"The chief trouble, as I said, with the Virginia Reel is the monotonous repetition and waiting for your turn on the corners. This can be obviated by a new form of the dance which is gradually growing in favor. In this form, instead of having corners bow, turn, etc., each gentleman, and all at once, crosses directly over and does all the moves with his own partner. Done carelessly, this leads to wild confusion (but fun). However, if the line of men all advance as a straight line, the ladies the same, and all return to places in straight lines it can be very effective. And everyone is active all the time up to the point when the head couple reels the set."
-- Lloyd Shaw, in Cowboy Dances: A Collection of Western Square Dances (1939)
It's unclear among whom, exactly, this version was "gradually growing in favor", since one page earlier Shaw had also noted that he had "never seen it with the country folk. It has strangely survived in schools and in society groups..." Shaw's mention is the earliest reference I have to this "all-active" (for the opening figures, anyway) version of the Virginia Reel. The earliest descriptions I have are from somewhat later, though I wouldn't want to make any promises about these being the earliest; my collection of mid-twentieth century dance books is fairly thin. But by the 1950s, this style of dancing the Virginia Reel seems to have become well-established.
Ricky Holden, in The Contra Dance Book
Four measures (eight beats) each:
All forward and back
All turn your partner by right hands
All turn your partner by left hands
All turn your partner by two hands
All dos-à-dos
Followed by:
Active couple hook right elbows and swing once and a half round, and reel down the set
(left elbow to next opposite-sex dancer below, right to partner, left to next, etc.;
swing partner halfway at the bottom if necessary to get back to proper side)
Active couple up the center
Active cast off to the bottom (all dancers follow) and lead up the center
Active couple down the center to the foot and stop
All of this is then repeated with the next couple active, and so on.
Holden gave four beats to each swing in the reel, but the timing is necessarily approximate since the length of the set can vary. During the last figure (actives down the center to the foot and stop), the other couples could form arches with their arms for the active couple to pass under. Holden also noted that sometimes, instead of leading up again after casting off, the active couple simply remained at the bottom and formed an arch which the second couple lead the others through.
Holden called this the "modern version", which had "almost entirely supplanted the original form" at this point.
A slightly different version is found in Betty White's Teen-Age Dance Book. My reference edition is the eleventh, dated 1963. The original copyright is 1952, but I don't have any earlier editions available to check whether it changed over the years. White advised:
"Want to really dress up a party? Then try a modern version of the Virginia Reel. There is nothing like it to pull a dance out of the doldrums...By all means try a Virginia Reel at last once. If you haven't done so, you've really missed out!"
She reiterated that this was the "modern version of the Virginia Reel, in which everybody is active", which she says is "much more lively" than the traditional one. (At left, you can see two dancers grooving through the dos-à-dos in the 1963 edition; click to enlarge.)
White's instructions are just slightly different from Holden's version, as indicated in bold/italic below:
(No timing specified):
All forward and bow and back
All turn your partner by right hands
All turn your partner by left hands
All turn your partner by two hands
All dos-à-dos
Followed by:
Active couple take two hands and slide eight steps [this is an eight-slide galop] down the center and eight steps back to the top
Active couple hook right elbows and swing once and a half round, and reel down the set
(left elbow to next opposite-sex dancer below, right to partner, left to next, etc.;
swing partner halfway at the bottom if necessary to get back to proper side)
Active couple take two hands and slide eight steps [eight-step galop again] up the center again
Active cast off to the bottom (all dancers follow) and form an arch
Second couple leads the other couples through; end with active couple at bottom
Repeat, repeat, etc.
White specified the timing for a six-couple set as "approximately" 48 beats for the reel and eight beats for each of slides down the set or up the set, the casting off, and the leading through.
The major difference between White and Holden is the addition in White of the galop down the center and back before the reel. White also added a bow during the forward and back and made Holden's optional arch by the active couples standard. (The arch figure, as shown in White, may be seen at left (click to enlarge).) White did not originate either; while it is beyond the scope of this post to discuss all the changes in the Virginia Reel over time, the galop down and back, the arch, and the bow during the forward and back all appeared in, for example, the famous "Good Morning" -- After a Sleep of Twenty-Five Years Old-Fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford (1926). The arch goes back at least as far as the 1850s, when it appeared in a version of Sir Roger de Coverley (the English ancestor of the Virginia Reel) recorded by Frances (Mrs. Nicholas) Henderson and others. White's sliding (galop) steps also match the Ford book (actually written by Benjamin Lovett) and are compatible with Holden, who doesn't discuss steps. The originality of the "modern" version lies exclusively in having all the couples active during the first set of figures.
As evidenced by these two sources alone, there doesn't seem to have been a definitive single version of the Virginia Reel in the mid-twentieth century. What is of interest to me is the timing. While I haven't done a comprehensive survey, I have no evidence at all of this version of the dance being done before, at best, the 1930s (relying on Shaw's reference alone). My few sources for this sort of dancing from the 1910s and 1920s give the traditional version where only the dancers at the top and bottom of the set are active and the figures are danced on the diagonal.
Interestingly, mid-twentieth-century American dancers were not the only ones to find the dance in need of adjustment. The aforementioned mid-nineteenth-century "Roger de Coverley" published by Henderson and others included some full-set figures at the beginning, then reverted to the traditional diagonals and recommended omitting the reel completely. (The full description may be seen at my earlier post on that version.) I would not consider the existence of this English modification justification for dancing this "modern" (mid-twentieth-century) Virginia Reel at a nineteenth-century-style ball, however. Unless further evidence appears, I would not consider it correct for a ball of any period prior to 1930.
A note about music
Holden noted that it was traditional at that time (1950s) to mix the music for the Virginia Reel, starting with a jig (6/8) for the first figures and shifting to a "peppy" 2/4 reel for the reel figure, then a march (4/4) for the rest of the dance, and recommended some suitable trios of tunes, mostly recycled from other dances. Obviously, this requires either live musicians or a custom recording, plus some very strict timing across all the sets, which, to be honest, is not usually how it goes in the Virginia Reel, even if all the sets are precisely the same length.
White's book, on the other hand, recommended a "reel" of 6/8 or 9/8 time (those are not actually reels, but jigs or slip jigs) but noted that music in 2/4 was equally workable and gave no specific tune.
I wouldn't say you can use any tune for this version, but I'd say any traditional tune is reasonable enough.
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