I’ve written a number of articles on different aspects of folk and historical dance. For articles on late eighteenth-century dance and a NEW BOOK titled Dances from Jane Austen’s Assembly Rooms, check out my Jane Austen page.
Past CDSS President David Millstone and I recently discovered that we had been independently researching the backstory of an increasingly popular English country dance and contra dance figure called the “dolphin hey.” We put our versions together and the result is The Dolphin Hey: The Evolution and Transmission of a Dance Figure. It includes vintage footage of the two key dolphins!
Ten Cents a Dance: The Taxi-Dance Hall, Jazz Dance, and the Folk Dance Movement
Picture a dark, smoky room on the second floor of a ramshackle building. The high windows are boarded up and the stifling air is redolent of cheap whisky, stale perfume and other, less attractive, odors. At one end, a piano-player and saxophonist pound out a few bars of “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.” The music stops, each man rushes towards his chosen partner, the girl puts his ticket in the top of her rolled up stocking, and the dancing begins again. At two in the morning. . . Read more