Square Dances for White Collars

Thanks to city slickers, there was a boom last week in country dances. Victor's square-dance album, Swing Your Partner ($3.25), had sold nearly 2,000 sets fortnight after publication. Columbia had followed with Square Dances ($2.50). Decca, which had already issued single square-dance discs, humped itself to get out albums. The strains of Hull's Victory, Portland Fancy, Buffalo Girl, Arkansaw Traveler were loud in the land.

Loosely, country dances include quadrilles, "running sets," reels or contra

(contry, hence country) dances, and even polkas and schottisches (including the five-step schottische, for virtuosos only).

Strictly, a square dance is a quadrille, descended by way of England from the early French court ballet. The quadrille, with its basic pattern of four couples forming a hollow square, spread from the original colonies throughout the land, acquired many a variant in technique and nomenclature. But everywhere the dance has a caller, an inventive, leather-lunged, cool-headed master of ceremonies who calls out the figures--swing your partner, dose-do (dos-a-dos or back to back), allemande, chassez (sashay), promenade, etc. As anyone knows who has ever tried it without prior training, a "set" of three different uninterrupted squares can be a confusing experience.

In New England, skiers from the city discovered square dancing, in many another locality, square dances spread from town halls and country fairs to roadside juke joints. Today there are organized square-dance groups in many a city, including New York, El Paso, Chicago and Colorado Springs, where Lloyd Shaw is a particularly zealous propagandist of the sashay. In Massachusetts, an Extension Specialist in Community Organization and Recreation has trained 2,000 young people to call figures, spread their knowledge to some 150,000 others who never do-se-doed in their lives.

The Specialist is young, handsome Lawrence Loy, a Kansan who has called dances since he was a boy, did the calls for Columbia's square-dance album. To back up Caller Loy, Columbia hired rangy, twinkling Carson Robison, a harmonica-burbling Kansas balladeer, no stranger to records and radio. Carson Robison's chief problem in making square-dance discs in the East was to find city fiddlers who could saw scratchy enough. He finally found them in Manhattan.

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