[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. As you may know, I have been working on a series about Dolly Parton. It's called Dolly Parton's America, which you can hear if you go to DollyPartonsAmerica.com, or you go to iTunes or all the other places and search for "Dolly Parton's America." And the whole thing is kind of an attempt to look at who we are as a country through the lens of this one singer songwriter. But ...

ALEX KRAMER: So everybody just find a partner.

JAD: ... while I was working on that ...

ALEX KRAMER: And if you don't know them, that's fine. You can just walk up to somebody and say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so. Will you dance with me?"

JAD: ... our reporter Tracie Hunte was stumbling into a similar set of questions about America and Americanness, but ...

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

JAD: ... in her case it was through a dance.

TRACIE HUNTE: Here we go!

ALEX KRAMER: Join hands and circle left. Back to the right, don't take all night.

JAD: A little while ago, Tracie and I threw a dance party over at a place called The Bell House. That's in Brooklyn. We had a live band.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Kramer: All the way back. Left hand start.]

JAD: We had a caller named Alex Kramer. We swung our partners round and round.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Kramer: You swing mine, and I'll swing yours.]

JAD: We do-si-doed. We dove for the clam.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Kramer: I'll swing mine, you swing yours.]

JAD: We might have even shot through the hole in the old tin can.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Kramer: Join hands in that pretty little ring. One couple make an arch. Duck for the oyster.]

JAD: There were about a hundred of us there that night, learning the very American art of—of square dancing. But, but, but, you might be asking, why'd we do this? Why would Radiolab do a square dancing event in Brooklyn in 2019? Well, it's Tracie's fault.

TRACIE: Why can't I hear anything? Oh! [laughs] It's not plugged in!

JAD: Oh.

JAD: It all goes back ...

TRACIE: I need to find a frickin' adaptor to the—oh here's—here they are.

JAD: ... to a conversation Tracie and I had in the studio before we ever got up on stage together.

TRACIE: Okay, so square dancing.

JAD: Lay it on me.

TRACIE: 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.

JAD: It was inflicted on me in grade school.

TRACIE: I know.

JAD: It's—yes, but I think that's just an inheritance from growing up in the South.

TRACIE: 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.

JAD: Huh.

TRACIE: Quick scan of the audience. How many of you had to do square dancing in school?

TRACIE: That's something that we actually confirmed later at the event.

[cheers]

TRACIE: Oh my God. So many of you. [laughs]

JAD: Wow, most of the audience!

TRACIE: I feel like that was most of the audience.

TRACIE: But the thing is, it doesn't just stop at schools. 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. 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 the bald eagle.

[bird screeching]

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

JAD: [laughs]

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

JAD: Hmm.

TRACIE: I mean, you know, it didn't really kind of mesh with my idea of America, exactly. But when I started digging and I went super deep, I gotta say it kind of messed with some of my ideas of my America and your America and our America.

JAD: Hmm. Okay!

TRACIE: So just to get things started off, I'm gonna take you back to the 1890s, or 1890-ish.

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

TRACIE: According to folk dance scholar Phil Jamison, at that time a new wave of immigrants were coming to America.

PHIL JAMISON: Italians and Slavs and Polish people and Jewish people.

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

PHIL JAMISON: And the old stock Americans sort of push back against these immigrants and said, "Wait a minute. We are the real Americans. Our ancestors were here first." And, you know, think of 1890s when the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded.

TRACIE: We were a generation past the Emancipation Proclamation and the Trail of Tears. And in 1892 ...

PHIL JAMISON: The Pledge of Allegiance was put into our public schools.

TRACIE: And so Phil says around this time, there was a national conversation bubbling up about who we as Americans are. Like, when we say "us," who is us?

PHIL JAMISON: Well ...

TRACIE: According to Phil, one answer to that question came from a music scholar.

PHIL JAMISON: An English ballad collector named Cecil Sharp who came to the Southern mountains.

TRACIE: From about 1916 to 1918, he went all around the Appalachian mountains in the Southern US visiting families, sitting on front porches, and asking people to sing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Old-time singing]

PHIL JAMISON: And was astounded that people were still singing old British ballads that had long since died out in England.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Old-time singing]

PHIL JAMISON: They were singing about Barbara Allen, and they were singing about lords and ladies and millk-white steeds and bloody daggers and all that.

TRACIE: Now this is 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 ...

PHIL JAMISON: These people had been isolated here in the mountains for generations.

TRACIE: And were therefore the keepers of the purest, Anglo-Saxon heritage in America.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Old-time singing]

PHIL JAMISON: And when he was in eastern Kentucky ...

TRACIE: He came across that pure heritage in dance form.

PHIL JAMISON: He came across some people doing a square dance that was—it was a demonstration for him.

TRACIE: And the thing about this dance that he was seeing, it had some elements of French dances.

PHIL JAMISON: French cotillions and quadrilles and ...

TRACIE: 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, where couples would link arms and skip around each other, then make arches for other couples to duck through. So all of these different moves were coming together in this one dance he was seeing happening right in front of him.

PHIL JAMISON: And he just made this assumption that these were Anglo-Saxon people, and this is the folk dance of our ancestors.

TRACIE: Now obviously, there were a lot of different kinds of people living in those mountains that he was ignoring. But despite that—or maybe more like because of it—this idea that square dancing was quintessentially American just took off.

PHIL JAMISON: And shortly after that is when they started teaching folk dances in schools.

TRACIE: So the first place I heard any of this was this tweet thread that was very tantalizing. It sort of pegged Henry Ford as the mastermind behind this white supremacist plot ...

JAD: Oh, okay.

TRACIE: ... to put square dancing in all the schools in order to, like, save white children from jazz or something.

JAD: Oh, I see. So this was an attempt at whitewashing.

TRACIE: Basically, yes.

JAD: Got it.

TRACIE: Now first of all, Henry Ford was an antisemite, and for some reason thought Jews had invented jazz and he hated jazz, and he tried to promote dances from, quote, "Northern peoples," but ...

PHIL JAMISON: Henry Ford had nothing to do with teaching square dancing in physical education classes.

TRACIE: ... that part of the tweet thread isn't quite true. But the whitewashing part isn't exactly wrong. It was actually one dance educator in Michigan ...

PHIL JAMISON: Grace Ryan in Michigan.

TRACIE: ... who started teaching the square dance ...

PHIL JAMISON: As a way to assimilate the children of European immigrants to be true Americans.

TRACIE: More teachers picked it up. She wrote some books, and that kind of popularized it around the country among teachers. And before you know it—bam!—square dancing in schools.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio announcer: From Tuscumbia, Missouri, they call themselves The Lake of Ozark Square Dancing.]

TRACIE: And then the dance started to spread.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio announcer: You all set? All right.]

TRACIE: People were dancing in community halls and public squares and churches and barns. By the '30s, square dancing is all over the radio. As TVs start popping up in American homes, square dance is huge

[ARCHIVE CLIP, square dance caller: Join hands, circle left.]

TRACIE: 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, cigarettes doing the square dance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, advertisement: Oh, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.]

TRACIE: By the '40s and '50s, it's huge!

[NEWS CLIP: The square dancing craze sweeping across the nation keeps on growing in New York in a big way.]

TRACIE: Square dancing clubs start forming all over the place.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I'm from Burbank, California.]

TRACIE: Out west, it starts to get a little yee-haw, with men in cowboy shirts and boots and women in big, fluffy skirts.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: It's so beautiful.]

TRACIE: And 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Square dancing is part of the heritage of the United States. Born with the very birth of the country.]

TRACIE: And then...

[NEWS CLIP: 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.]

TRACIE: These groups went to Congress to say that square dancing should be the American dance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Square dance is indeed uniquely American. It's American American.]

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

JAD: You mean, oh, so this is an old movement?

TRACIE: This is an old movement. But ...

RECEPTIONIST: This is Leslie.

TRACIE: ... I did manage to find the congressman ...

LEON PANETTA: Here's the door.

RECEPTIONIST: He is coming right in.

TRACIE: ... who introduced some of these bills.

RECEPTIONIST: Here he comes.

LEON PANETTA: Okay.

TRACIE: His name is ...

TRACIE: Hello!

TRACIE: ... Leon Panetta.

LEON PANETTA: Hey, how are you, Tracie?

JAD: Uh, wait.

[NEWS CLIP: The former Secretary of Defense and former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta.]

JAD: The Leon Panetta? The Clinton Leon Panetta?

TRACIE: The Clinton Leon Panetta. Former White House chief of staff.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leon Panetta: I think this is the moment for a strong, steady hand.]

TRACIE: Usually these days he's on CNN answering hard questions about drones ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leon Panetta: Responsibility of the intelligence community.]

TRACIE: ... national security.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leon Panetta: It has to be comprehensive. It has to involve ...]

TRACIE: So I think he was a little surprised when I called him up and said, you know, "Hey, you want to talk about square dancing?"

LEON PANETTA: Well, it came out of—it came out of nowhere. It brought back ... [laughs]

JAD: He introduced the bill about square dancing?

LEON PANETTA: [laughs]

TRACIE: Yep.

LEON PANETTA: Well, I actually did folk dancing when I was in grammar school. And—and enjoyed it then, and always kind of kept track of ...

TRACIE: Back in the 1980s he was a congressman out of California.

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

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

LEON PANETTA: And ...

TRACIE: He had some square dancers who were very supportive of his campaigns, so it was very much a politically, kind of, like ...

JAD: Oh.

TRACIE: ... favorish type of thing.

LEON PANETTA: They came to me with the idea.

TRACIE: But he was actually pretty kind of passionate about it when I was talking to him.

LEON PANETTA: Oh yeah, I thought it made sense to try to establish and recognize it as the national folk dance.

[NEWS CLIP: Well on the face of it, all that sounds harmless enough.]

TRACIE: But ...

[NEWS CLIP: But wait a minute ...]

TRACIE: ... there was this kind of immediate, very muscular opposition to this bill.

[NEWS CLIP: This house subcommittee today suddenly discovered that about the only people who would be happy to commemorate square dancing are square dancers.]

TRACIE: One by one, dance historians, folklorists got in front of the mic and said, "You gotta be kidding me."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: To make folk dancing a national dance, to me it would be a slap in the face to other arts.]

TRACIE: "This makes absolutely no sense."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is a nation of immigrants.]

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP: 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.]

TRACIE: Everyone was like, "Square dancing? Seriously? What about hula?"

[NEWS CLIP: Is that a folk dance?]

TRACIE: "What about tap?"

[NEWS CLIP: Or for that matter, breakdancing as an expression of urban folk culture.]

TRACIE: Not to mention the people who were here first, Native Americans, who have their own dance traditions. You know, one bit of testimony that actually stuck with me was from the 1988 hearing. It was a woman named Rayna Green. She was at one 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. That's the only place she ever did it, and at the same time, she was forbidden from doing her own tribal dances. And so to come and say that square dancing is now the national folk dance would be to dishonor her and dishonor all her ancestors."

JAD: And even just to put finer point on it, I mean, you take something like the massacre at Wounded Knee. I mean, that was the culmination of a series of events that I think began with a dance.

TRACIE: Wow!

JAD: So it wasn't simply that they were being forgotten, 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 not always—it's sometimes violent, you know?

TRACIE: Yeah.

JAD: So ...

TRACIE: I'm curious about, like, what would be your reaction to that argument?

LEON PANETTA: Well I mean, I certainly appreciate the Indian tradition, and what happened to the Indians throughout history. There's—there's no question how abused they were.

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

LEON PANETTA: At the same time, it's important to recognize some of the things that make the United States what it is today. So 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.

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

LEON PANETTA: But he mentioned 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. They have a sense of community."

TRACIE: Yeah. I don't think that that was—when de 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 were being driven off their land.

LEON PANETTA: No, it was tough. It was ...

TRACIE: I get—you know, I don't want to, like, start—you know, 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.

LEON PANETTA: No, I don't think we have to have a romanticized view, I mean, 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 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 is particularly unique to the history and to the culture of America.

TRACIE: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this.

LEON PANETTA: Sure. [laughs] Yeah.

JAD: That was a—I wish that there was a slightly more satisfying response there.

TRACIE: [laughs]

JAD: I feel like you guys were not having the same conversation or something. That was, like ...

TRACIE: 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. And so I made some phone calls.

TRACIE: Oh, are you Linda?

LINDA PETERSON: I'm Linda. Hey!

TRACIE: I traveled to the heartland of America. And ...

LINDA PETERSON: Square dancers' hug.

TRACIE: Okay, all right.

LINDA PETERSON: That's called a yellow rock.

TRACIE: Okay.

TRACIE: ... what I found out about square dancing was actually really surprising.

JAD: Like what?

TRACIE: Well you're gonna have to wait 'til after the break.

JAD: Oh. Well then, Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Alicia Bridges, calling from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: I'm Jad. This is Radiolab. We are back from break with producer Tracie Hunte doing the dance of the square. Well, we haven't actually done the dance yet. That's coming. Where we 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. 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.

TRACIE: Yeah, but that was in the '80s, more than 30 years ago, 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.

TRACIE: All right. I'm in the lobby of the downtown Marriott.

TRACIE: In Kansas City, Missouri in this huge convention center.

TRACIE: Uh ...

TRACIE: People were just arriving. They had their suitcases. You can see, like, they were bringing in these costume racks, I guess, filled with big, huge skirts, western shirts, cowboy boots, lots of glitter. Lots of crinoline. And anyway, Linda and I had planned to meet in the lobby of this hotel.

TRACIE: So hopefully she will notice that I'm the person with the big fuzzy microphone. Also, the Black one.

TRACIE: I will say that I did find Black square dancers there. [laughs]

JAD: You did?

TRACIE: I counted while I was there about 11.

JAD: Out of how many?

TRACIE: About 3,000?

JAD: Oh. Wow, so ...

TRACIE: [laughs] I guess one in 300.

JAD: [laughs] That's a—that's a ratio.

TRACIE: Yeah. But eventually ...

LINDA PETERSON: You're not Tracie, are you?

TRACIE: Oh, are you Linda?

LINDA PETERSON: I'm Linda. Hey!

TRACIE: ... Linda spotted me.

LINDA PETERSON: How are you?

TRACIE: I'm good.

LINDA PETERSON: Square dancers' hug.

TRACIE: Okay. All right.

TRACIE: And then she just takes me around. And she just starts ...

LINDA PETERSON: This is Tracie.

WOMAN: Hi, Tracie.

TRACIE: Hello.

TRACIE: ... introducing me to everybody.

MAN: Hi, glad to meet you.

MAN: Hi, Tracie.

TRACIE: In the square dance world ...

LINDA PETERSON: Yeah.

TRACIE: ... each person was just ...

LINDA PETERSON: [laughs]

TRACIE: ... friendlier than the last.

LINDA PETERSON: [laughs]

TRACIE: There was an opening ceremony.

EMCEE: Dear heavenly father, we gather this day ...

TRACIE: Some speeches, a prayer.

EMCEE: In light and happiness and fun.

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

CALLER: Walk on around to your corner girl. Seats on down your own. Show of hands, circle to the left around your own.

JAD: Wow!

TRACIE: And there's these super complicated calls. And instead of the traditional fiddle band with a banjo and so on, they're actually playing '80s pop hits.

JAD: Wow!

TRACIE: And this is actually common. I talked to this one caller who was like, "Yeah, I use J-Lo sometimes. [laughs]

JAD: Really?

TRACIE: Yes. [laughs] I actually walked into one room where they were using Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." So they really do use, like, just all kinds of music. And, 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...

TRACIE: New York Public Radio. So this is just my mic and I'm recording this, you know? [laughs]

ROY GOTTA: That's a microphone?

TRACIE: It is a microphone.

TRACIE: It was also pretty clear that ...

ROY GOTTA: We have some sugar cookies.

TRACIE: ... this push to make it the national folk dance was kind of waning.

ROY GOTTA: 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.

TRACIE: This is Roy. I talked to him and his wife Betsy Gotta.

BETSY GOTTA: Right.

TRACIE: Betsy Gotta is kind of a big deal in the square dancing world. Anyway, they made it sound like they had heard the backlash, and sort of in some way kind of got the point.

ROY GOTTA: Yeah, we were talking about that. And there were times when the square dance activity, to be perfectly honest, for a long time it was a white activity.

TRACIE: I think that that does make, you know, someone like me who I'm, you know, I'm a Black person, as you can probably tell ...

BETSY GOTTA: Right.

TRACIE: ... go, "Huh?" [laughs] Like, 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 national American dance, you know? And it kind of does feel like a little, you know, I'm being excluded or I'm being told that, you know, that this is what it means to be an American.

ROY GOTTA: And a lot of people in our activity took heed of that and said, "Yeah, you know, that's a valid point." But we still kind of felt that it was the one dance form that hopefully transcended all of that because it is all inclusive. Granted, it wasn't.

TRACIE: Yeah.

ROY GOTTA: But then again, America wasn't an inclusive society.

TRACIE: Yeah.

BETSY GOTTA: And what we kind of wanted to do was bring everybody in.

TRACIE: Yeah.

BETSY GOTTA: That was our strategy. We wanted to set the hook and reel everybody into the group.

TRACIE: Yeah.

TRACIE: And what sort of came out for me over time was that for them, you know, 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? [laughs]

BETSY GOTTA: You know, to make square dancing better, to get more people and keep 'em.

TRACIE: Numbers are declining.

JAD: Yeah.

TRACIE: And so because ...

JAD: Interesting. So their idea was this is a way to—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.

TRACIE: Yeah. And—and while I was there, they really made a point about how square dancing is really, really just open and inclusive.

DANA SCHIRMER: What makes it unique to us ...

TRACIE: This is Dana Schirmer. He's—he was the president of Callerlab. That's the group that trains all the callers. And he's also the guy who said he uses J-Lo sometimes.

DANA SCHIRMER: I think it's when you hear the music, and the first time you step in there and touch hands, the magic just goes right through your hands. And you just feel the warmth and the friendliness of all the people in the group with you.

TRACIE: Like, you come to the square and ...

DANA SCHIRMER: You don't care who they are, where they came from, or what happens.

TRACIE: Nobody knows anything about anybody else. But you all have to work together.

DANA SCHIRMER: You know, you're in the group, and you're gonna have fun.

TRACIE: Yeah.

DANA SCHIRMER: And I don't look—I'm an accountant. I don't go out there looking for accountants.

TRACIE: [laughs]

DANA SCHIRMER: I go out there and get in the square. "What do you do? I'm a farmer, I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer," you know? Doesn't matter. We have all kinds of people, and we're all gonna dance together.

TRACIE: Yeah.

DANA SCHIRMER: It's the teamwork. You're doing something together as a team.

TRACIE: Yeah. It's like a—like an equalizer, almost.

DANA SCHIRMER: Yeah. We're all together.

TRACIE: This is something I heard over and over and over again, that square dancing welcomes everyone, it doesn't matter who you are.

ROY GOTTA: You don't worry about sexual orientation. You don't worry about color. You don't worry about where they're from. All you worry about is can they square dance, can they help me have a good time square dancing?

TRACIE: Yeah.

ROY GOTTA: That's—that's all that matters. So ...

BETSY GOTTA: No, I can remember when we were—we, the square dance world, were making some strides in opening up.

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

BETSY GOTTA: In 1965, which was the year of Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, the national convention was in Dallas, Texas.

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

BETSY GOTTA: And I was there. And the country in the South was scary enough. We drove through the South in a car from New Jersey, and for a while we were followed because they thought we might've been outside agitators who were gonna register people to vote or something.

TRACIE: Wow!

BETSY GOTTA: And we were just a family coming back from the square dance convention.

TRACIE: Yeah.

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

TRACIE: [laughs]

BETSY GOTTA: This could've been very scary.

TRACIE: Yeah.

BETSY GOTTA: In that atmosphere.

TRACIE: Yeah. Yeah.

BETSY GOTTA: But they were very smart. 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.

TRACIE: Wow.

BETSY GOTTA: They started a group. They'd stand on the floor and put up their hands with three fingers up, which means we need three couples.

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

BETSY GOTTA: And let people come to them who would be comfortable dancing with them.

TRACIE: Yeah.

BETSY GOTTA: 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 the—you know, the African American dancers have been part of the activity since then.

TRACIE: I'm gonna let y'all go.

BETSY GOTTA: Thank you.

TRACIE: Yeah.

LINDA PETERSON: Thank you.

JAD: Huh. I mean, walking away from that visit, what did you make of all that, of the convention, the whole thing?

TRACIE: Well, you know, it was a great experience. I felt very welcomed and everyone was really, really sweet. But, you know, it still kind of felt like it was welcome and come do our thing, you know?

JAD: Yeah.

TRACIE: 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 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.

JAD: Yeah.

TRACIE: But I talked to Phil Jamison after I went to the convention. And Phil, if you remember, he was the guy who told us about Cecil Sharp in the mountains, and kind of the traditional story about where square dancing comes from.

PHIL JAMISON: I often ask, you know ...

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

PHIL JAMISON: I spent about 10 years of my life as a professional musician and dancer.

TRACIE: So Phil was actually a musician and dancer for a long time, and he was actually part of this clog group called ...

PHIL JAMISON: The Green Grass Cloggers. I was on the road for seven years with that group, and we traveled all over the US and overseas as well.

TRACIE: 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?

PHIL JAMISON: And I—so I'd go and look in books and try to—try to read up on the history of these dances. And all the books that were out there, square dance books, just talked about the British Isles and, you know, the hearty pioneers coming to the mountains with their dances.

TRACIE: 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. But at a certain point, Phil says ...

PHIL JAMISON: 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 mix. 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 and, you know, when you look at the musical traditions, the fiddle is accompanied by the banjo, and that has African roots. And you look at the vocal traditions ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Old-time singing]

PHIL JAMISON: ... yes, people still sing the old British ballads, but they also sing ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gospel singing]

PHIL JAMISON: ... gospel songs, blues songs, Tin Pan Alley songs and minstrel songs. 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, you know, figure it out.

TRACIE: So Phil would end up spending 14 years looking at letters and ...

PHIL JAMISON: Travel narratives, historical accounts ...

TRACIE: ... and dance manuals. Anything he could get his hands on.

PHIL JAMISON: And what I discovered was there was an evolution of the dances that occurred during the 19th century, and they're, you know, 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.

JAD: Oh! Well, what does he mean? Does he mean ...

TRACIE: Well, he means that they were all doing these dances, not just white people.

PHIL JAMISON: 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.

TRACIE: 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, and some people think this actually related to something called the ring shout, which is, like, a traditional dance from west and central Africa. And, you know, the crazy thing is that he told me, the thing that makes the square dance the square dance ...

PHIL JAMISON: Dance calling itself comes from the Black tradition.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Blues singing]

PHIL JAMISON: There's no evidence that that ever happened in European dances, but there's a lot of call and response in African dances. And the earliest dance callers were all Black fiddlers who were playing for dances.

TRACIE: Basically, Phil told me that when you were back in Europe, the way you learned these dances was that you had a dancing master, you had a dancing school, you'd go to these schools and you learn all the steps.

JAD: Yeah.

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

JAD: Yeah.

TRACIE: 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.

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

TRACIE: So—so you discovered that square dancing is a melting pot of dances?

PHIL JAMISON: Yes. Square dancing is definitely a, you know, so-called melting pot dance. But what happened by the 20th century is they basically—these traditions became whitewashed, and the Black history behind it got forgotten.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Gospel singing]

JAD: Did anyone at the hearing make the argument that he was making?

TRACIE: No. No, this is something that he's kind of discovered in the last few years.

JAD: It is interesting because now you're like, "Hmm, maybe it should be the national folk dance." But I don't know, does it still feel like someone else's dance, that you just now have a small, like, side role?

TRACIE: I did—I still don't think that square dancing should be the national folk dance. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

TRACIE: But I—and, you know, 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 had something to do with, like, kind of the development of this dance, if you told me that, then I would say, 'Oh, so that—actually, this dance is a lot more American, you know, in that inclusionary way.'"

JAD: Yeah.

TRACIE: That we would like to think of America as. Then I would've thought and maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea. And then he pointed out, "Well, what about Latino people, what about Asian people, and what about ...?"

JAD: Sure.

TRACIE: You know? Like, once again, we're like, way too multicultural a society to, like, just say ...

JAD: But what if ...

TRACIE: ... this thing. Okay?

JAD: What if you—I'm trying to be as—I'm trying to create a scenario that's the most inclusive thing possible.

TRACIE: Okay.

JAD: But it's not gonna—I'm not gonna get there. I'm gonna leave so many people out. But it's like ...

TRACIE: [laughs]

JAD: I don't know. I mean, couldn't—isn't there room in square dancing, in other words, for—if there's room for Black people ...

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Well I shouldn't say 'room.' I mean, if there—what's the word? Well yeah, fine. If there's room for Black people ...

TRACIE: Yeah, let's just ...

JAD: ... there's certainly room for white people.

TRACIE: Uh-huh.

JAD: Why not create a square dance that's—that's as diverse as America?

TRACIE: [sighs ] I think ...

JAD: I mean, I feel like you could tap dance at a square dance. I mean, it's just ...

TRACIE: You could. You can tap dance in a square dance, you can clog in a square dance.

JAD: Why not?

TRACIE: You can find videos of people clogging in a square formation.

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

TRACIE: It's a—it's a little harder, but ...

JAD: Ballet?

TRACIE: Sure. [laughs]

JAD: Hip hop dancing?

TRACIE: I could see more hip hop dancing in a square dance. Well okay, it was at this point that this conversation started to go somewhere that we decided, you know what? We should have a live show.

TRACIE: Does anyone else have any, like, other ideas about, like, what's a fun group dance that we can all do together? Mm-hmm? What did you say? The Moonwalk. Okay, all right. All right. Problematic now, but whatever, you know?

[laughter]

TRACIE: Documentary, but... any others? The Charleston? The Twist?

TRACIE: So we had done our introductory square dance with everyone and we told them this history.

TRACIE: The what? The butt? Okay. [laughs]

TRACIE: 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.

TRACIE: So Alex, let's talk a little bit about the last dance here tonight.

TRACIE: So we brought our square dance caller, Alex Kramer, back on stage.

TRACIE: It's gonna be a square dance, but at some point you're gonna use a call that's—what's the call gonna be?

ALEX KRAMER: Oh right, right, right. So ...

TRACIE: Did you forget already? [laughs]

ALEX KRAMER: So the dance is called Birdie in the Cage.

TRACIE: Okay.

ALEX KRAMER: So the call is—the first call is "Put the birdie in the cage." And so then what happens is if you're the birdie at that moment, you just, like, hop on in to the c—to the center of the circle, and you get to do your special dance.

TRACIE: It can be the YMCA, da butt. Da butt.

ALEX KRAMER: The funky chicken.

TRACIE: The funky chicken.

ALEX KRAMER: The floss.

TRACIE: You can floss, you can Milly Rock, you can Kid 'N Play, you can ...

ALEX KRAMER: Twerk.

TRACIE: [laughs] You can twerk.

ALEX KRAMER: You can nae nae.

TRACIE: You can what?

ALEX KRAMER: Nae nae.

TRACIE: Nae nae, yeah, absolutely.

ALEX KRAMER: Ducky.

TRACIE: So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do a little square dance, and then he's gonna say, "birdie in the cage," and then everyone's gonna do whatever the F you want. [laughs]

ALEX KRAMER: Okay. Show us what you're working with.

TRACIE: Okay.

ALEX KRAMER: And join hands, circle left. Circle to your left. Round you go. Back to the right, don't take all night. Go into the center with a great big shout. Do it again, do it again. Swing your partner all about. Promenade, promenade, go around the town any old way but upside down.

TRACIE: Were you dancing?

JAD: Yeah! I was trying. I was trying to.

ALEX KRAMER: Couple one, have some fun. Couple one. Go off to the right, circle left with couple two, birdie in the cage. Couple one, couple two, circle to the left.

JAD: I remember it was just chaos. [laughs]

TRACIE: Yeah.

JAD: It was, like, crazy chaos.

ALEX KRAMER: Bird hop out and crow hop in.

JAD: Because, like, he was doing these calls and we were swinging around 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.

TRACIE: [laughs]

JAD: But then he'll do a call and everyone snaps back onto the beat.

ALEX KRAMER: Circle to the left. Birdie in the cage.

TRACIE: 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 peoples' ways because there was a lot of limbs flailing around.

JAD: Yeah, there was.

TRACIE: From where I was standing, when people got into the middle, when the birdie got into the middle of the cage, the birdie was usually just hopping around and jumping up and down.

JAD: [laughs] I know! because you didn't have much time. You were just like, "I gotta do my thing, and then I gotta get out."

ALEX KRAMER: Circle left, around you go. Last chance, birdie number four, show us what you're working with.

[cheers]

TRACIE: And so whatever our national dance is, I guess it's just people hopping around a lot, until ...

JAD: [laughs]

TRACIE: ... until it's not their turn to hop around anymore?

ALEX KRAMER: Now swing your partner all about.

TRACIE: Yeah.

JAD: It was just a hot mess. But it was the happiest hot mess I've been a part of in a long time. Kind of beautiful.

TRACIE: Yeah. Really beautiful. One more thing. 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 old time music, this folk music.

JAD: Yeah.

TRACIE: And really reclaiming it. And one of those musicians was Jake Blount, and he actually performed for us at that live event. He is a fiddler.

TRACIE: So you're gonna perform a song for us. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

JAKE BLOUNT: 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. And I learned this tune from them via my teacher and friend Rhiannon Giddens.

TRACIE: So I thought it'd be a really cool idea if we just, like, played his song.

JAD: Yeah, totally.

TRACIE: And say thank you, Jake.

JAD: I love his description of—I keep thinking about when he said when he plays, it's like his brain moves into his arm.

TRACIE: Hmm.

JAD: Because I was like, when you hear it—you hear this, and you're like, "Oh yeah, he's just all arm."

[fiddle playing]

[applause]

JAD: Well thank you, Tracie.

TRACIE: You're welcome.

JAD: This episode, of course, was reported by Tracie Hunte and produced by Annie McEwen, and we also had an assist on the sound design mix front from Jeremy Bloom.

TRACIE: Also, I just want to say thank you to Lee Ellen Friedland, Bob Dalsemer, Alex Kramer, our caller, our amazing band from the live event: Stephanie Coleman, Courtney Harmon and Steph Jenkins. And Phil Jamison has a book out called Hoedowns, Reels and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance. You should definitely check that out. Thanks.

JAD: Wow.

TRACIE: Oh! And one more thing before we go. We did this interview with Phil Jamison, and he talked about Cecil Sharp being in Appalachia and hearing these, like, old English ballads, you know, that came from over there and that ended up right here, you know, in America, and just being—having his mind blown. And one of the songs that he actually mentions and that we play a little bit in the piece is "Barbara Allen."

JAD: Mm-hmm.

TRACIE: And I actually found a—like, Dolly sang "Barbara Allen." She actually recorded it.

JAD: Yeah, she sang it to me in one of our interviews.

TRACIE: She sang "Barbara Allen" to you?

JAD: Yeah. This is one of the amazing things about interviewing Dolly is that suddenly she just starts singing.

TRACIE: [laughs]

JAD: But, like, she sang her way through the entire interview. Like, I didn't even get a question in.

TRACIE: I feel like singing is talking for her, I think. [laughs]

JAD: Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. And she—yeah, she sang that, and all of these old ballads that were sang to her.

TRACIE: Mm-hmm.

JAD: When she was just a little girl in Sevierville. So yeah, I think actually that's gonna be in our next episode, in episode three of the "Dolly Parton's America" series, you will hear her singing, a lot.

TRACIE: Okay.

JAD: Those—those old ballads have, like, 15 verses. Oh my God, you could sing that thing from morning until lunch time and you still wouldn't be done.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To play the message, press two.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Hi Radiolab, this is Alex Kramer, your square dance caller, calling in from sunny Brooklyn, New York.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Hi, this is Phil Jamison in Asheville, North Carolina. Radiolab is created by Jad Abumrad with Robert Krulwich and produced by Soren Wheeler.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Our staff includes Simon Adler.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Becca Bressler.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Rachael Cusick.]

[ALEX KRAMER: David Gebel.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Bethel Habte.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Tracie Hunte. Nora Keller.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Matt Kielty.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Annie McEwen.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Latif Nasser.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Sarah Qari.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Arianne Wack.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee.]

[PHIL JAMISON: W. Harry Fortuna.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Sarah Sandbach.]

[PHIL JAMISON: Malissa O'Donnell.]

[ALEX KRAMER:  Neel Danesha, Marion Renault.]

[PHIL JAMISON: And Paloma Moreno Jiménez.]

[ALEX KRAMER: Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.]

[PHIL JAMISON: And that's it!]

[ALEX KRAMER: Thanks.]

[PHIL JAMISON: So promenade right off the floor, that's all there is, there ain't no more.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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