Square Dance History Project
The rich story of North American square dance finally has a home in the digital age.

Browse Items (40 total)

  • Temporal Coverage is exactly "1900-1930"
Website

"Barn Dances with Calls"

Article published in The Old-Time Herald (Volume 7, Number 8) discussing what can be learned from a careful study of old dance records. Includes a discography. View item
Document

"Dancing to the Music: Domestic Square Dances and Community in Southcentral Kentucky (1880-1940)"

This detailed examination of the role of square dances in south central Kentucky is written by a folklorist, who based his findings on interviews with 20 musicians, dancers, and callers in that… View item
Document

Farmhouse Fiddlers: Music & Dance Traditional in the Rural Midwest

This is an excerpt from a detailed and loving look at what the author terms "house-party music." His focus is Wisconsin, and he based the book on interviews with nearly 100 musicians and dancers.… View item
Website

Kentucky Square Dances

An early (1928) collection of figures collected "from callers in Kentucky who are familiar with the old square dances as they are danced in the Kentucky Mountains and elsewhere in the state."This is… View item
Website

78-rpm Recordings of Southern Dance Callers (1924-33)

This collection of nearly 100 old recordings was created by Phil Jamison to accompany the publication of his book, Hoedowns, Reels and Frolics (2015). The book tells the story behind the square… View item
Document

Adirondack Square Dancing

The author describes her experiences traditional square dancing in the Adirondacks from 1918 to 1965, when she began modern squares. This story appeared in the final edition of Ralph Page's Northern… View item
Moving Image

African-American quadrille, 1914 (#1)

SIlent movie footage from 1914 showing African-American dancers in square formation. Referring to the couple dance later in the footage, a comment on a YouTube posting of the same clip says, "They are… View item
Document

American Country Dancing on Colorado's West Slope

The article is based on oral history collected in 1979, though no footnotes or direct quotations are included. Instead, it is a generalized summary of the author's findings. "Depending on… View item
Document

An Old-Time Dance, Missouri, 1929

An account from a 1929 newspaper of what the author deemed "what was probably a duplication of the real, old-time hill country dance." Interestingly, the words "square dance"… View item
Still Image

Bennie "Cuje" Bertram

from the website of the Sgt. Alvin C. York State Historical Park "I was born August 24, 1894, in Fentress County on the Three Forks of the Wolf. Alvin York was our next door neighbor. His daddy was a… View item
Sound

Buffalo Girls - 1927

The recording is [Tommy} Dandurand and his Barn Dance Fiddlers, recorded in 1927, with caller Ed Goodreau. Dandurand was a fixture on the National Barn Dance on WLS radio in Chicago. For a detailed… View item
Document

Cowboy Dance (1923 article)

This description of dances on the Texas frontier was included in a 1923 collection, Coffee in the Gourd, edited by J. Frank Dobie for the Texas Folk-Lore Society. The author paints a vivid picture of… View item