Birdie in the Cage

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Speaker 8 This is Radiolab. I'm Lula Miller.
So around this time of year, in the States anyway, the days are getting longer. The nights are getting warmer.

Speaker 9 So everybody, just find a partner.

Speaker 8 It's dancing weather.

Speaker 9 And if you don't know them, that's fine.

Speaker 9 You can just walk up to somebody and say, hi, I'm so-and-so.

Speaker 7 Will you dance with me?

Speaker 8 You know, time for weddings and ho-downs, and of course, the great American tradition, square dancing.

Speaker 8 But whose American tradition is it? As we come up on July 4th, a time to ponder our American-ness, we are rerunning a piece from the archives and that gets into the surprising roots of square dancing.

Speaker 8 It comes from the wonderful producer and reporter Tracy Hunt.

Speaker 7 Tracy, we love you. We miss you.

Speaker 8 In conversation with Jad.

Speaker 8 And it actually begins.

Speaker 9 If anybody needs a partner, just raise your hand and then look around for other hands that are up.

Speaker 8 With the two of them hosting an actual square dance.

Speaker 2 So here we go.

Speaker 2 Join hands and circle left.

Speaker 2 Back to the rat. Don't think all night.

Speaker 6 A little while ago, Tracy and I threw a dance party over at a place called the Bell House.

Speaker 6 That's in Brooklyn. We had a live band.

Speaker 6 We had a caller named Alex Kramer. We swung our partners around.

Speaker 6 We doci-doed.

Speaker 6 We doe for the clam.

Speaker 9 I'll swing mine, you swing your.

Speaker 6 We might have even shot through the hole in the old tin can.

Speaker 2 Join hands in a pretty little ring.

Speaker 2 One cop will make an arch.

Speaker 9 Duck for the oyster.

Speaker 6 There were about a hundred of us there that night learning the very American art of

Speaker 6 square dancing.

Speaker 10 But, but, but.

Speaker 6 You might be asking, why we do this? Why would Radiolab do a square dancing event in Brooklyn in 2019?

Speaker 7 Well, it's Tracy's fault. Why can't I hear anything?

Speaker 2 Oh, ha!

Speaker 2 It's not plugged in. Oh.
It all goes back.

Speaker 7 I need to find a freaking

Speaker 7 adapter to the.

Speaker 7 Oh, here's here we are to a conversation Tracy and I had in the studio before we ever got up on stage together okay um so square dancing lay it on me a dance that I should say before I started reporting this story I'd never seen I kind of knew about it saw it in the musical Oklahoma it was inflicted on me in in grade school I know it's yeah but I think that's just an inheritance from growing up in the south well actually no it's not just a southern thing besides the fact that it somehow missed me in Miami it was taught in pretty much every other school in the country.

Speaker 7 Quick scan of the audience. How many of you had to do square dancing in school? That's something that we actually confirmed later at the event.
Oh my god, so many of you.

Speaker 6 Wow, most of the audience.

Speaker 7 I feel like that was most of the audience. But the thing is, it doesn't just stop at schools.

Speaker 7 Square dancing is a state dance, or the state folk dance, in about 30 states. 30.
Alabama, California, Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and on and on and on.

Speaker 7 And on top of that, it's been pushed in front of Congress on two separate occasions where people fought to make it the national folk dance of America, elevating it right up there with a bald eagle.

Speaker 7 By the way, that's a red-tailed hawk because eagles do not sound as cool as we think they do.

Speaker 7 And, you know, square dancing isn't exactly what we thought it was either.

Speaker 7 I mean, you know, it didn't really kind of mesh with my idea of America exactly.

Speaker 7 But when I started digging and I went super super deep, I gotta say it kind of messed with some of my ideas of my America and your America and our America.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 7 So just to get things started off,

Speaker 7 I'm going to take you back to the 1890s or 1890-ish.

Speaker 11 In the late 1800s, there were many immigrants coming to this country from southern and eastern Europe.

Speaker 7 According to folk dance scholar Phil Jameson, at that time, a new wave of immigrants were coming to America.

Speaker 11 Italians and Slavs and Polish people and Jewish people.

Speaker 7 And they were seen as very different from the earlier waves of English and Irish and German immigrants.

Speaker 11 And the old stock Americans sort of pushed back against these immigrants and said, wait a minute, we are the real Americans. Our ancestors were here first.

Speaker 11 And, you know, think of 1890 as when the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded.

Speaker 7 We were a generation past the Emancipation Proclamation and the Trail of Tears.

Speaker 11 And in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance was put into our public schools.

Speaker 7 And so, Bill says around this time, there was a national conversation bubbling up about who we as Americans are. Like when we say us,

Speaker 7 who is us?

Speaker 7 Well, according to Phil, One answer to that question came from a music scholar.

Speaker 11 An English ballad collector named Cecil Sharp who came to the Southern Mountains.

Speaker 7 From about 1916 to 1918, he went all around the Appalachian Mountains in the southern U.S., visiting families, sitting on front porches, and asking people to sing. Remember me

Speaker 7 when you were in town a drinking

Speaker 11 and was astounded that people were still singing old British ballads that had long since died out in England.

Speaker 11 They were singing about Barbara Barbara Allen and they were singing about lords and ladies and built white steeds and bloody daggers and all that.

Speaker 7 Now this was interesting to him because Sharp's idea, and he wasn't alone in this, is that the people living in southern Appalachia, the white people living there, these people had been isolated here in the mountains for generations and were therefore the keepers of the purest Anglo-Saxon heritage in America.

Speaker 7 And when he was in eastern Kentucky, he came across that pure heritage and dance form.

Speaker 11 He came across some people doing a square dance that was a demonstration for him.

Speaker 7 And the thing about this dance that he was seeing, it had some elements of French dances,

Speaker 11 French cotillions and quadrilles.

Speaker 7 Where six couples would be in some sort of formation, holding hands, moving in a circle, but also parts of it that looked like old Scots-Irish and English country dances

Speaker 7 where couples would link arms and skip around each each other then make arches for other couples to duck through.

Speaker 7 So all of these different moves were coming together in this one dance he was seeing happening right in front of him.

Speaker 11 And he just made this assumption that these were Anglo-Saxon people and this is a folk dance of our ancestors.

Speaker 7 Now, obviously there were a lot of different kinds of people living in those mountains that he was ignoring.

Speaker 7 But despite that, or maybe more like because of it, this idea that square dancing was quintessentially American just took off.

Speaker 11 And shortly after that is when they started teaching folk dances in schools.

Speaker 7 So, the first place I heard any of this was this tweet thread that was very tantalizing.

Speaker 7 It sort of pegged Henry Ford as the mastermind behind this white supremacist plot to square dancing in all the schools in order to like save white children from jazz or something.

Speaker 6 I see. So this is an attempt at whitewashing.

Speaker 7 Basically, yes. Got it.
Now,

Speaker 7 first of all, all, Henry Ford was an anti-Semite and for some reason thought Jews invented jazz and hated jazz. And he tried to promote dances from, quote, northern peoples.

Speaker 11 But. Henry Ford had nothing to do with teaching square dancing in physical education classes.

Speaker 7 That part of the tweet thread isn't quite true, but the whitewashing part isn't exactly wrong. It was actually one at Dance Educator in Michigan.

Speaker 11 Grace Ryan in Michigan. Who started teaching the square dance as a way to assimilate the children of European immigrants to be true Americans.

Speaker 7 More teachers picked it up. She wrote some books.
That kind of popularized it around the country among teachers. And before you know it, bam, square dancing in schools.

Speaker 13 From Tuscumbia, Missouri, and they call themselves the Lake of Ozark Square Dance.

Speaker 7 And then the dance started to spread.

Speaker 7 People were dancing in community halls and public squares and churches and barns. By the 30s, square dancing is all over the radio.

Speaker 7 As TVs start popping up in American homes,

Speaker 2 square dance is too.

Speaker 7 You know, you could just go to YouTube and like Google Lucky Strike square dancing, and you see this like really weird commercial where there's actually like

Speaker 7 cigarettes doing the square dance.

Speaker 7 By the 40s and 50s, it's huge.

Speaker 16 The square dancing craze sweeping across the nation keeps on growing in New York in a big way.

Speaker 7 Square dancing clubs start forming all over the place.

Speaker 7 Out west, it starts to get a little yeehaw with men in cowboy shirts and boots and women in big fluffy skirts.

Speaker 7 In 1951, they form a national organization that puts on this national square dancing convention where tens of thousands of people gather from all over the country and square dance together.

Speaker 13 Square dancing is part of the heritage of the United States.

Speaker 13 Born with the very birth of the country.

Speaker 15 And then

Speaker 14 the square dancers of America want something from Congress. They want their dancing, square dancing, officially named the National Folk Dance of the United States.

Speaker 7 These groups went to Congress to say that square dancing should be the American dance.

Speaker 16 Square dance is indeed uniquely American. It's American American.

Speaker 7 And actually, it was officially the national folk dance from 1982 to 1983. So I really wanted to talk to the people who were part of this effort, but a lot of them are dead.

Speaker 6 You mean, oh, so this is an old movement?

Speaker 2 This is an old movement.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 this is Leslie. I did manage to find the congressman

Speaker 7 who introduced some of these bills.

Speaker 2 All right, here he comes.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 7 His name is... Hello, Leon Panetta.

Speaker 18 Hey, how are you, Tracy?

Speaker 19 Former Secretary of Defense and former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta.

Speaker 6 The Leon Panetta?

Speaker 10 The Clinton Leon Panetta?

Speaker 7 The Clinton Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff.

Speaker 20 I think this is a moment for a strong, steady hand.

Speaker 7 Usually these days he's on CNN answering hard questions about drones.

Speaker 20 The responsibility of the intelligence community.

Speaker 7 National security.

Speaker 8 It has to be comprehensive.

Speaker 7 So I think he was a little surprised when I called him up and said, you know,

Speaker 7 you want to talk about square dancing?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 10 it came out of nowhere. I brought back.

Speaker 6 He introduced a bill about square dancing?

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 18 Well,

Speaker 18 I actually did folk dancing when I was in grammar school and

Speaker 18 enjoyed it then and

Speaker 18 always kind of kept track of back in the 1980s.

Speaker 7 He was a congressman out of California.

Speaker 18 And there was a couple that were involved in folk dancing, George and Ann Holtzer, I believe, were their names.

Speaker 7 He had some square dancers who were very supportive of his campaigns. So it was very much a politically kind of like favorished type of thing.

Speaker 18 They came to me with the idea.

Speaker 7 But he was actually pretty kind of passionate about it when I was talking to him. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 18 And I thought it made sense to try to establish and recognize it as the national folk dance.

Speaker 14 Well, on the face of it, all that sounds harmless enough.

Speaker 2 But wait a minute.

Speaker 7 There was this kind of immediate and very muscular opposition to this bill.

Speaker 14 This House subcommittee today suddenly discovered that about the only people who would be happy to commemorate square dancing are square dancers.

Speaker 7 One by one, dance historians, folklorists got in front of the mic and said, you gotta be kidding me.

Speaker 21 To make folk dancing a national dance, to me, would be a slap in the face to other arts.

Speaker 7 This makes absolutely no sense.

Speaker 22 This is a nation of immigrants.

Speaker 7 The United States is a country filled with a lot of different kinds of people from a lot of different parts of the world.

Speaker 22 To single out a dance that represents even a very small fraction of British origin immigrants would be insulting to every other cultural group in this country.

Speaker 7 Everyone was like, square dancing?

Speaker 2 Seriously?

Speaker 7 What about hula?

Speaker 4 Isn't that a folk dance? What about Tech?

Speaker 14 Or for that matter, break dancing as an expression of urban folk culture.

Speaker 7 Not to mention the people who were here first.

Speaker 7 Native Americans who have their own dance traditions.

Speaker 7 You know, One bit of testimony that actually stuck with me was from the 1988 hearing. It was a woman named Raina Green.

Speaker 7 She was at one time time the head of the American Folklore Society, and she is a member of the Cherokee Nation. And she said, my grandmother has only ever done the square dance in schools.

Speaker 7 That's the only place she ever did it.

Speaker 7 And at the same time, she was forbidden from doing her own tribal dances.

Speaker 7 And so to come and say that square dancing is now the national folk dance would be to dishonor her and dishonor all our ancestors.

Speaker 6 And even just to put put a finer point on it, I mean, you take something like the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Speaker 6 I mean, that was the culmination of a series of events that I think began with a dance. Wow.
So it wasn't simply that they were being forgotten.

Speaker 6 I think they were being they were being very violently suppressed at times. So the dance, the dance has the question of what dance you do is is not always it's it's sometimes violent, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So I'm curious about like what would be your reaction to that argument.

Speaker 18 Well, I i i mean i i certainly appreciate uh indian tradition and what happened to uh the indians throughout history that there's there's no question how abused they were

Speaker 18 at the same time it's important to recognize some of the things that make the United States what it is today.

Speaker 18 I always remember de Tocqueville's comments when he came to this country and went to the frontier and by the way saw people folk dancing at that time.

Speaker 18 But he mentioned something something that I think is particularly important. He said the difference about America is that in those small communities throughout the West, people care for one another.

Speaker 18 They have a sense of community.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 7 I don't think that that was...

Speaker 7 When the Tocqueville was here and he was looking at the West, I don't think that that was much of a time of togetherness. I mean, plenty of Indian tribes are being driven off their landscape.

Speaker 7 I don't want to

Speaker 7 start a whole thing, but I guess it's just I'm kind of don't want to have like a romanticized view of that time period.

Speaker 18 No,

Speaker 18 I don't think we have to have a romanticized view. I mean,

Speaker 18 the fact remains that all of us in our communities do recognize the importance of helping one another, and that isn't romanticizing a damn thing. And

Speaker 18 I just think at some point it would be a nice gesture to all of those that enjoy that to make clear that the United States recognizes the square dance as particularly unique to the history and to the culture of America.

Speaker 7 Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this.

Speaker 12 Sure.

Speaker 6 Yeah. That was a.

Speaker 6 I wish there was a slightly more satisfying response there.

Speaker 6 I feel like you guys were not having the same conversation or something.

Speaker 7 That was like. Yeah, to say the least.
And it made me realize that, you know, maybe I shouldn't be talking to a politician. I should be talking to square dancers.

Speaker 7 and so i made some phone calls oh are you linda linda

Speaker 7 i traveled to the heartland of america

Speaker 7 and a square dancer tug okay already that's called a yellow rock what i found out about square dancing was

Speaker 7 actually really surprising like what well you're gonna have to wait till after the break Oh, well then, Radiolab will continue in a moment.

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Speaker 1 Radiolab is supported by Apple TV. It's 1972.
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Speaker 6 I'm Jad. This is Radiolab.
We are back from break with producer Tracy Hunt doing the dance of the square, where we haven't actually done the dance yet. That's coming.

Speaker 6 Where we'd left off so far, we'd seen what happened when a bunch of square dance evangelists took their cause to Congress, pushed for square dance to be the American folk dance.

Speaker 6 People pushed back against that, claiming, actually, no, the square dance leaves people out. It actually represents something truly painful in our country's past.
That's where we left off.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but that was in the 80s, more than 30 years ago.

Speaker 7 And i wanted to see what was going on with square dancing today and i was making a bunch of calls and i eventually talked to this one woman named linda peterson she was part of the effort to make square dancing the state folk dance for the state of maryland and she invited me to the national square dancing convention all right i'm in the lobby of the downtown marriott in kansas city missouri in this huge convention center

Speaker 7 people were just arriving they had their suitcases You can see they were bringing in these costume racks, I guess, filled with big huge skirts, Western shirts, cowboy boots, lots of glitter,

Speaker 7 lots of crinoline. And anyway, Linda and I had planned to meet in the lobby of this hotel.
So hopefully she will notice that I'm the person with the big fuzzy microphone. Also, the black one.

Speaker 7 I will say that I did find black squared answers there.

Speaker 6 You did?

Speaker 7 I counted while I was there

Speaker 7 about 11.

Speaker 6 Out of how many?

Speaker 7 About 3,000.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

Speaker 7 I guess one in 300.

Speaker 2 That's a ratio. Yeah.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 10 eventually.

Speaker 10 Oh, are you Linda? Hi, Linda.

Speaker 2 Linda spotted me. I'm good.

Speaker 7 Square dance your tongue.

Speaker 2 Okay, all right.

Speaker 7 And then she just takes me around and she just starts. This is Tracy.

Speaker 17 Hi, Tracy.

Speaker 7 Introducing me to everybody.

Speaker 10 Hi, Hi, glad to meet you.

Speaker 17 Hi, Tracy.

Speaker 7 In the Square Dance world,

Speaker 7 each person was just

Speaker 7 friendlier than the last.

Speaker 7 There was an opening ceremony.

Speaker 7 Some speeches, a prayer.

Speaker 7 Eventually, we did finally get to see some dancing. And it sounds like this.

Speaker 7 And there's these super complicated calls. And instead of a traditional fiddle band with a banjo and so on,

Speaker 7 they're actually playing 80s pop hits.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 7 And this is actually common. I talked to this one caller who was like, yeah, I use J-Lo sometimes.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yes.

Speaker 7 I actually walked into one room where they were using Leonard Cohen's hallelujah.

Speaker 7 So they really do use like just all kinds of music. And

Speaker 7 you know, it was just a long ways off from like, you know, Oklahoma style Western frontier version of square dancing that I had in my head. And when I started going around talking to people.

Speaker 7 I'm we are public radio, so this is just my mic and I'm recording.

Speaker 2 That's a micro move. It is a microboo.

Speaker 7 It was also pretty clear that

Speaker 7 this push to make it the national folk dance was kind of waning.

Speaker 5 So after a while, I think the square dance folks decided, you know what, let's let it, let's not stir up trouble. Let's keep a positive attitude and image for our activity.

Speaker 2 This is Roy.

Speaker 7 I talked to him and his wife, Betsy Gata.

Speaker 7 Betsy Gata is kind of a big deal in the square dancing world.

Speaker 7 Anyway, they made it sound like they had heard the backlash and sort of in some way kind of got the point.

Speaker 5 We were talking about that and

Speaker 5 there were times when the square dance activity,

Speaker 5 to be perfectly honest, for a long time, it was a white activity.

Speaker 7 I think that that does

Speaker 7 make, you know, someone like me, who I'm a black person,

Speaker 7 go, huh? Like, you know, why is, you know, why is this activity that's, you know, seemingly for and by and created by white people, why does that have to be the

Speaker 7 national American dance, you know? And it kind of does feel like a little, like you're, you know, I'm being excluded or I'm being told that, you know, that this is what it means to be an American.

Speaker 5 And a lot of people in our activity took heed of that and said,

Speaker 5 yeah, you know, that there's a valid point.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 5 we still kind of felt that it was the one dance form that

Speaker 5 hopefully transcended all of that because it is all inclusive. Granted, it wasn't.
But then again, America wasn't an inclusive society.

Speaker 24 And what we kind of wanted to do was bring everybody in.

Speaker 24 That was our strategy. We wanted to set the hook and wheel everybody into the group.

Speaker 7 And what sort of came out for me over time was that for them, you know,

Speaker 7 Being the national dance, it wasn't so much like trying to make this like piece of white culture like enshrine it into you know some sort of national symbol it was more about good marketing you know you know to make square dancing better to get more people and keep them numbers are declining um yeah and so um

Speaker 6 interesting so that's for their idea was this is a way to so that it's not about let's whitewash america or maybe it was but they that wasn't the sort of spoken idea it was more like let's not die yeah and and and while i was there they really made a point about how square dancing is really, really just open and inclusive.

Speaker 6 What makes it unique to us?

Speaker 7 This is Dana Shermer.

Speaker 7 He was the president of Caller Lab. That's the group that trains all the callers.
And he's also the guy who said he uses J-Loves sometimes.

Speaker 23 I think when you hear the music, the first time you step in there and touch hands,

Speaker 23 the magic just goes right through your hands. You can just feel the warmth.

Speaker 10 and the friendliness of all the people in this group with you. Like you come into the square and you don't care who they are, where they came from, or what happens.

Speaker 7 Nobody knows anything about anybody else, but you all have to work together.

Speaker 10 You know, you're in the group and you're going to have fun.

Speaker 10 And I don't look, I'm an accountant. I don't go out there looking for accountants.
I go out there and get in the square and what you do. I'm a farmer.
I'm a doctor.

Speaker 2 I'm a lawyer.

Speaker 10 It doesn't matter. We have all kinds of people and we're all going to dance together.

Speaker 23 It's a teamwork. You're doing something together as a team.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's like an equalizer.

Speaker 10 Yeah, we're all together.

Speaker 7 This is something I heard over and over and over again, that square dancing welcomes everyone. It doesn't matter who you are.

Speaker 17 You don't worry about sexual orientation. You don't worry about color.
You don't worry about where they're from.

Speaker 17 All you worry about is, can they square dance, can they help me have a good time square dancing?

Speaker 17 That's all that matters.

Speaker 24 I can remember

Speaker 24 when we were, we, the square dance world, were making some strides in opening out.

Speaker 24 In 1965, which was the year of Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, the National Convention was in Dallas, Texas. And I was there, and

Speaker 24 the country in the South was scary enough.

Speaker 24 We drove through the South in a car from New Jersey, and for a while we were followed because they thought we might have been outside agitators who were going to register people to vote or something.

Speaker 24 And we were just a family coming back from the Square Dance Convention.

Speaker 24 But for some reason, and I do not know the background, that was the year that a group of of African American dancers from I believe the Detroit and or Chicago areas decided to attend the national convention.

Speaker 24 This could have been very scary in that atmosphere,

Speaker 24 but they were very smart.

Speaker 24 And I watched them. I was just out of high school.
And I watched them. And what they did was they never entered a square uninvited.

Speaker 24 They started a group. They'd stand on the floor and put up their hand with three fingers up, which means we need three couples, and let people come to them who would be comfortable dancing with them.

Speaker 24 And they never forced the issue. If three couples needed a fourth and they all said, come and join us, they would fill that square.
And there was not a single problem at that convention. And

Speaker 24 the African-American dancers have been part of the activity since then.

Speaker 7 I'm going to let y'all go.

Speaker 7 you.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Ben Leon again.

Speaker 2 Breaks through just in case.

Speaker 2 Huh.

Speaker 6 I mean, walking away from that visit, what did you make of all that? Of the convention, the whole thing?

Speaker 7 Well, you know, it was a great experience. I felt very welcomed and everyone was really, really sweet.

Speaker 7 But, you know, it still kind of felt like it was welcome and come do our thing you know yeah and i have talked to some black square dancers and lgbtq square dancers who you know didn't want to go on the record with me but they said you know we don't really feel comfortable coming to this convention every year and um

Speaker 7 all that to just say that you know it just doesn't really necessarily feel like it could be like my dance it's still kind of their dance yeah

Speaker 7 but I talked to Phil Jameson after I went to the convention.

Speaker 7 And Phil, if you remember, he was the guy who told us about Cecil Sharp and the mountains and kind of the traditional story about where square dancing comes from.

Speaker 7 And during that conversation, he really kind of upended this whole idea of my dance or our dance and their dance.

Speaker 11 I spent about 10 years of my life as a professional musician and dancer.

Speaker 7 So Phil was actually a musician and dancer for a long time, and he was actually part of this clogged rib called.

Speaker 11 The Green Grass Cloggers. I was on the road for seven years with that group, and we traveled all over the U.S.
and overseas as well.

Speaker 7 And he says a lot of times after these performances, people would come up and ask him, you know, where did these dances, these folk dances, like the square dance, where did it come from?

Speaker 11 And so I'd go and look in books and try to try to read up on the history of these dances.

Speaker 11 All the books that were out there, square dance books, just talked about the British Isles and, you know, the hardy pioneers coming to the mountains with their dances.

Speaker 7 And you know, they would basically tell the same story that he told us, you know, Cecil Sharp and how this dance is a combination of French and English and Irish dances.

Speaker 7 But at a certain point, Phil says.

Speaker 11 It just didn't seem right to me because the population of Appalachia has never been pure white Anglo-Saxon. It's always been a mixed.

Speaker 11 Of course, there were Native American people there to begin with, but there were enslaved people with the earliest settlers. And there was slavery throughout the southern mountains.

Speaker 11 And, you know, when you look at the musical traditions,

Speaker 11 the fiddle is accompanied by the banjo, and that has African roots. And you look at the vocal traditions,

Speaker 11 yes, people still sing the old British ballads, but they also sing

Speaker 11 gospel songs, blues songs,

Speaker 11 Tim Pan Alley songs, and minstrel songs,

Speaker 11 all kinds of things. So around 2001, I just started digging into it, and I just wanted to get to the bottom of the story and

Speaker 2 figure it out.

Speaker 7 So, Phil would end up spending 14 years looking at letters and travel narratives, historical accounts, and dance manuals, anything he can get his hands on.

Speaker 11 And what I discovered was there was an evolution of the dances that that occurred during the 19th century. And

Speaker 11 they're basically a multicultural hybrid that have elements of dances from the British Isles, reels, and there's African-American and Native American influence as well, all in the mix.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 6 what does he mean?

Speaker 7 Does he mean... Well, he means that they were all doing these dances, not just white people.

Speaker 11 This was shared culture back in the day. You'd find African-American folks dancing these dances and white folks dancing them, and Native American folks were dancing them.

Speaker 7 And things from their own past would creep into this dance. For example, there's this one move in square dancing where you have one dancer in the middle.

Speaker 7 And some people think this is actually related to something called the ring shout, which is like a traditional dance from West and Central Africa.

Speaker 7 And, you know, the crazy thing is that he told me the thing that makes the square dance the square dance.

Speaker 11 Dance calling itself comes from the black tradition.

Speaker 11 There's no evidence that that ever happened in European dances, but there's a lot of call and response in African dances.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 11 the earliest dance callers were all black fiddlers who were playing for dances.

Speaker 7 Basically, Phil told me that when you were back in Europe, the way you learned these dances is that you had a dancing master, you had a dancing school, you go to these schools and you learn all the steps.

Speaker 7 But when you came to America, to colonial America, there weren't as many dancing masters and dances schools to go around.

Speaker 7 And so the way that the fiddlers who were performing at these dances could tell people what the next move was was to call it.

Speaker 11 And this was a way for people who didn't go to dancing schools to be able to do the dances.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 you discovered that square dancing is a melting pot of dances.

Speaker 11 Yes, square dancing is definitely, you know, so-called melting pot dance.

Speaker 12 But what happened

Speaker 11 by the 20th century is they basically, these traditions became whitewashed.

Speaker 11 And

Speaker 11 the black history behind it got forgotten.

Speaker 6 Did anyone at the hearing make the argument that he was making?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 7 No, this is something that he's kind of

Speaker 7 discovered in the last few years.

Speaker 6 It is interesting because now you're like, hmm, maybe it should be the national folk dance. But I don't know.

Speaker 6 I mean, does that still feel like someone else's dance that you just now have a small, like

Speaker 2 side roll?

Speaker 7 I did. I still don't think that square dancing should be the national folk dance.

Speaker 7 But I, you know, and I told Phil that, like, but I was like, you know, if you told me that, you know, black people had something to do with this dance, that Native Americans have something to do with like kind of the development of this dance.

Speaker 7 If you told me that, then I would say, oh, so that actually this dance is a lot more American, you know, in that.

Speaker 7 inclusionary way that we would like to think of America as than I would have thought. And maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea.
And then he pointed out, well, what about Latino people?

Speaker 2 What about Asian people?

Speaker 7 And what about, you know, like, once again, we're like way too

Speaker 7 multicultural a society to like just say

Speaker 7 this thing. Okay.

Speaker 6 What if you

Speaker 6 I'm trying to be as I'm trying to create a scenario that's that that's the most inclusive thing possible. Okay.

Speaker 6 But it's not gonna, I'm not gonna get there.

Speaker 6 I'm gonna leave so many people out, but but it's like, I don't know, I mean, couldn't it couldn't, isn't there room in square dancing, in other words, for if there's room for black people,

Speaker 6 I shouldn't say room. I mean, if there,

Speaker 6 what's the word? Yeah, fine. If there's room for black people, there's certainly room for white people.

Speaker 6 Why not create a square dance that's as diverse as America?

Speaker 6 I mean, fuck, you'll get tap dance at a square dance. I mean, it's just, it's just

Speaker 10 like a dance.

Speaker 7 You can tap dance in a square dance. You can clog in a square dance.
Why not?

Speaker 7 You can find videos of people clogging in a square formation.

Speaker 6 You could, I don't know, do modern dance in a square dance? That's a little harder, but maybe.

Speaker 2 It's a little harder, but

Speaker 2 sure.

Speaker 2 Hip-hop dancing.

Speaker 7 I could see more hip-hop dancing in a square dance.

Speaker 2 Well, okay.

Speaker 7 It was at this point when this conversation started to go somewhere that we decided, you know what? We should have a live show.

Speaker 7 Does anyone else have any other ideas about what's a fun group dance that we can all do together?

Speaker 2 Let's see. What'd you think? It's not like group dance dance.

Speaker 7 The moonwalk.

Speaker 2 Okay, all right, all right. Problematic now, but whatever, you know.

Speaker 7 Documentary, but.

Speaker 7 Any others?

Speaker 7 The Charleston? Yes. The twist.
So we had done our introductory square dance with everyone and we told them this history. The what? The butt.
The butt?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 7 But then we heard about this one particular square dance call, and this is the one that's related to the ring shout, which I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 7 So Alex, let's talk a little bit about the last dancer tonight. So we brought our square dance caller, Alex Kramer, back on stage.
But at some point, you're going to use a call that's...

Speaker 7 What's the call going to be?

Speaker 10 Oh, right, right, right.

Speaker 9 So.

Speaker 7 Did you forget already?

Speaker 9 So the dance is called Birdie in the Cage.

Speaker 2 Okay. So

Speaker 9 the call is, the first call is

Speaker 23 put the birdie in the cage.

Speaker 9 And so then what happens is if you're the birdie at that moment, you just like hop on in to this, to the center of the circle, and you get to do your special dance.

Speaker 7 It could be the YMC, the debut, the funky chicken. The funky chicken.
The floss. You can floss, you can milly rock, you can kid and play, you can.

Speaker 2 Twerk.

Speaker 7 You can twerk.

Speaker 12 You can nay nay.

Speaker 2 You can what?

Speaker 9 Nay nay.

Speaker 2 Nay nay? Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 7 So that's what we're to do. We're going to do a little square dance, and then he's going to say Brittany in a cage, and then everyone's going to do whatever the F you want.

Speaker 9 Hey, show us what you're working with.

Speaker 2 And join hands, circle left, circle to the left, round you go.

Speaker 2 Back to the right, don't take all night.

Speaker 9 Go into the center with a great big shout.

Speaker 2 Do it again, do it again.

Speaker 2 Swing your partner all about.

Speaker 2 Promenade, promenade, go around the town and you'll wave it upside down.

Speaker 7 Were you dancing?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I was trying. I was trying to.

Speaker 2 Couple ones, have some fun. Couple one.
Go out to the right. Circle left with couple two.
Birdie in the cage. Couple one, couple two, circle.

Speaker 6 I remember it was just chaos. It was like crazy chaos.

Speaker 2 Bird, hop out and crow hop in.

Speaker 6 Because like he was doing these calls and we were swinging around

Speaker 6 and like you kind of want to get your dance going in the middle but then you don't have enough time and then you throw off the rhythm and then suddenly it all falls apart.

Speaker 6 And then he'll do a call and everyone snaps back onto the beat.

Speaker 2 Circle two to the left.

Speaker 7 Birdie in the cage.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I was standing off, I had gotten off the stage and I was standing off to the side, leaning against the wall and trying to just stay out of people's way because there was a lot of limbs splailing around.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 From where I was standing, when people got into the middle,

Speaker 7 when the birdie got into the middle of the cage, the birdie was usually just hopping around and jumping up and down.

Speaker 6 Because you didn't have much time. You're just like, I got to do my thing and then I got to get out.

Speaker 2 Circle and around you go.

Speaker 2 Last chance. Birdie number four.
Show us what you're working on.

Speaker 7 And so, whatever whatever our national dance is, I guess it's just people hopping around a lot until alone until it's not their turn to hop around anymore.

Speaker 9 Now, swing your partner all about.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 It was just a hot mess.

Speaker 6 But it was the happiest hot mess I've been a part of in a long time.

Speaker 6 Kind of beautiful.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 really beautiful.

Speaker 7 One more thing.

Speaker 7 You know, as I was going through all this, I kind of just stumbled into this community of African-American musicians who were really embracing this kind of, this old-time music, this folk music, and really reclaiming it.

Speaker 7 And one of those musicians was Jake Blunt, and he actually performed for us at that live event. He is a fiddler.
So you're going to perform a song for us. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Speaker 21 Yes, it's called Poor Black Sheep, and it comes from a black banjo fiddle duo, Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson, who were from Nashville, Tennessee. Were recorded in, I think, 1946.

Speaker 21 And I learned this tune from them via my teacher and friend Rhiannon Giddens.

Speaker 7 So I thought it'd be a really cool idea if we just like... played his song.

Speaker 7 Yeah, totally. And say thank you, Jake.

Speaker 6 I loved his description. I keep thinking about when he said when he plays, it's like his brain moves into his arm.

Speaker 6 Because I was like, when you hear it, you hear this and you're like, oh yeah, he's just all arm.

Speaker 10 Well, thank you, Tracy.

Speaker 2 You're welcome.

Speaker 6 This episode, of course, was reported by Tracy Hunt and produced by Annie McEwen. And we also had

Speaker 6 an assist on the sound design mix front from Jeremy Bloom.

Speaker 7 Also, I just want to say thank you to Lie Ellen Friedland, Bob Dalsimer, Alex Kramer, our caller, our amazing band from the live event, Stephanie Coleman, Courtney Harmon, and Steph Jenkins.

Speaker 7 And Phil Jameson has a book out called Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics, Rips and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance.

Speaker 7 You should definitely check that out.

Speaker 2 Thanks.

Speaker 26 Hi, I'm Basutkari and I'm from Somerset, New Jersey. And here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 26 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Eketi Foster Keys, W.

Speaker 26 Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu, Niana Sambandham, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 26 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 27 Hi, I'm Luis Vera, and I'm calling from Mexico City.

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Speaker 27 Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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