New Hampshire Old-Time Country Dance Web Site

Introduction

The series of articles underlying this page was originally inspired by the 1995 Ralph Page Legacy Weekend in Durham NH and by the journal Contra and Square Dance History published by Michael McKernon quarterly during 1995 and 1996.

I’ve been thinking about some of the changes in New England traditional dance over they years, and trying to fit together various observations and bits of knowledge and speculation I’ve encountered over the years.

Before getting any further into this topic, I need to establish several points. The first few deal with my approach to the topic.

• This is a topic that’s been studied at length by folklorists, ethnomusicologists and historians. I am none of those. I am a behavioral psychologist by profession, who has participated in New England Country Dance for the majority of my life in all the major roles: dancer, musician and dance caller.
• As such I think I have some worthwhile observations and insights on the matter. However I also recognize the dangers of trying to discuss a topic in a field outside one’s area of expertise.
• To avoid that, I will present a number of observations, and my interpretations will make use of concepts from behavioral psychology and related evolutionary concepts which I believe are useful in this context.

Contradancing is a living tradition and changes over time

Having said that, here are some broad observations about New England country dance.

• Contradancing is a living tradition. It goes back in its roots several hundred years, and it’s still being done. As with any living tradition it changes to fit the needs of the current musicians and dancers.
• This is a good thing: if it stopped adapting it would probably become a period performance art rather than something that we did just for fun.
• That doesn’t mean that all changes are good, or that everyone has to like the way things are going.
• In the past couple decades [from 2020] it seems like the overall pace of change has accelerated markedly; I’m not sure this is a good thing in the world of traditional music and dance, but we have to make the best of it we can.
• We can try to direct the changes, but my feeling is that it’s very difficult to change trends that often reflect changes in the society and culture at large.

But parts of the tradition are passed on with little change

From September 1992 to February 2019 the Lamprey River Band played a monthly dance in the Dover City Hall. Nearly every time we did a dance I would spend at least a few minutes looking out at the dancers and thinking about how many years earlier, in the 1940s and 1950s, there were also monthly dances in that hall. They were called by people like Phil Johnson, Mal Hayden, Ralph Page and Guy Mann. I knew Phil for years and met Guy Mann’s wife after he died; she came to the dance to see if I wanted any of his square dance materials, and we picked them up at their apartment in Dover. The musicians for the dance included Marcel Robidas, Milt Appleby and Joe Pomerleau, all friends I’ve played music with many times, and others I heard about from them. The dancers I’m less sure about, but I believe Paul Kanaly used to dance there and maybe others.

I would think about how they did many of the same dances we do now, often to the same tunes we use for them today, and called by some of the people who were my role models for learning to call. Suddenly history isn’t something you read about in a book; I was experiencing and participating in history myself!

The Dover dance isn’t happening any more, but we’re doing the dance in the Durham Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. When I first started dancing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dudley Laufman did a monthly dance there which I attended. So it was pretty amazing when Dudley showed up and called a couple dances at our first dance in the hall. And now I think about how I call some of the same dances there that Dudley called 40 years ago, again often to the same tunes. The big difference is that I was actually there, and remember him calling those dances that I am now calling in the same hall to the same tunes.

Although aspects of the dance may have changed

Think about some of the older dances you have danced. Some of them are clearly among the most fun dances around. In my opinion a list of such contras would include Chorus Jig, Hull’s Victory, Sackett’s Harbor, British Sorrow, Lady of the Lake, Money Musk, and actually quite a number of others. However, if you look through a book of dances from say 100 to 125 years ago [1995 reference], you’ll probably find many other dances that appear at best to be worth doing out of historical curiosity. And I say this as someone who overall is probably much more fond of the older dances than many. Even most of the older dances that are popular now once were done differently. Nearly all the old favorite dance were done in ways most modern dancers would consider less exciting.

In fact, sometimes I have wondered why dancing was ever all that popular given the obviously boring qualities of a number of older dances. If that’s what they did a hundred or two hundred years ago, it seems like they couldn’t have had that much fun. A look in dance books from a century ago produces a long list of plain quadrilles that, at least on paper, often seem rather uninspired. But yet, the kind of dancing we do was historically considerably more popular than it is now. In past years many more towns had their own dances, generally weekly rather than monthly. In the middle of rural New Hampshire, the Bradford dance attracted hundreds of dancers every weekend for decades.

One might attribute that to the slower pace of life, or to the dancers being less sophisticated. But consider the fact that contradancing appealed to people like George Washington, whose favorite dance was the Virginia Reel which is now considered boring by many dancers. No one could consider George Washington a simple rural person of simple taste who led a dull life.

In the next section I will present some concepts that may appear to be questionably relevant but I think say something about what’s going on.

Behavioral variability among dancers, musicians & callers …

In the previous section I showed a graph of the hypothetical quality of dances based on a large sample of available dances (top panel) I show a preponderance of mediocre dances and a smaller number of really good ones, which is probably accurate. Behavioral selection alone can account for the disappearance of most mediocre dances from the repertoire as described in the previous section (bottom panel). There are so many good ones that why dance the mediocre ones. You’ve likely experienced that yourself if you’ve been dancing for a while: new dances come along and are called a fair amount at first, but then gradually fade into obscurity.

But things are more complicated than that. In reading an article in Michael McKernan’s journal, some ideas I’ve had for a while started to solidify. As any dancer should be able to understand, the dance as written is really only the basic framework of the dance as actually danced. There are at least three aspects to this, each of which is subject to considerable variability.

Let's start with the music. The written music for most dance tunes is only a framework around which musicians, each with an individual style, build variations and harmonies to fill it out. Compare a dance tune played by a good fiddler who knows the tradition well with the same tune played by someone who is unfamiliar with the tune and the tradition and is reading the music out of a book. Even if the person has excellent reading skills the difference will be obvious. How the tune is played can have a profound effect on how the dancers dance.

The second aspect would be the caller. Some callers read from their cards; some callers don't use cards because they know the dances and don't need them. Some callers are more relaxed, move differently, have a showy style or a more low-key style; callers differ in many ways. The same person could differ substantially depending on outside factors. How the caller calls the dance also has a profound effect on the dancers.

Then there are the dancers themselves. In addition to responding to the music and the calling, different dancers have different styles. If someone were to add in some dance moves that weren’t part of the dance, that might make even a boring dance suddenly be fun.

All of these differences would be examples of behavioral variability. For the dancers, that variability could take the form of minor improvisation, or it could take the form of fairly radical changes to a dance. Of course, variability doesn’t always make something better. Many of us have had the experience of trying something new that just didn’t work. Probably most of us have experienced the results of someone else trying something new that disrupted the dance, sometimes badly. Likewise I've heard music played with very unclear phrasing, no distinguishable rhythm and even without clear melody. But sometimes several factors come together and produce an evening of outstanding music and dance.

Types of Variability

There are undoubtedly many ways in which the variability of behavior can be classified. I'd like to mention one important way in which behavioral variability can be discussed. Some changes in behavior are along a continuum. It occurs in greater or lesser degrees. For example, the quality of dances, as used on the page about selection, varies continuously. It can be broken down into categories as i did, but those are arbitrary. Other examples involve changes of a more discrete (as opposed to continuous) nature. There are real categories rather than just taking a continuous variable and making up arbitrary categories. For example, in Petronella, the change from only the actives dancing to everyone dancing in the "round to your right and balance" part of the dance is a discrete change: it's either one or the other. These discrete changes are very much analogous to the evolutionary concept of a mutation. As in biology, some mutations are successful (as with the dance Petronella), but there are many things that people try that just don't catch on.

Style of Dancing

I’ve mentioned that some of the older dances, especially those found in older dance manuals and not danced frequently these days, appear not to be very interesting. Some of them probably were danced a few times and then dropped out of the repertoire. But some appear in a number of dance manuals so likely were fairly widely danced. So let’s think about how people fill out dances to make them more fun and interesting, to the point where they continue dancing them sometimes for generations.