1. Introduction

As places whose populations are largely colonial and immigrant-based, North and South America have a vast number of dance traditions. We, of course, have dances of the Indigenous peoples of North America, including Native Americans, Canadian First Nations, and Alaska Natives, as well as those of Mexico, Central America, and South America. We also have dances that are descended from Spanish traditions, which we discuss in chapter 6. In the United States, dances followed immigrants from every region of the world. It is an amazing tapestry of ethnicities and cultures. There’s no way I can do justice to each of these traditions. We also can’t remotely touch on all the forms of what might be considered folk dance that have emerged on their own in the New World, such as Hip Hop, Latin Dance, Tap, etc. There’s just too much to cover. This chapter is limited to a tiny subset of folk dancing from North America: the dance styles inspired by the dance traditions of British and French colonial rulers.

Let us note up front that this is a very skewed and narrow view of what constitutes American and Canadian traditional dance. It is definitely a traditional colonialist view and doesn’t acknowledge the important contributions of either the Indigenous or other immigrant populations of the continent.

2. Set and Step Dances of Québec

Québec (pronounced kay-bek, not kwee-bek) is one of 10 Canadian provinces. It is bordered on the west by Ontario and the Hudson Bay, in the north by the Arctic Ocean, in the east by the Maritime provinces of Newfoundland and New Brunswick, and in the south by the US states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. Its major cities, Montréal and Québec City, along with the major cities in Ontario, form a corridor along the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes. About 50% of Canada’s population lives in this narrow strip of Ontario and Québec.

Québec is a unique part of North America. It is the only political entity on the continent with a French-speaking majority. French is the only official language in the province; English is a minority language. Within Canada, Québec has a unique constitutional status, and the Québécois have initiated several separatist independence movements.

The original inhabitants of the province were the Algonquians, Iroquoians, and Inuit. The territory was conquered by the French as New France and heavily settled by French speakers. But the region also saw a large influx of Irish and Scottish settlers, who had a profound effect on its music and dance. In 1759, the British Army defeated the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and the French surrendered the territory. It has been part of the dominion of Canada ever since, but it has retained the French language and French legal system. Québec was originally known as Lower Canada during British rule.

Québécois music is heavily influenced by Scottish and Irish music, featuring traditional reels and jigs. The most obvious difference in the music is in the instrumentation. The primary instruments in French Canadian music are the piano, the fiddle, and sometimes a guitar. Percussion is often achieved by making complex foot taps on a board or by banging two spoons together.

The costumes for French Canadian dancing reflect the attire worn by the voyageurs (fur traders) of the 18th and 19th centuries. The women wear patterned knee-length skirts, white aprons, and lace hats. The men wear knee-length britches, vests, and a colorful, woven belt called a ceinture fléchée, with a distinctive arrow-like weave. Both men and women wear hard-soled shoes to make noise as they clog through the dances.

The majority of French Canadian dances are couple dances performed in squares. They maintain the traditions of the Quadrille (or set), borrowed from the Irish and French, which involves a complex set of memorized figures. The French Canadian dances differ from the Irish and Scottish dances in that they are typically accompanied throughout by “la gigue” (the jig), which is the tapping foot movements found in clog dances. La gigue is done while the dancers form the figures.

• Québécois Fiddle
• An album of Québécois folk music
• Québécois set dancing
• Québécois step dancing
• Québécois step dancing

3. Red River Jigging

A closely related tradition to the Québécois dances is the dancing of the Métis people of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The Métis are a community of people of mixed Indigenous and French heritage. Their dances also involve la gigue and set formations. The style of jigging or clogging done by the Métis is, however, much more energetic and spectacular than that of the Québécois. They also perform the dances in a different style of costume, in which both men and women wear shirts with long, colorful fringes sewn onto the chest, back, and sleeves. The women’s skirts also have these fringes along the bottom.

This dance form is particularly interesting to folk dance scholars because it represents one of the very few cases of an indigenized dance style. What we mean by this is that a local Indigenous community has adopted a cultural tradition from their colonizers but has made it uniquely their own, distinct from the original dances.

• Métis Jigging from Manitoba
• Métis Jigging from Manitoba 2

4. Contra Dances of New England

Among the original colonies of the United States, we have the region that is now known as New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island). These states were the birthplace of a style of dance known as Contra dancing. However, the tradition of Contra dancing is found along the entire East Coast, including the South. New Englanders also took the dances to the places they migrated to, such as the Midwest. It is nonetheless known as New England Contra dancing, no matter where it is done.

There are two hypotheses about the origin of the name Contra dance. One hypothesis is that it is a corruption of the term “country dance” (cf. English Country Dance, Scottish Country Dance). The other is that it refers to dancing facing your partner in a longways set (i.e., contra, or against, your partner).

Modern Contra dancers have their own particular uniform. Women typically wear sleeveless, one-piece, knee-length straight dresses in floral or solids. Men typically wear jeans and T-shirts. And since the 1960s, those T-shirts have often been tie-dyed. One recent trend is that men have started wearing floor-length skirts to dance in. This practice does not appear to have anything to do with sexuality or gender identity. It appears that the dancers just like the feel of the skirt while dancing. This has become the norm at many Contra dances.

Many early Contra dances are identical to English Country dances (ECD) that bear the same names. The style of the dancing is quite different from ECD, though. It’s typically very fast, with tight turns. The dancers swing longer and more aggressively than in ECD. Between the figures, the dancers often add extra flourishes and spins. The dances are usually performed in “duple minor” sets within a longways set (e.g., four people dance together in the longways set, then progress to dance with a new couple each time). Most modern Contras are done improper, meaning that the active couple in each minor set does the dance crossed over from the traditional side. Contra dance is a living tradition, and new dances are being choreographed all the time. Contra dances are always called. This means that there is a person at the head of the hall who calls out the figures done by the dancers (Parkes 1992, Page 1984, Holenko 2009).

One subgroup of Contra dance is Gender-role-free dancing. This style of dance, founded by Chris Ricciotti in the early 1990s, was originally done by the LGBTQ+ community (where it is sometimes called “Queer Contra”), but it has since gained much wider acceptance. In Gender-role-free dancing, the traditional roles of the “man” and the “woman” are abandoned. People of any gender can dance either role. If the dance figures distinguish two distinct roles, they are renamed, depending upon the dance community, as “bands” and “bare-arms” (for communities where the leader position wears an armband), “larks” and “robins”, or “leaders” and “followers”.

• Modern Contra dance video #1 (note the men in skirts)
• Modern contra dance video #2 (more traditional music)
• Modern contra dance video #3 (jazzy music, but the dancers are doing a really old traditional figure from the 1600s called Petronella)

5. Traditional Square Dancing and Modern Western Square Dancing

Square dances are the most common kind of British-derived dances found throughout the US West. They are, as their name suggests, performed by groups of four couples arranged in a square. Like Contra dances, Square dances in the United States are called, in which dancers perform the figures called out by the leader. Traditional squares had fixed figures that the dancers could learn, however.

In the 1940s and 1950s, a new tradition of Square dancing emerged called Modern Western Square dancing (MWSD). MWSD is different from traditional square dancing in that you really need to go to classes to learn the figures that correspond to the calls. The calls are organized by difficulty (Basic, Mainstream, Plus, Advanced, Challenge), and you have to attend classes at each level in order to attend dance events that use those levels of calls.  In a Modern Western Square dance, each set consists of two parts. First, you have a hash or patter call, which is then followed by a singing call to a popular country western or pop song. The patter calls are like a game. The caller leads the dancers through a complex, improvised set of patterns that never repeat. The caller tries to then get the dancers back to their original positions, thus “resolving the dance”. Singing calls, by contrast, have a predictable chorus figure that fits the song’s words. In between the choruses, the dancers still have to follow the improvisations of the caller, but these are usually less complex.

MWSDers have a very distinctive costume. The men wear jeans and western-style cowboy shirts, with kerchiefs or bolo ties around their necks. The women wear skirts that come just above the knee. They typically wear very large crinoline petticoats underneath these skirts, giving them a distinctive look that, at its most extreme, can lift the skirts to waist level. Often, the couple is color-coordinated.

• Ken Bower, patter call
• Rick Gittleman, singing call
• MWSD patter call followed by a singing call

6. Country Western Two-Step and Round Dancing

In addition to the set dances discussed above, Americans also adopted the European traditions of couple dances such as the Waltz, Polka, One-step, and Two-step. In the South and West, these dances came to be set to country western music in a style known as Country Western Two-step, Country Two-step, Mountain Two-step, or Texas Two-step. This style of dance progresses counterclockwise around the room as the dancers execute asymmetric three-bar footwork while performing various fancy moves, such as the follower turning under the leader’s arm. Country Western Two-step is improvised by the couple as they work their way around the room.

Round dancing is similar to the two-step, except that, instead of being improvised, the dancers perform specific choreographies that, like Square and Contra dances, are called by a caller.^[1]

• Round dancing
• Two-stepping

7. Cajun Dancing and Zydeco

The Acadians are the French-speaking settlers of the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. After the French and Indian War of the 1750s, the British rulers of Canada decided to expel the Acadians from Canadian territories. Around 16,000 Acadians were forcibly removed from eastern Canada. Many of them traveled to the French territory in the southern United States that eventually became Louisiana. These people became who we know as the Cajuns. Cajun music has a distinct sound to it and is played on the diatonic button accordion, the fiddle, the mouth organ or harmonica, the guitar, and the bass guitar. One characteristic instrument is the washboard, used for percussion. Many of the tunes are the same as those found in Québec or New England, but they have a syncopation in which the primary emphasis falls on the 2nd and 4th beats of a 4/4 bar rather than on the 1st and 3rd, as is common in other styles. The music was influenced by the music of enslaved Africans and Native people.

A unique style of dance developed at Cajun dance parties called fais-do-dos. This term is thought to refer to what a mother would say to her child to get them to sleep, so she could go and dance. Cajun Two-steps and Jitterbugs have a unique up-and-down motion to them. The Cajun Two-step moves around the room like the Country Western Two-step. The Jitterbug stays mostly in place, holding both hands open, while the couple rotates clockwise around each other very quickly. While the dancers are moving, they execute complex arm movements, such as those found in swing dancing and German dancing, turning around each other and connecting into knots. There is also a more sedate Cajun Waltz, but again, the dancers will often show off with complex turns.

Zydeco is a closely related music-and-dance tradition. It comes from African American communities that lived adjacent to Cajun settlers. One difference between the two styles is that Zydeco music has more influence from Gospel and Blues than Cajun music does. In recent years, Zydeco music has also seen greater influence from classic Rock and Roll. You’re more likely to hear electric instruments in a Zydeco band. There are also differences in the instruments used. While Cajun music uses a single-row button accordion, Zydeco musicians tend to use a multi-row button accordion or a piano accordion. Zydeco music also typically uses a washboard played with spoons as its primary percussion.

Zydeco dancing is very similar to Cajun dancing but has some important stylistic differences. The dancers almost always stay in a closed ballroom position. The dance moves side to side rather than around the room. They also dance closer to their partners than Cajun dancers do. The dancers’ hips move more, and the dances are more sexually suggestive. Today, if you go to a Louisiana dance party in most places, you’re likely to actually dance to a mix of Cajun and Zydeco music with a mix of the two dance styles.

• Cajun Two-step/Jitterbug music
• Cajun Waltz music
• Zydeco music
• Cajun Waltz
• Cajun Jitterbug
• Cajun Two-step
• Zydeco dance
• Documentary on Zydeco

8. Clogging and Tap Dancing

British and Irish settlers also brought their clogging traditions with them when they immigrated to the USA. The heartland of this tradition lies in the Appalachian Mountains. Appalachian clogging is characterized by large movements, knee lifts, and a loose upper body (Hinds 1984).

It is thought that tap dancing is directly related to clogging. Enslaved African Americans and their descendants merged traditional African dance styles with clogging and set them to jazz. Another form of dance that comes to us via traditional clogging is modern western White-shoe clogging. This form of dance is called by a caller, like a square dance. The dancers who do White-shoe often wear sneakers with “jingle taps” on them. Jingle taps use a double layer of metal, which makes noise just by shaking the foot. The taps used in tap dancing and traditional clogging are typically a single layer of metal and must be struck against the floor to produce sound.

• Traditional Appalachian clogging
• Modern Appalachian clogging
• Tap dancing
• Called White Shoe clogging

9. Line Dancing

American line dances are a relatively recent innovation. The first clear line dance was a novelty dance called “the Madison”, which was done in the Midwest in the late 1950s. Line dances are done by dancers scattered around the room, all facing the same direction. Later developments created what are called 4-wall dances, where the dancers make a ¼ turn each time through the dance to face a new wall in the room. Line dances are done to a wide variety of music, from country and western, such as the Boot Scoot ’n Boogie, to disco music like the Electric Slide, to Latin music and rock and roll. The dance style has spread worldwide and is very popular in Asia and the USA.

• Boot Scoot ’n Boogie
• Cumbia Semana
• Electric Slide
• Saturday Night Fever
• The Madison
• The Bus Stop
• The Cupid Shuffle
• Rock Around the Clock

Further Reading

• Anonymous (2004), Burchenal (1918), Callerlab (n.d.), Casey (1976), Fix (1991), Gunzenhauser (1996), Greene (1984), Hall (1963), Hinds (1984), Holenko (2009), Jennings (1983), Kraus (1950), Owens (1949), Page (1984), Parkes (1992), Phillips (1968), Ricciotti (2005), Smith (1955). See the reference section at the end of this book for full citations.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_dance
• http://socialdance.stanford.edu/Syllabi/Madison.pdf

Some Suggested Dances for Teaching

The following links take you to descriptions and instructions from my website, Folk Dance Musings, for dances appropriate for teaching to new dancers.

• La Bastringue
• Les Saluts
• Fiona’s Saunter
• Cotton Eyed Joe
• Frederick Contra
• Inflation Reel
• Trail of the Lonesome Pine
• Boot Scoot ‘n Boogie
• Electric Slide
• Teton Mountain Stomp
• Swiss Break Mixer
• Cajun Cross line dance
• Cajun Jitterbug

Discussion Questions

Discussion Question 1

In this chapter, we didn’t discuss a number of dance styles that have emerged in the US and Canada that might legitimately be called folk dances: Disco, Swing dancing, Break dancing, Hip Hop, Krump, Crunk, and many others. Using the criteria discussed in Chapter 1, discuss whether these forms are folk dances or not.

Discussion Question 2

In the section on Red River jigging, we discussed how this style of dance was an indigenized form of dances borrowed from the colonizers, now unique to the Métis. Is this a case of cultural appropriation? Why or why not?