Browse Items (186 total)

History of Singing Squaresby Tony ParkesThe earliest description of a singing square I've found so far (in fairly shallow digging) appears in the first edition (1925) of Good Morning, prepared by Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Lovett for Henry Ford. It is…

Caller Walter Lenk, backed up by Tony Parkes, leads dancers through the singing square Just Because. Recorded at the Saturday night Grand Dance, January 1988, at the first Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend in Durham, NH. This version of the dance was…

Glenn F. Pease: Old-Time Barn Dance Caller

From just after WW II to the early 1970s, one of the places to be on a summer Saturday night in a small corner of west-central New Hampshire was at a square dance where changes were called by Glenn Pease…

Tony Parkes is the caller in this excerpt of a Ted Sannella composition, "Do-Si-Do and Face the Sides." The dance, at the Kingston, New Hampshire town hall on the evening of November 18, 2005, was a tribute to Ted Sannella, marking the tenth…

Veteran dance caller George Hodgson leads the classic singing square in this 2004 appearance at the Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend. Dancers at that event over the years became familiar with George's version of the dance-- on the chorus, when George…

Better known for his barn dances and as a contra dance caller, Dudley Laufman also includes some traditional squares in his repertoire. Here, joined by his wife Jacqueline-- "Two Fiddles" -- he leads dancers in Marching Through Georgia, a singing…

An excerpt of the calls for this old square dance, led by Fred Breunig and recorded at the 2004 Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend.

Music by Wild Card: Terry Traub (Piano), Vince O'Donnell (Fiddle), Robin Kynoch (Whistle) and Jon Weinberg (Hammered…

This is the opening of Ralph Sweet calling his version of Marshall Flippo's classic singing square, Auctioneer. Ralph is calling a basic goal post pattern; compare other versions of the dance and read a full description here. The musicians are the…

Caller Tod Whittemore with his yodeling square dance, "Grandma Slid Down the Mountain." As Tod says in his introduction, "This is a dance by Ted Sannella... but he never called it exactly like this." (Tod based his dance on Ted Sannella's Presque…

Frank Fortune with the Myron Colby Orchestra, Bradford, NH

Back in the 1930s and 1940s in many of the villages of New England were held dances referred to as "Barn Dances" or "Round and Square Dances" or "Eastern Barn Dance Style Square Dances". As people did not travel the distances for recreation that we…