New Hampshire Old-Time Country Dance Web Site

Dance Programs

A Comparison of a few Evening Dance Programs

In this section I present several listings of dance programs from a few different New Hampshire square dance callers. The choice of callers and programs is largely determined by what I have available, mostly from recordings made of dances.

Page & Section Contents

This section presents listings of dance programs from several excellent callers. I think the change and consistency observed in a caller's program of dances for an evening can be interesting, especially in some of the excellent callers of previous generations who tended to have more consistency in their programming. I also present some analysis and comparison of the programs. Hopefully this section will also be useful, for example, to some future ethnomusicologist looking to study this from a different perspective.

So far I've included the following callers; I will add to this section if additional dance programs become available. You can use the buttons below (or the website menus) to get to each page.

Duke Miller
About The Bradford & Emerson Hill Square Dances
Frank Fortune
George Hodson

About the NH Country Dance Website

There are two major sections to this website: the Music and the Dance sections. This is the Dance section. Both are described below.

The Website. The New Hampshire Country Dance website is divided into the Music and Dance sections. The Dance section presents stories, history, philosophical and analytical articles. Topics include how dances and dancing evolve, and the repertoire and calling patterns of several callers The Music section presents a few hundred tunes in abc and PDF format as well as discussion of topics like learning by ear vs. from written music.

Edited & Published by Peter Yarensky. I am a dancer, caller and dance musician from the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. I play fiddle, piano and hammered dulcimer as well as several instruments that I play not very well. I call contras and squares with the Lamprey River Band and am available to call with others. I particularly enjoy calling for beginners due to the wonderful enthusiasm they exhibit.

Contact Information

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions related to any website material, if you find any errors, typos, omissions, or if you want to know about music and/or dance in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire.

Peter Yarensky
email:	peter dot yarensky at unh dot edu or
	peterynh at icloud dot com
	➛ usual substitutions apply
web:	nhcountrydance.com or
	fiddle.nhcountrydance.com or
	dance.nhcountrydance.com

Sources

Website Photos

All photos were taken by Peter Yarensky (website editor and writer of most of the contents) unless otherwise noted. All photos are used with permission.

There are a number of items, used by permission, from the Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH, USA. These include:

Photos taken by Patrick Stevens. These are now part of the Patrick Stevens Collection, 1992-2018, MC 331.
Dance program booklet, West Swanzey NH, Dec. 23, 1898. Brownlow and Dorothea Thompson Collection, 1802-1994, MC 294.

Patrick was very supportive of my website efforts, and gave me a substantial collection of his dance photos explicitly to use on the website. After he died, Penny very generously donated his entire collection of dance photos and recordings to the New Hampshire Library of Traditional Music & Dance at University of New Hampshire.

Other Graphics

All sources of graphics allow usage on a noncommercial website.

Sources not mentioned here are acknowledged fully where used.

Aridi Computer Graphics Vector Clip Art Collection, Vol. 1–5. Aridi Computer Graphics, Inc., Dallas, TX, 1992–1994. Available for download as part of a larger collection at the Internet Archive.

Jury, David. The little book of typographic ornament, London, Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2015. Downloadable as a set of 720 TIFF files.

Underground Grammarian, Printers' Devices & Clip Art collection. Early 1990s; no more information available, although there's a lot on the Internet about the Underground Grammarian.

Visual Delights collection of graphics, SunShine, Austin TX, 1991. Although that was too early to mention the web, the description of allowed usage says the graphics "may be incorporated in any products you sell or give away, provided you aren't primarily selling or giving away the images themselves." This usage would seem well within that definition.