New Hampshire Old-Time Country Dance Web Site

Money Musk

The material in this section is based on two articles I wrote for the Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter. The first was published in March, 1988 under the name Some Thoughts About the Dances We are Dancing. The second was from August 2006 and was part of a report on Northern Week at Ashokan that summer. The material has been edited and expanded to fit together, update some of the ideas expressed, and to include some new material and ideas that I didn’t know about when I wrote the original articles. I start with material from the 1988 article.

As you read the article you can see more detail about the various versions of the dance I discuss in the sidebar.

The varied ideas about phrasing of Money Musk

A few months ago (from March 1988) when Steve Zakon was calling, he was asked if he would call Money Musk. Many bands, including Swallowtail and the Lamprey River Band don’t play the tune, so the dance isn’t called very frequently around here. Furthermore, very few triple-minor dances (in which every third couple is active) are called these days anyway. Thus, it was the first time Steve had called the dance. He did reasonably well, but he wasn’t sure of the phrasing, which surprised me. 2020 Note: To be fair, Steve hadn’t been calling all that long at the time, and although he had danced it the chestnuts weren’t being done very frequently in the Monadnock region at the time.

Before the next dance he called in the area, I decided to make sure I knew the phrasing so I could pass it on to him. Besides my memory of dancing it to Tod Whittemore on numerous occasions, as well as to other callers, I consulted a tape of Duke Miller calling the dance in Fitzwilliam several years ago (Duke being one of the people who made the dance very popular in the Monadnock region for many years). Sure enough, Steve was asked to call it again in Madbury this month, and I gave him a card with the phrasing I knew. As we were dancing, it felt just right to me, but I noticed strange facial expressions from Roger, who has undoubtedly danced it at least as much as I have. I talked to him afterwards, and it turns out that he used to dance it with a slightly different pattern with a few additional moves in the dance. [2020 Note: A number of years later I saw a similar response from Marianne Taylor. It turns out she also knew different phrasing for the dance.

This got me to think about the evolution of some of the dances we do over the years. Over the past century, the dances (and music) have evolved considerably. For example, if you went to a dance a hundred years ago (from 1988), most (if not all) of the contras would have been triple minor dances. In Prof. L. H. Elmwell’s Prompter’s Pocket Instruction Book published in 1892, it appears that all the dances were triple minor; he doesn’t even mention whether dances are triple or duple. [This book isn't very well known, but there are numerous books very much like it from that time period. I have it because I ended up inheriting a number of dance books from Guy Mann who used to call in Dover in the 1940s and 1950s.]

The transition from 32 to 24 bars of music

Getting back to Money Musk, for many years, it was danced to a 32‑bar version of the tune. That is not surprising, as the majority of dance tunes are of that length. However, at some point it changed to be danced to a 24‑bar version of the same tune. It’s not entirely clear when that happened. In the Northern Junket, Vol. 2 #11 (1951), Ralph said it happened about a hundred years earlier. In his An Elegant Collection of Contras and Squares (1984) he described it as happening in the 1870s. I’ve read that in some places it kept being danced to 32-bar music into the 1900s.

In any case, the same amount of dancing was compressed into 3/4 the amount of time. In part this was done by changing the forward and back figure to a very quick figure. In the Northern Junket in 1951 Ralph Page describes it as “take two short steps forward and two steps back”. Over time in New Hampshire that evolved into a balance forward and back in many places.

But that only accounts for eight beats (four for each “forward six”); there are 8 left to cut to bring it down to a 48-beat (24-bar) dance. The first four came out of the “go below one couple” which was cut from 8 beats to 4. The remaining beats came out of the final “three quarters around”, which was cut from 8 to 4 beats as well.

Most of the changes in the chestnuts over the years can probably be attributed to two basic factors. (1) There has been a general speeding up of dancing. This corresponds with a general speeding up of so many other aspects of our culture that it’s to be expected. Not only is the overall pace of life greater now, but where people used to come to dances at least in part to socialize and relax after many hours of hard physical labor, these days many people come to dances to get exercise after hours of working in an office. (2) People have on many occasions come up with variations with the intent of making dances more fun. Some of these have caught on to the point of largely replacing existing ways of doing a dance. We’ll see this more with Petronella. But next I present a couple changes/reasons for changes that don’t fit this pattern.

A different idea

Ed Moody wrote an article in the Northern Junket, Vol. 10 #9 (July 1971) about Money Musk, tracing changes in the dance starting with the original The Reel of Sir Archibald Grant of Monie Musk. In asking how it had come to be shortened by 16 beats he suggested the following line of reasoning. Interestingly he described the change as happening about 40 years ago which would make it approximately 1930, considerably later than usually thought to have happened.

He described the kitchen junkets which were where dancing occurred prior to dancing in town halls. The kitchen was usually the biggest room in the house, although often long and narrow, so the best too dance in. Generally all the furniture would be cleared out and a fire made in the wood stove. A milking stool was set in the sink opposite the wood stove for the fiddler/caller to sit on. Because the room was long and narrow, that meant the dancers would have to pass close to the stove. But the stove would get pretty hot, so you wouldn’t want to stay close to it for long.

So rather than the usual graceful turns with outstretched arms, the turns would be done with the forearm vertical to take up less space. As a result it took fewer steps to get around, and people would get ahead of the music. The fiddler/caller therefore started calling the next figure sooner, eventually reaching the point where they would be calling the rights and lefts for the first B part, leaving a whole B part at the end no longer needed. Presumably rather than playing the tune AAB, at some point the C part was added in, and the tune went ABC, with the dance shortened to 24 measures.

Although there is a certain plausibility to this, it seems a bit far fetched as well. It appears to be presented seriously, but the apparently serious presentation of something implausible can be part of Yankee humor, so it’s hard to say. But it was amusing enough to be worth presenting here!

Go below one couple and forward six!

What follows is based on an article written in 2006 as part of a report on that year’s Northern Week at Ashokan. I wrote:

“One of the most enjoyable events was the New England Ball on Friday evening beginning at midnight, at which we did many of the old chestnuts - Petronella, Chorus Jig, Money Musk (for the second time of the week), Lady of the Lake, Lady Walpole's Reel, Gay Gordons, Varsouvienne, etc. Some were done with no calling or minimal calling, starting with just the top couple being active as Dudley often does it. Combine that with some of the best music imaginable and it was truly outstanding!”

But I had one complaint about the teaching and dancing of Money Musk, both there and at the previous Ralph Page Weekend. As we do it in New Hampshire, the calls after crossing over are “Go below one couple and forward six” which has always been taken as short for forward six and back. Then you turn three quarters and forward six again. That started as two steps forward and two steps back, but in New Hampshire it turned into a balance forward and back.

But at Ashokan (and at the previous Ralph Page Weekend) it had been taught as go below one couple and balance to the right and to the left. The calls going back at least to the 1890 (see transcriptions in the sidebar) have been forward six. At sometime in New Hampshire we started dancing it as a balance forward and back, presumably because it was more fun. Dudley has attributed it to the music being played slower than in Boston I believe, leaving more time for footwork which at times has been fancier than most current balances. In Francestown in the 1980's everyone balanced forward and back together making seven discrete sounds. But it's always been forward and back. Those of us who knew the dance cringed when it was taught as side-to-side.

Now I am and was perfectly aware of the folk process and how things including dances often change over time. But this didn’t accomplish any of the usual purposes. It didn’t speed up the dance, and it didn’t make it more fun. I speculated: This is different; it appears to be either based on ignorance of the dance or (hopefully not) a simplification assuming dancers can't handle a balance forward and back. From 2020 I have to add that the side-to-side balance is so prevalent these days that I’m inclined to think that callers might just have been avoiding one more thing to teach in an already complicated dance. In any case, nearly 15 years later I still object!