On January 21, 1926, a column unfavorably comparing modern dancing to that of earlier eras was published in the Lewiston Evening Journal, published in Lewiston, Maine. "On 'Old-Fashioned Dances' " appeared under the column title "Just Talks On Common Themes" and the byline of A. G. S. The initials are those of Arthur Gray Staples (1861-1940), a Maine writer who was the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal (later just the Lewiston Journal) from 1919-1940. "Just Talks On Common Themes" was his daily column. Staples described these columns many years later in an inscription of one of his books to the Maine State Library:
The only claim for these things is their spontaneity. They write themselves — “after hours,” chiefly. In their day and generation many good folk seemed to like some of them and many did not.
A collection of the columns was published in 1919 or 1920 and may now be found online at archive.org. Later collections were issued in 1921 and 1924, but a 1926 column was obviously not included in any of them. Fortunately, it is now online in its original newspaper publication.
Staples was a rambling sort of writer, and his column on dancing was not particularly focused. The main points touched on were:
- that contra dancing was a lot of fun, and bumping into girls during Portland Fancy was especially fun
- that good prompters were critical, and George T. Wilson was a particularly good one
- that back in the 1860s-1880s, private dances were better than public ones (for keeping out the riff-raff and rowdiness) and that changing partners was better than the modern habit of dancing constantly with a single person
- typical complaints about the bad habits of young people nowadays
The dance-specific bits are interesting. I'm familiar with a couple of different figures for Portland Fancy, but neither of them have a figure where one couples swings and crashes into advancing lines, as Staples describes:
I reckon I can dance Portland Fancy or better “New Portland Fancy” which was invented later by far than the original, better than some other folks can dance it.
It has a swing down the hall and a break thru the advancing sets, wherein the girls’ faces are rosy and flushed with excitement and exercise until they look like a garden of peonies.
“Hoop-se-da-da-da!” bumping the gals and meeting the boys —
Portland Fancy came out high on the list of dances appearing on New England dance cards in a small survey I did back in the spring, so clearly it's something I need to look into at some point.
Staples also challenges his readers as to how many dances popular in 1863 they remember. His list looks suspiciously familiar:
Let me tell you the names of some of them that you have forgotten maybe in the passing years. Here goes: “Downfall of Paris; Isle of Skye; Girls of Belfast; Otis’s Quickstep; Chorus Jig; Money Musk; Fisher’s Hornpipe; Drunken Sailor; Cincinnati Hornpipe; Durand’s [sic] Hornpipe; Miss Brown’s reel; Rickett’s Hornpipe; College Hornpipe; Hull’s Victory; Lady’s Trumpet; Speed the Plough; Beaux of Oak Hill; Humors of the Priesthouse; Beaux of Albany, Twin Sisters; Cheat the Lady; Irish Washerwoman; Jefferson and Liberty; California Reel; Sicilian Circle, otherwise known as Tempest,” or rather danced to the music of Tempest; Soldier’s Joy; Mischief; Portland Fancy; Kentucky Reel; Two Rustics Reel; Thursday Night; Roy’s Wife; Sackett’s Harbor; Megunticook Reel; Figure Eight; Ives’s Hornpipe; Girl I Left Behind Me; Morning Fair Hornpipe; Chase the Lady; Fly, danced to Fisher’s Hornpipe; Rustic Reel; Maid in the Pump Room; Hard Times; Opera Reel; Virginia Reel to “The White Cockade”; Virginia Reel, to the Downfall of Paris; Lady of the Lake; Forest de Bondi; Jackson’s Hornpipe; Boston Fancy; Reefer’s Hornpipe; Partners All; Lanciers; and of course all of them varied by Ladies’ Choice.
In cotillions we had Sociable set; Violet set; Ninepins; plain quadrilles and the Spanish dance or waltz.
Staples was taking some artistic license here. Given that he himself was born in 1861, I don't expect he remembers anything about what was danced then, or for a number of years afterward.
He went on to note the existence of "tiny books of ball room etiquet" [sic], and that the dances had "so many steps; 80 steps; 120 steps..." Counting steps is an unusual way of describing contra dances, used in only a few sources. With that clue and the date 1863, it didn't take much effort to discover that his list is suspiciously similar to the contents of The ball-room manual of contra dances and social cotillons, with remarks on quadrilles and Spanish dance published in Belfast, Maine, and Boston in 1863, complete with the typo "Durand" for "Durang". I expect Staples did dance some version of Portland Fancy at some point, but the list is clearly not his own recollection and should not be taken as reliable documentation of late nineteenth-century Maine dance practice.
The few elements that are not pulled directly from The ball-room manual are interesting, however. Ladies' choice dances appear now and then throughout the nineteenth century. "Lanciers" is nowhere to be found in its contents, and while "Rustic Reel" appears in two different forms, neither is "Two Rustics Reel". A local title variant, perhaps, and, along with the Lanciers, possibly a more authentic memory of something he actually danced as a young man?
I won't quote at length from his remarks about the virtues of good prompters (or masters of ceremonies) or the particular excellence of George T. Wilson. There is nothing surprising in them; he noted that a good prompter was essential for guiding the dancers at balls and that Wilson was exceptional at this work as well as being a "maker of new figures in the dance and a teacher of modern dances". The comment about making new figures is interesting in the context of the evolution of square dancing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Did Wilson compose figures in advance, as in the older quadrilles, or could he smoothly create them on the fly while actually calling?
I also will not fully quote Staples' remarks on "etiquet" and the declining morals of young people, a standard complaint of the older generation throughout history. But it's interesting to note that his ideal contra dance ball was a private event, rather than a public one; that goes against the perception of it as a community dance form:
The old fashioned country dance was an affair of invitation, when it was at its best. Public dances were rather scorned. One met people whom one might not care to meet and girls were prone to meet lads whom they might as well avoid and lads were prone to meet girls who were old-time vamps and gold-diggers.
He describes drinking and general roughness, including fights over partners:
Dance too many times with one girl — may lead to a fight with some other chap who has ambition in that direction. All such affairs settled behind the engine-house during intermission.
More artistic license or memories of his own youth? Either way, Staples really did not approve of exclusivity with one partner:
...no mooning in corners; no exclusive girl with whom one dances all evening into a semi-proprietary give and take environment that leads to an intimacy more fictitious than real, but dangerous often.
The most unfortunate development, however, was the collapsing morals of the young women, with their drinking (in the midst of Prohibition!) and, of course, their skimpy flapper clothing:
One thing has certainly grown worse — the girls of the old-fashioned dances did not drink gin or anything else but water and they did not smoke and they were fully attired.
The original column as it appeared in the Lewiston Evening Journal may be found here for those interested in Staples' full thoughts.
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