Mountain Home Guide
DO-si-do & PROMENADE
By JOYCE M. TICE

Our old folks in this part of the world will tell us about all the great Saturday night square dances they went to in their youth. Dances were held in nearly every community, in the grange halls, the parks, and in the cleared-out lofts of barns. They were accompanied by a small dance band and a caller who told the dancers which of the moves to make. These include “promenade all,” “Do-si-do,” and many others.

Everyone knew the moves and could follow the calls. Polka and “round dance” were also part of the mix. The dances were part of the glue that held the community together.
Natalie Phelps of Coudersport joined a dance band in the mid-1950s when she was just a teenager. Natalie’s Irish father was a singer, and music was always part of her life. Natalie played guitar and sang, but when the band’s accordionist left, she took on the challenge of learning accordion in less than a week, and succeeded. She played for the dances at the Odin Grange between Coudersport and Austin, and she hosted a radio show from WFRM in Coudersport called, “Allegany Mountain Jamboree.”
Natalie went on to play for 13 years in a square dance band in Nashville that performed old-time mountain music. About four years ago, she moved back to Potter County, where she raises and markets organic produce through an organization called Food Matrix.

When Natalie saw that so many of the old barns were gone and that the barn dances were no longer part of the local culture, she felt the loss. Odin Grange held its last dance way back in 1961. Some of the older folks who remembered her suggested they get the dances going again. In 2006 they formed a three-person dance band and did just that. They had an accordion, a guitar, and an upright base fiddle. Natalie became a caller for the first time in her life, because no one else was available. Many community members who had attended the dances decades ago did so again, and cried. The “pie ladies” came back with their pies, and they cried. Everyone cried and danced to the songs and calls of their youth.

It was then that Natalie contacted and started studying with the old-time callers who remained. Theirs was a dying and soon-to-be-lost art. Lisa Rathje of the Pennsylvania Institute for Cultural Arts encouraged her to apply for a grant to record, collect, and preserve these cultural treasures. With the help of the grant, Natalie has been interviewing and recording the callers and writing down their calls.

She has discovered regional differences. In this area the calls are sung. Specific calls are paired with a specific song, and they belong together. The song may incorporate the call. An example would be the call “promenade your partner,” and the song, which is a filler while the dancers perform the step, would be “Oh my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away.” The eight beats of the song reflect the eight beats of the step. In other regions sets of calls may be used interchangeably with a variety of music as long as the beats fit the dance. In this case the calls are not sung.

Natalie has also observed that the dances and calls evolve. Farther south in the state the same calls are used, but the steps have become more complex and new ones have been developed. Her theory is that with longer warm seasons they have more time to dance.
Natalie points out that not only the calls have history. The dancers, too, have their own set of tales that have become part of the area’s lore. Like the time a clumsy young man leaped in the air during a dance, caught his toe on a young woman’s crinoline and fell to the floor. Unaware, she kept dancing while the crinoline unraveled layer by layer still attached to his toe. She cried when she saw what had happened. Her mother had just bought the dress for $5, and she knew she was in trouble. The Coudersport girls and the Sterling Run girls used to have fights during dance breaks. They’d remove their crinolines and pile them in the corner until they were done beating each other up. Then they’d put them back on and dance some more.

Ah, the good old days. You can experience them again on May 24 in Colesburg.

The Northern Tier Cultural Alliance has designated 2008 as the Year of the Barn. As part of this, a real old-time barn dance will be held on May 24. The place is the restored Waterwheel Farm barn on the old Lent Farm on Route 49 in Colesburg, east of Coudersport. A community supper will be held in the barn’s basement at 6 p.m. Film crews will record the dance. Three callers will lead the dances: Harry Erhardt of Port Royal, PA, Ray Wetherby of Belmont, NY, and Natalie Phelps of Coudersport. There will be room on the floor for 18 sets at a time, with four couples per set.

Joyce Tice is a regular contributor to Mountain Home magazine. You can read her column for this month on page 40.