Old-time music for contras?

July 16th, 2013
contra
In the Northeast, contra dance and music have grown and changed together over time. Among contra musicians there's a strong tradition of playing for the dancers, tailoring the music to the specific dance and the specific dancers in front of you. As contra dance spread out of New England through the South and Midwest, organizers looked for musicians and in many places found people playing old-time music. This is also dance music but it's music for old-time square dance, which puts more limited demands on the musicians. Because old-time music was less constrained by its associated dance form it developed a different culture, one in which the dancers were much less central. The standard old-time approach to playing a dance is to focus on playing good music, playing the tune as it should be played, and not pay much attention to the dancers.

With this in mind, it's not surprising that lots of contra dancers will say they don't like dancing to old time music. It's not a form of music that is naturally a close fit to contra and it's not usually played in a way that makes that fit any better.

(The historical component of this post is somewhere between fact, folk history, and conjecture.)

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)