Waltz the Hall: The American Play Party (review)

Spurgeon has provided the academic world with a superb example of how oral history has the power not only to supplement the historical and academic record but also to enlarge our understanding of a topic. These days, few know of the esoteric folklore genre, the play party, and those who do might well assume that it has been defunct for several decades. Even nineteenth- to early twentieth-century folklorists wrote about it as an old and dying form of childhood recreation. Vance Randolph wrote some articles about it surviving in the Ozarks, mostly in the 1930s; Benjamin Botkin wrote his dissertation on it in 1937; the last major original publications on it were in the 1950s. But Spurgeon, discovering that many people today still have vivid memories of growing up with play parties, interviewed forty-one people in six states to obtain their memories of this rural recreational activity that young people ranging in age from eight to twenty-five would engage in.

Spurgeon, a musicologist at the University of Mississippi, provides an excellent overview of the history of play parties, its connection to the Virginia reel, square dance, frolics, hoedowns, and other forms of rural dancing and social gatherings. He likewise provides a good sense of the geographic range of the play party—how it existed early in the 1800s on the East Coast but prospered with the pioneering movement into the Midwest, the South, and the Plains, even with appearances in Idaho. His coverage of play party scholarship is in and of itself a service to folklore and ethnomusicology, for he not only brings together all the works published to date but also provides descriptive and analytic assessments of them and situates them in historical and historiographical contexts.

In terms of oral history, Spurgeon’s interviews inform his introductory research significantly and allows for a broader understanding of the persistence and spread of the genre. Importantly, he includes a section on African-American play party songs and games, an area that no one had ever recognized in print before and includes interview materials from people from an African-American community in Arkansas concerning their play party traditions. He provides a list of all of his informants at the end, including date, place, and interviewer information. For oral historians, a further inclusion of his oral history interviewing and processing methodology would have helped to understand the presented information better. But simply that Spurgeon’s impetus for creating this book was discovering that he was able to do an oral history on this subject and that moreover he should do the project because oral histories were out there to be gathered is a point oral historians will notice and that other academics should act on.

Perhaps it has something to do with the interviews, since many of the cited songs are variants from his narrators, but I was curious how Spurgeon chose the particular ninety songs he included in the songbook section. In the explanatory text of the book, he cites many of the play party songs and dances and discusses the variants, both published and from the interviews, which provides excellent depth of information. But the songbook provides only one version for nearly all the songs and no listing of other variants or any selection rationale for each song. Notably, many of the song texts and transcriptions are from the regions that Spurgeon interviewed in, which may be the obvious reasoning behind his selection criteria. As a musicologist, Spurgeon’s primary intent was probably to ensure that the songs themselves, as well as the very nicely delineated dance steps that accompanied them, would be documented and included in as complete a songbook as possible. Further, as a book in the American Made Music Series issued by the University Press of Mississippi, the broader concerns of folklorists and oral historians would be subservient to the musicological imperatives of documenting the history of the form and presenting...