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

Browse Items (11 total)

  • Tags: Michigan
Document

"Swing Your Partner!"

This account of square dancing in Michigan dates from 1951, and informs the reader early on, "Today, Michigan is a square dancer's paradise." Because of that time, it offers a glimpse of an era when… View item
Document

Wisconsiana: Here and There (1949)

Short mention of the booming interest in square dancing in Wisconsin: "North, South, East, and West are resounding to the 'shuffiing' of the Square Dance which is sweeping in increasing… View item
Document

Revival of American Square and Country Dancing - 1949

This article documents the change on American dance floors in Michigan state in the late 1940s, where, in the author's words, "croonersare replaced bycallers." She cites the work of Grace Ryan in… View item
Document

Quadrilles and Cotillions

This is a collection of e-mails in 1997 from the Fiddle-L discussion group, with participants offering thoughts about tunes and dances. Although the information can be found on a website, we're… View item
Website

Karl Byarski - Michigan fiddle and dance recordings

Paul Gifford is a researcher and musician with a particular focus on tradition Michigan fiddling. He writes:---I put up a large collection of home recordings of fiddling made by Karl Byarski, of… View item
Document

Star All Eight (Michigan)

View item
Document

Michigan Square Dance News

View item
Website

Midwestern Fiddle Masters:
Michigan's Les Raber and Indiana's Francis Geels

Biographies of two fiddlers, each of whom played extensively for square dances in Michigan and Indiana. View item
Website

Michigan Fiddle Style

Folklorist Eliot Singer presented a paper—"How to Start Figuring Out What "Michigan Fiddle Style" Is"—at a Michigan Historical Society meeting in 1988. In it, he references… View item
Document

Henry Ford and Benjamin Lovett

Dave Taylor and Al Brundage called a dance in Lovett Hall in Dearborn, Michigan, around 1980. This article is Taylor's effort to tell some of the story of that venue. [Editor's note: some of the… 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