American Country Dances

Collected and edited by Elizabeth Burchenal with piano arrangements by Emma Howells Burchenal, published by G. Schirmer in New York in 1918 at $1.50. The book is arranged by dance rather than by tune. Each of the twenty-eight dances receives a heading, one or more tune settings, and full directions covering formation, steps, and figures, with diagrams. Where a dance carries more than one tune, the settings are numbered and the tune title is given in parentheses, so that Portland Fancy appears with both “Texarkana” and “Young America Hornpipe,” and Lady of the Lake with “Spitfire,” “Durang’s Hornpipe,” and “Cincinnati Hornpipe.” Front matter includes sections on calls, steps, and figures, with the balance, buzz, chasse, and galop steps described in detail and the timing of calls set out for the caller. A classified index groups the dances by formation: four danced around the room, three longways for six couples only, twelve longways involving two couples, seven longways involving three couples, and two in quadrille formation.

Burchenal assembled the material from three kinds of source: dances still in regular use at New England country dances, figures reconstructed from the memories of old fiddlers who had played for kitchen dances some forty years earlier, and calls preserved in the printed call books those fiddlers worked from. Because the call books recorded only the calls and no description of the figures, she recovered several obsolete dances by matching their calls against figures still danced in her own day. She observes that many of the tunes are Irish, English, and Scottish jigs, reels, and hornpipes, or variants of them, while others appear to be American in origin. The volume is dedicated to John J. Burchenal, and Stephen Kimball, the New Hampshire fiddler known as Uncle Steve who had played for country dances for over forty years, appears as the frontispiece and lends his name to one of the tunes.

The preface, dated January 1917, records the repertoire under pressure. Burchenal writes that “the introduction of modern dancing into the country inevitably forces out the old fiddlers (who cannot play the new dance-music, though they play the old dance-music irresistibly), and the older people, who can dance only the contra-dances.” What she meant by modern dancing was the ragtime-era couple dance craze that had spread out of the cities after 1911: the one step, turkey trot, hesitation waltz, tango, maxixe, and fox trot, codified for a mass audience in Vernon and Irene Castle’s 1914 manual Modern Dancing. She identifies summer visitors from the city as the vector carrying it into rural New England.

Her section on music makes the same point from the other direction. The characteristic sound, she writes, is a single violin played as only a real contra dance fiddler can play it, and she holds that these jigs, reels, and hornpipes are essentially violin music that no other instrument can do full justice. She then notes that the solo fiddler who plays and calls at once had already become scarce, that violin with piano or organ had become the usual arrangement at country dances, and that since violin music would probably not be available for general use she has set the whole collection for piano. The barrier facing those fiddlers was structural as well as instrumental. Contra dance tunes run thirty-two bars in AABB form because the music has to lock to the figures and to the caller, and the fiddle repertoire lives in D, G, and A, where the open strings ring in sympathy and give the instrument its carrying power. The new dance music was written for piano and band, frequently in flat keys that leave those strings silent, and its harmony ran to secondary dominants and chromatic passing motion rather than the three chords a New England reel needs. The couple dances had no caller and no set figures, so the music no longer had to phrase with anything at all.

Elizabeth Burchenal (1876 or 1877 to 1959) graduated from Earlham College in 1896 and studied at the Sargent School of Physical Education in Boston before teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Recruited by Luther Halsey Gulick, she served as executive secretary of the Girls’ Branch of the New York Public Schools Athletic League and later as inspector of athletics for the city Department of Education. The title page of this volume identifies her as chairman of the organization committee of the American Folk-Dance Society, formed in February 1916 with its work suspended for the duration of the war, and as organizer and first chairman of the folk-dance committee of the Playground and Recreation Association of America. She collected folk dance across northern Europe and Ireland, published extensively with G. Schirmer, and with her sister Ruth established the Folk Arts Center in New York. She died in Brooklyn on 21 November 1959.

Subhead: Volume 1: Twenty-Eight Contra Dances

Note: Included in the bibliography of Samuel Bayard’s Hill Country Tunes (1944).