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

Browse Items (1926 total)

Document

Meet the Docey-Doe Family - 1949

Square dancers in the late 1940s and 1950s encountered a variety of similar-sounding terms meaning very different figures. The do-si-do / docey-doe / dos-a-dos / do-paso confusion produced several… View item
Document

Lloyd Shaw - Caller of the Month

Article by Mildred Buhler with brief biography and accomplishments of Lloyd Shaw View item
Moving Image

Square Dance at the Aqua Barn, Seattle

Kappie Kappenman, caller; Vivian Williams, fiddle; Phil Williams, guitar; Judy Webster, bass, videoed in the early 1990s by Phil's brother, Mike. The tune is Ragtime Annie. Vivian and Phil… View item
Moving Image

Texas Star - Mike Rogers, Wien, Missouri, 1994

The caller is 92-year-old Mike Rogers, patter calling at a jam session and square dance held at Wien (Chariton County in north central Missouri) in 1994. There's close-up footage of Rogers starting at… View item
Website

Square Dance Legislation Collection

The Square Dance Legislation Collection consists of manuscript materials (1975-present) documenting the history of legislation to designate the square dance as the national or state (folk) dance. The… View item
Website

Set Running - Cecil Sharp in America

The name "running set" comes to us from the work of the great English song collector Cecil Sharp, founder of the English Folk Dance Society and, in 1915, what became Country Dance and Song Society.… View item
Document

Irish Set Dances - an introduction

An introduction to Irish Set DancesSet dances are danced by four couples arranged on the sides of a square. and, occasionally, in “half sets” of two couples opposite each other. Sets are almot always… View item
Website

Medicine Fiddle

This beautiful ethnographic film explores the music and dance heritage of the Fur Trade among Native and Métis families on both sides of the U.S. and Canadian border in the area of the northern Great… View item
Moving Image

Square Dancing in Sudbury, Ontario

This film, made in 1959 by members of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union Local 598 in Sudbury, Ontario, illustrates the wide range of programming that the union provided for the community.… View item
Moving Image

Cheat & Swing - Meredith Robb

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Website

Fogo Island, Newfoundland - A Wedding and a Party

A Roman Catholic wedding (1967) in the church in Joe Batt's Arm South on Fogo Island, Newfoundland; then a party afterward with music and dancing in Joe Batt's Arm North. There appears to… View item
Moving Image

Runnin' the Goat - Newfoundland

Harbour Deep was a Newfoundland logging and fishing community that no longer exists; when the cod fishery collapsed, the town disappeared, with the last residents leaving in 2002. This documentary… View item