Ted Glabach - Vermont dance caller

This is the transcription of a lengthy interview with Dummerston, VT, dance caller Ted Glabach and his wife Marie, conducted in 1978 by Steve Green. Glabach was a farmer, born around 1913, who had invited fiddler Louis Jillson to call a dance in Putney, Vermont. (Jillson himself is mentioned by Eloisie Linscott in her classic work (1939), Folk Songs of Old New England.) Glabach decided to learn to call himself, this at a time when the style was changing over from prompted calls to singing squares.

Topics in the interview include:
• numerous discussions of musicians and callers
• "kitchen jigs" (p. 4)
• the role of contra dances (p. 6) and the change from contras to squares in the late 1920s (also p. 14)
• starting the East Putney dance (p. 7)
• his start as a caller (p. 9)
• Dick Perry's Orchestra (p. 12, 30)

• the appearance of "western" squares (p. 16)

• Ralph Page (p. 17)

• dance etiquette (p. 19)

• pigeon wing step (p. 21)
• hippies dancing (p. 23)

• rough dancing and fights (p. 25)

• sample calls (p. 26–32)

 

Glabach was enlisted to narrate a 1950 film, "Green Mountain Land," created by Robert and David Flaherty; he is seen as the caller in a short square dance sequence of that film.

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