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AFRICAN AMERICAN ROOTS OF SQUARE DANCE

African American Quadrille 1914

What do you see in this video?

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OVERVIEW

Terminology
History
Why Forgotten?
Next Steps?

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BROAD USE OF ‘SQUARE DANCE’

American set dances for couples in a

Plus other dances and games done at a square dance

or long

or big

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OTHER TERMS FOR ‘SQUARE DANCE’

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ORIGINS OF SQUARE DANCE

ENGLAND

THE AMERICAS

EUROPE

AFRICA

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1651 The English Dancing Master, John Playford, Publisher

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1770 A Set of Cotillons Compos’d by Mr. Siret

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EVIDENCE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ROOTS

Drawings, photos & docs
Rare videos
Oral histories
Letters by European visitors to America

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1820 “Dance in a Country Tavern” by John Lewis Kimmel

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John Putnam (1817-1895), Band Leader & Prompter

John Putnam, Black fiddler and caller

John Putnam (c. 1817–1895) was born into slavery and by the 1850s was living in Greenfield, MA, where he worked as a barber. He played left-handed fiddle and Putnam's Orchestra played for dances and other musical events. The ads are newspapers in the areas around Greenfield, MA:��Putnam, John - Dancing ad - 7 Jan 1856�Town Hall Ball - 27 Dec 1869�Catholic group - 2 Aug 1875�Prof. - Lake Pleasant - 11 Aug 1873�John Putnam Remembered - 1 July 1934��The enclosed "Old-Timer" newspaper clipping, from July 1, 1934, says: "He possessed the curious ability to play second violin and direct the movements of the dancers at the same time and woe to the dancer who made a mistake. Putnam would abruptly halt the music, come down from the orchestra platform and correct the error, showing the dancer how it should be done. He did not pretend to be a dancing master, but possessed an unusual knowledge of how the old time dances should be done and insisted on their being danced in what he believed to be the proper fashion. He organized an orchestra which was in wide demand over a long period of years throughout this country and towns beyond its borders. ... He had peculiar ability in playing the contra tunes, executing jigs, reels and hornpipes so seductively that the most rheumatic legs were inspired to perform with the greatest agility."��The article goes on to say, "Back in the eighties dances usually began at 8 in the evening and did not end until three or four o'clock in the morning, the programs including some 30 or more dances. This put a heavy task on orchestras, which had to play through that number of dances, divided between quadrilles and contra dances, with a few waltzes and polkas interspersed, which made a fairly full night."

https://squaredancehistory.org/items/show/1958

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BLACK & MIXED RACE FIDDLERS 1709-1789

Connecticut (50)

Delaware (12)

Georgia (5)

Maryland (43)

Massachusetts (34)

New Jersey (33)

Source: Keller, Dance and Its Music, 2007.

New York (40)

North Carolina (7)

Pennsylvania (48)

Rhode Island (15)

South Carolina (18)

Virginia (84)

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New Orleans 1819

English-born architect Benjamin Latrobe attended a ball:

“I have never been in a public assembly altogether better conducted.... Altogether the impression was highly favorable. The only nuisance was a tall, ill-dressed black in the music gallery, who played the tambourine standing up, and in a forced and vile voice called the figures as they changed.”

(Jamison, 2015, p. 44)

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South Carolina 1825

A visitor from Ghent (at that time a part of the Netherlands) attended a plantation ball near Columbia, South Carolina. Slave musicians provided the music:

“The whole music consisted of two violins and a tamborine. This tamborine was struck with a terrible energy. The two others scraped the violin, in the truest significance of the word; one of them cried out the figures, imitating with his body all the motions of the dance.”

(Jamison, 2015, p. 52)

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Boston 1832

Carl Arfwedson of Sweden attended a ball in a hotel:

“A practice which surprised me more than any other was, that one of the musicians attached to the band constantly called out to the dancers the different figures they were to go through…The instrument on which he performed was a broken violin; and he often beat time so loud with one foot, that the music was drowned by the noise…He called out as loud as he could, in a hoarse and shrill voice: ‘Advance!’ ‘Retreat!’ ‘Ladies chain!’ Gentlemen’s chain!’ ‘Sideways!’ and so on.” (Jamison, 2015, pp. 52-53)

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WHY AFRICAN AMERICAN CALLERS & FIDDLERS?

Suppression of native cultures by Colonizer; imitation of Colonizer culture

Migration after 1791 Haitian Revolution up through New Orleans

African call and response; African banjo, 3-string fiddle, tambourine

Music and calling defined as slaves’ task

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AFRICAN AMERICAN SQUARE DANCES IN APPPALACHIA 1800s to mid-1900s

Example: Martinsville, VA

Public balls and barn dances plus home dance parties into 1960s
“Breakdowns” for 2, 4, or more couples
Constant footwork plus occasional solos in the center

Source: Spalding (2014) pp. 63-95

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WHY DID WE FORGET THESE ROOTS?

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COLLECTOR BIAS

Example:

Cecil Sharp (1859-1924)

Cecil James Sharp (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924)^[1] was an English-born folk song collector, musician and composer. He was a key leader of the folk-song revival in England as a collector, archivist, teacher and promoter. He gathered thousands of tunes both from rural England and the Southern Appalachians region of the United States, and wrote an influential volume, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions.

Based on his study of surviving rural folk dances as well as written sources, he collected, curated and popularized the latent practices of English country dance and Morris dancing. In 1911, he co-founded the English Folk Dance Society (which was later merged into the English Folk Dance and Song Society).

Sharp's legacy survives in the folk music and dances that he helped preserve, some of which are still performed today. Many of the most popular musicians of the British Folk Revival of the 1960s, for example, used songs collected by Sharp in their music and understood his contribution.^[2]

Conversely, Sharp has been criticised by historians for the manner in which his racist and sexist attitudes influenced his works, noting that he refused to collect folk music from people of colour. Sharp has also been criticised for downplaying the role of female and ethnic Scottish creators in the history of folk music.

with his collaborator Maud Karpeles during the years 1916–1918, large audiences came to hear Sharp lecture about folk music, and Sharp also took the opportunity to do field work on English folk songs that had survived in the more remote regions of southern Appalachia, pursuing a line of research pioneered by Olive Dame Campbell and Katherine Jackson French.^[12]^[13] Traveling through the Appalachian mountains in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many using the pentatonic scale and many in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England. Generally, Sharp recorded the tunes, while Karpeles was responsible for the words. They collected songs from singers including Jane Hicks Gentry, Mary Sands and the Ritchie family of Kentucky.

-Wikipedia

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DEFINITION OF RECREATION & FOLK DANCE

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RECORDING INDUSTRY

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NEXT STEPS?

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CULTURAL EQUITY WORK

Country Dance and Song Society

Own our history
Inclusivity statement
Equity training
Amplify work of Black artists
Resource portal
Community grants
Listen, read, get involved

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COMMUNITY INITIATIVES

Community dance
Musical revival and collaboration
Interview the older generation
Apply for grants
Share info & ideas
What else?

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MY PROPOSAL: DIVERSITY THRU THE ARTS

Community Dance

Easy circles, squares, longways sets
Live music (get a grant from CDSS?)
Intergenerational (8-adult)
Hosted by different groups in Wooster
Bringing together people of various racial, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds

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AFRICAN AMERICAN ROOTS OF SQUARE DANCE

Listen to the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

What do you hear in their music?

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REFERENCES

Emery, Lynn Fauley. Black Dance: From 1619 to Today, 2nd Revised Ed. Princeton Book Company, 1972, 1988.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977, 2003.

Jamison, Philip A. “Square Dance Calling: The African-American Connection.” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2003, pp. 387–398. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41446577.

Jamison, Phil. Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Spalding, Susan Eike. Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014.