Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

23. Sugar Hill

— 212 — 23 SUGARHILL Breaking Up Thanksgiving was a weekend-long celebration of old-time music and dance beginning on the Friday after Thanksgiving. For a modest donation, floor space was provided for sleeping and some food for meals. But meals were mostly potluck contributions, especially leftovers from Thanksgiving dinners. Word was spread throughout the Midwest music and dance network. At the time, there were old-time musicians widely dispersed throughout the Midwest. At festivals such as the Battleground Fiddlers’ Gathering (near Lafayette, Indiana), the Eagle Creek Folk Festival (near Indianapolis), and the New Harmony Festival of Traditional Music (New Harmony, Indiana, near Evansville), they had formed a loose alliance. While few communities at the time had dance groups, many had old-time performing bands that were sometimes hired at these festivals. There were the Indian Creek Delta Boys from Charleston, Illinois; Company Comin’ from Cincinnati; the Hotmud Family and the Corn Drinkers, both from southern Ohio; and the Chicago Barn Dance Company from Chicago. The Barn Dance included John Lilly on guitar, Mark Ritchie on banjo, and Mark Gunther, who had come to Chicago from Charlottesville, Virginia, on fiddle. As fulfilling as folk — 213 — Sugar Hill festivals were, musicians and dancers sometimes had to struggle with unaccommodating facilities and unsympathetic organizers to have satisfying jam sessions or dances. Why not, it seemed obvious to ask, simply organize an event devoted solely to old-time music and dance? The earliest Breaking Up Thanksgiving weekends were extraordinary in their circumstances. Gene and Margaret Ritchie were not dancers but hosted the party because their son Mark had become involved in the Chicago music and dance community. For the Ritchie parents and siblings, this was an undertaking of immense sacrifice. I remember sleeping in an attic during one of the early years. It was a spacious room, yet as guests continued to arrive throughout the first evening, they would lay down their pallets one by one until the room was simply covered every inch with sleepers. This was the extent of the crowd. In the evenings when everyone was indoors, it was so crowded on the main floor of the house that it was almost impossible to move. The greatest risk to personal injury, as happened once to someone, was in sitting too close to a fiddler and accidentally being poked in the eye by the bow. The Ritchie family members seemed to take it all in stride, allowing the chaotic weekend to unfold around them. Mark’s siblings seemed unfazed by this assault on their privacy, on their time, and on their personal space. Once I arrived early to find Gene and Mark erecting a huge log post, which they had cut from a recently blown-down hardwood tree, in the basement to support the central joist under the dance floor. This seemed to me so poignant an affirmation of the loving, engaged family, of the profound value of our undertakings, of the usefulness of discarded things, and of the fundamental unity of all of these qualities from which so many in the postwar revival had been alienated. I don’t think anyone at the time grasped how extraordinary it was for a family to host a weekend old-time music and dance party of more than a hundred guests for their son. Although Breaking Up Thanksgiving was genuinely innovative, earlier weekend events outside the Midwest provided more than vague models. In the area around Lexington, Virginia, old-time musicians organized Breaking Up Christmas, a series of parties during the week ending with New Year’s Eve. The event was based on the mountain “old Christmas” tradition as described in the fiddle tune and song made — 214 — Old-Time Music and Dance popular in the revival by North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell and others. And near Ithaca, New York, a mid-summer Highwoods Weekend was held that year, organized by the Highwoods Stringband and friends. Both were loosely structured old-time music celebrations, but neither had the focus on dance that became the norm in Chicago. In featuring both dance and music, Breaking Up Thanksgiving established the first annual celebration that linked neighboring old-time music and dance communities, and in doing so left an indelible mark on what would become the ubiquitous Midwest dance weekend. When the Ritchies held that first party, there were no other dance weekends in existence . The term “dance weekend” had not entered...