Dance Trance will be limited to 270 dancers and a close gender balance will be maintained. 40 men and 57 women have signed up as of May 3.
Or, from CFOOTMAD Dance Events and News: “Gender balance will be maintained, register early.”
Or, from 2000 Bugstomp (boxed, all-caps, red-letters):
SINGLE FEMALE WAITING LIST NOW IN EFFECT (AS OF 20 FEB 2000)…WOMEN, PLEASE REGISTER AS A GENDER BALANCED COUPLE…YES WE ARE STILL OPEN TO COUPLES AND SINGLE MEN.. PLEASE REGISTER ASAP SO WE CAN CLEAR OUR WAITING LIST…. I NEED AT LEAST 15 SINGLE MEN
Needless to say, this issue has been raised in discussion on rec.folk-dancing; see: Gender balance: good, bad, necessary evil?
For me, as someone whose normal dance partner is another woman, the MWSD world is a little better: if I sign up with a partner, they don’t care (at least for women) what the gender of my partner is. At contra dance weekends, since the expectation is that partners don’t dance together the whole weekend, they do care…they don’t want two extra women around who are supposedly competing for those rare men.
From gender-balancing to gender-free:
Here’s a great article on the gender-free contra dance scene in Boston: Contra Dance, including a comparison with straight (gendered) contra dancing. But notice the effort to distance themselves from MWSD:
Ask any contra dancer about the pastime, and odds are the first thing you’ll hear is that “it’s not square dancing.” No frilly skirts, no bolo ties. Period.
Think about it…these are people who like to do basically the same kind of dancing that we do, and yet they take pains to make sure that no one thinks they’re square dancers. Sounds like an image issue to me.
What do ballet and square dancing have to do with each other (other than, of course, the tutu-like effect of extreme crinolines)? Not a whole lot (other than that they’re both dance forms), but there is a connection via George Balanchine’s ballet Square Dance, a ballet performed to music by Vivaldi and Corelli, using a real square dance caller, at least until 1976, when it was revived without a caller.
The ballet, including a real caller, was recently performed by The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. The caller was a friend of mine, John Oldfield.
I’ve found two reviews of this production: one was a review posted on John’s site:
George Balanchine was a Georgian-born, Russian-bred choreographer, but like many of America’s greatest directors who were immigrants, he saw this country with a unique vision. In his 1957 “Square Dance,” he mixed the traditional ballet vocabulary and classical music (by Corelli and Vivaldi) with the speed, structure and language of all- American folk dancing.
The result is a nifty (and deceptively difficult) piece for a large ensemble and authentic caller (the playful, witty, John Oldfield). The bravura, intensely musical lead couple were Tracy Julias-with flawless footwork, an exquisite line and the elegance of an English rose-and Willy Shives, a dancer of silky lyrical expressiveness.
The other reviewer didn’t much care for the caller’s role: Metromix Dance Review: The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago:
For his “Square Dance,” George Balanchine first combined classical ballet, live music by Vivaldi and Corelli, American folk-dance traditions and an authentic square-dance caller nearly half a century ago.
Balanchine’s main point was that both types of movement are obsessed with order and what the choreographer once termed the “richness of metrical invention.” Aside from the interest of the deconstructive juxtaposition, this piece is still a lot of fun, even if the loose-limbed elegance of Tracy Julias was best enjoyed when the caller was not yacking about the dancer’s legs going “wickety-wack” or some such nonsense.
Balanchine is not the only ballet choreographer to look at square dancing: see Aspen Ballet for a great picture of dancers not in square dance attire (but hey, she’s wearing a crinoline…).
Brimming with tongue-in-cheek humor, Square Dance, a lively and flamboyant piece by modern dance pioneers Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith, returns to delight audiences. Aspen Ballet Company kicks off their pointe shoes to dance barefoot and revel in the sometimes bizarre world of American rural dance halls!
It’s interesting to see the Mainstream list changes that have occurred over the years: Mainstream History. It’d be even more interesting to have something like the Congressional Report, that would give the legislative history behind the various changes.
This is an interesting site: California Folk Music Home Page, especially this page: Walter Harp calling for square dancing, March 10, 1939. I couldn’t really decipher much of what Walter was calling, but it’s interesting to hear that “raw” style.
In a note to the trad-sd mailing list, Fred Feild notes:
It’s the real thang. Raw and right on. I suggested it as a mystery call to this group about a year ago. Nobody could help me decipher Walter’s screams. I finally decided that the figure must be Birdie in the Cage done in a couple visit with opposite swings and a long docey-doe.
Well worth what ever it takes you to download it. It’ll raise yer goose bumps.
Some notable rhymes which can be understood:
- “Now let’s go down the line, meet your honey & everybody wind”
- “Ice cream, lemonade, meet your honey, go promenade”
- “Right now go trade, your little girl for my old maid”
- “All 4 reel and rock, we’ll be here ’til 4 o’clock”
- “Swing, swing, everybody swing, break loose get ’em in a ring”
- “Third gent, out by the right, two hand swing, cut the grade as you go ’round the pretty little thing”
- “Docey doe for a spell, bid those folks fare thee well”
To subscribe to the trad-sd mailing list, go to groups.yahoo.com/group/trad-dance-callers/.
