Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance (Music in American Life) - Softcover

Jamison, Phil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252080815 ISBN 13: 9780252080814

Verlag: UNIV OF ILLINOIS PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics, old-time musician and flatfoot dancer Philip Jamison journeys into the past and surveys the present to tell the story behind the square dances, step dances, reels, and other forms of dance practiced in southern Appalachia.

These distinctive folk dances, Jamison argues, are not the unaltered jigs and reels brought by early British settlers, but hybrids that developed over time by adopting and incorporating elements from other popular forms. He traces the forms from their European, African American, and Native American roots to the modern day. On the way he explores the powerful influence of black culture, showing how practices such as calling dances as well as specific kinds of steps combined with white European forms to create distinctly "American" dances.

From cakewalks to clogging, and from the Shoo-fly Swing to the Virginia Reel, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics reinterprets an essential aspect of Appalachian culture.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Philip Jamison is a nationally-known old-time musician, flatfoot dancer, and square dance caller, who teaches Appalachian music and dance, as well as mathematics, at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He writes on Appalachian music and dance at www. philjamison.com.

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Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics

Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance

By Phil Jamison

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08081-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, xi, 
Preface, xv, 
Introduction. Appalachia and Appalachian Dance, 1, 
1. Diversity and Cultural Transmission in the Southern Mountains, 9, 
2. The Southern Square Dance, 20, 
3. Square Roots, 24, 
4. Transforming Tradition, 44, 
5. Cecil Sharp and the Kentucky Running Set, 60, 
6. Sharp's Legacy, 75, 
7. "Barn Dances with Calls" (1924–1933), 82, 
8. The Virginia Reel, 91, 
9. Religion and Dancing, 102, 
10. Couple Dances, 112, 
11. The Cakewalk, 122, 
12. Appalachian Step Dance, 129, 
13. Clogging: Appalachian Step Dance on Stage, 150, 
14. Community Dance in Appalachia, 167, 
15. The American Square Dance, 177, 
Appendix. "Barn Dances with Calls" (1924–1933), 193, 
Glossary of Dance Terms, Figures, and Steps, 201, 
Notes, 209, 
Bibliography, 241, 
Index, 265, 

CHAPTER 1

Diversity and Cultural Transmission in the Southern Mountains

"A Mixed Multitude of All Classes and Complexions"

Since the late nineteenth century, when local-color writers first popularized many of the common stereotypes now associated with the southern mountains, Appalachia has been perceived as an isolated and backward place that retained old-fashioned customs and lagged behind mainstream America. In 1899, however, Berea College president William Goodell Frost portrayed the southern mountains more favorably, as "one of God's grand divisions." In an appeal to Northern donors and philanthropists, he described the "highland stock" of eastern Kentucky as predominantly English and Scottish, but also "Scotch-Irish." Frost characterized these "mountain whites" as patriotic "Sons and Daughters of the Revolution" who had been isolated for generations in a "Rip Van Winkle sleep." Unlike the flood of immigrants who were arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe at that time, these supposedly racially pure, "native born" "mountain Americans" had preserved the Anglo-Saxon heritage of "our pioneer ancestors." In his mind, they were conservators of true "American" culture, and they clearly deserved an education at Berea College.

Echoing Frost, American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, in 1901, likewise portrayed the people who lived in "isolated communities" in the mountains of eastern Kentucky as "the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States." She described these "chiefly English and Scotch-Irish" people as "direct descendants of the early Virginia and North Carolina immigrants ... kept free from the tide of foreign immigrants which has been pouring in recent years into the United States."

This characterization of the southern mountaineers as a homogeneous population of racially pure Anglo-Saxons, however, is a myth. The population of the Southern backcountry, in fact, was a diverse mix of Europeans, African Americans, and indigenous Native Americans. Charles Woodmason, an itinerant Anglican preacher based in the Piedmont of South Carolina between 1766 and 1772, characterized it as a "mixed Multitude of all Classes and Complexions." Neither ethnically, racially, economically, nor culturally homogeneous, the region was home to wealthy landowners, poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers, well-to-do merchants, and isolated subsistence farmers, as well as enslaved African Americans.

In addition to the English and Scots-Irish, those of European descent included Germans and smaller numbers of Scots, Welsh, and French Huguenots. Some were recent arrivals; others were second- or third-generation European Americans. The Scots-Irish (and not the English), however, made up the single largest group among the early settlers. These people, also known as Scotch-Irish or Ulster-Scots, were primarily Presbyterians from northern Ireland whose ancestors had come from the lowlands of Scotland and northern England in the 1600s. Charles Woodmason encountered many of these "Northern Scotch Irish" settlers in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Venturing as far west as the Cherokee towns beyond the Saluda River, he noted their fondness for fiddling and "frolicking": "If You want to hire a fellow to Work, You'l not raise one for Money — But make a Dance, or a Frolic — and You'l see an hundred turn out." On one occasion, he wrote: "Married a Couple, who imprudently (or impudently) left the Service and staid not to Sermon, carrying with them ½ the Congregation to frolic and dance." Woodmason was appalled by the "Revelling Drinking Singing Dancing and Whoring" of these "poor wretches" and "licentious wenches," whom he dismissed as "ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the Scum of the Earth, and the Refuse of Mankind."

Although Frost portrayed the Appalachian people as "mountain whites," and Semple claimed that the region "excluded the negroes," there have been people of African descent in the southern mountains since the time of the earliest explorers and settlers. African slaves accompanied Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto when he passed through western North Carolina in search of gold in 1540, and during the 1700s slaves and indentured servants arrived with the early white settlers. By the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, there were many thousands of slaves as well as free blacks in the southern mountains. In 1800, at the new settlement of Asheville in western North Carolina, one-third of the population was black — twenty-five free persons and thirteen slaves.

The Appalachian backcountry was a fertile "cultural contact zone" that fostered interaction and cultural exchange between Native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans. Thomas Ashe, an Englishman who traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1806, experienced this blending of traditions one evening while staying at an inn in Wheeling, [West] Virginia: "I entered the ball-room, which was filled with persons at cards, drinking, smoaking, dancing, &c. The 'music' consisted of two banjies, played by negroes nearly in a state of nudity, and a [flute], through which a Chickesaw breathed with much occasional exertion and violent gesticulations. The dancing accorded with the harmony of these instruments." Ashe was appalled by this crude "music" [Ashe's quotes] and dancing, which he characterized as "a violent vulgar uproar." This raucous frolic, which was accompanied by African-derived banjos and a Native American flute, was no doubt quite different from the sophisticated, genteel music and dances of the European ballrooms with which he was familiar.

Though not as pervasive in the mountains as in the Deep South, slavery played a significant role in the development of the region, and it was important to the Appalachian antebellum economy. Prior to the Civil War, approximately 10 percent of white Appalachian households owned slaves (though typically fewer than five per household). Slave labor was used to clear timber and for agricultural work; slaves were also crucial to the efficient transportation of goods (as livestock drovers and riverboat laborers), in gold mining and lumbering, in the ironworks, saltworks, brickyards, in carpentry as well as in travel and tourism, where slaves worked as stage drivers and hotel workers. Anne Royall, who traveled throughout the southern mountains in the early 1820s,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ILLINOIS PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252080815
• ISBN 13: 9780252080814
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande