The American Gavotte is another of the variations published by dancing master M. B. Gilbert in his manual of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and republished by G. W. Lopp in La Danse (Paris, 1903). It was attributed by Gilbert to James P. Brooks of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (and by Lopp to “J.-D. Brooks”). Gilbert also noted that it was adopted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York — this would have been in 1886, from contemporary writeups of the event — and published by permission of White Smith Music Publishing Co. Lopp listed it as “Polka Américaine (American Gavotte)”
I’ve discussed a couple of other American “gavotte” variations before, but both of those were for the schottische. The American Gavotte is listed as a polka, though it actually works perfectly well to schottische music and there is some confusion surround how it is notated that suggests that it might have originally been meant as a schottische; see the music note below. It certainly has some choreographic kinship with the schottische gavottes in that it also uses the rhythm pattern “1&2&3,4” stepped as “slide, chassé, chassé, close” or “slide-close-slide-close-slide, close”. This is one measure of schottische as usually counted, but two measures of polka. Because of the pattern of the following four beats of music, I actually prefer to break the first four up into two bars, polka style, as follows, with dancers starting on their first foot (his left, her right):
