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

Browse Items (1929 total)

Moving Image

Phil Jamison 3 - The caller's role in Southern squares

The square dance caller in Southern dance traditions plays a somewhat different role than his Northern counterpart. Phil looks at the way a Southern caller improvises and uses basic figures in… View item
Moving Image

Phil Jamison 4 - Cecil Sharp and the "running set"

Phil discusses the origins of the term "running set," going back to when the English folklorist and collector Cecil Sharp first encountered southern Appalachian dancing.For a demonstration of the… View item
Document

Square Dancing Standard and Experimental Guidelines

A flood of new calls in the early 1970s led a group called Square Dance Systems to publish a catalogue of calls, an attempt to bring order to an increasingly-complex universe of new figures. Square… View item
Document

Hand position in MWSD

The formation of CALLERLAB in 1974 established definitions and helped modern square dancing become more standardized. This does not mean that everything fell neatly into place! The cover illustration… View item
Website

Stan Winchester - C4 Singing Squares

Stan Winchester was a MWSD dancer who created a large body of singing squares for the C4 community. These dancers sometimes share a series of recorded audiotapes with prerecorded calls, and Winchester… View item
Document

Uncle Steve's Quadrille (description)

This dance was published in Elizabeth Burchenal's Folk-Dances from Old Homelands (1922). This is the first dance iin the book, one of two American dances, along with Old Dan Tucker. (See the moving… View item
Sound

Uncle Steve's Quadrille (recording)

The first audo file contains instructions for the dance; it is followed by two music files with calls for the first and second figures.Detailed information about this dance, as published in Elizabeth… View item
Website

Square and Contra Dance Posters

A collection of 43 flyers and posters collected by Steve Green that advertise contra and square dance events in northwestern Massachusetts, southwest New Hampshire, and southeast Vermont dating from… View item
Still Image

Ted Glabach - photographs

Three photographs of Vermont farmer and dance caller Ted Glabach, taken by Steve Green, plus one photo (from his scrapbook) of Glabach as a younger dancer. View item
Website

Sammy Spring - fiddler & square dance caller

Sammy Spring (1883–1958) was a fiddler and square dance caller from Otis, Massachusetts, in the western part of the state. This website includes photos of him and a lengthy interview conducted in 1939… View item
Moving Image

Cheyenne Mountain School and Dr. Lloyd Shaw

A history of the Cheyenne Mountain School of Colorado Springs through the films of Dr. Lloyd Shaw shot in the 1920's and 1930's and narrated by former Cheyenne Mountain School student and… View item
Website

Square Dance Oldies

Stig Malmo is an avid collector (in Denmark) of American square dance recordings and other related material. He makes selected recordings available on his website, and others are released on CD… View item