Category: About

TK: Why don’t we go through your dance career chronologically. I know remarkably little about your time in Southern California with Mary Judson¹, before Berkeley, so I would just love to hear how you got connected with her, and with your peers who were around, like Lydee Scudder², and Mary’s kids Molly and Ellen. How did that happen?

BF: When I was in middle school, just before I went into high school, I was in a high school play, and at the end of the play some of the cast invited me to go to “The Museum.” I thought they were crazy because I thought they were talking about going to an art museum, and it was already after 9:00 PM when a museum would have been closed. The Museum turned out to be a folk dance café, and I fell in love with that.

The Museum also was where Mary Judson taught. Through folk dancing I met Lydee and then her sister Alice, and Mary’s daughter Ellen, all of whom were in my high school. Through Ellen and The Museum, I then met Mary, who taught English country dancing there and around town. I started dancing regularly, rode my bike to all the events that I could go to. And I did a little bit of dancing in school too. I remember Ellen teaching me some morris dance figures out in the courtyard of our high school. I even got assigned the role of calling a dance for a school performance. It wasn’t really calling because everybody knew the dance; calling was just part of the performance. But I think that assignment set the stage for my calling later on. So through the four years of high school I did English country and international folk dance, and a group of us always went to the Southern California Renaissance Faire and performed. Sometime during those years I met you, Tom, but I can’t remember where or when. I know I was up in Berkeley once or twice, but you also came down to do a workshop at one time. Then in 1971, just before my senior year in high school, I wandered across the country and ended up at Pinewoods³ on visiting day! I came as a visitor, but somebody (I assume it was Mary Judson) had made arrangements for me to stay, and so I stayed the rest of the week.

TK: But you’d heard about Pinewoods. Mary had been coming with her kids.

BF: Yeah, Mary had been coming with her kids. Ellen had told me all sorts of stories about Pinewoods, about May Gadd ⁴, and the bush patrol. [Here Brad puts on a high pitched “May Gadd” voice:] “Rumpety tump!” ⁵ I’d been visiting Alice and Lydee Scudder at their grandparents’ house in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, where I first ran across Duke Miller⁶ and that style of contra dancing. Alice was heading down to the Cape to visit relatives so she drove me to Pinewoods and dropped me off. That was an unusual summer—there I was from this private high school in Pasadena, with three of my school friends—Ellen, Patty [Haymond], and Pam [McGrill]—also there.

TK: So then, what about college?

BF: Like most of my friends in Pasadena, when I finished high school I wanted to escape and go somewhere else. I looked at Prescott College in Arizona and some other places but ended up choosing U. C. Santa Cruz. I wanted to study natural history, but they also had an international dance program. I saw you in that period, too, because Santa Cruz was close enough for me to occasionally get to your dance in San Francisco.

In Santa Cruz I took dance classes and I also, rather quickly, got a job teaching folk dancing. The regular folk dance teacher, Marcel Vinokur⁷, who came over the hill from Palo Alto to teach, took a sabbatical soon after I arrived—so in his absence I stepped in and taught. My first class was in international folk dance, but it quickly got turned into an English country dance class. I would come up to San Francisco to go to your dances and record the music and bring it back. There was also a square dance caller who I knew as “John the bass player.” I never learned his last name. He had learned his square dances from the pastor of a church in Oakland, who had learned them somewhere in the Midwest. John called squares with a bluegrass band, but then he graduated and left, and so I filled his gap too. That was the beginning of my square dance calling.

TK: So did you have any contact at all with CDSS National during that time?

BF: Well, I certainly knew about CDSS. I’d been to Pinewoods already, and they were the source of dance books and records. I also remember getting big scholarships—this was later on, when I was coming as a camper in 1975—to come to camp, and I ended up spending about as much as I would have on the camp fees buying books because I had no dance library. I may have first met Jim Morrison⁸ at Pinewoods; I know that I saw him there in 1971, because that was the summer he and Marney got together. Jim was from Oakland; I can’t remember if I met him in California before I went to Pinewoods, but by the time I knew him, he was working in the CDSS office. In 1974, I wrote to him at the office, hoping to come to camp. That was the year Pat Shaw⁹ came, but my letter to Jim got lost, and by the time I figured out what had happened, camp was full and there was no way for me to get in, so I went to Stockton Folk Dance Camp ¹⁰ instead. You had been to Stockton.

TK: Yes. I left California in 1974; I’d taught at Stockton maybe in 1972, and Nibs Matthews¹¹ had been there the year before me.

BF: And Nibs was supposed to come back in 1974, but he cancelled, and Bob Parker¹² came and basically took all of Nibs’s notes and tried to figure out what Nibs meant so he could teach from Nibs’s material. (Laughs)

TK: Yeah, I came the year after Nibs, sort of as a follow up to Nibs. Not a particularly successful gig for me.

BF: That’s when you were using Chuck Ward’s¹³ double-tracked harpsichord recordings, the 45s?

TK: Yes, right. Chuck set all that up for me.

BF: He said he’d been supposed to record the tunes with Lea Brilmayer¹⁴, but right when the recording was supposed to happen she went off to Mexico. So the recording was double tracked with harpsichord and harpsichord.

TK: At Stockton we had to provide a set curriculum with recorded music and printed sheet music, and we had to have discs to sell. When I left California in 1974, Chuck and I decided you should teach, and we asked you. Where were you at that point?

BF: Well, I started at U. C. Santa Cruz in 1972, and I lasted about a year and a half, and then started a long process of transferring to U. C. Berkeley. I stayed in Santa Cruz and taught dance and did carpentry and gardening, and then in 1975 I transferred up to Berkeley, just after you left. I finished Santa Cruz, moved to Berkeley, and took over your dance. A couple of years later Nick Harris, who had been running the Stanford contra, graduated and left, so I took over his contra dance too.

TK: Tell me something about the Bay Area Country Dance Society. It’s gotten all built up now, but what was it like then? How much of that growth were you there for?

BF: When I came on the scene, you had your dance. The story I tell is—this is one of those stories that I’m not sure is true—but what I remember hearing is that you met every week on Sunday, with a very tiny crowd, and the dance stayed like that until the crowd finally got big enough, and then you switched to once a month.

TK: Is that right? I don’t remember that.

BF: And then you moved it from San Francisco across the Bay to Berkeley because Chuck found a different hall. Then I came in and switched the dance to twice a month, and it has stayed pretty much like that ever since. Your dance, which later became my dance, was the only English dance for a while. At some point before 1975 Nick Harris started the contra dance at Stanford, and a few people did traditional style squares as well. At some point I met a fellow whose grandmother was connected to the dance department at Stanford University. He told me that May Gadd used to come out once in a while to teach at Stanford . But as far as I can tell, her visits had no lasting impact; nothing grew out of them.

So, in 1975 I took over your English dance, and I started a short-lived contra in Berkeley; I later started another contra in Berkeley and an English dance at Ashkenaz¹⁵ that didn’t last very long. I started something in an art center on a pier in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Bruce Hamilton¹⁶ moved to Palo Alto and started an English dance in San Jose. Bob Fraley moved to the Bay Area and started the first English dance in Palo Alto. So, things started cropping up. Kirston Koths moved in and started a Berkeley contra that kept going, unlike mine. When my contra in San Francisco failed to keep going, Charlie Fenton started another one in California Hall—that dance moved out to St. Paul’s on the West End and has been going for a long time. It just felt as if a couple years after you left everything exploded, and suddenly there were all sorts of new people. The same thing happened when I left—as soon as the vacuum was there, all these people filled it, and lots more stuff happened.

TK: I assume the Bay Area group now has a board of directors and an organizational structure that wasn’t there when you left, or had that started?

BF: I feel like I created that. You had a single English country dance in San Francisco, run by you, Chuck Ward, and Nora Hughes, and that was the English Folk Dance Society of San Francisco (or some similar title).

TK: Yeah, we had some official structure. We might have even been a CDSS Center.

BF: Yes, you were a Center¹⁷, and you were very early in getting onto the nonprofit group exemption. I learned all that later when I became CDSS Director. But I think you had no appreciable organization, no bank account then.

Then, in 1979, I was hired to teach English country dancing at the Mendocino Folklore Camp, an international folk dance camp held at the Woodlands in Mendocino. I loved it so much that, with my first wife Jenny, in 1980 we created the English dance camp at Mendocino. In 1981 we added the American week. After the first year began, we started thinking that there should be an organization. That’s when we created BACDS, and we merged the earlier organization, the English Folkdance Society of San Francisco, into it, and also brought in any of the contra and English dances that wanted to join us.

Some people thought I was crazy to create BACDS. They said, “You created this camp. Why are you giving it to BACDS?” Even though at that time I had no intention of leaving California, I thought the camps and dances should have permanence, should be more than me, and so I created the board and all that.

I remember very early on talking the board into hiring me as the part-time paid administrator of BACDS. It was about a one-tenth time job. My first task was to learn how to do accounting, then to create an accounting system, and finally to figure out how we stood financially. A couple of months later, I came to a board meeting and said, “Well, I have two things to report. The first one is that I finished that task of putting a financial system in place, and I can tell you your financial standing. The second one is, ‘I quit,’ because I can show you that you can’t afford to hire me.” And it went back to being a volunteer organization. Even that little bit of time was more than BACDS could afford back in those days.

TK: Before we move on and launch into CDSS, is there anything else about your early career that you wanted to get in?

BF: I had learned morris dancing in high school before getting to Pinewoods, and learned more at Pinewoods. I think you taught some morris or sword at the dance weekends, too. When I moved to Berkeley, I started a morris team, the Berkeley Morris. We first met in what was then the Ho Chi Minh Park. I wanted to be the Ho Chi Morris Men but no one else would agree to that.

Then, starting around 1977, I began doing some small calling tours, and by 1980 I was doing bigger tours. In those days it was primarily contras and squares—English groups couldn’t afford to pay enough to cover travel costs. My first tours were on the East Coast, in New England, and then I started touring in northern California, plus a little bit of Oregon and Washington.

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TK: So tell me about moving east, and how that happened. Jim Morrison had stopped working for CDSS and moved [to Virginia]. CDSS was struggling with a series of short-term Executive Directors.

BF: Gay [May Gadd] had been National Director for decades; I don’t remember exactly when she stopped. 1974-ish? Then Genny Shimer¹⁸ came in; she wanted to do it for only a year, but stayed maybe a year and a half. Next Jim Morrison stepped in for a couple of years, at which point he moved from New York City to Virginia but stayed on as Artistic Director, and Nancy White-Kurzman served as Executive Director for a couple of years. After Nancy, Bertha Hatvary came in as Interim Director and then was hired as Executive Director for a while. Bertha’s biggest strength was the newsletter and publicity. At some point they started looking for somebody new, and approached me. By then I had already been organizing lots of weekends, and had started and run Mendocino for a few years.

Then someone asked me if I’d like to work for CDSS. At first, I didn’t take it seriously. Meanwhile Jenny received a job offer from a school in Greenwich, Connecticut. I had graduated a few years earlier with a BA in Architecture from U. C. Berkeley, and was working as a draftsman in an architect’s office. In late 1982 a recession hit, and my architecture boss kept telling me he was going to lay me off. With the job at CDSS as a possibility, and Jenny’s solid job offer, we moved east. After we moved, I interviewed with CDSS, was offered the job, and began as the National Director on February 1, 1983. The job title was later changed to Executive and Artistic Director.

TK: Tell me about the scene at CDSS when you came into it, what your reaction was, who the mentors were there. I know Sue Salmons and Genny Shimer were there. John Hodgkin was Treasurer, right?

BF: Yes, John was Treasurer, Sue was Chair of the Executive Committee ¹⁹.

Sue worked so hard. In later years I realized she quietly had served as interim Executive Director in the many months between when Bertha Hatvary left and I came in. Sue never had the title, she never asked for recognition, but she came in every week and just made the office run. She was always there, working the phone all the time. I had a lot of respect for her energy and for what she wanted to do, even if I didn’t agree with all of her decisions or the methods.

So Sue was there, and Kit Campbell was office manager. Genny Shimer was also around; she was the quiet person on the artistic side. I had such reverence for Genny, for her teaching, and for her sense of where CDSS ought to go artistically. If I had a question on artistic matters I would go to Genny or possibly to Jim. I knew Jim better, but he lived a lot farther away.

[And] John was Treasurer. I learned an awful lot of nonprofit accounting from John. He also had a philosophy. When he was a young man getting into accounting, one of his bosses gave him a financial leg up and said don’t pay me back, just pass it on—give a similar gift to someone else when you can. That became a model for us at CDSS, one we couldn’t always follow. The idea was that we would support you now in the hopes that you would support someone else later, and we would just keep lifting people up.

TK: So by the time you’d been there three years or so, you were developing your own opinions about what things were working and weren’t, what the vision was or wasn’t, and what your vision might be. Tell more about that.

BF: I remember very early on, I told somebody that I was the director of CDSS, and he said, “Oh, you’re the New York Society.” That was this CDSS member’s image of what CDSS National did—it focused on New York City. And there was some truth to that. There was also Pinewoods, and some others might have said, “You’re the Pinewoods organization.” So there was Pinewoods, and then there were NYDAC (New York Dance Activities Committee²⁰) and the Folk Music Club²¹, and also weekends at Hudson Guild in New Jersey, but the main focus was on New York City activities as a showcase for the nation. In my interview before I got the job, someone asked me what I thought of NYDAC and the Folk Music Club. I had already heard some mutterings and disagreements about what was going on with them, and I said, “Well, we’re a national organization. The local organizations should make their own decisions.” And I heard back “You can’t say that.” And I took that literally—I stopped saying it, but I didn’t stop thinking it.

When I came into the job, some people expected me to revitalize the English dance in New York City because I was a teacher as well as an administrator. But my focus for CDSS was national, and in my first ten years I used my contra touring, which I was doing quite extensively then, to get myself all over the country and to build up CDSS’s visibility and membership. The membership of CDSS grew rapidly, and perhaps doubled, in those years. CDSS went from an organization that had been largely English dance based, with some folk music and some contra dance, to one that grew particularly on the contra dance side, partly because I was all over the country calling contras but also because we were riding the wave of contra dancing that was sweeping the country.

Then our rent in New York doubled—our rent in this grungy top floor space in the garment district. So we looked all over New York City and found that, even at double the old cost, it was still the most reasonable place we could rent in NYC. Bertha Hatvary, who was still involved, said, “You should move Sales to New Jersey to save money because it’s cheaper.” She didn’t mean move the whole office out of New York City, just the sales department. Then, someone at our Leadership Conference in the South said, “This is crazy. Your rent is so high, come to where we are.” That started the whole brouhaha about whether we should move or not, which lasted a while. Eventually we did move [to Massachusetts]. I looked at it as a question of where we could find something we could afford that was close enough to serve Pinewoods, our major program. It was a big political hassle, moving.

TK: So it was an economic decision at its core. I remember you were interested in living somewhere else, and I know that Jim Morrison wanted to live somewhere else when he worked for CDSS. Back when he wanted to move, he had suggested moving the Society, but there was no question then that a move was going to happen. How much of the Society’s move from New York do you think was prompted by your wanting to move it out?

BF: I’m not sure what would have happened if Jim had not already tried to get CDSS to move [in the 1970s]. Jim tried and failed, but his attempt set the stage for another try. I wanted to move because my salary was so low compared to New York City costs. I had gone looking for a place around New York where I could afford to buy a house, and the closest was an hour and a half drive from the city. Everything was very expensive. So I wanted the move in a personal sense. I remember saying to Sue Salmons and Mary Judson that I couldn’t afford to keep being Executive and Artistic Director in New York and would happily help them find a new ED if CDSS preferred to stay in the city. So I was looking both for a cheaper place for CDSS and a cheaper place for me and for the staff, a place where the current salaries wouldn’t be so far out of line. They would be low instead of abysmal.

TK: The other aspect, of course, was that to make CDSS more of a national organization—a move from New York City to almost anywhere would potentially help.

BF: That’s true. Even though that wasn’t the main thing on my mind, I thought it wasn’t a bad idea either. CDSS had become ingrown and it needed to grow and change. Moving was one of the biggest ways to grow and change. We lost a number of members in New York City, but we gained many more new members elsewhere after the move.

TK: So let’s talk about the move to Northampton [in 1987], and the early years there.

BF: One funny story about the move. Steve Howe wasn’t working in the office yet. He’d started working for me at camp part-time, and he had been doing stage management for the Theater for the Deaf and knew a lot about packing trucks from his tours with them. When it came time to move, we offered to help move the office staff who were going with us by putting their personal belongings in the same truck with the office gear. So we had this tour where we went to various people’s houses. Steve walked into the first one, looked at the pile of stuff, and said, “Two feet.” I didn’t know what that meant. Then we went to someone else’s house with more stuff, and Steve said, “Four feet,” and I still didn’t know what that meant. Then he looked at the office and he figured out the size of truck we needed. “Two feet” meant two feet of floor depth in the truck from floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall. And he was right! He knew how to estimate from his job as stage manager.

TK: So Steve was quite involved in the move, then, getting the truck?

BF: He was involved in the move; he didn’t join our year-round office staff until about a year after we moved up there. He was just summer help before that. Caroline Batson and Aithne Bialo-Padin moved with the office; they and I were the only ones who moved with the office to Northampton. Steve joined us a little later. Aithne stayed a couple of years, and then moved on to other things.

BF: Several years after the move we wrote new bylaws—Genny [Shimer] felt the Society needed a clearer structure—and we incorporated in Massachusetts, merged that organization with the New York corporation, and went through all sorts of legal this-and-that.

Around that time, we started [our programs at] Buffalo Gap. People down in West Virginia were saying. “There’s this great camp. Why don’t you come down here?” We did it partly because Pinewoods was so full. The English and American Week and the Family Week that started then still go on, because Timber Ridge is really the continuation of the Buffalo Gap programs. But just about when we started Buffalo Gap, we suddenly hit a downturn at Pinewoods. I remember when we started the Finance Committee meetings at your place, we had a couple of years of losing what seemed a lot of money in our terms.

TK: In my first meeting [as Treasurer ] there was a big blowup about our losing money and our need for financial controls. That’s why we created the Finance Committee.

BF: We did lose money for a couple of years and then we essentially regained everything we’d lost within a few years after that. It’s funny looking back at that, because we worked really hard at our finances, but it’s hard to say whether the improvement was due to our work or simply due to other factors bringing the campers back.

TK: Well, maybe the financial controls helped; they at least let us know what was going on.

TK: I wanted to get your sense of what you feel your major achievements have been, from moving the Society out of New York and making it more national. I think that clearly happened, to some extent.

BF: I agree; I think it happened as well. Later on, people had a different idea of what they wanted “national” to mean, but considering that I started with an organization that was focused on New York City and Pinewoods, I feel that we were very successful in becoming visible in a larger part of the country. A lot of what I did was to push support for groups—grants, liability insurance—to groups all over the country to help them grow. Encouraging the Family Week in California to get started, supporting it financially for several years to get it off the ground. Growing membership, becoming less ingrown. Those were the things I worked on. Also expanding camps. At its peak, we went from seven weeks at Pinewoods, when I started, to nine with the addition of two weeks at Buffalo Gap, plus three more at Ogontz, including a storytelling week. Then we went back to two at Ogontz, then one at Ogontz, and then [a combined] one at Timber Ridge. And now six at Pinewoods—that happened after my time.

TK: When you first started in Northampton you had a small staff, essentially no committees. So how did things change?

BF: In the move from New York, the old committees disbanded and only some were reformed immediately. The first committee that came up was Bylaws. The next was Finance, because we had the short term financial loss. Staff slowly grew. The office work grew. In New York we had one computer. Gene and Susan Murrow brought in the first CDSS computer, and we used that for a long time. It was a CPM Vector Graphics machine. Then, around the time we moved to Northampton, we migrated to a single DOS based PC. But it was just one computer. A board member from Michigan asked, “How can you get by with only one computer?” I hadn’t thought about it, we all just struggled to get computer time. But soon after we added one more, and one more….

TK: From the outside, it seemed like a slow, steady building. It’s interesting to me how organizations grow. In some ways it’s easy to grow, and it’s harder to shrink, or stop growing, because it feels like failure. But things can end up changing in ways that actually don’t work.

BF: There were times when I thought my role was to be a “brake.” Ideas would come through that were often good ideas, but their timing was wrong, or the speed at which people wanted to carry them out was wrong.

TK: I want you to talk about [the Christmas Country Dance School in] Berea [Kentucky] a little bit. You’ve been going there for a long time, and it’s an important part of your connection to the dance world. And it’s a different world.

BF: Yes, it’s a different world. So, Berea. In 1977 I got a ride across country with Stan Kramer²². My trip to Pinewoods that summer took me from California to Port Townsend, Washington for the first Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, then wandering back toward California and heading with Stan to Brasstown, North Carolina. Stan took me to the John C. Campbell Folk School and then up to Berea.

I got to Berea just in time to help tear down the Dodge Gym, which I never saw in operation. I don’t think I got back there again until I was Executive and Artistic Director. Berea had a tradition of having CDSS’s Director come on staff if he or she was a teacher. I think Jim had been there on staff, but the directors between Jim and me, who weren’t teachers, hadn’t. Genny had been teaching there, but she said that it was time for me to take over, and then she kept going anyway. In those early years, the ‘80s, I tended to do Berea for one or two years, then Brasstown’s Winter Week one or two years. Sometimes I’d do neither, so I wasn’t constant. Now things have changed—for the last ten years, or longer, I’ve been to Berea almost every year.

Berea reminds me of the [CDSS] dance weeks back in the ‘70s. It’s old home week: it’s a part of your family life and tradition to do it. Ogontz has turned into that for [my family] too; we go to CDSS’s Ogontz Family Week because it’s our family vacation.

TK: It’s interesting. CDSS has a lot of groups that are very different from each other. It’s not as if there’s a single model for anything. In a way, that makes it hard for the national organization to have a clear focus, because there are all these different groups doing all these very different things, and with very different needs.

BF: This is partly based on the stories I’ve heard about Gay (May Gadd), but I felt like she had an iron hand and made people do things the “right way,” her “right way.” There was an advantage to this in consistency, but its existence also meant it was harder for the groups that were different. When I came in as Director, one of my goals was not to have that iron fist. It wasn’t what the Society needed at that time; we needed to help all the different groups in their different ways, rather than to apply a single model.

TK: Let’s go back to your non-CDSS calling career. How did you get your gigs? Did you go out and seek them actively, or did people get your name through the grapevine?

BF: When I first started calling, I taught at community colleges, and I went looking for community groups that wanted dances. I also taught the class at U. C. Santa Cruz mentioned earlier. There weren’t many dance groups around hiring callers. I got involved in the international scene early on, and then, by the ‘80s, more dance groups existed, and I was able to start putting tours together. By the time I did my first tours of the Northwest, Penn Fix had moved back to Spokane, and had created this great newsletter in which he kept track of all the old-timey little dances up North. This gave me a list of contacts that I could use to set up a string of gigs. So I would put together a tour that would take me from Seattle to Spokane and out to Idaho and back again.

TK: You would write the organizers and say, “I’m going to be in the area. If you’re interested, I would love to put a tour together?”

BF: Yes. And I also started getting hired for weeks and weekends. Creating Mendocino English Week made me much more visible. First I started the Mendocino Camp and taught there. Soon thereafter, I got hired to teach at Family Week and English & American Week at Pinewoods. Just before I became CDSS Director I was asked to be Program Director for Family Week. Once I started with CDSS, I programmed about one week a summer, sometimes two. But programming was a big part of my job. When Buffalo Gap started, I was already scheduled to run a week at Pinewoods, and I also ran the first English & American Week at Buffalo Gap.

TK: One unusual aspect of your success with this career is your ability to handle both the artistic and the administrative sides of the job.

BF: Sometimes it was hard to juggle the two.

TK: And of course, doing Pinewoods was part of the job. That was Gay’s model.

BF: It was Jim’s model too. Back then the [NYC] office would shut down [during the summer]. Gloria Berchielli and some others would come by to pick up the mail, but no sales took place unless they were handled from Pinewoods. In my early days it was easy for me to leave my administrative tasks and go off on tour without having to think about CDSS while I was gone. Ten years later, CDSS work came with me on the tours.

TK: So, about your parallel career as a caller…

BF: Oh, yes. I feel like the things that brought CDSS to hire me were a mixture of my camp administration experience and my teaching ability. I’m not sure we all agreed on what I was supposed to do with that teaching ability. One board member said that being director would be a big boost for my teaching career. I thought that my teaching career was a big boost to CDSS.

TK: What about your English dance teaching? Presumably there was more of that when you became CDSS Director. And as you said, the number of groups grew, so that there were more groups wanting somebody to come in and teach.

BF: By the time I became CDSS Director I was a fairly accomplished English caller and contra caller, good enough to teach the advanced dance in NYC and to be on staff at CDSS adult dance weeks, but there were fewer places that would hire someone calling English. So I did more contra dance calling than English calling, but often did it with people who played English, like Laurie Andres and Cathy Whitesides. Of all the people I toured with, I toured with Laurie and Cathy more than with anybody else. Sometimes we’d be booked for an English dance and sometimes it would be a contra. As time went on, I got hired more for English. There had been an explosion of contra dance callers, and there weren’t nearly as many English callers available.

TK: That’s still true.

BF: Now I do primarily English country calling and the odd, rare, contra. It feels like the whole thing is just totally the opposite of what it was when I started. And when I call contras, it tends to be at community events with both English and contra.

TK: In the early years, did you ever consider that calling might be a way to make a living?

BF: Yes, I called for my living for a while in Santa Cruz. What that meant was that I lived really cheaply. I lived incredibly cheaply, and I earned very little from teaching. That’s when I had my international class and my English class on the UC campus and I taught at a community college and did the odd dance, but it’s hard to call that a living. By the time I was up in the Bay Area, I was teaching a lot all over the place. I would call at Berkeley and Stanford twice a month each, and I would do these private parties. I realized that I could have turned that into a livelihood, but it would have meant being on the road constantly. Even then I didn’t want to do that.

TK: When I started in the dance world, I did notice the big explosion in the ‘70s, and the increased number of people who were trying to make a living from both calling and music. I think the musicians were a bit more successful, perhaps, with that than the callers were. There were more venues for the musicians, and they could do concerts as well as dances.

You’re famous for your stories, and I’m wondering if you have some favorite ones you could tell. Does anything come to mind?

BF: We were talking about May Gadd. I had this image, possibly from something Ellen said, of this woman doodling while she taught, and ever since my impression of May Gadd has been “a rumpety tump, a rumpety tump.” Years later I was out canoeing with [my wife] Barbara [Russell] on Long Pond at Pinewoods, and we ran into some middle-school age kids. It turned out they were relatives of Steve Howe’s from across the pond. They asked where we were from and we replied Pinewoods Camp. Their reaction was, “Oh, you’re the “tiddely pommers!” [Both laugh.] The way camp is situated, C# [pavilion] is fairly well sound-isolated from the lake, but there’s a low spot that goes right through to the Point on the Conants’ property, heading right straight toward Ashanti [the Howe family cottage across the pond]. That’s what they’d hear at night, the “rumpety tumps,” but they called them “tiddely poms.”

TK: What about those early square dance days you were talking about?

BF: I learned squares—my western patterns called squares—from that fellow “John the bass player.” He’d call a full night of squares—the Virginia Reel plus four or five squares, a lot of polkas and a lot of gaps in between. People mostly bounced around and didn’t pay much attention to the caller. One of the first calling skills I developed was “patience.” It was the only way to survive that.

Then I went out and visited Duke Miller and fell in love with his sing-songy style of calling contras and singing squares, so I taped them and came home. But in my early days I couldn’t find any bands that would play the music for me. So I started doing just patter-call squares. Later on I shifted, so by the time I became Executive and Artistic Director I was pretty much doing New England squares and very little patter-call anymore. And I would do some singing contras too. Duke Miller sang Petronella and Money Musk and others.

I found out that Kate Barnes²³ had also gone to the same dances I did, and had in her head the same Duke Miller sound, and we would set it up to do a duet. It was fun to do. I’d start at the microphone and would teach it and then sing it. A little while later I would still be there standing in front of the microphone, but Kate would start singing and people would think it was still me. Then suddenly we’d shift into harmony. Kate always did the harmony; I couldn’t sing harmony when I was also trying to call. The people were really confused. “Where did that second voice come from?” We did that for a while, especially with Money Musk.

TK: Tell me what you are doing now.

BF: I’m still quite connected to CDSS—I was in the office just two days ago. In my new work as Executive Director of 1794 Meetinghouse, I organize summer concerts, and CDSS is helping sponsor three of our folk concerts amidst a whole summer of all kinds of music. I recently went to a Centennial fundraising party at Sukey and Rhett Krause’s house—it was really an Ogontz reunion. Because I like what CDSS is doing, and because I wanted to be a good role model, I publically got out my checkbook: I wanted people to know that we give too.

I also run a new dance program called New London Assembly. It’s somewhat ironic. For years CDSS has been putting on an Early Music Week, even though early music is not directly connected to CDSS’s mission. Meanwhile, Amherst Early Music Festival, which is an early music program, now is putting on an English Country Dance Week, even though English country isn’t directly connected to their mission. That’s in part because people on both boards, like Pat Petersen, suggested I lead an English program at their summer festival.

So I’m leading it now, and watching the dancers at New London reminds me of the old days. Back in the ‘70’s at the CDSS dance weeks at Pinewoods, I felt there was a culture of respectful learning, of coming to a dance and being quiet and listening to what the teacher had to say. And people had a fairly long attention span. As time has gone on, there’s been more chatter, less attention paid to the teacher, and it’s become harder to teach style. I realize I’ve contributed to that change, doing things like learning to teach quickly and trying to make English country dance more welcoming to newcomers, but that has also played into the modern culture of short attention spans. New London is different. When I started New London Assembly, it was outside the norm—it just wasn’t a place anyone normally went for English country. By chance, we attracted dancers who were all respectful listeners, and so we have been able to work on style in a way that is often hard to do at other camps. At New London, people come to learn. It’s not just recreation. So I go to New London, and it’s like a blast from the past, and I can teach differently there than I do elsewhere.

And that is my life now. I continue to run New London Assembly, to direct the 1794 Meetinghouse, and I’m doing nonprofit accounting locally for a number of small nonprofits. I also travel to teach, when I can, while also trying not to be gone too much from home—I love being home with my family. We still go to CDSS’s Ogontz Family Week whenever we can, and I’m often on staff. And the same is true with Berea’s Christmas Country Dance School. And we try to get to something at Pinewoods—I’ve been going there almost every summer for the last forty-four years, only missing two so far. All of this is a big part of my past, and a big part of my present and future too.

TK: Okay, this is good. I have my work cut out for me writing this out.

BF: Thank you, Tom.

I gained a habit early on of suspending my artistic and critical biases in the presence of someone with any amount of multi-generational musical or dance culture. I have likewise always deferred to the tradition bearers of English ritual dance when it comes to the best way to do their dances and the best way to preserve them. Customs are not modular, each aspect is interrelated, and to extricate one piece of a musical tradition without the others, from a single moment without the before or after, and give it a different function in a new place is not preserving anything.

Over the centuries popular culture has always raided traditional culture for the next thing. Traditional culture is mostly a survival of the popular culture of old. Though symbiotic in this way, popular and traditional culture serve very different functions. The popular needs change, thrives on novelty, and has a commercial intent. The traditional nurtures a physical community and accommodates all generations and inclinations. It changes as it needs to, but doesn’t change for the sake of change.

I bring up these issues at the beginning of this biographical sketch because I ruminate over these issues all the time, and I have come to realize that most people have other things to think about. I hope it helps make some sense out of the choices I have made over the years, such as the traditional fiddlers, cloggers, shape note singers that I have championed at dance camps, and teaching sword dances in their entirety with their songs, marches, other ancillary bits. Throughout a long career I have watched for and tried to preserve the part of our material that has passed through many hands, and view this as the great treasure of old music and dance. It is not a sequence of notes, a particular step, or a rousing chorus. Rather it is the spirit, intent, unique groove, and the knowledge that it has worked its magic before and will work again.

I found that there were more topics to address than there was time to write, and my initial intent of writing down what happened and why is a better topic for a book. So I describe below some of the things that happened.

I was raised in a dark hollow in the California coastal mountains, a chasm deep enough to stop the fire the day Oakland burned. When I was ten we moved to a hillside where I could race to school in under four minutes, but it took 15 to get back up. I still like vertical landscapes best.

My family had considerable musical inclination in former generations, particularly on my mother’s side. In my home there was a residual music appreciation which included going to the Oakland Symphony, my grandmother playing Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Kitten on the Keys on piano, my dad playing Benny Goodman on the phonograph. My mother and her two brothers played piano and knew the lyrics to all the songs of their day. My parents liked to dance, but left us at home when they went dancing. I have learned in later years that my great grandfather played for mining camp square dances on guitar and harmonica, and I remember him showing me his elaborately inlaid old Washburn guitar and harmonica holder.

At the same time, I started listening to unapproved music on my neighbor Jon Benner’s basement radio. Everly Brothers, Elvis, Chuck Berry were our favorites. My mother interrogated me to determine if I liked Elvis for his music or his appearance. At that time I had no idea what Elvis or any of them looked like. I took guitar lessons when I was 11 from Mr. Meecham at Montclair Music Center, who taught me classical and flamenco guitar fundamentals. He took the master classes when Segovia came to town, but also played at a strip club in San Francisco some evenings, which, when realized by my parents, brought my formal music education to a close.

For the next few years I sought out anything involving an acoustic guitar, played Hard, ain’t it Hard with friends at the Joaquin Miller Elementary School assembly to mixed reviews, learned songs from the Limelighters, Kingston Trio and Burl Ives.

Then in 1963 the 1960s finally arrived, including the Beatles, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the civil rights movement, starting high school the year Oakland integrated the schools, and especially Bob Dylan. Hearing Dylan sent me looking for more in his vein, and I found what seemed even better in the Berkeley folk scene: Merritt Herring’s guitar/singing classes at the Live Oak Center, John Lundberg’s guitar shop on Dwight, concerts at the Jabberwock, and Freight and Salvage, and especially the Berkeley Folk Festival. I heard and met many of the people that would be important to me later: Jean Ritchie, Mike Seeger, Pete Seeger, Hank Bradley, Doc Watson, Sam Hinton, Frank Warner and others.

Mississippi Fred McDowell appeared at the Berkeley Folk Festival in 1965 and I was transfixed. I went to all of his sessions and performances, and later heard him at the Berkeley Blues Festival, Jabberwock, and Freight and Salvage clubs. The intensity of his performance made anything else I had heard seem tame. In hindsight, I would say that Fred McDowell’s incredible traditional blues groove was what turned me into a lifelong traditional dance music aficionado. I only tried to play blues for a few years, but kept looking for Fred’s spirit in other genres.

Meanwhile, I was still a high school student, sailboat racer, rock climber, and, surprisingly, chairman of the student race relations committee. I bring this up because the one hugely successful thing our committee did was to put on soul dance lessons in a room of the Skyline High School gym. I think I got the idea then that putting on a dance was easy and that I could do it.

I left California for Dartmouth College in the fall of 1966. A string band whose name I can’t recall played in Hanover in 1967 and I invited them back to the commons room of my dorm, Cutter Hall (now El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), after the show. I had been wishing I could be in a band with a fiddle and that night somehow decided I would have to be the fiddler myself. I knocked on Fred Breunig’s door and asked if I could borrow his violin. He was asleep when I knocked, but managed to ask if I could play the violin, and then loaned it to me anyway. A few days later I borrowed another violin on a more permanent basis and secreted myself in the room the janitors used for garbage, emerging eight hours later slightly able to play Crow Black Chicken and Boil the Cabbage Down.

Later that year I walked into that same commons room and saw two tall men standing there, looking lost. They told me that a student had arranged for there to be a dance that evening. I knew the student, and knew that he had left the college at the end of the last term. Dartmouth was still all male, but I enlisted help from friends to knock on doors in both our dorm and the nearby one that housed exchange students from Mt. Holyoke. We had a good dance with eight or ten couples, I joined in on guitar, and I learned about the ongoing dance at the Nelson, NH town hall. Have you guessed? These guys were Dudley Laufman and Dave Fuller, a great accordionist who has had very little recognition due to falling off a ladder just as the contra dance scene took off in the early 70s. So I didn’t discover contra dancing; it discovered me.

Dartmouth’s Tucker Foundation started a program in 1968 that placed students as teachers in disadvantaged communities and the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC and Murphy High School hosted the pilot program. George Ainley and I were the first students. I arranged to work at the Folk School the summer ahead, and so arrived the day the June dance week began. I was looking for mountain fiddlers, and had no clue about the Folk School’s long history of dance and music programs. All at the same moment I encountered Phil Merrill, Gathering Peascods, Otto and Marguerite Wood, Genny and Jack Shimer, Totur, George and Marguerite Bidstrup, Johanna Kulbach, and tried to play the recorder. John Ramsay was both Folk School director and chief dance instructor. It was from him that I learned my first morris and sword. Standing out in the field a few evenings after my arrival I could hear a banjo ringing out across the landscape. Following the sound, I discovered that Carl Green had music sessions in his garage/service station in the middle of Brasstown, so I had begun finding mountain fiddlers too.

At the end of our residency both George Ainley and I attended Berea College’s Christmas Country Dance School. Here I met fiddler Lewis Lamb, Genny Shimer, Gene Murrow, and many others. It felt as if I had discovered a way of life formerly unknown. I wanted my life to be like Christmas school all the time. Be careful what you wish for!

Back in Hanover, NH, George and I, along with Fred Breunig and others, tried to get a morris team started (we danced Headington, made bell pads, and practiced in the basement of the fraternity on which the movie “Animal House” was based). More successful was our contra/country dance, which started in the commons room of the women’s dormitory, moved to the Catholic Student Center, and finally (under Fred’s leadership, and after I had graduated) moved to the White Church. I went to the dance in Nelson on a regular basis, meeting Allan Block, Bob McQuillen, Newt Tolman, Pete Colby, Ted Levin, and many others. We generally had a full car from Hanover, often John Wheeler’s pickup truck, and weren’t ready to go home when the dance ended, so went on to someone’s house (mostly Debbie and Loring Puffer’s, neighbors of Dudley Laufman) and stayed up all night playing and carrying on, arriving back in Hanover as the sun made an appearance in the rear window.

I graduated in the summer of 1970 without any plan whatsoever. At John Wheeler’s suggestion I spent the rest of that year as a summer camp counselor and tutor in Lynchburg, VA. We went to many fiddle contests, and also to Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts.

Other things were going on including a war, a draft, and a lottery for the draft which I lost (#13). I applied for and received conscientious objector status, and needed to arrange for a public service job as alternative service. I remembered a conversation with May Gadd in New York when she had told me “what CDSS needs is a young person like you.” Amazingly, my draft board agreed to my working for CDSS as my public alternative service. I subsequently was determined unsuitable to serve at my physical exam, but I decided to go ahead and work for CDSS as planned anyway.

May Gadd immediately promoted me as a square dance caller, an under-emphasized aspect of the organization’s purview at the time, and square dances were held in some of NYC’s most obscure locations. One public school in the East Village required a guide to find the hall. After several months I was allowed to teach morris dancing in the regular weekly classes at Metropolitan-Duane Hall, and after a year or two English country dance. In each instance I got May Gadd’s evaluation the next morning in the office. This was my primary apprenticeship in dance leadership.

I found curious things around the CDSS office, such as the recordings made of Cecil Sharp’s ballad informants, by Maud Karpeles and Evelyn Wells in 1955, tucked away in a corner and apparently never played. Or the book American Country Dances as Danced by the British Soldiers in their Winter Quarters, gift of Bessie Osgood of Cambridge, MA, likewise undisturbed. Or the 78 rpm records of Jinky Wells of Bampton playing the morris tunes.

My responsibilities in the office consisted of fulfilling orders and purchasing merchandise for the sales program. I replaced Paul Skrobela in this role. At the time I arrived (in the very last bit of 1970) our biggest seller was Irish linen tea towels with heraldic themes. Of course we also sold morris dance paraphernalia, tune and dance books, vinyl recordings, and tin whistles.

In those days there were fairly frequent public performances by New York country dancers; English country dancing was the main focus, but morris, sword and American contras were also included. We danced at street fairs and hospitals, and had particularly good receptions in mental wards. May Gadd directed these as long as she remained director. There were also the Spring and Christmas festivals that were held at Barnard College’s beautiful hall and which drew hundreds. Here there were fairly elaborate performances that were rehearsed and slightly costumed. (In the 1930s-1950s these events took place at the Armory in New York’s upper east side and drew thousands of participants and observers.)

The CDSS office at 55 Christopher Street was the whole second floor of an old brownstone next door to the Stonewall Inn. It had two rooms, front and back, a small storage closet on the stair landing where I found various treasures, and a larger back storage space that also served as kitchen. Ed Durham and Frank Edwards turned the back room into more of a proper office as the staff grew in the mid-70s. Throughout my tenure the secretary sat next to the window on the street side, and had the only view. Which was a great view of all that went through Sheridan Square, including the subway entrance. The rest of us were more or less in the back. There were two electric typewriters, a mimeograph machine, costumes, dance equipment, file drawers, and a desk for each employee. These employees numbered three in the beginning, but grew a little as the years went on. Here is a synopsis of my office mates:

May Gadd

Director of CDSS from its inception, inspirational dance leader, protective of territory, old when I met her but once a dynamo, she devoted her life to CDSS and asked little back. She started dancing in England as an adult, quickly becoming part of Cecil Sharp’s demonstration group and then EFDS regional coordinator based in Newcastle. She retired in 1973.

Phil Merrill

CDSS music director for life but not an employee. By far the best English country dance player I have been privileged to dance to and work with. Phil was a great dancer in his younger days, and had studied to be a concert pianist at Eastman before stage fright sent him our way. His music actually did tell you what to do.

Genny Shimer

Inspirational dance teacher and organizer. Though not an employee at first, Genny held an important leadership position even before becoming director in 1973, and was critical to many endeavors including the American Country Dance Ensemble (the Bicentennial performance wing of CDSS), family weeks, and the purchase of Pinewoods Camp. She and her husband Jack were also close friends despite our generational gap.

Joan Carr

Became a key assistant to three directors – Genny Shimer, myself and Nancy White Kurzman and provided crucial continuity during the late 70s and early 80s. Joan, Kate Charles, Marney and I all lived in the same apartment building.

Winifred Kelly

Secretary for many years, retired weeks after I started. She was followed in this position by Bob Dalsemer (1971), Joanne Childress (later Joanne Davis, 1971-1972), Jane Ross (later Jane Leibert, 1972-1973), Kate Charles (1974-1976), Jody Evans (1977-78)

Ed Durham came on staff as coordinator of the American Country Dance Ensemble in about 1975 and added many modern touches to the office including a multi-line phone system, which I viewed as a miracle of sorts.

Elizabeth Hodgkin (membership secretary) and Frances Houghton were regular office volunteers

By the time I arrived at CDSS headquarters, May Gadd had been at the job for about 42 years, and was 79 years old. She had built up what currently existed, not just once, but again after World War II. She understood and implemented Douglas Kennedy’s populist reorientation of country dance, and had seen CDSS thrive in the new non-elitist guise. But she was uncomfortable when activities spread beyond her control, and, for example, took the formation of the Village Morris Men as a challenge to CDSS rather than as the natural outcome of a job well done. I think she recognized the need for new leadership; certainly everyone else did.

Genny Shimer took on the directorship in 1973 at a time when many things were in transition. The Conant family needed a break after decades of operating Pinewoods Camp; morris teams and contra dances were poised to spring up all over the country, as were local dance festivals. During Genny’s leadership Pinewoods Camp was purchased by the several user groups (including CDSS), the American Country Dance Ensemble was started, regional leadership conferences were started, and the Family Week at Pinewoods was inaugurated. Genny’s stature as a dance teacher and her level-headedness made the transition from May Gadd’s leadership widely acceptable within the Society, and her many years within the organization helped her navigate the various personal and group agendas existing at the time.

Genny had only agreed to a two year term and did not intend to sign up for another, so in mid-1975 I became director at the age of 27. My strengths were my direct involvement in the morris and contra scenes, my waxing dance leadership skills, an expanding understanding of how dance history fit together to create the present, enthusiasm, and wanting to do everything. My weaknesses were same list differently viewed: I took on too much, both for myself and others, I used enthusiasm to cover what I hadn’t yet thought through or understood, I made early American dance seem too fussy because I confused an evening of social dancing with historic recreation, and I was too busy calling dances, morris dancing and going to meetings to know what was going on in the office. Fortunately, I had a very good team in the office who graciously picked up the slack. Joan Carr and Kate Charles started during Genny’s tenure and already knew what to do. Joan was also an outstanding diplomat.

The purchase of Pinewoods Camp by the newly-formed Pinewoods Camp Inc. created more opportunity for CDSS and the other users. Genny had rightly put Family Week at the top of the list for CDSS expansion (the first Family Week was in August of 1975, just after I had become national director; Genny was program director of the week). But there were more weeks available in the summer, and I made American Week the next priority. The first American Week at Pinewoods was 1977, and as program director I put primary effort into bringing tradition bearers to the party. Even back then, I was more interested in the origins and local perpetuation of music and dance traditions than I was in disseminating bits and pieces of these traditions to a new audience. At the time there was an audience for both the wonderful, uninterpreted music, and also for the inter-cultural social scene created by reaching out to important tradition bearers. Perhaps that day will come again.

Marney and I were contemplating the future, and among other things thought raising a family in New York would be hard. I proposed moving the headquarters, and we looked at a number of possibilities. In the end the board decided to stay in New York and look for a new director. I still had a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and was made Artistic Director as a half time employee for the next three years, returning monthly for meetings. In June of 1977 Marney and I moved to Charlottesville, VA and have been there ever since.

My own curiosity about dance history, CDSS’s proclivity for public display, and the public funding surrounding the Bicentennial of American Independence were on a collision course that would lead me into show business, musty libraries in distant cities, costume balls and dance history conferences. I applied for and received three successive grants from the NEH to study early American social dance. CDSS created the American Country Dance Ensemble of which I was made director. I published a few of the dances I had uncovered in Twenty-Four American Country Dances, 1976.

The American Country Dance Ensemble was a major effort during the mid-1970s; dozens of volunteers sewed costumes under the direction of Honey Hastings for many months. We originally planned two shows, one depicting American social dance in the second half of the 18th century and the other a retrospective of the 18th and 19th centuries. Bookings were harder to get than we had imagined, the all-18th century show proved more popular and required fewer costumes. So to consolidate our efforts and cut our losses the second show was abandoned. One thing that has stayed with me from practicing for this second show was Genny Shimer’s careful teaching of the Viennese waltz. Though the dancers were all volunteers, musicians Phil Merrill (harpsichord), Marshall Barron (violin), Julie White (flute), Iris Hiskey (soprano), and narrator Alex Blachly were paid. Margaret Ann Martin later replaced Phil Merrill, who didn’t like wearing a costume very much.

A similar effort was undertaken in Boston; my own connection with the Boston show was limited to a couple of workshops on material as yet unpublished. What was the impact of these projects? No doubt more costume balls than otherwise would have occurred. Some living history locations, including Sturbridge Village and Colonial Williamsburg, added dance to their interpretation. Certainly a few dance groups started focusing on early American dance. Probably CDSS was stretched too thin for its own good. I personally gained an ideal platform to try out reconstructed dances and dance style with good dancers in historic clothing.

November 28th,1973 (the note on my calendar says “2:30 pm at Gay’s, bring fiddle”) May Gadd invited me to her apartment on Bleeker Street to meet her longtime friend, Agnes deMille, whose ballets and Broadway musical choreography changed the course of theatrical dance in the mid-20th century. She was a ballerina as well, and danced the lead role in her best remembered ballet, Rodeo. But before she was famous, she came to morris and country dance classes sponsored by CDSS. Phil Merrill reported that her “split capers” in morris were unequaled and gravity-defying. Miss deMille often used elements of traditional social dance in her creations, and when she needed material, she came to May Gadd (or Phil Merrill in the instance of Brigadoon). So this meeting was one with a history for the two of them, of which I was naturally ignorant at the time. The first tune I played for her was June Apple, and she never wanted to hear another one.

Agnes deMille was putting together a company to perform a number of her ballets on tour, and she wanted square dance and flatfoot material for an introduction to her latest creation, Texas Fourth. But she also wanted me to be in the production as fiddler, dancer and caller. And I agreed to do it! (I later figured out how Agnes cast dancers – whether their face could be distinguished from the back of an auditorium. Apparently my cheekbones were up to the task.) The show included interludes by ballad singer Jean Ritchie and tap dance legend Honi Coles. The Agnes deMille Heritage Dance Theater started rehearsals in mid-January, worked intensely for six weeks in various venues including Carnegie Hall rehearsal studios, and then toured in the northeastern United States for the month of March in 1974. I also performed my segment of the ballet in Agnes deMille’s “Conversations on the Dance” a number of times over the next decade, and was frequently her waltz partner on these occasions. I couldn’t do a second tour later in 1974, and Fred Breunig learned my role and toured with the company. I also reprised the role in 1983 when Miss deMille was given a Broadway tribute at the Shubert Theater; we were on last, and Isaac Stern opened for us.

I went to England for the first time in July of 1971 at the invitation of Ron Smedley. Ron had seen Wayne Henderson of Brasstown buck dance one evening at the Berea Christmas dance week, and also met me. He put together a month long tour of performances and festivals for the two of us that was breathtaking. Mostly I played fiddle and Wayne danced when we performed, but when we had a fiddler who could play a mountain hoedown available I also danced and we had a routine worked up. At the Loughborough festival we saw Bampton morris, danced English celidh dances to the Rakes, listened to Steeleye Span, John Kirkpatrick, and Packy Byrne. In Sheffield both the Grenoside and Handsworth sword dancers put on performances just for us. We met Northumbrian clog dance legend Johnson Ellwood, and actually got in the set and danced with Monkseaton Rapper (in the back yard of the Browns’ house, not in public). We opened at the High Level Pub for Sean McGuire, Irish fiddle virtuoso, and I started to learn wooden shoe clog from Peter Brown. We met Pat Shaw and attended one of his Another Look at Playford sessions and taught American clogging to London Folk, EFDSS’s performance troupe directed by Ron Smedley. Our final performance was at the Royal Festival Hall at the EFDSS 60th anniversary; I played for Wayne to dance and then we both danced to Brian Jackson’s fiddle. We were in august company: Loftus Sword, Monkseaton Rapper, Headington Quarry, Bampton, the Copper Family, the Watersons. There were more, but that is enough.

Wayne returned home and I went to a weeklong dance leadership seminar led by Nibs Mathews, EFDSS director, and Ken and Sybil Clarke. It was the best course of its type I have seen; particularly effective were the evening sessions arranged for uninitiated dancers with a post mortem discussion scheduled the next morning. I got back to New York and left a few hours later for Pinewoods Camp.

From that first trip to England I had developed many good friends, a revised impression of English folk customs, and a near desperate passion for morris dancing. I returned to England almost every summer for the next decade, then more infrequently after the children started to arrive. Back in New York I collaborated with John Dexter, Karl Rodgers and Howard Seidel, all former Village Morris Men (1968-69), in trying to start a new New York morris group, which, however, never really got very far.

John left NYC to join a string quartet in Ithaca and quickly succeeded in starting Binghamton Morris, whom he brought to a Greenwich Village morris tour sponsored by the Pinewoods Morris Men in the Spring of 1974. Some of the Cooper Union students who had been holding square dance weekends with me as caller were inspired by the morris generally and the spirit and quick progress of Binghampton, and wanted to morris dance themselves. This finally provided critical mass to start the Greenwich Morris Men, who first danced in public in June of 1974.

Karl Rodgers was our only Village Morris alumnus, and he very quickly left us due to the choices I was making for the group. Single tradition (we danced Fieldtown) and a more expansive style of movement were the main contentions, but I also think Karl and I were on opposite sides of a dichotomy created by Cecil Sharp many years before. Sharp presented morris to refined society in a form that could be accepted, though it made it into a cricket match in appearance. He also admired the regularity of the Headington Quarry dancers and tended to “Headingtonize” the other traditions. I had recently been to both Headington and Bampton for Spring Bank Holiday and was completely enchanted with both, and disillusioned with the Morris Ring style of dance. Now I am sad that we didn’t find a way to compromise. And I am glad that Greenwich had the fine run that it did.

Greenwich Rapper started about a year later when Tony Poile moved from London to Connecticut. Tony had a burning passion for rapper, having danced with Chingford Lads and London Folk, and soon also started Greenwich Guard rapper at the high school near his home in Connecticut. Everyone in Greenwich rapper was also a Greenwich Morris Man, but we had different practice nights and worked very hard on our stepping. Greenwich Rapper folded about the time I moved to Virginia in 1977, but Greenwich Morris continued and thrived.

The Greenwich Morris Men rented a Winnebago and traveled to Knoxville, TN for the first Knoxville Dance Festival in February of 1978, stopping in Charlottesville on the way. Local dancers saw them dance and liked it, and we were able to start the Albemarle Morris Men a few months later. Excepting Ralph Compton, a former Berea dancer, no one had danced morris before so they danced what I told them to without complaint. Workshops with Roy Dommett over the next few years modified our style considerably, and for the better. And we are still going strong today, many of the men being in the their fourth and best decade of dancing.

Since my time as a student in Brasstown, NC, I have tried to attend as many traditional community dances as I could. The majority of these events were in the southeastern states of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, but also included dances in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. I also interviewed people who had been callers and dancers about what they remembered from times past.

My method at a dance was to be as innocuous as possible, aware from folklore classes of the danger of changing what one hopes to observe unchanged. I wrote down what had happened at the event as soon as possible afterwards, including both dance and non-dance details. When I could I described the figures and calls, and in one case transcribed a tape recording of a whole dance, all 50 pages worth. When I had a tape recorder I would carry it in small bag and just leave it running under a bench or in a corner so as not to draw attention. Today these are some of my most cherished recordings.

After my second child arrived I did much less traveling to collect dances, but playing in local country bands brought me in contact with lots of local culture, including dance culture. I mostly stopped notating what happened by this time. Virtually all of the teaching I do of American traditional dance comes from the material gleaned in these years.

Since I plan to publish the original notations with some explanation I will only add here that the dancing at the best of the traditional community dances was by far the best dancing that I have encountered. The fire hall at New Creek, WV, the Woodhill Community Center in Union County, TN, the monthly dances of the Ed Larkin Dancers near Sharon, VT, Bill’s Roller Rink in Blairsville, GA, the Stella, VA Ruritan Club in my mind epitomize what the local dance can be.

What was different from the average revival contra or country dance? At interest-based events we dance with other dance enthusiasts, while traditional dance communities dance with the neighborhood. Another major difference in traditional dance communities is the educational content, of which there is none; there is no teaching, and it is not missed or needed, the dance is a party, the dances are the same every week or month, as are the caller and band in most cases, and variety is not a virtue. Which leaves room for good dancing in a social setting with the same folks who cut your hair, service your tractor, or teach your kids.

I have most always been in dance bands, and rarely other kinds.

Cottey Light Orchestra might have begun the day in the early 70s that Tom Kruskal and I came across a band stand on the shore of Oakland’s Lake Merritt where we gave a concert for ducks. Or perhaps it started the night that Tom, Tony Barrand, myself and maybe another culprit decided that a midnight strolling serenade was needed by folks at Pinewoods Camp. The band was named at Pinewoods a few years later when John Dexter, John Roberts, Tom and myself were housed for the week at Cottey House. Several nights, Tom, John Roberts and I went back to Cottey House to play lumpy English traditional tunes, morris tunes, historic tunes, anything that could be slow and emphatic. John Dexter, single at the time, came in later, Coleman lantern in hand, and announced “the search goes on.” The he joined in the music. Soon we heard the Old Swan Band and realized we weren’t the only ones who thought this kind of band was a good idea. Tom and I did a number of dances and short tours and together with Tony recorded Round Pond Relics in 1980. A second album, Over the Water, was made in 1994 and featured John Dexter, Tom and myself.

In New York I played old time music with groups made up for the moment, drawing from Bill Garbus, Pete Lissman, Jerry Schieber, David Spilkia, Jim Miller, Paul Brown, Jeff Woodring, and others. We also had a contra and square dance band named Urban Felicity that consisted of myself on fiddle and calling, Margaret Ann Martin (piano), Karl Rodgers (accordion, calling) and Betsy Blachly (percussion).

After moving to Charlottesville I had a few years when I played with Freyda Epstein (fiddle), Sue Read (piano and guitar) and me playing steel guitar and fiddle. Starting in the mid 80s, and continuing for more than a decade, we had a band named UFO consisting of Laura Light (fiddle), Pete Vigour (guitar and fiddle), Kim Cary (bass), and Jimbo Cary (drums), and myself playing steel, fiddle, guitar and calling. We played some western swing and country along with the jigs and reels.

In the mid-1990s our local middle school had a good band program. My oldest son Will played drums in the concert and marching bands, while Owen, who had taken seven years of violin and then quit, didn’t participate in band at all. But he did take an introductory guitar class the Winter he turned 14. He took off with the guitar, playing his black Fender Stratocaster or my Gibson J-45 non-stop, day and night, in bed, on the telephone, all the time.

I needed allies with whom to play dances, and it soon was apparent my sons could be them. For the boys, the chance to make $50 or $60 in an evening seemed great, but I think they liked playing, too. The instrumentation was already chosen for us. The sound was sparse and rhythm heavy. As Owen’s prowess as a lead player burgeoned, I started putting down the fiddle and picking up the guitar to add rhythm behind Owen’s leads.

The name of the band, Morrison Brothers, was sort of a joke, as I was obviously not a brother to anyone else in the band, but was sort of not a joke, in that I hoped from the start that the brothers would have the major input into the direction the band took. This is still my favorite playing experience.

I now also have a band with T. J. Crow (aka T. J. Johnson, mandolin) and Sue Read (piano) in a band that is local by design and called “In Wildness…”

In the mid-1980s I was thinking about ways to stay closer to home with my young and growing family (which now included my daughter Claire), still heard the siren call of the steel guitar from my youth, and learned that one of the great players, Buddy Charlton, was living nearby and giving lessons. I found a used steel for sale (a ShoBud double neck with hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs marking the frets) and started lessons. I eventually upgraded to an Emmons La Grande model and played with several local country bands. I also tried to incorporate the steel into contra and square dance bands, notably in UFO. I ultimately found bars and fraternity parties too loud, degrading, and hard on gear (but not Moose, Elk, and VFW clubs—I liked playing at them) and rededicated myself to traditional fiddle. I also was frustrated with my own progress on the steel and realized that I loved the sound of the instrument a lot more when it was being played by one of the leading geniuses but not so much when played by lesser practitioners, myself included.

I acquired my first fiddle at Dartmouth, but I don’t remember how. I went into Israel Young’s Folklore Center in New York on my way to Brasstown the very first time. There I met a fiddler who offered to set up my fiddle and find me a better bow, and I just gave it to him there and then with a forwarding address of John C. Campbell Folk School. This was risky, in hindsight, but my trust was validated when the fiddle came three months later, much improved, and with a nice Otto Hoyer bow I wish I still had.

I traded that fiddle later in the year to Randall Collins who had a music store in Murphy, NC. I don’t know anything about that fiddle, but it is the one I played for the next ten years. It was stolen from my car during a CDSS executive committee meeting along with the Hoyer bow. Randall Collins left Murphy a few years later to join the Pinnacle Boys of Knoxville, TN, a bluegrass band with a great twin and triple fiddle sound. Today he is back in the music store business in Blairsville, GA.

To replace it I bought a good German factory instrument from Tom Hosmer (who wrote a regular violin column for Strings Magazine) in Rochester, NY and a strong Pfretzschner workshop bow. After a violin maintenance and repair session he led at Buffalo Gap Family Week in 1991, I asked Rodney Miller to make me a violin. That is the 1993 instrument that I have played ever since. Violin and bow geekdom have gradually permeated my consciousness.

Though I almost always play my Miller violin in public, I have also have:

A 19th century factory fiddle with painted grain that belonged to Pug Allen, fiddle and banjo player from Stuarts Draft, VA that I mostly play cross-tuned. It is the one on the cover photo of Round Pond Relics and I recorded Betty Anne with it on the Morrison Brothers Band’s second album;

A 1910 violin by Ole Bryant of Boston that has the remarkable quality of sounding better in the presence of an accordion or concertina;

And my other lifetime achievement award—a nice German Guarneri copy from about 1900 that was John Ashby’s main instrument in the 1940s and 1950s. It was first bought by an Olinger, neighbors to the Ashbys, given (or sold?) to John Ashby by Charlie Olinger, and given to me by John’s son Skip Ashby in 2012.

At one early Charlottesville Dance Festival a session in Kerry set dancing was offered by Michael Denny and Linda Hickman. The dance taught was the North Kerry Set and we had great music from members of the Washington, DC band Celtic Thunder. I soon learned a modest repertoire of polkas and slides, listened to recordings of several Cork and Kerry musicians, and taught the North Kerry set at late night sessions at dance camps, morris ales, and parties. I had no awareness of any other sets, and basically thought this one dance was “the” Kerry Set. The dance worked great in the right social situation. A style of dancing emerged that was exuberant, heavy footed—just right for the occasion, but not close to the tradition. On one occasion I was asked to call with the Boys of the Lough at the Washington Folk Festival at Glen Echo Park. The ballroom was packed beyond capacity, around 600 people, and the Boys of the Lough were great players but so used to speeding up in their stage performances that I was struggling to make the contra dances work. So I called different dances, first a southern square dance to jigs, which was better. Then I remembered the North Kerry set and taught it, hornpipe figure and all. Finally the Boys, the dancers and I were all happy, me in particular because Michael Denny was there to watch the whole thing and see what he had started.

Decades and hundreds of North Kerry sets later (about 2002), Timmy “the Brit” McCarthy was brought to Charlottesville by the Blue Ridge Irish Music School to teach the sets of Cork and Kerry, at which he is a master. He came back for the next five or six years, and I went to his weekend of dance in Ballyvourny. I was captivated by both the music and the dances and have been increasingly asked to present them at workshops and festivals. I have limited myself to the sets of Cork and Kerry because this is what Timmy does, and because life is short.

Having written far more than I had ever intended, I will not say anything about the following:

Pinewoods, Mendocino and Buffalo Gap dance camps, Albemarle Morris Men’s week resident in Bledington, Gigs from hell, Fiddlers who have changed me, Gibson Guitars, the first American Dance Week, Douglas Kennedy, Pat Shaw, Shetland in 1976, sound reinforcement for dances, clogging lessons, Steve Hickman, what happened after the curtain fell at the Shubert Theater, Chuck Ward, Laurie Andres, workshops for various morris and sword groups, the Free State Ramblers, the Virginia Vagabonds, Brad Foster, Napoleon Bonaparte Chisholm, Cecil Sharp in central Virginia, dance history research, Minstrelsy, the minuet or Jimi Hendrix. And definitely nothing about the night I was licked by a skunk.

The multi-talented Glen and Judi Morningstar are musicians (fiddle and five-string banjo, Glen; dulcimer and piano, Judi; and bass and mandolin, both), dance band leaders (both), dance leader and organizer (Glen), tune author (Judi), and they are dancers (contra and English country dancing, eighteenth and nineteenth century historical dancing, square dancing, recreational dancing), AND they are singers (shapenote singing, folk song), dance researchers and educators. They are busy people.

Music has always been around them. Judi’s dad, Adrian “John” Emery, was a guitar player and grew up joining in the house party dances of the day; her granddad, Henry Emery, was a harmonica player; and her mom, Eva, was a stride piano player. Her other granddad, Herbert Smith, was a fiddler and played with his brothers in their family band. A lot of music was played in their home while she was growing up.

Glen’s parents were grange members and dancers, traveling the polka and grange hall circuits in Saginaw and Bay Counties, Michigan. Both sets of grandparents, the Crellers and the Morningstars, were grange members and dancers too. Glen’s parents, Glen Sr. and Ruth, met at a grange dance. Glen and his sister, Sue, joined in as youngsters. The music of his uncles, Bill and Norman Creller, guitar and mandolin, was always around the house. Uncle Bill was in a country western band (now he plays Hawaiian guitar…builds them too). Uncle George Lukezic played bass in a polka band out of Saginaw… he was “spot on,” Glen says.

Into these musical households, Glen and Judi were born, three days apart and across the street from each other, in Saginaw. Their families moved to different neighborhoods when they were very young, so they didn’t officially meet until teenagers, at neighborhood baseball games, and then at the same high school, where they started going steady. I’m not sure if they courted each other with music, but Glen used to ride his horse to meet Judi when she was visiting friends near his home. Upgrading to a car helped their relationship, they say.

Music, dance and song became a larger part of their lives when they moved to Rochester, Michigan in 1975, with Glen’s transfer to Chevrolet Manufacturing R&D. There they discovered the Rochester Folk Workshop, and from there were connected to the traditional music and dance community in southeast Michigan. Paint Creek Folklore Society, led by Vince Sadovsky and John Carter, was just forming, as well as the Detroit Country Dance Society, led by Burton Schwartz and Paul Tyler. These connections broadened quickly to include rising Michigan dance communities in Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Holland, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Midland and Traverse City. Glen and Judi were “on fire,” they said, learning to play additional instruments through other Paint Creek members, and honing their traditional dance skills. In 1979, encouraged by Burt Schwartz, they traveled southward to Berea Christmas Country Dance School and that REALLY got them hooked. They returned to Berea CCDS in 1981 to join the staff leaders for many enjoyable years.

They still have the plaque on the wall. Judi and Glen, along with music pal Tom Radcliffe, played their first gig for the Fenton Cub Scouts, in Fenton, Michigan on February 14, 1977. Judi played Appalachian dulcimer, Glen played banjo and Tom played guitar, and they sang the popular folk songs of the day. They had met Tom at PCFS, and Tom and Glen were the President and Vice President by then. Judi, too, served as both, and she and Glen each had terms as the newsletter editor. Judi, a.k.a. Aunt Lu, wrote a nearly-monthly article, “Ask Aunt Lu,” for Paint Creek Folklore Society’s newsletter, Keepin’ Tabs.

“Dear Aunt Lu… My husband recently took up the fiddle. It’s awful listening to him practice, it sounds like he’s torturing our cat and the neighbor called the ASPCA. I hate to discourage him but he’s driving me MAD! Signed, Raving & Ranting

(Aunt Lu’s response) “Dear Raving… This is a common problem among couples where only one decides to learn an instrument. Here are a few hints: Take up the fiddle with him (this will give you empathy). Buy him a mute (it works wonders for your nerves). Banish him to the basement. Encourage him to practice the same time every day and find something else to do, preferably in another city.”

Along with Tom, Glen and Judi organized the Paint Creek annual concert in 1977 as a society fundraiser…Tin Whistle Coffeehouse it was called, and it still runs today. A year later they organized the Olde Michigan Ruffwater Stringband from members of the folklore society who had either been playing for concerts and dances or were looking to be a part of that fun. With other members of Paint Creek, they organized annual music, song and dance picnics. The picnics grew into a Zing into Spring weekend (cohosted with the Detroit Folklore Society), and then an annual May Play Day, a mini-festival, with traditional music, song and dance workshops, a Maypole dance, an early evening contra and square dance, and evening concert. Paint Creek officers Gene Menton and Rick Ott worked with them to organize the first one, and it was held at Detroit Country Day School where gene was teaching. From the dancing fun at the May Play Days, came the annual Starry Night for a Ramble Contra and Square Dance, launched in 1984, organized with Jan Boonstra Pavlinak and Susan Grace Stoltz, and it, too, continues. Judi has been the annual band leader for the Paint Creek Country Dance orchestra for many years, along with JoAnn Shulte and others; they gather annually, practicing that year’s tunes for the Starry Night dance.

In the 1980s, Glen and Judi were “delightfully consumed” with organizing music, song and dance events. Ruffwater had been playing in Greenfield Village, Dearborn, as part of the offerings of the original Dulcimer Player’s Club, and Glen started leading impromptu dancing in front of Henry Ford’s family home and the Village Town Hall. They caught the eye and ear of Bob Eliason at the Village and started the monthly Lovett Hall dances in October 1981, with Glen leading the dances and Ruffwater playing the music; guest callers and groups performed as well, right up until the dance was retired in 2005. Meanwhile, Judi helped organize a women’s band called Just Friends, with Lori (Thompson) Cleland, Cecelia (Horodko) Webster, and Rosemary Kornacki, with a focus on concert presentations in the traditional and folk styles. Their reputation grew and they performed at a number of national festivals including the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the old Songs Festival.

At Berea Christmas School in 1982, Dr. John Ramsay asked Glen to organize a music, song and dance exchange with a group of musicians, singers and dancers from Denmark. Away they went! Conversation began among Thy Folkedanserslaug (folk dance group) and Thy Spillemandslaug (music group) in Denmark, Paint Creek Folklore Society in Michigan, and the Frankfort Country Dancers in Kentucky. A year and a half later, twenty-five musicians, singers and dancers came from the Thy region in Denmark to stay for a week in Michigan and a week in Kentucky, presenting their music, songs and dance. They stayed in local homes, including Glen and Judi’s. “It was phenomenal!,” Glen and Judi said. The following year (1985), the Kentuckians and Michiganders traveled to Denmark to perform there, and then to Sweden with their host families. The exchanges were repeated in 1987 and 1989, opening Glen and Judi even further to the power of connection among a community’s musicians, singers and dancers.

Also in 1982, Don Coffey and “T” Auxier launched Kentucky Summer Dance School, and the Morningstars were thrilled to be a part of the staff in its early years, learning a ton of practical information about working with organizers and other musicians, callers and dancers. Four years later, at Berea Christmas School, Peter Baker, Jonathan Robie, Jean Gal and Glen, four of the Michigan dancers who were there, put their heads together— it was time to have a week or weekend of similar music, song and dance back in Michigan. The four brought the idea to the Michigan folk community, and, with their support, Michigan Dance Heritage Fall Dance Camp was launched in September 1987. Bob Dalsemer, Joel Mabus and Bud Pierce were the first headliners…“perfect.” An MDH Spring Dance Camp, called Trillium Twirl, was added by the dance community in 1992 to fulfill the large demand for this grand fun…both are weekend camps and, yes, they, too, continue to this day.

In 1976, Glen and Judi’s involvement with Paint Creek Folklore Society opened the door to sharing traditional music, song and dance at a variety of venues in Michigan. They enjoyed being ambassadors for the traditional arts at shopping malls, town festivals, weddings, barn dances, birthday celebrations, family reunions and, ultimately, to their community. They saw the membership of PCFS grow from twelve to seventy over five years. Their good fortune in being connected to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village for almost twenty-four years allowed them to host over two hundred contra dances in the hall that Henry Ford built specifically for traditional dance…sprung floor, crystal chandeliers, winding staircase, panorama of second floor windows, bandshell. They met many people from across North America and Europe at those dances, they said, and believe they left a positive feeling of good music and fun dancing (and a great museum) with them. The Danish Exchanges were very influential on the global perspective of traditional music, song and dance for the Michigan and Kentucky dance leaders. Participating in launching Michigan Dance Heritage’s two weekends are a real boost to keep the energy in the traditional arts at a high level for their local dance community.

One special highlight happened in 2005 when they were hired by Don and Rhonda Cardwell of Dearborn to lead the dancing for their Cape Breton Summer Dance School at the Gaelic College in St. Ann’s on Cape Breton Island. They were immersed in dance workshops and Cape Breton culture presentations each day there. In the evening Glen led dancing in Baddeck for the many styles of dance sets found around the island. The musicians…“wow!” Jerry Holland, Buddy MacMaster, Roberta Head, Bara MacNeils, Mac Morin and more. A photo of Judi playing with Buddy is priceless. Over the years, their band’s core of hammered dulcimers, has kept Glen and Judi involved with the dulcimer festivals in Michigan and the Midwest—leading instrument workshops, shapenote singing, and performing for concerts and dances. This year marks thirty-five consecutive years at the Evart Dulcimer Funfest. It’s like a big family reunion, they say: singing, dancing, concerts, workshops, jamming, eating, camping. “Yay!!” they say.

Who has inspired you musically, I asked. Bands like Bill Spence and Fennig’s All Stars, they said. The Highwoods Stringband, the Red Clay Ramblers, Hillbillies from Mars, and Bare Necessities. Instrumentalists Dudley Laufman, Randy and Rodney Miller, Laurie Andres, Shane Cook, Buddy MacMaster, Jerry Holland, Bud Pierce, Jay Round, Bob Spinner, Bob Hubbach and Les Raber.

Dancewise? Glen’s biggest inspirations came from Burt Schwartz in Michigan for his historical dance work, Bill Alkire for his fun squares out of ohio, Carole Howard from Central Michigan University for her recreational dance leadership skills, Bob Dalsemer, Tony Parkes and Ted Sannella for their contras and squares. Don Armstrong from Colorado stands out for his contras, his personal skills with people, and his promotion of our traditional dances worldwide.

And organizationally? There are so many, Glen and Judi told me. Notably, Don Hays and Debbie Jackson from Paint Creek Folklore Society, John ramsay, Joe and Patty Tarter from Berea Christmas School, Peter Baker and Jerry Hickman from Midland Folksong Society, David Baur from Trillium Twirl, Don Armstrong from the Lloyd Shaw Foundation, Don Coffey from Kentucky Summer Dance School, Svend Hamborg from Thisted, Denmark, Bob Dalsemer from everywhere good, Ted Sannella from Maine, Don Theyken the personable collaborator from Michigan, and a host of skillful organizers from AACTMAD (Ann Arbor Council for Traditional Music and Dance), the Ten Pound Fiddle (East Lansing), and the Oakland County Traditional Dance Society—“What they accomplish each year is astounding!”

Not content to continue to lead dances, form bands, organize events, support their local dance and music societies, and perform, Glen and Judi… and I don’t know how they do it, but they do…record (both); compose, lead bands and write music books (Judi); and teach music and dance in elementary schools and homeschool communities (Glen).

Their first Ruffwater Stringband recording was in 1981—“Michigan Winter” and was a 33-1/3 LP on vinyl. DgA Productions brought their portable recording studio to Lawnridge Hall in Rochester which was the home base for Paint Creek Folklore Society. They were all in one big room together, thirteen of them, with their individual microphones. The band had practiced hard for the seventeen cuts and they recorded it all in two sessions. It mixed easy and had a great live sound. The second recording was “Michigan Spring,” produced in 1992 at Numark Studio in Utica on audio cassettes and leading edge CD, and, again, recorded in one big room with individual microphones. But this time sound “fences” were added for this recording to allow more separation of the fiddles from the dulcimers from the piano etc. It, too, mixed pretty well and still had a good live sound. They also did a number of small diameter 33-1/3 instructional records for the Lloyd Shaw Foundation from this collection of tunes. The third recording was “Michigan Summer” and was a CD in 2002. They stepped into the digital age with this recording—no longer in one big room, but rather recording the bass and rhythm tracks first, then the melody tracks separately, then the vocal tracks. It was a techie geek’s dream. Michael King Studio in Birmingham coordinated all of this recording, and it was substantially more work to mix, but turned out well. Judi has enjoyed recording two cassettes, “A Dulcimer Holiday” and “Here’s to Song” with Just Friends. Although they never made the digital crossover, they’re proud of both recordings. She also is heard in two CDs, playing piano for Bob Hubbach in “Up North, Down East,” and more recently in “Out the Buckhorn Way.” 

When they began leading youth dances in 1986 they were delighted that a group of about two dozen homeschoolers wanted to partake in traditional music and dance. This first group grew rapidly each year, spawning a new group of homeschoolers that then began their own annual dance. Both groups continued to grow and by 1996, attendances of one hundred eighty young people were common. A third homeschool dancing group spawned from the second group in 2002 and this group grew VERY quickly through the support of the Center family out of Royal Oak. In 2010, the Center family group moved to a new dance club facility in Madison Heights and attendances of four hundred and five hundred young people have amazed them. In the past year, Glen has received requests to lead these dances for homeschool groups in Memphis and Hart, Michigan, whose members had attended the dances in southeast Michigan. The Memphis group was organized by an energetic fifteen-year old young lady named Hannah. The first dance there saw one hundred forty teenagers attending. The expansion is underway!! Glen and Judi see the next two generations of traditional dancers, musicians and singers coming in part from these homeschool groups and the elementary schools, where Glen is leading his Dance Your Way Through History program. The Morningstars’ goal is to provide a fun, significant social experience for these young people so it becomes an instinctive part of their lives. They know that someday soon these students will be playing the music, leading the dancing, singing the songs, and organizing the events for their generation.

I asked Glen and Judi if their perception of traditional dance, music and song has changed over the last thirty-eight years. “YES!!,” they said. It had become increasingly clear to them, they told me, that the necessary things for a healthy lifestyle are found in traditional music, song and dance. The benefits of discipline, working together, exercise for a healthy body and mind, self-confidence, organization skills, shared respect, social skills and much more, are all to be had in the traditional music, song and dance world we live in. Now, how do we engage even more people to join us and realize these benefits, and share the fun?,” they ask each other. And us, the readers.

Glen is retired from General Motors and Electronic Data Systems where he held many positions in Manufacturing Engineering and Information Technology. His profession has shifted to leading dance programs in schools, historical settings, for dance communities around Michigan and dance weekends across the country. He also does community volunteer work as an Advanced Master Gardener. Judi taught Appalachian and hammered dulcimers and piano for many years, and still takes the occasional student. She is a prolific tune writer and book publisher, as well as an avid reader who volunteers at Highland Township Library, and she designs and constructs her own jewelry when it’s time to relax a bit. Her immediate goal is to update the music notation in her Ruffwater Fakebook to take advantage of the crisp and clear notation in more modern music applications. Nothing has changed—they’re still busy people.

Over the years, occasionally, not too often, but from time to time, I hear or read concerns about the lessening of the traditional music, song and dance community. But with folks like Glen and Judi Morningstar, their friends and fellow organizers in Michigan and elsewhere, strong folk communities have been and are being built. To throw oneself so enthusiastically, over so many years, with so many accomplishments to your name and still keep going, may be unusual to some, but the Morningstars of our world keep me feeling that the traditions we love are in superb hands as they pass from generation to generation.

“What are the most valuable thoughts you’ve taken away from your activities so far?” I asked at the end of the interview. “The memories of caring, dedicated, forthright people around us,” they said. “They have made our activities a true delight. What a joy to work with people in all the aspects of traditional music, song and dance, who lean forward and pour their hearts into making this community click.” I can’t say anything better about these two people myself. So, on behalf of the Country Dance and Song Society, I say thank you, Glen and Judi Morningstar—you have leaned forward and poured your hearts into our community, making it stronger and longer lasting by your gifts of music, song, dance, friendship, organization, and the ability to inspire. It’s a joy to honor you with this year’s Lifetime Contribution Award. Long may you thrive.