The Li'l Abner Official Square Dance Handbook

This book clearly is riding the wave of square dance popularity at that time. Linking square dance with the popular comic strip figures, the book even more explicitly illustrates the way that the dance was linked with hillbillies, and in particular with Sadie Hawkins. (Bugs Bunny appeared in Hillbilly Hare in 1950.)

For example, in a Duds for Dancin' chapter, the author suggests:

• Men may wear slick cowboy shirts, frontier pants, cowboy hats, boots and fancy belts. Or, if they prefer, they may don farmer type outfits with plaid shirts, overalls, straw hats and large red bandannas. Square dance supply firms also carry false beards, mustaches, goatees, rubber buck-teeth, large rubber "bare feet" for comic effect, as well as corn cob pipes, sheriff's badges, toy shotgun for "weddin's"' and hilarious rubber masks.

In addition to dance descriptions, illustrated by lively line drawings—one illustration, not included here, shows a corncob pipe in a woman's mouth—the author tells readers how easy it is to make big money as a caller. We learn that the author is "a former advertising man" who has "built up a lucrative trade which has been keeping him busy 7 nights and 5 afternoons a week during the past ten years."

We learn that square dance calling is easy; a mere two pages is all that is needed for the author to tell all you need to know!

1953