Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

14. The Gang of Four

— 136 — 14 THEGANG OFFOUR When I arrived in Bloomington in 1976, I had already been dancing for several years and had been involved in several organizations that promoted folksong performance. But in Bloomington I sensed an astonishing difference in the concerns of the group and in the understanding of the group as a social and political entity. I would later learn that this was a crucial year when identity and structure became more of a conscious issue in the group. Mostly during that year, during the Jukebox era, there was a series of meetings at which issues of group structure were openly discussed. There was one meeting at Donna Doughten’s house and at least two at the Fourth-and-Jefferson home of Stan Sitko and Toby Bonwit. Stan and Toby, with Barry Kern, had built a large porch suitable for warmweather dancing; thus their house became a common meeting place during the years that they lived there. Until just before they moved out, however, there was still no door to the porch, and dancers grew accustomed to climbing through the window to get from the kitchen to the porch to dance. Another meeting was held at Frank Hall’s “Boys’ Club” apartment on Sixth Street. Frank had moved quickly to the social and cultural center of the group, absorbing a variety of song- and dance- — 137 — The Gang of Four related skills. Consequently, his apartment also became the site of frequent activity. Something of the flavor of dance crowd meetings should be inferred from all of this: that they were not regularly held but arranged ad hoc around issues of importance, and that meeting sites were chosen for their proximity to, not their distance from, the celebratory social life of the group. The issues raised then, and yet unsettled, were musicianship, finances , and leadership. Music at the dance, some claimed, was occasionally out of control and difficult to dance to. Money was only marginally important at the time but became an issue after the group treasury was established. But underlying these issues were differing ideas about the basic social structure of the group. Since the first time Dillon Bustin left Bloomington and a grassroots movement swelled to fill the void, an anarchistic mood had prevailed at the dance. Some group members, fitting nicely within the larger counterculture ideology, felt that leaders were not to be trusted, and that structure was stifling to creativity, festivity, and friendship. Even until the late 1980s, there was resistance to affiliating with the Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS) or even to applying for non-profit tax status precisely because both of these required the identification of group officers. And so many musicians then clung to the nourishing, jam session informality of the stage practices. On the other hand, lack of leadership and structure compromised a number of obvious benefits. Musicians and callers were not paid, thus, some would say, limiting their desire to excel, their professionalism, and their just reward. This was a burden on the dancers , felt particularly when the music was not good. Furthermore, as Dillon had argued before, the group missed the benefits of large organizations such as CDSS. These were fundamental structural issues. The folk revival had inherited the principle tenet that musical performance was organic—arising spontaneously, as Cecil Sharp put it, from its social and cultural context. Having encountered the impoverished experience of imitation, old-time music and dance revival had in time resolved instead to create organic society in the image of community tradition. By the time these structural issues began their lengthy tenure in the consciousness of Bloomington dancers, the underlying premise had become entirely existen- — 138 — Old-Time Music and Dance tial. The concern was not at all with re-creating authentic folk music, but rather with how to provide for authentic experience. The concern was with the desire to avoid partitioning of experience into consumer and performer, to assure access to and status at the dance for those with limited resources, and to preserve the inverted status of folk performance . Only a few structural changes were installed as a result of those meetings —and certainly nothing to upset the prevailing informality of the weekly dance itself. Anticipating the need for money, the group opened a bank account. It was decided that a voluntary collection would be taken at each dance, but no admission...