Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

4. Back to the Land

— 35 — 4 BACKTO THELAND Dillon Bustin came to Bloomington in 1969. Although born and raised in Indiana—during most of his youth he lived in Cumberland, near Indianapolis—he spent two formative high school years in New England , where he began accumulating the unusual set of experiences that led eventually to the Bloomington dance. He learned contra dancing in the Monadnock region of southern New Hampshire, dancing to Ralph Page, Ted Sannella, and Dudley Laufman. He also worked at an Audubon camp in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and played in a camp dance band, called Roaring Jelly after the tune of that name. In 1972, he visited the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina , where programs in music and dance were encouraging influential and idealistic young people to promote folk culture in their home communities . Dillon would later recall that, inspired in part by the Folk School, he and his friends “dropped out of college and went back to the land” (1990b: 7). To understand the significance of these circumstances, consider that recreation leaders had long extolled the virtues of traditional American community dance, perhaps with the vague hope of establishing communities such as those today. Yet for most of the twentieth century, — 36 — Old-Time Music and Dance Kathy Restle and Dillon Bustin at their rented house near Orangeville, Orange County, summer, 1974. Photo by Dan Willens. — 37 — Back to the Land their efforts were only sparsely rewarded. Among the dance forms encouraged by this movement was contra dance (also, “country-dance”), a once-popular social dance form that had roots in colonial America. Its essential structure consists of sets of dancers in two long lines of indeterminate length. Partners begin the dance facing one another across the set and work their way up and down, eventually interacting with all or most other couples in the set. Losing its popularity elsewhere— primarily to nineteenth-century couple dances—contra dance settled into the New England villages, where it has enjoyed an unbroken tradition on the margins of mainstream culture. Its vigor throughout this century has drawn strength from several “revivals,” each a mix of community tradition, regional consciousness, promotion as recreation, and affiliation with younger generations. Undoubtedly, the sense of selfrenewal that Dillon and others experienced in contra dance in the late 1960s was on the one hand an appropriation of tradition as part of the countercultural movement and on the other the experience of the cycle of tradition that had sustained contra dance for two centuries. The particular suitability of contra dance to the needs of the postWWII folksong revival seems to have been well established even before the war by Ralph Page. Page was a pivotal figure, not only because he was a tireless caller and dance leader into the 1960s, but even more importantly, because his vision of dance was so well suited to the egalitarian utopia of the counterculture. It was a native vision, established locally well before contra dance was “discovered” by postwar revivalists. His 1937 Country Dance Book, written with Beth Tolman, depicted the revival of tradition as operating in cultural “islands,” of which his own rural southern New Hampshire was one (Tolman and Page 1937: 9). Thus through Tolman and Page there was already established the importance of “place” as a vehicle for durable oppositional values. They quoted directly from vintage dancing manuals to recognize the need for “making manners,” but they were also pleasantly tolerant of liquor for the fiddler, harmless pranks from locals, and irreverence toward “chiding prompters.” They viewed New England tradition not as the wellspring of American culture but as local and regional components of a grand pluralist experiment. Foremost, Tolman and Page quickly grasped the — 38 — Old-Time Music and Dance insider/outsider dichotomy that would come to define post–World War II folksong revival, and used it to the locals’ advantage. “The country dance picture has grown more and more encouraging,” they concluded, since their rural neighbors opened up their “guest chambers” to the “summer and winter sportsters” (1937: 21). They took inspiration from the belief that “most city folks really wanted to learn the dances in a ‘serious’ way” and, confidently and irreverently, brushed aside considerable evidence to the contrary. Winter skiers, for example, were “harder to cope with.” But this only gave locals cause to smirk: “[The skiers] are really a good bunch, with unusual vigor and...