Way back in the first year of Kickery, I wrote about the mid-nineteenth-century American contra dance "Light Dragoon", which Elias Howe assigned to the popular tune "Miss [or Mrs.] McLeod's Reel". Here's another example of a country dance for the tune, this one taken from London dancing master Rudolph Radestock's The Royal Ball-Room Guide and Etiquette of the Drawing-Room (London, c1877). Country dancing was not a major part of the fashionable London ballroom by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though a few traditional dances like Sir Roger de Coverley and the Triumph appear to have lingered. Radestock's book is unusual in giving not only six specific dances, including a polka country dance and a galopade, but another fifteen "various" country dances with no tune or other name attached and with very generic figures distinguished only by the frequent use of a poussette as the final figure. "Miss M'Leod" [sic] is one of Radestock's half-dozen specific dances.
First couple cross to opposite places, offering right hands to each other, and turning second lady or gentleman, as the case may be, with the left hand, in the form of the ladies' chain; back again to places with the same figure; promenade down the middle, up again; four hands round with second couple; waltz eight bars; repeat the figure to the bottom of the dance.
I have no other source for the dance.
The formation is the standard longways country dance set, gentlemen in one line facing the ladies in the other. The dance may well have been started by the top couple only, with the other couples becoming active as they reached the top of the set and the dance continuing until all couples had returned to their own places. For more information regarding this style of historical country dance progression, please see my earlier post. In America by this time, starting multiple active couples at once was a documentable practice, but it's not clear to me whether this extended to England.
Figures
4b First couple take right hands and change places (2b), then turn new neighbor (opposite gender) by the left hand (2b)
4b First couple take right hands and cross back (2b), then turn original neighbor (same gender) by the left hand (2b)
8b First couple promenade down the middle; turn individually and come back up to places
8b First two couples hands four round and back
8b First two couples take closed ballroom position and dance round each other one and a half times to change places, opening up on original sides
The dance is repeated down the set in standard country dance style.
Performance and reconstruction notes
The first figure is the most interesting of the dance: a "ladies' chain" across the set danced by a lady and gentleman rather than two ladies, resulting in both opposite- and same-gender turns. This is an unusual variation that I've never seen elsewhere.
The promenade down the center could be done holding inside hands, crossed hands, or right hands. Since the active couple is emerging from left hand turns, I favor the smooth flow of taking right hands for the promenade. With either right hands only or crossed hands, the dancers need not drop hands as they turn toward each other to come back up the set.
The hands four does not specify "and back", but with eight bars of music available, there is plenty of time for both directions. One could make an argument for "down the middle, up again; four hands round" to be only eight bars total, using a galopade for the down the middle and up and circling only to the left for the hands four, but that would yield a twenty-four-bar dance. "Miss McLeod's Reel" is typically played with either a sixteen- or thirty-two-bar structure, depending on whether the strains are repeated or not.
The progressive figure is a typical "poussette" of this era, the original push-pull nature of the poussette having been discarded in favor of couple dancing. The instruction to "waltz eight bars" does not mean the music shifts to waltz time; it just means to use some turning dance. Given the nature of the music, a turning ("two-slide") galop, or smoothed-out polka, would be the most obvious choice. This poussette works smoothly in the "couple-facing-couple" dance formation, but it is more awkward to open up at the end into the "proper" formation of separate lines for each gender. The dancers need to separate early enough to regain their lines before the next repetition of the dance.
Music
While any country dance tune of thirty-two bars will fit the dance, obviously the name tune, "Miss McLeod's Reel" would be the best. Sheet music and recordings of the tune are easy to find; I linked to several options in my "Light Dragoons" post.
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