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

Browse Items (214 total)

  • Temporal Coverage is exactly "1940s"
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Community Squares - Ed Durlacher

Writing for Sets in Order, Ed Durlacher looks back at his successful program of outdoor dancing in New York City parks.===The first evening was more or less a nightmare. ... From the hundred or so the… View item
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Saturday Night in Central Park

This song is from a 1947 musical, Make Mine Manhattan, and refers to the popular Saturday night square dances led by Ed Durlacher in Central Park. Clearly, the dances were enough of a phenomenon that… View item
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"Kitchen Junket"

This evocative portrait of a New England kitchen junket ran over the first four issues of Ralph Page's Northern Junket magazine. Page draws on his own memories to paint a detailed picture of the… View item
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Square Dancing on the Eastern Shore of Maryland

This is a detailed description of square dancing in the mid-1940s in the area around Salisbury, Maryland, located on the Eastern Shore, in particular dances that took place at Fruitland, four miles… View item
Still Image

Ed Durlacher - World's Fair, 1940

The description on this publiicity photo from the 1940 New York World's Fair reads: FAIR STAGES WORLD'S BIGGEST BARN DANCE More than 700 square dancers, hill billy bands and square… View item
Still Image

Buffalo Boy Go Round the Outside

Lawrence Loy is the caller, working with Carson Robison and his Old Timers. (Click on the Additional Files link to hear the audio clip.) You can also download the cover or the instructions from inside… View item
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Meet the Docey-Doe Family - 1949

Square dancers in the late 1940s and 1950s encountered a variety of similar-sounding terms meaning very different figures. The do-si-do / docey-doe / dos-a-dos / do-paso confusion produced several… View item
Still Image

West Newbury, VT - square dance competition

This is a newspaper account (and acccompanying poem) describing the 1941 success of a team from West Newbury, Vermont, in a dance competition. We often think of square dance contests in Texas, but… View item
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Life Goes to a Square Dance

Here's the text, in case it's hard to read: Life Goes to a Square Dance Thousands of fans gather to swing their partners in Oklahoma City The objects in the picture at the right look like orchids… View item
Website

Square dance tunes and calls

Audio recording of interview by Alan Lomax with Alan Robertson in the Mississippi Delta View item
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Review of Cowboy Dances

This review of Lloyd Shaw's book comes from Douglas Kennedy, director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society from 1924 (after Cecil Sharp's death) until 1961. Kennedy had teveled to the… View item
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Pop Sweet

George R. "Pop" Sweet was a traditional fiddler and dance caller from Austerlitz, NY, and the neighboring towns of the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. In the early 1930s, he was engaged in a… View item