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II. 1. WHITE DANCE TUNES |
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Breakdown tunes and square dances have experienced a spectacular revival in the last ten years in the United States. They have furnished a ground upon which the whole population—American and recent American, old and young, rural and metropolitan—could meet on a common basis of recreational activity. As rural workers moved into the cities, barn dances have appeared on the radio and old-time sets have been called between fox-trots in beer parlors and dance halls. Middle-class people in the cities flock to square-dance classes and turn out in thousands to watch the dancing at folk festivals in every part of the country. Here first and second generation immigrants see something that they can immediately understand and participate in, since their own folk dances are not too different in design from those of rural America.
That there existed, on the other hand, a deep-seated Protestant prejudice against square-dancing is testified by Aunt Molly Jackson.
"When I was nine years old and we. lived in East Bumstead, Kentucky} at a little coal-mining camp named Queen City} these Spivey children they wanted me to come and stay all night with them on Christmas Eve night because they was goin' to get enough together to have a square dance and a party of just children. So Charlie Spivey he come out to the house and said to my stepmother; €Aunt Lizzy beth, can't Molly go an' stay all night with us—itys Christmas Eve night?'
"And she said, 'You'll have to go out to the commissary and ask her father' So he went and asked my father, and my father said} cNo, she can't go? And they come back and told a story, said my father had said cyes, I could go.' So I went up and dressed and went to stay all night with the Spivey children; and when my father come home that night I was mis sin' and the dance was on} and I was a-dancin' in the dance. But I didn't know that I was dancin'; I thought it was a play we was a-playin' called 'Swing Your Partner.' They knowed that if they told me it was a dance that they was a-dancin' that I'd be afraid, so I wouldn't dance it. So John Spivey he was a-pickin' the banjo, he was the oldest one, he was fourteen, he was singin', callin' the sets. In the square dance back in them times they said,
"iFlies in the buttermilk—shoo, fly, shoo; Gone again, skif to my Lou?
And just as my father come in the door they called that part of the set.
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