Square Dance History Project
The rich story of North American square dance finally has a home in the digital age.

Browse Items (1933 total)

Moving Image

Lucky Strike cigarettes - commercial

Television commercial featuring animated cigarettes doing square dance figures, with caller's patter describing the cigarette's many virtues. View item
Website

Washington Fiddlers Project Panel Discussion

This is an edited transcript of the panel discussion at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunesl, Port Townsend, Washington, July 2, 1986, as a part of the Washington Fiddlers Project, funded by the… View item
Website

Haynes Family manuscript - Oregon

This manuscript of sixty-five dance tunes was handed down through several generations of the Haynes, Shuck, and Adams families who came West over the Oregon Trail from Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa and… View item
Document

Square Dance festival programs

This collection of more than two dozen festival programs from the 1940s until early 1960s gives a good sense of what material was being called as well as names of featured callers. In chronological… View item
Document

Square dance callers - photos

A series of square dance magazine covers featuring these modern square dance callers: Baldwin, Charlie Brower, Jim Brundage, Al Burdick, Stan Calhoun, Louis Castner, Bill Davis,… View item
Still Image

Golden State Round Up 1964

Grand march at the Golden State Round Up, Oakland, CA, 1964. Each row is 4 squares, and there are about 50 rows That's 200 squares, or 1600 dancers. The event featured live music, with an 11… View item
Website

Scottish Country Dance - 4 couple squares

Most Scottish country dances are done as four-couple longways sets. There are, however, dances in square sets, and this Scottish Country Dancing Dictionary provides a brief overview of the formation. View item
Still Image

Ed Durlacher - Central Park, photos

Photographs documenting Ed Durlacher's series of dances in Central Park, New York City. These date from August, 1946. View item
Moving Image

Carcassonne big set, #1

This is an excellent example of traditional southern Appalachian big set square dance, recorded by John Ramsay in Carcassonne, Kentucky, September 19, 1991. ("Big set" is the name given by outsiders;… View item
Moving Image

Carcassonne big set, #2

This is another example of traditional southern Appalachian big set square dance, recorded by John Ramsay in Carcassonne, Kentucky, September 19, 1991. With relatively few examples on our site of… View item
Moving Image

Nils Fredland - Birdie in the Cage and Seven Hands Round

Birdie in the Cage is a traditional square dance figure and a common one; a search for "birdie" on this SDHP website will bring up more than half a dozen other examples. In this version, each of the… View item
Document

Three Southwest SD records

Here is a website dedicated to Southern Colorado vinyl recordings, including several square dance: For He's a Jolly Good Fellow (Al Horn and Elmer Swartwood's Prairie Hornets)Sunshine Lollipops and… View item