One Sunday night about six months ago,
I was calling at a community dance an hour from home. Good band of
talented young musicians and a friendly crowd. We had some hard-core
contra dancers—one of whom left early on, perhaps because the first
few dances weren’t challenging enough for his taste—and some
absolute beginners, with a nice mix of ages. One young girl, maybe 4
or 5, apparently comes often; she was dancing with her dad and she
had clearly absorbed the most important things to know: keep smiling,
look at the people around you, keep moving, and hold out your hands.
Later in the evening, second dance after the break, we were down to
short sets, 7 or 8 couples in each. I looked at one line, saw a bunch of adults, and announced Money Musk, a tune
the band had been itching to play and a dance that I knew would be
familiar to many of those present at that time. No sooner had I had
announced the dance than I noticed a different young girl lined up in
another set.
No problems… the dancers around her, with huge smiles on
their faces and gentle handholds, helped her up and down the line,
one of the nicest moments I can recall at a dance in a long time. She
sat on a pew afterwards on the side of the hall—we were dancing in
an old church—and then curled up and slept there for the rest of
the evening.
That next week, thanks to Terri Gross
on NPR, I learned that Hazel
Dickens had died. She was a bluegrass musician, singer,
songwriter and activist, born in coal-mining West Virginia; I
encountered her first on the “Hazel
and Alice” album she recorded with Alice Gerrard in 1973. I
spent a few hours that night reading her obituary and tributes,
watching videos on YouTube and Folkstream, and remembering those
years. Woke up the next morning with Hazel still on my mind and put
on the LP; my wife, unaccustomed to the high lonesome country sound
at 8 in the morning, asked what was going on and I tried to explain.
Those two events have been rattling
around in my brain, and I’ve been thinking about the scene,
such as it was, when I discovered traditional dance in the early
1970s, the same time when I heard Hazel and Alice. At that time, we’d
see many of the same people in different settings. The people who
were at a dance were the same folks you’d see at a folk music concert
or festival, or at a food co-op distribution meeting, or at a
community sing, or at a potluck supper at someone’s house. One night,
we’d be sitting around together talking and singing, another night a
few people would be on stage and others would be in the audience
listing to a performance, and another night different ones would be
on stage playing while friends and neighbors bounced around on the
dance floor. As the evening wore on, the dark corners back of the
stage would have kids curled up on sleeping bags while their parents
danced.
We don’t see as much of that anymore.
Perhaps we’re victims of our own success. Now we have more
specialized gatherings… Irish sessions separate from old-time
string band jams, contras separate from squares from English country
dance, not to mention the proliferation of even more specialized
groups doing tango or swing, and even there you can choose between
East Coast Swing and West Coast. All this, and I don’t live in an
urban setting. (Back then, the first Pat Shaw dances I
learned—Walpole Cottage and Levi Jackson Rag—were at contra
dances. A friend who started dancing in New York City in the 1970s
says it was several years before she figured out that some of the
dances on the programs were contras and some were ECD; that’s how
integrated the two forms were.) This Sunday night experience made me
remember how uncommon now it is to see kids that young brought not to
a specialized “family dance” but to a regular dance.
I get the sense that the pendulum may
be swinging back again. After a period of some pretty steady
contra-only for hard-core dancers, I’m learning of more
family-friendly events starting up. The new square dance scene that
Bill Martin and others created in Portland is spreading to other
venues; Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, DC are all places where I’ve
heard about similar events, which place a premium on community fun.