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Texas squares
Caller Rickey Holden is well represented on this site by clicking this link. A playlist of many Holden videos posted by SDHP on YouTube can be accessed here. It includes these dances from his… View itemDocument
Cowboy Square Dances of West Texas
This booklet provides an introduction to West Texas square dances. After a detailed glossary, complete with diagrams, the author provides a sample of dances as they might be called. The patter is… View itemDocument
Texas Square Dance Festival regions
Texas had a history of square dance contests going back to pre-World War II days. The dance festivals and contests continued into the late 1940s, evidenced by these articles from Foot 'n' Fiddle… View itemSound
Alamo Style
This 1949 description of "Alamo style" balances comes from Rickey Holden, who coined the term to describe the figure. Holden points out that the action itself had been around for a while.… View itemDocument
Bob Sumrall
Bob Sumrall (born Virgil Giles Sumrall) was the leader of the Abilene Set, a group that he started around 1938 (when he was 20); this group of Texas square dancers won the Texas square dance… View itemDocument
Texas Squares at Pinewoods
In the late 1940s, the Country Dance and Song Society was best known for its work focused on English country dances and ritual dances. Starting in 1949 (see cover of the CDSS newsletter) and then at… View itemDocument
Early Texas Dances
This article was written by Olcutt Sanders, a dance caller and historian who was among the founders of Foot 'n' Fiddle magazine, an early square dance magazine in Texas. View itemDocument
Texas Square Dance - Family Tree
The author attempts to trace the various antecedents leading up to Texas square dancing in the 1940s. After the obligatory look at British sources, he notes: "The recent history of the square… View itemDocument
Square Dance Contests - Texas debate, 1948
In the 1920s and 1930s, continuing a little into the 1940s, Texas had numerous square dance competitions. These two essays from Foot 'n' Fiddle magazine debate the merits of such events.In the first… View itemDocument
Texas Square Dance Contests
These are a series of newspaper clippings made by J. Olcutt Sanders, documenting Texas square dance competitions. (Unfortunately, most of them are undated.) We assume that these are from Fort Worth;… View itemDocument
Bob Sumrall - Olcutt Sanders correspondence, 1939
These letters between Bob Sumrall and J. Olcutt Sanders provide a glimpse into Texas square dances in the late 1930s. Sanders was a serious student of square dance history, part of a group of… View itemDocument
1940 Texas Square Dance Contest
Newspaper accounts of a square dance competition won by Bob Sumrall's Abilene set. The story goes into detail about each of the six competing teams,naming each of the dancers, the judges, and… View item
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