Cowpuncher's Square Dance Call - response
Folklorist Sam Hinton has some fun with the poem. If it is to be taken literally as an example of a dance call, Hinton calculates that the cowboys are dancing at a speed greater than 20 miles per hour. He continues, looking at the centrifugal force:
"This means that if the dancer maintained his distance from the center by holding to the end of a swiveled five-foot rope, the rope would be subjected to a strain of about 980 pounds. Or, to bring the figures up to date in this supersonic age, the dancer would be subjected to a sidewise strain of about 6.16 gravities. These figures speak volumes for the nonskid qualities of the boots worn at the time, and I think they place the cowboys themselves among the world's most athletic dancers; the loggers of the North Woods, reputed to have arranged hobnails in both boot heels so as to form their initials and to have been able to stamp both initials at once into a ten-foot ceiling, are not in the same league."
Turning serious, in conclusion the author cautions us to maintain a healthy skepticism about such supposed historical artifacts; "It may be, after all, that the poem was never intended to represent a set of dance directions, but is a compilation of slightly polished standard phrases, skillfully combined with the intention of evoking a pleasant picture of a good time in a day unhappily past."
Subjects: General - Dance and Culture, Traditional Western (pre-1940)
Tags: cowboy, Sam Hinton
Item Relations
| This Item | is related to | Item: Cowpuncher's Square Dance Call |
| This Item | is related to | Item: "Meet Your Honey, Go Hog Wild" |
| This Item | is related to | Item: "The Texas Cattle Country and Cowboy Square Dance" – Olcutt Sanders |
| This Item | is related to | Item: Frontier Dances - Bob Cook |
| This Item | is related to | Item: Cowboy Dance (1923 article) |
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"This means that if the dancer maintained his distance from the center by holding to the end of a swiveled five-foot rope, the rope would be subjected to a strain of about 980 pounds. Or, to bring the figures up to date in this supersonic age, the dancer would be subjected to a sidewise strain of about 6.16 gravities. These figures speak volumes for the nonskid qualities of the boots worn at the time, and I think they place the cowboys themselves among the world's most athletic dancers; the loggers of the North Woods, reputed to have arranged hobnails in both boot heels so as to form their initials and to have been able to stamp both initials at once into a ten-foot ceiling, are not in the same league."
Turning serious, in conclusion the author cautions us to maintain a healthy skepticism about such supposed historical artifacts; "It may be, after all, that the poem was never intended to represent a set of dance directions, but is a compilation of slightly polished standard phrases, skillfully combined with the intention of evoking a pleasant picture of a good time in a day unhappily past."