French Quadrilles
During the American Revolution, Americans had positive feelings toward France thanks to its help in defeating the British, and the French quadrille, which featured four couples in a square formation, became a popular dance. Noting the dancing at victory celebrations in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1781, French army officer Baron Ludwig von Closen wrote, “All of them like our French quadrilles.” These French square dances, which incorporated figures from the earlier French cotillions, an elaborate ballroom dance, soon displaced the older longways English country dances, in which dancers stood in two lines facing each other, in American ballrooms. By 1801, French dancing masters were teaching quadrilles in Alexandria. In 1803, Englishman Charles Janson encountered a French dancing master teaching at a dancing school held in a local tavern in Orange County. By 1813, French dancing master John A. Xaupi was teaching quadrilles at a dancing school in Winchester and elsewhere in the Shenandoah Valley.
By the 1820s, quadrilles were being danced in the ballrooms of the many mineral springs resort hotels in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Englishman G. W. Featherstonhaugh took part in these dances at Warm Springs, Virginia, in 1834. “After supper it is the custom at the Warm Springs to adjourn to a place called the Ball-room, which has a few wooden benches round it, and one fiddler . . . [to dance] quadrilles,” he wrote.
By the 1850s, quadrilles were also being taught at dancing schools in Abingdon, Lynchburg, [future url="Staunton"]Staunton, and other towns. These French dances are the source of the verse-chorus structure of the Southern square dances. They are also the source of the “Grand Right and Left” figure, in which dancers pull past their partner with their right hand and the next partner with their left hand, and the “Promenade,” in which couples walk counterclockwise around the set side-by-side with their partner.
Scots-Irish Reels
Many of the early settlers of the Shenandoah Valley were Scots-Irish, primarily Presbyterians from northern Ireland, whose ancestors had come from the lowlands of Scotland and northern England in the 1600s. Joseph Doddridge, who grew up just north of Berkeley Springs in what is now West Virginia, recalled the dances of his youth in the late 1700s: “After dinner the dancing commenced, and generally lasted till the next morning. The figures of the dances were three and four handed reels, or square sets and jigs.” He said contra dances, cotillions, and minuets were “unknown.”
These Scots-Irish three- and four-handed reels (for three or four dancers) were popular in many rural backcountry communities. Their simple repetitive weaving figures were easily learned, so they did not require attending dancing school, and this made them popular with all classes of people. They also did not require much space, so they could be danced in homes and taverns.
Some Scots-Irish reels involved more than four couples in a larger circular set. In The Valley of Shenandoah (1824), novelist George Tucker described such dances in a Scots-Irish settlement in northern Virginia in the 1790s. He wrote of “reels consisting of four, five, and even six couples.”
Black Fiddlers and Dance Callers
As early as 1690, enslaved Black fiddlers were routinely providing the music at balls and dance assemblies in Tidewater Virginia. Playing for a dance was a servant’s role, and at public dances, especially formal ones, the musicians were most often Black. The tradition of Black fiddling, however, did not start in the New World. One-string gourd fiddles have been played in West Africa since the twelfth century, and with that musical background, Black musicians in North America adopted the European violin.
Black fiddlers were common throughout Virginia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sally Hemings’ son Beverly Hemings played fiddle for the Saturday evening dances at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In 1840, Englishman J. S. Buckingham noted that the dance bands at White Sulphur Springs and Salt Sulphur Springs in western Virginia were “almost always formed of coloured people.” Clarence Archibald Bryce, who was born in Louisa in 1849, likewise recalled Black fiddlers. “In my boyhood days the music for the dances at parties and balls was universally played by colored men belonging in the neighborhood.” He said that for most dances “the musicians consisted of a violinist (‘fiddler’ they called him), who could call the figures, a banjo picker and tambourine player.”
As Bryce noted, it was common for Black fiddlers to call the dance figures. Unlike white dancers, enslaved African Americans could not attend dancing schools to learn the dance figures, so dance calling developed as an alternative. Vocalization was a part of instrumental music and dancing in the West African tradition. James Ireland, a Scottish schoolmaster who emigrated from Edinburgh to New Market in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1760s, wrote of “balls” where “chanting to the sound of the violin, was the most prevailing practice.”
Black musicians continued to provide the dance music at summer resorts in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century. Will Grigsby and his brothers, Black musicians from Baltimore, played for old-fashioned barn dances at the Skyland Resort, where they worked as waiters, in what is now the Shenandoah National Park.
Southern Square Dances
The practice of dance calling enabled elements from different dance traditions to combine to create the Southern square dance. The circular Scots-Irish reels are the source of the visiting-couple form, in which each couple dances with the other couples around the set, and freeform timing, which means the dance figures are not tied to the musical phrase. The French quadrilles added the verse-chorus structure and the “Grand Right and Left,” and “Promenade” figures, and the Black practice of dance calling guided the dancers through the figures.
There are two fundamental forms of traditional square dance in the Southern tradition. One consists of four couples, standing beside partners, in a square set. The other is a circular set that can include any number of couples. The dance figures are accompanied by Southern old-time music—fast reels and breakdowns—played on the fiddle.
Folk dances traveled with settlers as they moved west across the Blue Ridge. Dancing was a popular pastime that combated isolation in rural areas, served as a forum for courtship, and helped to build community ties. Dances often took place following work parties, such as barn raisings, corn shuckings, or molasses makings. This was true in Black as well as white communities. David Hunter Strother wrote of “reels and square figures” being danced at a “frolic” in Randolph County, West Virginia, in 1872, and in 1890, The Roanoke Times reported on a Black square dance, danced to a banjo, with a Black woman caller, at a dance hall in Roanoke.
The Virginia Reel
The Virginia Reel, which is danced with partners across from each other and the top couple “reeling” down the set, became very popular in the nineteenth century and was often the last dance of the evening. It was based on a country dance called “Sir Roger de Coverley” that became fashionable in England in the early 1800s. By the 1820s, it had become popular in America, replacing the older six-handed reels that were danced in three-couple sets and adding the signature move of couples reeling down the set with a series of hand-turns.
The Twentieth Century
At the start of the twentieth century, dances in rural communities still often took place in private homes. English folklorist Cecil Sharp attended such a house dance at Afton in 1918. In this community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains not far from Charlottesville, he observed four-couple square dances with figures derived from the French quadrilles. Similar house dances also took place in African American communities, such as in Martinsville in Henry County.
There was a revival of old-time square dancing throughout the country in the 1930s. The folk-dance movement sought to assimilate the children of immigrants into “American” culture. Industrialist Henry Ford heavily promoted square dancing through instruction manuals, clubs, and events to counter jazz, which he believed to be a corrupting influence, and successfully advocated for the inclusion of square dancing in physical education classes in public schools.
With the advent of the automobile and improved roads, dances began to be held in newly built community centers, schoolhouses, fire halls, and VFW halls. In many communities, the square dances at these larger public dance venues expanded into larger circular sets with eight or more couples.
Interest in square dancing continued to grow as part of the mid-twentieth-century folk revival. In the 1950s, a new form of square dancing, known as Modern Western Square Dancing, also became popular in Virginia. This club-based form of square dance, which originated in California, is danced to recorded music, and the choreography is more complex than the traditional square dances, so dancers need to take lessons to participate.
Square Dancing Today
In the 1970s, the United Square Dancers of America launched a campaign to designate square dancing as the national folk dance, which resulted in thirty-one states making square dancing their official state dance. Virginia designated the square dance, including the Virginia Reel, as the official state folk dance in 1991. This designation cited square dancing as an “American folk dance that traces its ancestry to the English Country Dance and the French Ballroom Dance, and is called, cued, or prompted to the dancers.”
Square dancing is still practiced throughout Virginia. Square-dancing organizations include the Virginia Reelers Square Dance Club in Charlottesville, the Fluvanna Flutterwheels Square Dance Club in Palmyra, the Blacksburg Square Dance, the Blue Ridge Stars Dance Club based in Amherst, the Bizzy Bees Square Dance Club in Vienna, Rawhide and Ruffles in Manassas, and the Riptides Dance Club in Virginia Beach. There is square dancing at the Floyd Country Store in Floyd as part of Virginia’s Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail.
In urban areas such as Richmond, clubs like RVA Square Dance have seen a revival of square dancing among younger participants, with a diverse crowd of some 200 dancers crowding the floor for events featuring live old-time string bands. “It’s really taken off. People are looking for connection,” says McEver Dugan, an organizer and caller for RVA Square Dance. “It was very traditional but has changed a lot in urban areas—it’s more inclusive, with gender-neutral calling. The tradition continues, but how it plays out changes over time.”
