New Hampshire Old-Time Country Dance Web Site

New Hampshire Country Dance History

A Variety of Historically Oriented Pages

This section contains a variety of information, mostly historical in nature. I couldn't figure out any way to organize a unified history section, so instead I will present pages with a variety of historical themes.

Note: This section will eventually be much more substantial.

Page & Section Contents

On This Page: This page provides an introduction to the section on the history of New Hampshire Country Dance mainly since about 1980.
Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter. A section on the Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter, its history and influence, and topics and events covered by the Newsletter.
Still to Come: I intend to do a lot moe with this section although it may be several months before it happens.

About This Section

This section contains a variety of material about New Hampshire Country Dance of an historical nature. I focus on the time during which I have been dancing: from the late 1970s to the present. I have documentation for much of what happened while the Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter was being published (1985–2008), so that time period receives the fullest coverage.

I thought quite a bit about how to organize this section. I was able to come up with any good way to present a unified history of dancing in the Seacoast area, never mind in the state and maybe beyond. There are too many aspects that don’t fit in when I try to do it that way.

So instead I will present several different sections with different approaches to the historical information. One section has to include the Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter for at least two reasons. First, it was very influential in the Seacoast area dance scene and beyond for many years. Second, it was very influential on this coverage which depends heavily on the documentation provided by the Newsletter. [As of now this is the only section that's done.]

I went through the Newsletter issue by issue noting any topic or article I thought would be of interest to this section and to other sections of the website in a spreadsheet. I then set up several different categories of topics and types of information and checked off each time that topic came up in the newsletter. I am using these checklists to help me organize the material in this section.

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.