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

Browse Items (1930 total)

Sound

Double Tea-Cup Chain - Les Gotcher

This is Les Gotcher calling, recorded live at Kirkwood Lodge (Osage Beach, Missouri) at the second annual Les Gotcher Square Dance Institute. We hear Gotcher start with two regular squares doing a… View item
Document

Cecil Sharp at Pine Mountain Settlement School

Cecil Sharp first encountered southern Appalachian dancing at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky on August 31, 1917. (See here for Sharp's notes that day in his diary.) The event became… View item
Website

Square Dance, Oakland, CA - 1919

This silent newsreel footage from Gaumont News, a French company, shows several sets of dancers doing a quadrille in an outdoor setting. The brief title before the action reads: "Choose… View item
Document

Notes on Timing - Ed Gilmore

This set of comments by Ed Gilmore on the subject of timing predates the Related items by some 30 years. Gilmore is dealing with fundamentals of square dancing in the early years of modern squares, so… View item
Still Image

Round Dance Positions 2

Round dancing, a form of couple dancing in which a cuer calls out the figures, is frequently a part of modern square dance clubs. In some locations, instead of round dances being incorporated into an… View item
Moving Image

George Washington's Favourite

This dance comes from the Asa Wilcox 1793 manuscript held by the Newberry Library of Chicago; St. Louis dance leader John Ramsay found it in Leland Tichnor’s George Washington’s Birthday… View item
Moving Image

Quadrille (Länger, 1824, №1)

The first figure of a quadrille from 1824; the source document is Christian Länger's book, Terpsichore, Ein Taschenbuch der Neuesten Gesellschaftlichen Tänze, and can be read, in German,… View item
Document

A Few Square Dance Calls from Bill McAdoo

Editor Larry Edelman writes: "I collected these figures in the mid-1980’s at the Independence Grange Hall Dance in Independence, Washington County in southwestern Pennsylvania. During my visits,… View item
Document

Carl Sims - Milestone Award

Other entries in this archive discuss the establishment and early years of American square dancing in Japan. Caller Carl Sims played a significant role in developing modern square dancing there,… View item
Website

Eastern Kentucky Folk Dancing Oral History Project

This is a collection of recorded interviews that document the development of traditional square and related dance activity in southeastern Kentucky. The interviews were with mostly elderly residents… View item
Website

Square Dancing in the Kentucky Foothills

Based on extensive interviews, audio files and video recordings, the author has compiled a detailed look at dancing in the area around Berea, Kentucky. Her introduction provides a broad look at the… View item
Document

Finding List of Southeastern Square Dance Figures

Author J. Olcutt Sanders embarked on a serious effort to track down examples in other regions of square dance figures found in the Southeastern United States. He devised a shorthand method of… View item