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

Browse Items (99 total)

  • Subject is exactly "Modern Western 1960 - 1974"
Website

SDFNE 1960's Era Recordings

Jim Mayo undertook a project to use the Square Dance Foundation of New England's audio archives and locate representative samples of square dance calling from the time period when Modern Western… View item
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Jim Mayo 2 - Square Thru and Changing Choreography

The call "square through" provided callers with a new tool for moving dancers around on the dance floor. Jim describes how callers experimented with the figure and how he introduced it in… View item
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Jim Mayo 3 - Start of CALLERLAB

The 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the number of calls, which led to repeated cries from dancers for someone to bring order out of chaos. This led to the formation of CALLERLAB. View item
Sound

Kansas City - Ralph Sweet

Ralph Sweet, caller. This singing square, done to a 12-bar blues instead of the usual AABB structure of a traditional fiddle tune, was recorded live in 1964. View item
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Auctioneer - Tony Parkes

Tony Parkes, caller.This song was originally recorded by Leroy Van Dyke in 1956, and the dance was made famous by Marshall Flippo, who recorded it twice. The calls Tony uses here are from Flippo's… View item
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Auctioneer (remake - clip) - Marshall Flippo

This is a remake in the 1970s by Marshall Flippo of his big hit. For this version, he changed the choreography to reflect changes in MWSD, and the music also has a very different sound. This is Blue… View item
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Auctioneer - Ralph Sweet

Recorded at the Greenfield, MA, Grange Hall on June 27, 2010. The event was sponsored by Country Dance and Song Society to celebrate the publication of "On the Beat with Ralph Sweet." This dance is… View item
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Popcorn Quadrille

Variations on Grand Square figure, danced to early electronic music, a record named "Popcorn." Chicago caller Andy Anderson created the dance to go with it. From a demonstration of historical dances,… View item
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Square Dance Revival - Australia, 1980

Television documentary that looks at square dancing in Australia. Mention is made of the boom years of the early 1950s an the start of square dancing there, but this focuses on a revival around 1980.… View item
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Grey Eagle Square Dance with the New Lost City Ramblers

This program appeared on German television during the 1966 European tour by the New Lost City Ramblers, with Roscoe Holcomb, the Stanley Brothers, Cousin Emmy and others. See article by Philip Gura in… View item
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Do Paso What (clip) - Les Gotcher

sample of Les Gotcher's calling style, in this case building a dance from a break sequence Black Mountain 128 View item
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Texas Whirlwind (clip) - Rickey Holden

Starting with a simply RH star in the center, Holden ups the complexity with a series of Catch All Eight calls around outside of the circle. === TEXAS WHIRLWIND (Folkraft 1073A) – Rickey… View item