City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America

7 Re-Generation

206 | 7 Re-Generation It really depends on what you mean by “folk.” I don’t think origins matter very much. . . . Obviously, a lot of these dances have been composed at one time or another, so if the time happens to be the 20th century, why worry. —Pat Shaw, 19701 And in his own crazy English way of looking at American things, he [Pat Shaw] created American dances—so called American dances—that really were an English man’s view of American dances. And so he shook the world up, and it [1974] was a great year. —Jacqueline Schwab, 19992 Jacqueline Schwab, a self-described “nerd” who loved the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary and “the usual sixties,” attended Pinewoods in 1971 for the first time. She found a world still rooted in a mainstream culture: “Women weren’t allowed to ask men to dance. Men could ask women to dance. And women had to wear skirts to the dances. And there was even a bush patrol for scouring the bushes late at night so that there weren’t any extracurricular activities going on . . . and etc.” Schwab, who had been introduced to ECD through International Folk Dance, went on to have an illustrious career in CDSS and as a professional musician. She served as Pinewoods Camp manager , became the pianist for the leading ECD band Bare Necessities, and did the music for Ken Burns’s blockbuster PBS television series The Civil War.3 In that same summer of 1971, future CDSS national director Brad Foster arrived for his first camp visit. It was the heyday of the sexual revolution in the counterculture, and he remembered that Gadd prohibited unmarried couples from rooming together. He recalled the year as “a very hormonal year at camp.” “Some people said they got married so they could come and stay at Pinewoods in the same cabin,” although he added what seemed more likely the case: others just quietly “changed roommates.” No rules were posted, but Re-Generation | 207 “there were traditions that you had to be aware of. Even if you were never told, you had to follow these things.”4 As these anecdotes suggest, the entrance of dancers such as Schwab and Foster who came of age in the Sixties into the urban dance communities and the pavilions at Pinewoods turned the world of country dance upside down in the 1970s. But at the same time as the social profile of the dance community changed, so did its repertoire—and it did so across the country as groups of converts to country dance in cities and college towns from the San Francisco Bay Area to the City of Brotherly Love and points in between made CDSS a robust national organization. For many who remembered those years, the controversial 1974 visit to Pinewoods Camp of the pioneering dance choreographer and teacher from London—Pat Shaw—was the transformative symbolic moment. As Kate van Winkle Keller recalled, Shaw’s call to innovation upset many traditionalists. Keller, who went on to become a leading historian of Playford and Colonial American dance, had her inaugural visit to Pinewoods that year and remembered the consternation that Shaw’s visit occasioned among many CDSS leaders: “His ideas challenged their insistence that to have a uniform dance community there needed to be uniformity in teaching and dance interpretation . Pat’s ideas undermined this uniformity but encouraged budding American choreographers . . . to follow his lead as he similarly inspired English teachers.”5 For many others, and most especially those of a new generation, Shaw’s appearance was empowering. Typical is the view of the caller and musician Gene Murrow: “The effect of his prodigious talent, strong presence, and point of view was, in effect, to give us all permission to make this material our own.”6 For Shaw argued that the “folk” were as much expressions of contemporary and urban peoples as they were of “primitive” peoples in some distant, rural world; Shaw could not have been more forthright: folk origins do not matter very much. Although Shaw was not an academically trained folklore theorist, his view reflected a profound and growing alternative among anthropologists and folklorists to the colonial, linear paradigm that had dominated folklore studies— and to the thinking of country dance revivalists. The formative work in folklore and modern anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century by Lewis Henry Morgan and James G. Frazier essentialized the peasantry and traced cultural evolution from peasantry to “civilization.” Written from...