Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2009 American Team Clogging as Pilgrimage and Heritage Ritual James Andrew Howard

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE AND DANCE

AMERICAN TEAM CLOGGING AS PILGRIMAGE AND HERITAGE RITUAL

By

JAMES ANDREW HOWARD

A Thesis submitted to the Department of Dance in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009

Copyright © 2009 James Andrew Howard All Rights Reserved

The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of James Andrew Howard defended on March 30, 2009.

______Tricia Young Professor Directing Thesis

______Jennifer Atkins Committee Member

______Sally Sommer Committee Member

______Patricia Phillips Committee Member

Approved:

______Patricia Phillips, Co-Chair, Department of Dance

______Sally McRorie, Dean, College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

Dedicated, in loving memory, to Ryan Lee Marsh (1983-2008) Thank you, Ryan, for your encouragement in this and many other adventures. Thank you for being part of my story. One more thing…

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to thank my family for being team cloggers, by association, for over 21 years. My grandmother, Annie Ruth Howard (Granny Annie, as many clogging friends call her), has been exceptionally supportive and significant in my clogging adventures, from the earliest lessons to family summer pilgrimages to Dollywood. To all my family (including my —clogging family“), my clogging experience would not be as meaningful if I had not first and always experienced it with people I love dearly. I would like to thank Pat Bedingfield for my first clogging steps and Debra and Lynnette White for inspiring me to entertain, while a member of the Sidekick Cloggers. I am fortunate enough to have two families: one I was blessed to be born to and one that I chose for myself-- the American Racket Cloggers, the best friends I could ever ask for. Some cloggers have helped me specifically with this project through continuous support: Erin Hughes Hunter, Lauren Fackender Carmody, Jenny Boston, and Chelsea Dunlop (a clogger by association). For the greatest source of encouragement during the process of writing this thesis, I thank Juliet McMains who is as passionate about her ballroom dance glamour as I am about my team clogging home-spuns. Thank you, Juliet, for reminding me that this investment is bigger than a thesis. Thank you, to Jennifer Atkins for her patience and her detailed feedback, not to mention the sacrifice of hours and hours of editing. Thank you also to Sally Sommer: I have fond memories that were made possible by you, especially the opportunity for this clogger to take on the streets of New York City (literally, as I registered myself a street performer). Tricia Young is truly the —rock“ of the American Dance Studies program. Thank you, Tricia, for not giving up on me. A big thanks to clogging scholarship pioneers: Loyal Jones, Susan Eike Spalding, David Whisant, and Jane Harris Woodside; also to Gwen Kennedy Neville and Celeste Ray whose work, although not about clogging, inspired me a great deal. Some other —folks“ have been helpful in this project: Jeff Driggs, Bruce Garner, Janice Hanzel, Lib Mills, Dan Angel, Bill Nichols, American Clogging Hall of Fame, National Clogging and Hoedown Association

iv

(CLOG, Inc.), the Barbary Coast Cloggers, the Buffalo Chips, the Grand Ole Opry, and the Pack Memorial Library of Asheville, North Carolina.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vi Symbols, Abbreviations, and Nomenclature ...... viii Abstract ...... ix

1. Introduction ...... 1

2. American Industrialization and Rural-Themed Entertainment As A Root Paradigm ...... 9

2. Asheville‘s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival ...... 18

3. —Interlude“: Team Clogging 1928-1980 ...... 51

4. American Clogging Hall of Fame Pilgrimage ...... 53

5. Conclusion ...... 77

APPENDICES ...... 79

A Team Clogging Timeline ...... 79 B Lunsford Collection and Mountain Dance and Folk Festival Timeline ...... 82 C ACHF Rules and Clogging Categories (2009) ...... 85 D Sample ACHF Score Sheet, Southern Appalachian Category (Big Set) ...... 99 E 2008 ACHF National Dance Off Participating Senior, Adult, and Young Adult Teams and Cities ...... 100

REFERENCES ...... 105

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 118

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Asheville‘s Pack Square ...... 23

Figure 2: Asheville‘s Pack Square ...... 23

Figure 3: Asheville‘s Pack Square (1919) ...... 24

Figure 4: WNC Rhododendron in Bloom ...... 24

Figure 5: Float in Rhododendron Festival Parade (1933) ...... 25

Figure 6: Bascom Lamar Lunsford at Rutherford College ...... 27

Figure 7: Bascom Lamar Lunsford as Lecturer on WNC Culture (Flyer) ...... 28

Figure 8: Circle Four Figures, Dancers at MDFF ...... 31

Figure 9: MDFF Poster (26th Annual Event) ...... 32

Figure 10: The Hill Billies (Band), Self Promotion Illustration ...... 34

Figure 11: The Hill Billies (Band), Promotion Photograph as Promoted by Okeh Record Label ...... 34

Figure 12: Bascom Lamar Lunsford Dancing at MDFF ...... 36

Figure 13: Illustration of Big Set Dance Formations ...... 39

Figure 14: Sam Queen‘s Soco Gap Dancers (Practicing) ...... 46

Figure 15: Lunsford and Dancers at MDFF ...... 48

Figure 16: Scene Outside Asheville Auditorium During MDFF ...... 48

Figure 17: MDFF Champions, 1970 ...... 49

Figure 18: MDFF Dancers ...... 49

Figure 19: Smooth Dance Team at MDFF ...... 50

Figure 20: View of Audience and Platform at MDFF ...... 50

Figure 21: Montreat Smooth Dance Team at MDFF ...... 61

vii

Figure 22: Stompin‘ Ground Outdoor Sign, Maggie Valley ...... 66

Figure 23: Team Competing, Inside Stompin‘ Ground Venue ...... 66

viii

LIST OF SYMBOLS, ABBREVIATIONS, AND NOMENCLATURE

Symbol Definition ACHF American Clogging Hall of Fame MDFF (Asheville‘s) Mountain Dance and Folk Festival NCHC National Clogging and Hoedown Council WASP White Anglo-Saxon Protestant WNC Western North Carolina

Terms for Interpretation of ACHF Rules (Appendix C) Progressive Start One dancer starts percussive footwork. Others join in, one at a time, until the entire team is dancing. Progressive Step Step sequences that might break unison among dancers (i.e., dancers traveling in opposite directions might be on opposite feet; dancers might perform steps in —ripples“ rather that in unison, etc.) Rise and Shine Also called —showcasing,“ where one dancer or couple is featured as a solo performer (usually a —freestyle“ solo) Drag Slide Style Basic Standardized Clogging Steps which include: Double-steps, Rock-steps, Chugs, Brush Steps, Kick Steps, etc. Steps usually not accepted as Drag Slide Style include: Canadian style steps, certain tap steps (pull backs, toe stands, etc.), buck steps (heel-ball, heel-ball), etc.

ix

ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates ritual expressions of heritage and identity within a dance community, American Team Clogging. The scope of this thesis includes competitive team clogging which emerged through a spontaneous fusion of regional —big set“ square dancing and improvised percussive footwork (otherwise performed solo) during a square dance competition at Asheville, North Carolina‘s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in 1928 (originally known as the Rhododendron Festival). This study reveals how Appalachian heritage, especially Western North Carolina (WNC) —folk“ dance, is accessed and interpreted through team clogging on local, regional, and national levels in the United States. Using Victor (and Edith) Turner‘s theories on communitas, ritual performance, and pilgrimage, this thesis demonstrates the function of team clogging, and its pilgrimage systems maintained through a network of sanctioned clogging competitions known as American Clogging Hall of Fame, in leveling differences of participants–diverse in expression of ethnic and religious heritage and/or identity. Through clogging rituals, team cloggers are united in communitas, the greatest width of commonality. This thesis demonstrates how unity is generated and maintained among diverse participants through interpretation of symbols, rituals, and myth in this American dance culture. This thesis demonstrates that diverse cloggers literally clog away their differences.

x

INTRODUCTION

According to cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, —some form of deliberate travel to a far place intimately associated with the deepest, most cherished, axiomatic values of the traveler seem to be a ”cultural universal.‘“1 Pilgrimage systems function to create and maintain intense social bonds between —large numbers of men and women, who would otherwise have never come into contact due to feudal localism and rural decentralization of economic and political life.“2 Turner borrowed the Latin term communitas, distinguished from community which has a geographic connotation, to describe these intense social bonds; communitas gives its members a sense of homogeneity and unity, hiding —crevices“ between social differences, including status.3 Through his written contributions to the study of social action and process, Turner revealed various forms of religious and non-religious pilgrimages functioning in the maintenance of the various participant groups, the pilgrims of each system; he also revealed the capability for pilgrimage to take various form, necessary for maintaining the specific needs, desires, cultures, and beliefs of the pilgrims in each case. Often, at their final destination and at —way points“ along their path, the pilgrims participate in rituals of meaning that reinforce the spirit of the pilgrimage. Afterwards, the pilgrims return to their everyday lives with a sense of renewal and also that intimate beliefs, those at the heart of the pilgrim‘s journey, are shared with others. The focus of this thesis is team clogging, a competitive group dance form with which I have actively been involved in since childhood, over 21 years. My intention is to examine how ethnic and ideological heritage and identity are constructed and expressed through team clogging, maintained through its own network of pilgrimages–clogging competitions sanctioned throughout the southeastern United States by the American Clogging Hall of Fame (ACHF). Furthermore, this thesis investigates

1 Victor Turner and Edith L.B. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 1978), 241.

2 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1974), 178.

3 Turner, Dramas, 201.

1

how ACHF pilgrimage reflects the social conditions of the ACHF clogging community, comprised mostly of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) families in scattered Southern communities. This thesis investigates how myth and the team clogging dance form itself (the ceremonial center of all ACHF competition events) function to maintain communitas in the social system of the pilgrims, those who call themselves —cloggers.“ It is necessary to explain the limits of my scope and definition of terms to the reader: (1) American Clogging Hall of Fame is one of at least three major sanctioned clogging competition networks that exist today.4 I selected ACHF because it is the only sanctioning organization that holds its annual —National Championship,“ the highest level of the tournament network that also marks the end of the competition season, in a fixed location. Moreover, the fixed location of the National Championship is in Maggie Valley, a quaint tourist community in the mountains of WNC, significant for its proximity to the —birth“ of team clogging, the spectrum of heritage the dance represents to diverse participants, and for the maintenance of myth which supersedes official history. (2) Asheville‘s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival (MDFF) is an exception to my study of competitions sanctioned by ACHF. MDFF has never been the part of an official network of clogging competitions; it was primarily a square dance competition and teams attended only by invitation, not by —qualifying“ through a series of regional bracket-tournament-style competitions which culminate ultimately in a final championship competition between winning teams (as is the case in ACHF). I believe pilgrimage exists at MDFF (through audience tourism and also, in a proximal sense, through regional teams gathering in near-by Asheville), but MDFF is primarily important to this thesis as the genesis of clogging heritage (and the genesis of the form itself) which established (and, quite literally, set into motion) important identity rituals that drive the actions of cloggers to this day, including those who connect through ACHF. (3) Myriad disparate American percussive dance styles (and to some extent country dance styles) are matched with limited, non-standard nomenclature which is often problematic for scholars as well as participants who attempt to study or learn them; quite literally, one community‘s (or individual‘s) jig is another‘s buck dance,

4 By network, I refer to those organizations that sanction numerous regional —qualifying“ competitions throughout the calendar year; success on the regional level results in an invitation to compete against other winning regional teams at a final —National Championship.“ Some clogging competitions exist as unsanctioned, independent entities where success does not result in moving on to a more advanced level of competition. These non-sanctioned events are not of primary interest to this study, with one exception: Asheville, North Carolina‘s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival where team clogging originated.

2

clog, flatfoot, dance, step, shuffle, double shuffle, etc.5 Many of these forms (and terms) have distinct pre-American histories; however, continuous merging, blurring, and cross-labeling has occurred through practice and discovery of individuals and groups in various regions of the United States–rural and urban.6 The dance form at the center of this thesis stems from the introduction of improvised percussive footwork by Appalachian square dance teams beginning in 1928 in Asheville North Carolina, in fact before the form was called —clogging“ (both the origin of the form and name are discussed in chapter two). Various European forms, histories, and labels of —clogging,“ —clogs,“ and —clog dancing,“ share partial credit in the influence and development of the American form. However, the distinct yet mutual existence of American and European forms also contributed to both confusion and the development and maintenance of myth.7 I use the term —American team clogging“ to eliminate solo vernacular styles (those not practiced and performed by teams),8 to emphasize the element of organized competition (teams rather than groups), and to limit my study to these forms of team clogging that originated in WNC and spread into practice throughout the United States and beyond; I chose American over Appalachian to reflect the scope and network boundaries of American Clogging Hall of Fame. Victor Turner‘s —ritual process“ theories have helped me grapple with my understanding of American team clogging and ultimately with the topic of this thesis. In Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure, Turner outlines a process by which marginalized groups come to terms with themselves during crisis. Through this ritual behavior, marginalized people look, sometimes unconsciously, for a

5 See Mike Seeger, Talking Feet (Berkley: North Atlantic Books, 1992) and Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside, ed. Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America’s Southeast and Beyond (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995)

6 Various American percussive dance forms over- or under-play either rural or urban influence in the creation and perpetuation of myth and narrative history. It is my belief, based on experience, that urban influences are under-played in the anecdotal and mythic history of American team clogging.

7 It has been my experience, for instance, that some participants in the American team clogging tradition erroneously conclude that American tap dance (which was influenced by various types of clog dances) developed out of American team clogging. For tap dance history, see Mark Knowles, Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing (Jefferson: McFarland, 2002).

8 In fact, solo categories do exist in sanctioned clogging competitions, including ACHF, but it was introduced later as part of the clogging team competition tradition. These solo competitors are primarily individuals that are members of clogging teams in attendance and, furthermore, team clogging is the major influence of the style of these dancers–notably different in style from solo vernacular dancers. For more on solo vernacular dancers (not the topic of this thesis), I recommend Seeger, Talking Feet (also has a companion video).

3 better life than they are currently living–a utopian cultural model, or root paradigm, identified through symbols, rituals, history, and imagination. The magnetism of these symbols and rituals attracts individuals and groups to a shared experience, communitas. Pilgrimages are an expression of what Turner defines as the normative phase of communitas.9 Pilgrimages are more specific than general ritual process because they involve mobile communitas, a journey to the outside of everyday time and place in addition to everyday experience. In America, we can identify ritual process in social radicalism. Through campaigns and movements (in the activist sense), marginalized people emerge in groups, confronting dominant structures in society. These radicals, in Turner‘s model, are communitas--homogenized in their shared action during crisis and temporary in nature. A lesson we can draw from America‘s past, groups that were once radical (and temporary) are also vulnerable to becoming generic, or even dominant structures.10 New anti-structure movements emerge and the cycle of structure/communitas/structure ensues.11 Radicalism, per se, is not requisite to the formation of communitas. As is the case with this study of American team clogging (largely associated with white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, especially in the South), processes and pilgrimages functioning as Turner has described can be less obvious within dominant social systems–usually seen as the structure to the anti-structural communitas. However, this thesis reminds us that dominant cultures can also experience crisis, recession, change, or compromise which may result in the formation of communitas and pilgrimage systems. Team clogging is rich in contradictions; it embodies polarity between history and myth, secular and sacred, local particularisms and commercial or (relatively) global generalisms, action and reaction, and structure and anti-structure. Team clogging‘s reliance on principals of authenticity in expressing heritage (whether local, regional, national, ancestral, global, commercial, ethnic, religious, etc.), has made the form particularly vulnerable to great internal and external debate, especially in conflicts arising between tradition, invention, and evolution. Using Turner‘s theories, this thesis embraces the

9 Turner‘s second phase of communitas; —the attempt to capture and preserve spontaneous communitas in a system of ethical precepts and legal rules.“ Turner and Turner, 252.

10 Consider the settlement of the United States territory by Old World religious radicals, the primary influence of dominant culture in the U.S.

11 Victor Turner, Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (Piscataway: Albine Transaction, 1995).

4

complexity of team clogging rather than presenting one set of attributes dogmatically or otherwise abandoning the complexity itself. In fact, the complexity of team clogging and the vast realm of possibilities for interpretation of authenticity are of upmost importance to this thesis, which is a study of clogging team-making, community-making, and world-making– a community in motion on every level. As a participant in team clogging, I have found it very interesting that the specific origin of team clogging is not commonly known; the key people and teams are not clogging-household names. I hypothesize that most cloggers would be surprised to discover that team clogging is less than eighty years old. This is knowledge I acquired from the writings of scholars, such as Loyal Jones and David Whisant, who were able to interview many of the individuals who were integral to the development of team clogging and are not alive or available today. Mike Seeger also interviewed many cloggers, however his focus was primarily on solo vernacular practitioners. My personal enlightenment, upon the discovery of these authors‘ works, was the genesis of my desire for further research. Due to the nature of dance culture, the transmission of visual aspects of team clogging has been more successful than those which are rooted in historical fact. The history is available (thanks to Jones, Whisant, and others), but it is not —required reading“ for individuals learning how to clog. In my experience, popular and anecdotal clogging history among participants often reflects the mythic dimensions of greater Appalachia. Phrases such as —a long time ago,“ —for many generations,“ or —when the mountains were first settled“ usually precede the common answers to: —Where did clogging come from?“ The common misunderstanding regarding the origin of team clogging stems from cross-labeled percussive dance practices and is further complicated by mythic dimensions of geographic isolation theories and the —noble savage“ 12 version of the Appalachian mountaineer, —our Contemporary Ancestors.“ 13 The first chapter of this thesis provides context regarding American industrialization and individualism as a social crisis. As a result, Americans have turned to certain forms of entertainment (old-time dances, country music, minstrel entertainment, etc.) for a source of pre-modern continuity and comfort inside and outside of everyday life. Chapter two investigates the origin of team clogging competitions, first documented in 1928, when freestyle percussive dance was added to eight-couple

12 H.R. Stoneback, Hillfolk Tradition: Images of Hillfolk in U.S. fiction since 1926 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, Ph.D. dissertation) 1970.

13 W. G. Frost quoted in John Alexander Williams Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 201.

5

square dancing at a —mountain dance“ competition in Asheville, North Carolina.14 The significance of 1928 denotes the celebration of a —first.“ Team clogging drew from previous history–the practice of square dance and percussive dance as separate forms and other less obvious contexts, but the symbolic importance of 1928, to this thesis, is the date when WNC square dance teams merged the two traditions during a competitive mode of performance.15 This is where American team clogging exists as the spontaneous first stage in Turner‘s ritual process– neither precedent nor standard. The organizer, WNC native Bascom Lamar Lunsford, had the most influence in shaping the festival to reflect his own interests: elevating the individual dignity of the people in his region of birth and confronting popular stereotypes which presented Appalachian people as ignorant and unsophisticated.16 Lunsford initiated redressive cultural intervention17; regional community dance styles that were out of vogue, once revived by Lunsford‘s competitions, vied for popularity with generic national dance fads. As American folk wisdom has it, —imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.“ The demand for the forms (including square dancing and later clogging) rose, and the popular worth of WNC mountain culture increased, as did the dignity of the natives.18 Clogging made square dance styles more attractive for those whose interest relied on a more physical, athletic challenge; this proved especially successful in attracting the interest of youth.

14 1928 marks the first annual Asheville Rhododendron Festival. The exact year clogged- through square dance was introduced is unknown.

15 —Being the first stands for the whole, and as we have seen we often celebrate the class or whole of something by celebrating the first (first person to fly, the first to stand on the moon, the first human being, etc.).“ Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000), 119.

16 David Whisant, —Finding the Way between the Old and the New: The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival and Bascom Lamar Lunsford‘s Work as a Citizen“ in Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America’s Southeast and Beyond, eds. Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), 97.

17 Redressive action is a stage in Victor Turner‘s social drama theory. —In order to limit the spread of crisis, certain adjustive and redressive ”mechanisms,‘…are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed system.“ Turner, Dramas, 39-41.

18 —Popular worth“ can be measured here by the success of tourism, the ability to hold an enthusiastic captive audience, the ability to transcend to stage performances, the desire to learn clogging by others, etc.

6

In this redressive cultural intervention, Lunsford confronted commercial (and often derogatory) stereotypes through selective presentations of —natural“ regional performances in his MDFF. Lunsford transformed regional square dances into competitive performances for tourist audiences, and, in the context of a regional folk festival billed to showcase mountain talent and style in natural form, the team clogging that emerged is often understood as an Appalachian tradition rather than an innovation. Team clogging, as a result, was canonized as American (by way of Southern by way of Appalachian) heritage. According to Celeste Ray, —Though we may celebrate heritage as an unchanging ”thing,‘ it is really a process of renegotiating a past or a cultural inheritance to be meaningful in the ever-changing present. What individuals and groups perceive as heritage replaces what outsiders may regard as ”fact‘ or ”history‘ and becomes memory.“19 Such is the case with team clogging; it was presented as —natural“ Appalachian culture and (because so many Southern WASPs trace their cultural roots to Appalachia) it was canonized as Southern heritage (—of“ the South in addition to —in“ the South).20 Because many Americans outside of the South trace their heritage to the South (or also directly to Appalachia), clogging became an expression of American heritage or identity. Chapter three reflects on one normative phase of team clogging in which pilgrimage occurs. The popularity and dispersal of team clogging led to demands for standardization, organization of the dance form itself, and the development of competition rules and judging practices; this eventually resulted in the establishment of several competition network sanctioning organizations including American Clogging Hall of Fame (ACHF). Through ACHF, clogging teams compete at sanctioned regional events held throughout southern states (and Oklahoma, which Celeste Ray aligns with Southern Studies as a —Little Dixie“21). Winning teams move on to a —National Championship“ held in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. The venue for the National Championship is the —Stompin‘ Ground,“ a tourist attraction built to showcase set dance, clogging, and WNC secular and sacred music. Here, cloggers themselves become tourists and team travel functions as pilgrimage in Victor Turner‘s Dramas, Fields, and

19 Celeste Ray, —Introduction“ in Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism, ed. Celeste Ray (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 3.

20 This represents one function of complexity; team clogging can create strong bonds based on shared or reclaimed heritage although the participants might vary in their affiliation with Appalachia, the South, or America at large.

21 Ray, 5.

7

Metaphors and Victor and Edith Turner‘s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Using Turnerian theories, chapter three compares the National Championship to high shrines in Christian culture; regional competitions are —way points“ in the strata of pilgrimage, sanctified and governed by rules enforced by trained judges. Sacred meaning is assigned to ritual dances and places where the dances occur (and also where the dances represent, through the performance of folk). Through repetitive annual acts of tourism, pilgrimage functions to express ideological identity and to unify diverse members of the clogging community who seek refuge from the mundane in their everyday lives. Through this ritual process, cloggers achieve a sense of homogeneity (despite real differences) in their temporary annual visits to the —Clogging Capital of the World.“22 In the conclusion, I reflect on the issue of complexity, the metaphorical albatross of team clogging. Reflecting on my research, I conclude that complexity itself serves a major function in the maintenance of team clogging communitas. According to Victor Turner: the communitas character of pilgrimages and their capacity to evoke the loyalty of the most diverse types and groups of people to common aims–in contrast to many sectarian religious activities–are probably well adapted to the communications media of mass culture and large- scale societies, industrial perhaps even more than feudal.23

Complexity, I argue, is a powerful adaptation that allows for the greatest number of participants to experience the intense bonds of homogeneity and wholeness, that which Turner calls —the widest, most generic bond.“24 Starting with the invention of clogged-through square dancing and the outward expansion of team clogging boundaries (broadening the acceptable limits of choreography, iconography, geography, ideology, etc.), improvements test the limits of the width of shared common bonds, the limits of a shared clogging experience.

22 Author‘s observation, Stompin‘ Ground outdoor sign, Maggie Valley, NC. (October, 2005)

23 Turner, Dramas, 217.

24 Ibid., 224.

8

CHAPTER 1

CONSUMPTION OF RURAL AND MOUNTAIN CULTURE, ENTERTAINMENT,

AND RECREATION AS RITUAL PROCESS IN THE LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURIES

In the chapters to follow, I will argue that team clogging emerged at a folk festival in WNC, and, as a result, became a ritual expression of heritage for many Americans–especially Southern WASPs. I will argue that clogging competitions in WNC maintain annual pilgrimages, a form of communitas according to Victor and Edith Turner‘s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. In order to provide a better understanding of the human behavior and social bonds that team clogging provides (a major argument in following chapters), this chapter provides background information on industrialization as American social crisis and also, as a result, how various forms of rural- or mountain-derived (or themed) culture, entertainment, or recreation became popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The invention or revival of such forms (including country music, mountain arts and crafts, old-time dances, minstrel entertainment, mountain and outdoor recreation, and team clogging) encouraged the development of positive and/or negative mountaineer or country folk stereotypes. In the following chapters, these fictional commercial stereotypes are combated by revivalists interested in presenting —natural“ and positive WNC folk expressions. On the world stage, development of technology has given way to new factory-centered industry while making agricultural production less labor-intensive. Combined, these shifts stimulated urbanization as people left jobs on rural farms for the urban centers of production. Industrialization also nurtured cultural discomfort in a new and ever changing environment. Dissatisfaction created hostility or anxiety regarding modern advancements, science, technology, multiculturalism, and/or urban life. This hostility manifested in the arts during various periods of industrialization-related crisis; from visual art to music (and later in this thesis, dance such as team clogging and square dance), much of the art (and recreation) created or revived during these periods turns to themes related to picturesque, natural setting (rural, mountains, wilderness, etc.) or the nobility of common folk--the anti-modern.25

25 William Vaughan, Romanticism and Art (New York: Thames and Hundson, 1994); Erica Doss, TwentietyCentury American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 97-117.

9

The Industrial Revolution started in the United States upon the introduction of machinery, including steam-powered engines, advancements in the production of cotton, and the industrialization of textile manufacturing.26 Various advancements in industry and technology have created waves of white middle-class migration into cities where they were faced with urban displacement and occupational competition against technology, African Americans, and contemporary immigrants from Eastern European countries. The dissatisfaction among displaced whites created an anxious preoccupation, characterized by Country music historian Bill Malone as —a nostalgia for an older and presumably better America–a society where people were poor but proud, hard-working, and resistant to welfare… and where values were fixed and knowable.“27 American performance found ways to harness rural iconography to meet the demand for resemblances of pre-modern society. In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David R. Roediger attributes the popularity of blackface minstrel shows in the 1800s to the appeal of —expressions of the longings and fears and the hopes and prejudices of the Northern Jacksonian urban working class, especially the artisanate.“28 The function of minstrel performances as described by Roediger, mirror the function of performance in Victor Turner‘s The Ritual Process. Although the minstrelsy is widely recognized for having reinforced the —whiteness“ and purity of the audience through the degradation of African American images on stage, the performances also formed communitas by inciting nostalgia for rural places, Southern plantations in particular. According to Roediger, minstrel audiences discovered that —preindustrial joys could survive amidst industrial discipline. Even the ”rough‘ culture of young, rowdy traditionalist artisans and unskilled workers could lie down with the ”respectable‘ norms of striving, upwardly mobile skilled workers.“29 Roediger explains nostalgia for rural places at work in minstrel entertainments: Similarly assuaged was the tension between a longing for a rural past and the need to adapt to the urban present. The blackface wore rather thin when, for example, Irish minstrels sang laments by ”slaves‘ involuntarily removed from home and family. Other immigrants, migrants from rural

26 Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, 18701920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17-19.

27 Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2002), 47.

28 Roediger, 115.

29 Ibid., 118.

10

to urban areas in the United States and migrants to the frontier, could likewise identify with the sentiments in ”Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny‘ or ”Dixie.‘ So could almost any American involved in what Alexander Saxton has called the nation‘s ”endless outward journey‘ of expansion. Minstrelsy likewise idealized the preindustrial pastimes familiar to its white and often formerly rural audience. Hunting, especially of coons and possums, was a recurring delight during blackface performances, which also featured the joys of crabbing, eel catching, eating yellow corn, fishing and contact with animals not about to be killed.30

In the following chapters of this thesis, Appalachian tourism and ritual expressions of —folk“ heritage function similarly to minstrel theatre as a coping mechanism for industrialists becoming comfortable with their own urban-ness, and for individuals in scattered communities who resent a lack of continuity, unity, and corporateness; Protestants, urged to seek salvation and success individually, often lack strong community and kin networks. Cultural tourism in WNC often mediates this dilemma by allowing tourists the opportunity to discover —preindustrial joys“ outside of the everyday experience. Appalachia is an important focus of American rural romanticism. Williams Goodell Frost, the third president of Berea College in Kentucky, wrote an essay published in 1895 which is now a common reference for Appalachian studies. In —Our Contemporary Ancestors“, Frost defined —Appalachian America“ as —the inheritors of the culture of Elizabethan England and colonial America,“ one of —God‘s Grand Divisions.“31 John Alexander Williams offers this interpretation of Frost‘s claims and their implications: Mountain people were not just white, but the right kind of whites: bearers of —Anglo-Saxon blood.“ In this they stood apart from other exceptional populations among whom missions had been planted: African and Native Americans and foreign-born slum dwellers… —We are proposing not merely to prevent the mountain people from being a menace, but to bring the people of Appalachian America over from the ranks of the doubtful classes and range them with those who are to be the patriotic leaders and helpers of the new age.“… Frost‘s formulation was primarily based on images established by the creators of the literary mountaineer, not an assessment of mountain realities.32

In his writing, Frost suggests that the people of Appalachia, while in need of an intervention, could themselves intervene in the problems of the nation. This evidences the existence of a root paradigm: promotion (or revival) of Appalachian folk ways could serve as means for cultural and social

30 Ibid., 119.

31 John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 201.

32 Ibid.

11

intervention and the Appalachian region could serve as a region for cultural reflection and renewal through heritage- and religious-based tourism. The commercialization of rural- or Appalachia-based entertainments aided the development of communitas, through consumption of goods and especially through the assemblage of audiences. This ritual process involves uniting audiences and consumers in a shared longing for or celebration of rural heritage; the assumption that such rural heritage is rapidly diminishing often gives these forms passionate, obsessive, and even sacred fervor. Such cultural expression and/or consumption of rural or mountaineer iconography exists in many genres of American art and entertainment. The fiction writings of —local color“ authors in the late 19th century reinforced Appalachian mountaineers as primitive white other, characterizing the mountaineer as a contrast from the urbanite, industrialist, or scientist.33 Many of these authors found themselves among America‘s first best-sellers by the early 20th century.34 In Appalachia: A History, Appalachian State University history professor John Alexander Williams highlights the cultural —props“ that accompanied the literature mountaineer: The inventory invariably began with speech patterns and personal comportment and included both expressive culture (notably vernacular log architecture, folk music and dance, handicrafts, woodscraft, superstitions, and religious practices) and social behavior, with emphasis on such deviance as illiteracy and a propensity for feuding and brawling. The literary props included mountain scenery with stirring contrasts of heights and valleys, light and shade, wildness and tameness, and log houses with puncheon floors and dim firelit interiors, bright quilts on crude beds, and cane-bottomed chairs.35

Such fictional literature encouraged national sympathy for an ignorant, backwards, and often violent society while simultaneously fueling a national (even international) obsession with a region unspoiled by urban life, where Anglo-Saxon traditions are rich, unadulterated, pure, and white. For example, mountain feud lore, as characterized in local color writing, inspired imposed labels such as —savage“ and —barbaric“ yet simultaneously suggested direct lineage to the clan warfare of late medieval England and Scotland.36 John Alexander Williams calls this an —affiliation with an admired but obsolete culture

33 Ibid.,198.

34 Such as Will Wallace Harney, Mary Noailles Murfree (under the —nom de plume“ of Charles Egbert Craddock, and John Fox, Jr. Ibid., 197-198.

35 Ibid., 198.

36 Ibid., 199.

12

descended from–but not evolved beyond.“37 Williams‘ statement points to the marginalized group searching for its inferior origins in Victor Turner‘s ritual process model.38 The Appalachian mountaineer, highlander, and/or hillbilly comprise one set of common symbols in the ritual process of commercialized, rear-garde entertainments, including country music (—hillbilly records“) and local color literature. As a symbol, mountaineers are often used to retrieve the signata (a Victor Turner word for symbolic meaning) of America‘s receding innocence. The mountaineer has a wide variety of meanings. Negative meanings are associate mountaineers with ignorance, poverty, primitiveness, feudalism, animism, and sexual deviance; these negative meanings often function to reinforce the fruitfulness of modernity and progress in industrial society. 39 Positive characteristics are the foundation of the root paradigm in this thesis, preconditions of the communitas formed in the chapters to follow. These positive associations with mountaineer iconography include: pioneer spirit, strong family networks, clear gender roles, closeness to nature, purity, authenticity, rugged individualism, common knowledge, and strong Protestant religious faith (the ladder two are especially opposed to scientific or technological knowledge).40 Fueled by resentment towards industrialization and discomfort associated with religious and cultural pluralism, romanticism for —Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains“41 spawned new markets for consumable cultural artifacts ranging from visual art, music, entertainment, architecture, literature, and dance. The value of these artifacts to consumers relies on authenticity, often

37 Ibid.

38 Turner and Turner, 251.

39 In Apples on the Flood, Rodger Cunningham examined the ancestry of the Appalachian people and presented his —peripheralization theory“ which aligned the mountain South with a larger historic pattern of —regional juxtapositions in which a metropolitan core that saw itself as ”civilized‘ imposed labels of ”savage‘ or ”barbaric‘ on an outside, underdeveloped periphery“, the Romantic-derived —other.“ Cunningham, traces this Romanticism to the European Industrial Revolution during the second half of the 18th Century. John Inscoe, —The Discovery of Appalachia: Regional Revisionism as Scholarly Renaissance“ in A Companion to The American South, ed. John B. Boles (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 372-373.

40 Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford: Oxford Press, 2004), 6-7.

41 William Goodell Frost, —Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains“ Atlantic Monthly, March 1899, 311-19. Reprinted in Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture, ed. W.K. McNeil (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 92-106.

13

measured in the perception of simplicity and saturation of pastoral, natural, and domestic themes through mountaineer iconography. Romanticism of the mountaineer manifested in the consumption of an actual geographical place–Southern Appalachia, known as —the South‘s South,“42 through purchased goods, consumption of media, and cultural tourism. Transactions within these markets often resemble moral action; consumers seek artifacts as part of what Victor Turner calls a —total pattern.“ 43 In All That is ative and Fine, David Whisnant examined the process by which Appalachia came to be seen as a —great reservoir of American folk, or pioneer, traditions.“ A new industry formed and sustained through the dissemination and commoditization of such traditions and their manifestations, a process he calls —systematic cultural intervention.“44 At the dawn of an American Arts and Crafts Revival, Northern reformers created —settlement schools“ throughout the Southern Appalachian region.45 These schools, led by middle-class Northern women, used the domestic crafts of an earlier era as a mechanism for intervention. At these settlement schools, instructors taught domestic arts and crafts to mountain women as a method for instilling —middle-class values and standards of living.“46 By 1904, more than fifty domestic textile (spinning, weaving, rug making) industries had been started in the United States (including a large concentration in the Appalachian region) by settlement reformers, missionaries, philanthropists, artists, and tourists.47 Leading scholar on Appalachian settlement schools, Jane Becker describes the settlement school movement as a source of contradiction, a culture in progress pressured by economic and moral incentives to recede to earlier customs and traditions. The economic pressures were fueled by

42 Lee Smith quoted in Casey Howard Clabough, —The Imagined South“ in Sewanee Review volume 114, No. 2 (Spring, 2007), 301-307.

43 Turner and Turner, 248.

44 Quoted in Inscoe, 382.

45 The settlement movement originated in England, embracing William Morris‘s ideas —concerning the degradation of industrial labor and the importance of creating an atmosphere of simplicity and beauty in the home.“ Settlement schools were primarily located in rural New England, the southern highlands, and urban areas with large immigrant populations. Ibid., 382.

46 Becker, 59.

47 Ibid., 63.

14

consumers nationwide who were eager to purchase homespun goods during the American Arts and Crafts Revival: Cultural education was, in fact, a prominent settlement strategy for treating the symptoms of dislocation emerging from the mountaineers‘ shifting worlds. Such programs, however, failed to acknowledge the changes that had already taken place in the mountains. Moreover, cultural education entailed selective nurturing and, when necessary, the reintroduction of particular archaic customs. Thus settlement workers often —revived“ outmoded cultural practices incongruent with contemporary life in the region.48

What Becker describes is cultural intervention in sanitization mode. This process helped to bring the ideological mountain region to life by rewinding the clock and specializing mountain people in the production of out-dated traditions. According to Becker, the settlement reformers —believed they could enlist tradition to nurture particular values and habits that they hoped would improve the material and moral standard of living among the ”backward‘ mountain people.“49 The sanitization of the Appalachian South would involve only —select pieces of an archaic culture they ascribed to the pioneers who first settled the region.“50 Reformer and settlement educator John C. Campbell described the region as —a land of paradoxes and contradictions“ where the traditional coexisted with the new and the modern.51 Perhaps Campbell negated his own contribution to the culture of contradiction. The development of the American popular music genre known as —country“ inherited the namesake of rural tendencies. Country music scholar, Bill Malone wrote that these tendencies gave associated record labels, artists, and radio shows —remarkable commercial appeal.“52 In Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Malone acknowledged that many fans were —people who had no actual experience with rural life but who nevertheless identified with musical forms that they believed were representative of an older and less perplexing America.“53 Other fans, he notes, were —rural transplants trying to come to terms with lives now spent permanently in cities

48 Ibid., 57-58.

49 Ibid., 42.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 51.

52 Malone, 41.

53 Ibid.

15

while nonetheless clinging to remnants of old home.“54 Malone described country music as a process by which —entertainers, promoters, and fans shared an unspoken, and probably unconscious, assumption that the traditional social relationships that had prevailed in society and that were endorsed in the music would endure.“ The shared unspeakable experience revealed by Malone indicates communitas, evidence of Victor Turner‘s ritual process. Further evidencing that these patterns were somewhat driven by a popular concern that rural ways were diminishing, Malone writes: —As music vogue, it [country music] seems to have been inspired, in part, by a vague sense of disquietude among many intellectuals and artists who felt that America‘s rural-derived innocence was receding.“55 In recent decades, some scholars have devoted energies towards myth-debunking and deconstructing popular knowledge of Southern Appalachian highlander life and culture as an imagined and —invented“56 otherness, constructed and characterized by popular literature which influenced the forces of religion, politics, and commerce. The presumed explanation for literature-contrived otherness is geological isolation of a —strange land and peculiar people“57 from modern and industrial influences. Popular myth justified the static state of cultural evolution with topographical barriers to trade and travel, presumably capable of preserving pure Anglo-Saxon heritage in an unchanging environment. The isolated and picturesque qualities of the Southern Appalachian mountain region produce an ideal setting for a fictional region that some Americans (including anti-modernists, nativists, and Southern Protestants) want to believe can exist. The myth of Appalachian purity and the reality of Appalachian —connectedness“ with greater modern America are contradictory; Appalachian contradiction often becomes an icon in itself.58 Some scholars, like Robert Mitchell, have focused on the historical pole of the Appalachian myth/reality contradiction. In Commercialism and Frontier, Mitchell denied Appalachian culture as ever being static

54 Ibid.

55 Malone, 56.

56 Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia quoted in John Inscoe, —The Discovery of Appalachia: Regional Revisionism as Scholarly Renaissance“ in A Companion to The American South, ed. John B. Boles (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 372.

57Will Wallace Harney —A Strange Land and Peculiar People“ Lippincott’s Magazine (October 1870), 429-38. Quoted in Ibid., 370.

58 Ibid.

16

and maintained that Appalachia, like other frontier regions, —should be viewed as ”becoming, as a place in progress,‘ or as ”a series of frontiers‘ in which the mode, timing and rate of local and regional development differed considerably and must be appreciated on their own terms and in juxtaposition with each other.“59 Following Mitchell‘s work, most scholarship has since portrayed communities in the mountain South as fluid dynamisms demonstrating that —broader regional and even national trends–in politics, market forces, religion, and war–shaped the fortune of its residents, who were themselves more varied in their socioeconomic circumstances and outlook than had been generally acknowledged.“60 In the following chapter, I discuss Asheville‘s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival which was created to stimulate tourism and, thus, WNC regional economy. At the same time, the leader of MDFF, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, was focused on presenting positive and —natural“ (not the hillbilly culture and image that was sold through commercial race records, the predecessor of American country music) WNC culture. A complicated paradox, Lunsford used the demand for fantastic mountaineer folk ways to booster the popularity of forms he felt were dignified and best represented the WNC people. At this festival, team clogging emerged and has since been understood as a naturally occurring WNC folk custom.

59 Ibid., 374.

60 Ibid., 375.

17

CHAPTER 2

ASHEVILLE‘S MOUNTAIN DANCE AND FOLK FESTIVAL:

ORIGIN OF TEAM CLOGGING AS WNC HERITAGE RITUAL

This chapter focuses on the origin of competitive team clogging at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival (MDFF) in Ashville, North Carolina. Because the introduction of clogging was a spontaneous (Turner‘s first stage of communitas which exists prior to standardization, normalization, and elaborate communication) innovation, or improvement, made to square dance during a staged competition, the origin of team clogging and competitive team clogging are simultaneous.61 In its spontaneous phase, team clogging was not called clogging, although I refer to it herein as such. At that earliest emergence, sometime shortly after 1928, what we now recognize as team clogging was judged as square dancing at a square dance competition. The research I present in this chapter on the origins of competitive team clogging and clogging competitions is not common knowledge among clogging participants. The emergence of team clogging within the context of a folk festival, marketed to tourist audiences who gathered to reconnect with, discover, or reclaim their own heritage, is significant. Today, the festival itself and its organizers are lost in popular clogging memory and team clogging history myth. Contemporary participants reach back beyond 1928 for the origins of their heritage which they express through clogging. Those who reach back can often be satisfied in the complex mythic history of Appalachia and earlier cross-named, non-standard percussive dance styles, including earlier dance traditions called clogs, clog dancing, and clogging. Myths, in the place the history, allow for wide argument, interpretation, and, most often, justification. Here, complexity and confusion function to satisfy the widest, common interests of the

61 At this point, clogging was being judged as a square dance. In 1959, a separate category at MDFF would recognize clogging as a distinct style at which point clogging teams would only compete against other clogging teams. It was, however, competitive team clogging. Also, I do acknowledge that the team that first introduced the clogged-through style of square dance (unknown) would have rehearsed before arriving at the competition; some decision was made before the competition which resulted in the addition of freestyle percussive footwork to square dancing. To account for the pre- competition rehearsal in pre-dating the festival performance, I am including any period of preparation (unknown duration, location, etc.) as part of the competition event itself.

18 participants. As the result of the history in this chapter, clogging is understood as a folk dance, an expression of heritage. 62 Cloggers use various myths to define their own personal heritage and they use clogging to access it. Clogging myth can be used to reconnect with local, regional, American, Southern, or Appalachian heritage–it can also be used to reconnect with European origins; I am certain that it is impossible to know the extreme limits of cultures and subcultures with which cloggers identify, those which represent a disparate cultural association with clogging symbolism that is unrecognizable outside of one‘s own mind.63 Because clogging, like other dance, is a visual culture, heritage is accessed primarily through rituals and symbols which rely on non-verbal modes of interpretation. Oral or written history is not a major, official part of organized team clogging; it has not been studied, standardized, and communicated to the extent that the dancing itself has experienced in normative phases. The omission of verbal history also contributes to the preservation of social bonds; those who might not agree on or share interest in verbal expressions of heritage or history can celebrate together harmoniously through symbolic ritual. Clogging then functions as a ritual to express heritage and also to unite cloggers through dance and through dance events (perhaps not aware of how the other cloggers at the competition–or even on the same team–define the heritage clogging represents, if any at all). Communitas, the wholeness of the clogging community, hides the crevices of diversity within the group. Cloggers gather to celebrate their clogging heritage and, although there are recognizable limits and the limits constantly change (to be discussed in later chapters), experience wholeness and homogeneity despite great diversity. The history that I present in this chapter is largely forgotten, reserved for a few —old-timers“ in the clogging community who danced or whose parents danced at MDFF. I know of no living participants of the 1928 festival; therefore, I assume that even the —old-timers“ know clogging only as it

62 One of my homosexual male informants, a member of the all-male Barbary Coast Cloggers of San Francisco, calls this —cultural drag.“

63 For instance, I once had a student inquire about team clogging lessons I was offering in a community dance studio. Her interests in clogging stemmed from Equestrian (horse) dancing which apparently involved percussive hoof-work and pattern pageantry; she wanted to dance like her horse. As an active participant, this is the only such association between cloggers and dancing horses I have ever encountered. Also considered here are dancers who come to clogging by way of other dance cultures, such as tap or Flamenco, or those who clog to embody the heritage of a group to which they might admire yet do not identify with. Everyone brings a different perspective but there are also certain —averages“ that exist; this is the realm of this study which would otherwise be less focused.

19

was told to them, as they researched it, or as they experienced it in later stages of the development of MDFF or elsewhere. A few academic scholars have published work on Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the festival‘s primary administrator who is also significant to musicologists for his WNC ballad collection and documentation, many filed with the Library of Congress or at Mars Hill College in North Carolina. I rely on two of these Lunsford scholars, David E. Whisant and Loyal Jones, who have interviewed many of the participants and key figures and published their work. Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside have also contributed greatly to the availability of clogging research materials in their anthology, Communities in Motion.

The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival

To stimulate veneration for folk customs; to keep alive the spirit that enters into the dances and the music; to provide a competitive forum where the mountain people could at once present their best interpretations and at the same time enjoy the presentations of other individuals and groups; to give outsiders and opportunity to see the beauty and charm, the quaintness of this folk entertainment were among the motives that prompted the Asheville Chamber of Commerce in arranging this unique fete. The program is just as the mountain people desire. This city provides the opportunity and attends to the details of management. No theatricals are attempted. There is no added coloring. It is real and genuine. For grace in performance, for spirit and intense enthusiasm, for keen rivalry, these performance [sic] are unequalled anywhere. --Asheville Chamber of Commerce, 1934 Festival Program

MDFF is considered one of America‘s first folk festivals, from which competitive team clogging emerged.64 In this section, I aim to document and analyze the development of team clogging by: (1) illustrating the function of Appalachian cultural tourism where, in team clogging‘s first stages, tourists are spectators and participation (clogging) is reserved for native regional groups; (2) describing the environment of the festival and the image of the performers, intentionally shaped to counter negative stereotypes associated with WNC, qualities that would be interpreted by tourists–and even many WNC natives and transplants– as —natural“ heritage; (3) describe contradictions and complexities at MDFF concerning the presentation of authenticity, including the introduction of competition and festival performance (which were then radical formats) to booster interest in older square dances, solo

64 David E. Whisant, —Festivals, Folk Music“ in The ew Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 12, Music, ed. Bill C. Malone (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 66.

20

vernacular percussive dances, and regional styles of string music (fiddle, guitar, banjo, bass–no drums or electric instruments); and (4) introduce competitive team clogging spontaneously in these circumstances. All aspects of this history, as outlined above, influence team clogging in chapter three, where clogging is discussed at Turner‘s normative phase–standardized, institutionalized, and communicated through pilgrimage networks (tourism maintained by sanctioned competition organizations established to normalize team clogging). In this chapter, pilgrimages involve participating dance teams from proximal communities and tourist spectators, mostly from the American South. Communitas is experienced by dancers on stage and also by the audience, among which some were tracing their own ancestral heritage in Appalachia and discovered clogging. In the chapter to follow, interest in clogging globalizes beyond WNC (a result of the circumstances outlined in this chapter) making it necessary to establish standardization. Over a half-century past the beginnings of MDFF, pilgrimage involves groups of cloggers who annually trek to WNC to compete at the American Clogging Hall of Fame (ACHF) National Championship, held at a venue known as the Stompin‘ Ground.65 In 1928 and 1929, the presentation of music and competitive square dancing at MDFF (which continues to this day) was one part of a larger Rhododendron Festival held in Asheville, North Carolina. By that time, Asheville was a city with an identity crisis. WNC‘s antebellum hydropathy-based (warm and sulfur spring) health resorts were purchased by Northern and New South industrialists after the Civil War and the collapse of the credit system in the South; a new class of wealthy entrepreneurs made investments in Asheville‘s infrastructure to booster and expand then-existing regional tourism industries. The railroad connected to Asheville in 1886 and a half-century of booming growth and progress followed. Prior to the railroad, Asheville was a sleepy mountain town. In the short period following the introduction of the railroad, Vanderbilt arrived (1889) and built a 250-room chateau and Edwin W. Grove (—Grove‘s Tasteless Chill Tonic“) built the massive tourist hotel, Grove Park Inn (1913). Between 1880 and 1900, the city‘s population rose rapidly from 2,600 to 15,000 and Asheville was among the first U.S. cities to witness street cars and electricity. 66

65 The Stompin‘ Ground was built by Kyle Edwards, the son of one of the dancers in the premier 1928 festival. Edwards is also the nephew of the legendary clogging team director Sam Queen (to be discussed later).

66 C Brenden Martin, Tourism in the Mountain South: A DoubleEdged Sword (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 1-28.

21

By 1928, the year of the Rhododendron Festival, Asheville‘s population had reached 50,000 and diverse tourism interests were a primary focus of the community‘s economic development.67 The city made investments in order to become a tourist center: 52 miles of paved streets, 65 miles of sidewalks, 20 miles of electric streetcar service, city parks, and a municipal golf course.68 The Asheville Chamber of Commerce sent —goodwill ambassadors“ to promote Asheville tourism throughout the United States, part of a national campaign that targeted the upper-middle class Americans throughout the nation and urged them to visit the —Land of the Sky.“69 Asheville included the creation of a tourist-oriented festival in a five-year development plan adopted in 1923; formal plans for a Rhododendron Festival were adopted in November 1927. The festival honored the colorful rhododendron blossoms that bloom on the Asheville mountainsides each year during the month of June. The Asheville Chamber of Commerce and a prominent local newspaper, The Asheville Citizen, promoted the first festival (held in June, 1928) as a tourist attraction and placed ads promoting —the finest folk musicians and dancers ever assembled in one place.“70 Railroad companies issued special rates for tourists and the chamber encouraged the participation of local civic and community groups to sponsor various activities. An elaborate parade was coordinated–young women were sent from fifteen southern states to ride along on floats and attend balls.

67 By 1928, western North Carolina tourist markets included hydropathy and health resort (natural spa) tourism, Victorian (—Gospel of Leisure“) recreation tourism, cultural tourism, and religious tourism. Ibid.

68 Ibid., 120.

69 ibid.

70 Ibid.,150.

22

Figure 1: Pack Square, Asheville, North Carolina (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

Figure 2: Pack Square, Asheville, North Carolina (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

23

Figure 3: Urbanites, Automobiles, and Soldiers in Pack Square, Asheville, North Carolina, 1919. (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

Figure 4: Rhododendron in bloom on Mount Mitchell, WNC (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, 1910-1977 L.C. Le Compte Postcard Collection, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

24

Figure 5: Float in Rhododendron Festival parade, 1933. (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, E. M. Ball Collection, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

The Asheville Chamber knew it could build on economic success of tourism by offering the chance to encounter people and products that were not like those tourists saw in their everyday lives. An exotic pageant, —symbolizing ”The Spirit of the Eternal Hills‘“ was a centerpiece of the festival– organized by many people from several communities with limited opportunity for rehearsal.71 In its second year, the pageant showcased —seven dramatic episodes set in lands in which the rhododendron grows,“ including India and China (the latter complete with a hundred-foot-long dragon).72 In 1929, the paper reported marked improvement in the second annual Rhododendron Festival procession, which featured —several hundred [performers]…so much more complete and mammoth, that in its first presentation…“ The paper continued: Garbed in flowering garments o‘bright hued as spring flowers, themselves, the members of the vast procession presented a magnificent tribute to the flower they had gathered to honor. There followed, then, without delay the English episode, presented by the town of Waynesville, and in turn the Episodes of India, Japan, China, and Western North Carolina. The dancing was as brilliant as it was beautiful.73

71 —A Big Night In The Festival Program,“ The Asheville Times. (June 6, 1928), 4.

72 Whisant, 93.

73 —W.N.C. Towns Join In Big Floral Fete At Stadium: Ideal Weather Turns Field Into Magic State For Event: Bright Costumes Worn By Players: Beautiful Procession Headed By Royalty Of Rhododendron,“ Asheville Citizen. (June 21, 1929), 1.

25

Choreographed dancing was included in all —episodes“: maypole and Morris dances represented the English; tumblers and a —Japense Geisha girl dance“ represented Japan; —Fourteen girls in skirts many yards wide gave the India rhododendron interpretive dances“; and the final —Tar Heel Episode“ representing WNC, featured —The Snowshower Girls.“74 The article listed many of the featured dancers, dance groups, choreographers, and leaders of local and regional dance schools–evidencing the reserves of local talent and opportunities for formal dance training in and around Asheville by 1929. The Chamber understood the region‘s reputation for engaging in —tasks and pastimes that conjured pictures of antiquity“ and saw an opportunity to appeal to tourists and spectators who saw the region as a repository for their own primitive cultural heritage, either real or reclaimed.75 On the same evening as the first Rhododendron Pageant in Memorial Stadium (June 5, 1928), a square dance and string band competition, billed as —Folk Songs and Dances,“ was staged at Asheville‘s Pack Square amphitheatre. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a regional native who had developed a reputation as a ballad collector and lecturer on regional string music (including dance tunes collected and remembered from his own childhood), was recruited by the Asheville Chamber to lead the —folk frolic“ as emcee and select the dance groups that participated, by invitation. The first event featured five square dance groups, each representing a regional county, community, or a combination of several communities; dancers represented Leicester, Turkey Creek, Newfound, Dogget‘s Gap, Lower Hominy, Swain County, Jackson County, Hooper‘s Creek, Cane Creek, Mud Creek, and Haywood County.76

74 The article does not indicate what style of dance the Snowshower Girls performed.

75 Loyal Jones, Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 43.

76 —Dancing Club of Leicester Wins Contest: Rector‘s String Band First Among Orchestra In Folk Festival,“ The Asheville Citizen. (June 6, 1928), 5.

26

Figure 6: Bascom Lamar Lunsford at Rutherford College (Courtesy of Lunsford Collection, Mars Hill College)

27

Figure 7: Flyer advertising Professor Lunsford as an academic lecturer on WNC culture (Courtesy of Lunsford Collection, Mars Hill College)

28

The clubs (or teams) were given 25-minutes each and performed —strictly to mountain tunes“ in competition for prizes of 35, 25, 15, and 10 dollars.77 The Asheville Citizen announced that the event would consist of —old favorites of the hills,“ and the chairman promised —songs and dances which had their origins in England before Colonial days will be on the program…the ancient customs and dance tunes which have been preserved in their pure form by the mountaineers, will be presented.“78 The Citizen also reported that —contestants have agreed to wear the regular barn dance customary garb–no special dressing up for city folks.“79 A review of the dancing during the first event appeared in The Asheville Citizen on the following morning: After a threat of rain in the early evening, the dancers got down to the real business of merriment at 8 o‘clock and from then on held the unfaltering enthusiasm of the crowd. The graceful marchers and gay swinging circles, the dips and curtseys were like the old ball room movements of the Virginia reel but they were done in simple home folks style. It was a regular backwoods entertainment, hilarious and joyful but none the less [sic] dignified.

The caller was the master of each team. He stood in the middle of the floor and yelled his orders for the movements at the top of his lungs like a captain drilling a company and the success of the team in competition depended on ready response to the commands…

The string band music tickled the crowd. —Sourwood Mountain,“ —Kidder Cole,“ —Cumberland Gap,“ and —Band Box“ floated out over the square from the stand and awoke childhood memories in many Asheville folks.80

The —Folk Songs and Dances“ event became a festival of regional memories, truly a cultural revival held only a few blocks away from the exotic Rhododendron pageant. Asheville natives who had experienced tremendous and remarkable civic growth over a relatively short period of time were reconnected with music and dance from an era that had passed, now brought back by a number of WNC communities through this —hilarious and joyful yet none the less [sic] dignified“ competition. Another article, published in the same paper, reported on the audience and community response:

77 ibid.; Whisant, 95.

78 Whisant, 103.

79 ibid.

80 —Dancing Club of Leicester Wins Contest: Rector‘s String Band First Among Orchestra In Folk Festival,“ The Asheville Citizen. (June 6, 1928), 5.

29

The old-time dances came back to Asheville last night, to the delight of thousands of spectators in Pack Square…Henry Ford would have had just about the time of his life if he could have joined the throng in Pack Square while the strains of —Sourwood Mountain“ and —Cumberland Gap“ filled the square amphitheater and the —callers“ put the native dancers through their dances…

Western North Carolina found itself last night in artistic representation of the life and the natural beauty of this region. Unquestionably the lesson of what can be done thus through joint community effort will not be forgotten. The folk dances of the mountains and pageantry rooted in the soil have established themselves as permanent features of the annual summer festival of the North Carolina Mountains.81

This passage evidences that Asheville had been without —old-time dances“ for some period of time and that Asheville was also aware of Henry Ford‘s efforts to revive old-time dancing and fiddle music in Detroit and throughout the various locations of his automotive dealerships where fiddle competitions were held as promotional events.82 In 1926, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford published Good Morning, After a Sleep of Twentyfive Years, Oldfashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford where they praised old-time dancing as —that style of dancing which best fits the American temperament.“ Ford denunciated —ultra modern dance,“ lacking in —the group spirit of fun“ resulting from its one-on- one qualities and —commercial considerations“ (dancing by large amounts of people in crowded spaces). Perhaps one of the reasons developing cities, like Asheville, witnessed a recession of old-time dances is also revealed in Ford‘s rant: —Dancing that inspires the group spirit of fun requires room. Room in cities, especially in cabarets, is expensive.“83 Revival of old-time dances, in these conditions, required the sponsorship of wealth, or–as was the case in Asheville–civic organization and investment. For Ford and others, the revival of old-time dancing was redressive cultural intervention; nurturing old-time dances would aid in reviving old-time morals. Five thousand people attended the first square dance competition at the Rhododendron Festival in Asheville. The Asheville Citizen reported, —Park Square never presented a more colorful sight in all its

81 —A Big Night In The Festival Program,“ The Asheville Citizen. (June 6, 1928), 4.

82 Jay Urr, —Fiddle and Fiddlers‘ Conventions“ in The ew Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 12, Music, ed. Bill C. Malone (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 228.

83 Henry Ford and Mrs. Henry Ford, Good Morning. (Dearborn: Dearborn Publishing, 1926), 8.

30

history,“84 and called the festival a —throwback from the modern jazz mad world“; it speculated that the festival would become an annual event–—on the order of the great festivals of older nations which have been handed down from generation to generation.“85 The Citizen was correct in predicting the square dance competition would become a permanent affair. The Rhododendron Festival, however, did not. In 1930, the folk competition emerged as the —Mountain Dance and Folk Festival“ led by Lunsford, and separated from the Rhododendron Festival. The Rhododendron Festival ceased during World War II and, after a short revival, permanently ended in 1940. Exotic pageants ended but WNC folk competitions and performances continued to grow; according to Lunsford biographer Loyal Jones, the split —emphasized in the minds of many people the difference between that which is long-standing and genuine in tradition and that which is manufactured and imposed as a substitute for tradition.“86

Figure 8: Opening Night of MDFF (Courtesy of Lunsford Collection, Mars Hill College)

84 Whisant, 95.

85 Ibid.,139.

86 Jones, 44.

31

Figure 9: Poster for 26th Annual Mountain Dance and Folk Festival (Courtesy of Lunsford Collection, Mars Hill College)

32

David E. Whisant is a leading scholar on folk festivals and, consequently, on Bascom Lamar Lunsford as a festival administrator. Whisant noted that although Lunsford‘s festival —was shaped partly by circumstances and the wishes of others, in the long run it became almost solely the product of his own consciousness, desires, and view of mountain culture.“87 As MDFF emerged and grew, Lunsford‘s imprint would manifest in the regulation of dress and selection of presentations, resulting in the perpetuation of a censored version of mountaineer culture. Lunsford was uncomfortable with commercial hillbilly sensation becoming increasingly popular by hillbilly —race records“ and radio (pre- country music) that became popular in the 1920s; he was aware of and offended by the negative pole of popular stereotypes that plagued the people and culture of his region: backwards, barbaric, ignorant, and affiliated with feuding and making/drinking moonshine.88 David Whisant commented on Lunsford‘s redressive intervention (MDFF) of negative stereotypes and receding regional distinction: He made a set of observations and judgments about the worth of authentic mountain culture vis- à-vis both the popular misconceptions of it and the mass culture that was rapidly supplanting it. He made some calculations about the —Your-culture-isn‘t-worth-anything/Yes-you‘re-right-our- culture-isn‘t-worth-anything“ feedback loop that was so destructive to mountain people‘s dignity and consequently to their will to survive culturally. And like a Janus who could see both ways, he placed himself at the center of that cultural conflict.89

Lunsford was an exception to industrial patterns of migration in the 1920s; he spent most of his life in WNC where he was born and raised around several generations of kin, aside from short periods away while he attended college and law school, or during other temporary vocations which occupied him elsewhere.90 The hillbilly iconography used to sell hillbilly records signaled —Appalachia“ to modern consumers, yet was foreign and unnatural to Lunsford who grew up there. Lunsford resisted stereotypes, conscious of their effect on the dignity of the people of WNC; the cultural innovations of western North Carolinians could prove their own worth without losing distinct regional flavor by succumbing to commercial fabrications.

87 Whisant, 97.

88 Jones, 53. The positive pole of popular stereotypes includes the noble mountaineer with pure, untainted cultural expressions.

89 Whisant, 97.

90 Jones, 1-9.

33

Figure 10: A band, called The Hill Billies, as they chose to present themselves. (Talking Machine World, April 15, 1925, p 50, reprinted in Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 80.

Figure 11: … And the Hill Billies (band) as presented in publicity photographs by Ralph Peer and Okeh Records, 1926. Commercial investors often perpetuated the image of the backward —hillbilly“ mountaineer which Bascom Lamar Lunsford resisted at MDFF. Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, p. 846, reprinted in Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 81.

34

Lunsford resisted stylized costuming for MDFF dancers and musicians, borrowed from make- believe hillbilly radio or western cowboy movies. —We are mountain people,“ Lunsford said, —and we want to present ourselves and our heritage in a manner that is keeping with the dignity of our forebears. Just wear the best you‘ve got and be proud.“91 Perhaps the sympathetic tone of Lunsford‘s statement here is misleading. He did expect the dancers to wear the —best“ they had. Lunsford required a special day (perhaps a Sunday) image but, through the illusion of performance and cultural tourism, outsiders might see them as typical every day customs. Whisant reported observations based on an image of festival dancers from 1930, the first year of MDFF. He noted that dancers did not match and men wore business suits and sweaters with ties and women wore various dresses.92 At his festivals, Lunsford himself wore a white suit or dark coat with dress pants and a tie but when asked to don a checkered shirt and hat, he responded: —just because I‘m going to sing a song or call a dance I learned from my great-granddaddy, why should I have to change my costume?“93 Some people, like film maker Jonathan Gordon, questioned Lunsford‘s right to call himself a mountaineer based on his formal dress and his education.94 Gordon worked with Lunsford on a documentary film, Music Makers of the Blue Ridge, featuring Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Lunsford and Gordon had a falling out when the film was released; Lunsford felt like it portrayed the stereotypical Appalachian backwards image that he had fought to eradicate. Gordon said of Lunsford, —Let me point out here that Bascom was not really a mountaineer; he wore a suit and he had lived in the city and was at home with its ways. His education, relatively speaking, was considerable.“95 This quote indicates one opinion that Lunsford, educated and dressing in

91 Lunsford interview, ibid., 58.

92 Whisant, 102.

93 Quoted in Jones, 89-90; Whisant, 99.

94 Lunsford attended Rutherford College, and law school at Trinity College (now Duke University). He taught public school, was a professor of English and history at Rutherford College, lectured as a mountain musician (speaking, singing, and playing fiddle and banjo in white tie and tails), practiced law, edited newspapers, and served as an agent for the Justice Department. He also worked as a bee-keeper and a fruit tree salesman, which gave him the opportunity to visit homes in rural areas– collecting honey, selling trees, and often collecting ballads and making music with the people with whom he came in contact. Whisant, 97.

95 Jones, 83.

35

his best at the festival and at public speaking engagements, was sometimes viewed as over-corrective; his authenticity was rejected. It also indicates a challenge Lunsford faced, the deep rooted signata (a Turner word for symbolic meaning) of mountaineer, antonymous to educated and well-dressed and synonymous with static antiquity.

Figure 12: Bascom Lamar Lunsford (in white suit) dances to Bill McElreath‘s banjo picking. (Courtesy of Lunsford Collection, Mars Hill College)

Lunsford took the presentations of folk seriously. He was very selective in the dance groups and bands, tailoring the image and behavior that best represented his cause combating negative stereotypes. He said, —In a festival you get as much good in as you can and keep as much bad out as you can. We keep it as genuine as we can.“96 For Lunsford, —genuine“ was —good“ and a —good“ dancer or musician

96 Quoted in ibid., 51.

36

would be dignified–well groomed, wholesome, and naturally, but well-dressed. Occasionally, an infiltrator would get past Lunsford but when spotted, Lunsford would intervene. Roger Sprung, a banjo player, was heaved off the stage by Lunsford reportedly for wearing jeans.97 Lunsford escorted a female banjo player off the stage by the arm for wearing a hula skirt; he reprimanded: —If you are going to try and play on my show, you go home and put on some decent clothes like a lady is supposed to wear. You are a disgrace to the five-string banjo.“98 Lunsford also had no room for vulgar language or content on his show. One of Lunsford‘s colleagues told Loyal Jones, —One thing about him, he was strict with his show. There was nothing unclean that got in his show. If anybody did something like that, the minute he caught it, he‘d walk right up, take him by the arm and take him off stage. He‘d tell him ”no dirty songs.‘“99 Along with obscene language, Lunsford disapproved of —countrified“ talk which conjured up the negative stereotyping of ignorant, backwards hillbillies. Lunsford said, —The proper use of words and expressions can take you a long way.“100 Although Lunsford resisted commercial hillbilly fantasy at MDFF, the culture he presented was still, to a large degree, as fantastic as the Chinese dragon in the Rhododendron Festival pageant. Competing teams of bodies on display at a tourist festival is an intrinsic contradiction to —natural.“101 The square dances were also intrinsically fantastic–symbolic inversions of everyday life. According to Barbara Babcock, symbolic inversion —may be broadly defined as any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural

97 Jones, 65.

98 Quoted in ibid., 65.

99 Quoted in ibid.

100 Quoted in Whisant, 98.

101 Jane Desmond talks about this issue as —staging the natural.“ She writes: —the audience gets a show of (and is shown) the culture of the natural world (i.e., its distinctive, unique, and —essential“ characteristics) in much the same way tourists attending folkloric shows see a performance of —traditional“ (i.e., —naturally occurring“) behaviors which celebrate the difference and particularity of the performing group.“ Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), xvi.

37

codes, values, and norms.“102 Symbolic inversion functions as liminality in Turner‘s ritual theories in this study of team clogging–an escape from the mundane of everyday life. In reviving —old-time“ dances, participants inverted time by reliving the entertainments of a past era. Dancing was also done on a person‘s free time–weekends, vacations (for tourists), etc.; this is also a symbolic inversion of labor. Even the term hoedown metaphorically indicates —once through with work.“ The audience at MDFF witnessed modern mountaineers competing in —down home“ and old- time styles from an era that had passed–especially in the city where there was no (affordable) place for such. The dancing mountaineers held a captive and enthusiastic audience while they performed symbolic performance rituals of rural domestic tasks, agrarian chores, and errands into the wilderness; callers would prompt: —chase the rabbit, chase the coon,“ —mow the wheat,“ —birdie in the cage,“ —old crow in,“ and —see saw your pretty little taw“ 103; the dancers responded accordingly. Another contradiction of —natural,“ Lunsford‘s festival competition was a revival for big set dances. In the 1920s, Square dancing made a come-back throughout the nation, including Dearborn, Michigan, where Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford published manuals and arranged lessons for factory employees in 1926. The title of the Ford manual provides further evidence that square dancing had been out of popular vogue: —Good Morning, After a Sleep of Twenty-five Years, Old-fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford.“104 The —barn dance“ radio format also made its debut in the 1920s, marketing the fantasy of community square dance through —hillbilly“ music and radio skits. A complex texture rich in contradiction, real square dances and imaginary barn dances throughout the country were revived as a reaction to industry and technology which had supplanted —old time entertainments.“105 A contradiction is also evidenced in that industry and technology were used in the promotion of its own anti-structure, including Ford himself, radio, and modern travel which aided tourism.

102 Barbara Babock, —Introduction“ in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babock. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

103 Bill Nichols and Garland Steele, The Encyclopedia of Traditional Appalachian Square Dancing Volume 1. (Lilburn: The National Clogging Leaders Organization, Inc., 1996), 76.

104 Ford, Good Morning.

105 Asheville Chamber of Commerce, Seventh Annual Mountain Dance Contest and Mountain Music Festival, 1934 festival program. Duplication provided by Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, NC.

38

The dancing presented at the folk frolic and MDFF was the —big set“ variety of square dancing, a style that is couple and community oriented, not restricted only to four couples like contemporary or Western-style square dancing. Big set dancing can accommodate any even-number of couples, only limited by established rules which reflect taste or the limits of the size of a dance platform or hall. In all varieties of square dance, couples visit each other within the set, always returning safely —home.“

Figure 13: This illustration appears in D. B. Hendrix‘s Smoky Mountain Square Dances (1947), page 9. Fig. 1 illustrates eight couples in the big set circle. Fig. 2 illustrates how couples break into small —circle four“ squares throughout the dance. Big set dances alternate between big circle or other —connecting figures“ and circle four figures, led by the caller. The dance always begins and ends with a connecting or big circle figure. D.B. Hendrix, Smoky Mountain Square Dances (Sevierville: Edwards Brothers, 1941).

39

Lunsford‘s festival promoted a return to older customs and, presumably, to older values. Dr. Fred Bentley, president of Mars Hill College, said Lunsford —has seen the pendulum make a full swing. The ballads, tales and dances which were expressed by our grandparents, mostly abandoned by their children, are now reborn in their grandchildren.“106 To achieve revival square dancing among youth and young adults, Lunsford knew he had to choose his battles in resistance to certain change. One such change occurred early in the dancing at Lunsford‘s festivals–the birth of clogged- through square dancing or team clogging. Standard steps used in regional square dances up until clogging was introduced at Lunsford‘s festival involved standard left-right-left-right footwork (one step per beat of music, dancers continue whether moving or not) in three different variations; the figure patterns used for each were all eight-couple big sets: smooth step - a sliding or gliding step in which alternating feet never leave the floor–literally sliding each foot forward on the floor. When not moving, dancers slide each foot back and forward one cycle per beat of music. This style is usually reserved for less energetic tunes. Ladies sometimes wear long skirts and hold them periodically, extending outward with their free hand, resulting in floral patterns of figures comprised of bodies and cloth. running step - a fast and athletic running gate that was the object of fascination for English ballad hunter Cecil Sharp who wrote about it on one visit to Kentucky.107 Dancers either bend their legs up from the knee behind them as they travel or bend their knees in front in a gazelle-like leaping run. marching step œ literally marching through the figures.

Standard steps, prior to clogging, did not require much specialization or extensive training–the focus was primarily on execution of complex figures and patterns. Several years into the competition, teams spontaneously introduced a —highly rhythmic, noisy clog step“ executed in an improvised, —freestyle“ method by all dancers for the duration of the dance. 108 Percussive dancing in the form of clog dancing, jigging, and buck-dancing was not completely unfamiliar to the square dance and, in their solo forms, were included in the umbrella of —barn dance.“109 As a matter of fact, many solo vernacular

106 Dr. Fred Bentley in Lunsford‘s eulogy, quoted in Jones, 114.

107 ibid, 58.

108 Whisant, 102.

109 In footnote, citing Nevell. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 254.

40 percussive performances were featured through the years at MDFF, and Lunsford himself is sometimes seen in photos or on rare video improvising percussive steps (sometimes called a buck dance).110 Prior to team clogging, a dancer might individually break into a clog-step while running the sets or improvise percussive steps with the music during breaks, but dancers previously did not continually clog.111 Clogger and author of Clogging and the Appalachian Square Dance Frank Bonner noted that —some of the mountain pioneers did ”clog‘ during the square dance using freestyle; the only change is everybody clogging all the time. This is partly the result of having more people proficient in clog dancing today than in pioneer days.“112 What is now known as —team clogging“ was still referred to simply as dance, old-time dance, or square dance–the format by which they were judged in competition regardless of footwork; the new footwork was sometimes distinguished as hoedown, flatfoot, or double shuffle.113 The clog steps were a compromise Lunsford was willing to make in order to increase interest and excitement in the traditional figure dancing; Lunsford was interested in drawing positive attention to WNC culture and clogging achieved that mission. He knew that the culture he promoted would continue to change, especially by the innovations of youth and the creativity and —out-doing“ encouraged by judged competitions. But he encouraged change that avoided falling into generic American commercial fantasy. Quoting an interview with Sarah Gertrude Knott, who looked to Lunsford for guidance and enlisted his assistance in organizing the National Folk Festival (which now tours to various host cities), Loyal Jones shares: Sarah Gertrude Knott felt that traditions do change and that Lunsford was perfectly justified in allowing —new“ expressions into his festival. —Time changed certain things,“ she wrote, —and Bascom was not hide-bound. He made his own songs, made them so well because he was so steeped in tradition, that no one could tell it. Who cares in one way? That has always been done.“…As to the festival, Miss Knott says, —I went to Bascom‘s festival a few years ago, and I heard a few say, ”Why does Bascom allow the newer songs or music on the festival program?‘ ”It is changing,‘ I said, ”Bascom did not change this festival. Time and a new way of life, a force

110 Bluegrass Roots, DVD. Directed by David Hoffman. 1964

111 Jones, 58.

112 Frank Bonner, Clogging and the Appalachian Square Dance. (Acworth: The Bonner Company, 1983), 33.

113 Jones, 58.

41

stronger than Bascom is at work on all folk activities. Bascom is struggling to find the way between the old and the new.‘“114

Lunsford did not resist change, but by making selective changes he controlled the boundaries of communitas, extending or retracting the width of common interests. Lunford insured that change that did occur focused in a certain direction, creating favor and enchantment for old-time traditions, resisting generic commercial influence, and keeping the cultural flavor of WNC in the forefront. Lunsford promoted WNC traditional culture, not American popular culture–regional as opposed to national. A root paradigm worked in his favor: Americans were already fascinated with Appalachia and mountaineer culture. In the context of industrial America between the First and Second World Wars, the success of Lunsford‘s Festival was made possible by preconditional inertia, the stored energy in the American appetite for Appalachia which was considered a mythic repository of American heritage and innocence that was receding elsewhere.115 In a 1945 MDFF publication, George Myers Stephens made no apologies for neo-traditional WNC forms making their way into the festival program: Visitors with keen understanding will not be misled by the clothes of the dancers into concluding that the mountaineer has become a city dweller. He may work in an industrial plant, or teach school, but for the most part he still lives back in the mountain valleys where he can raise a family on the land and do a little squirrel hunting if he has a mind to.

The mountaineer has changed since his former shut-in days, but less than one might think. His home life is much the same as it always was, and this is where his children grow up sharing his heritage of song and story and dance. When a group of young singers brings forward a new song version of their own at the Festival, it does not mean that the old tradition is dying. It means that it is still very much alive and bearing new fruit. So long as the new is not just something copied, but is natural and straight from the people, it finds a welcome at the Festival.116

Here, Stephens is also justifying the —wear your best“ motif enforced by Lunsford. This indicates that some spectators probably expected to see old-time dances and old-time mountaineers wearing mythical

114 Ibid., 127.

115 Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2002), 47.

116 Asheville Chamber of Commerce, Mountain Dance & Folk Festival, You Will Enjoy a Visit to the Land of the Sky. Festival publication, 1945. Duplicate of original provided by Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, NC.

42

hillbilly garb. Lunsford‘s interests presented old-time dances but contemporary, educated, civilized, and wholesome mountaineers. The key to interpreting the Festival‘s policy on adding new elements is found in Loyal Jones‘ interview with Sarah Knott: The change had to come from within, —steeped in tradition.“ Clogging was not copied; it was spontaneously introduced at MDFF. It was, indeed, natural, from the people of WNC, and steeped in WNC tradition and experience. The emergence of team clogging was unexpected and unprecedented, the opposite pole of structured clogging as exists today and will be discussed in chapter three. In Turner‘s model of ritual process, this stage of clogging is the spontaneous, existential communita: —the wind which bloweth where it listeth.“117 There were no rules for clogging yet, no special categories; clogging was an exciting alternative to the running or smooth steps used in big set square dancing. The value of clogging to Lunsford‘s mission was centered in: (1) WNC created it first and (2) it created excitement–the audiences loved it. This aided in the success of Lunsford‘s mission, to draw —attention to the fine cultural value of our traditional music and our dancing and the fine honor of our people.“118 In an interview with Loyal Jones, Ethel Capps, founder of the Berea College Country Dancers, offered some explanation on the criticism Lunsford received from purists: —He promoted clogging. The way they did it was offensive to some people, and the fact that it was just a big show, and some would go to any length to create attention for their group. Some of the groups were kind of mechanical, with everybody on the same foot at the same time.“ This statement supports Paul Spencer‘s Turner-based work on dance and communitas, social solidarity —bred of the complementary opposition between groups of people,“ and the —solidarity expressed in complementary opposition to a dominant principle of social organization, a competition of ideas, so to speak.“119 Spectacularity, including the spontaneous introduction of clogging, was a product of one-on-one dance team opposition (teams trying to out- perform each other). However, the standardization of spectacularity reflexively into the culture, the transition from spontaneous to structure, becomes a cultural boundary; the culture essentially tries to out-perform itself, or some other element outside the boundaries defined by the competition. I assert that this clogging outperformance is a vehicle to achieve public admiration, rooted in some

117 Turner and Turner, 252.

118 Jones, 53.

119 Paul Spencer, Society and the Dance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 32.

43 psychological need for positive reinforcement, perhaps resulting from guilt or an inferiority complex (depending on who is clogging)–especially varied along the scale from Americans to Appalachians, respectively. Further psychological investigation here is reserved for future study. Clogging steps strengthened the boundary of MDFF, spectacularly promoting the idea that innovations of mountain people were worth watching and were worth learning. In an interview with Loyal Jones, George Stephens (a close friend of Lunsford) said —Lunsford resisted clogging mildly“ but noted that Lunsford —had the breadth and wisdom to allow it to come in. Actually the younger generation likes the clogging much better than it likes the smooth dancing, in general.“120 Another friend, Jerry Israel, told Jones: —He gave in to a certain degree, but I don‘t think it was against his better judgment. I think it was because of his better judgment.“ 121 Israel himself expressed his feelings towards clogged-through square dancing: —Why I think it‘s terrible, but the crowd likes it. I don‘t know what could be done, if anything to reverse the trend.“122 Mountaineers had ignited a trend that competed with broader generic crazes. Clogging caught on and there was no turning back. Clogging footwork would, however, face criticism and inquiry and Lunsford would have to defend their presence on the MDFF stage. When asked by one spectator of its origins, Lunsford replied —It was here before you were born.“123 The fact that vernacular percussive dances did exist as folk expressions in Appalachia helped Lunsford justify the compromise. Community dancing and percussive solo dancing had shared a cultural environment, but had never been completely fused into one dance form.124 Folk festivals emerged in other parts of the country, including Pittsburgh and St. Louis, and organizers looked to Lunsford for guidance and for talent recommendation. Lunsford would put the clogging groups on the front line, especially Sam Queen and his Soco Gap Dancers, one of Lunsford‘s favored performance groups from Haywood County, WNC.125 Sam Queen was on the —Haywood

120 Quoted in Jones, 127.

121 Quoted in ibid.

122 Quoted in ibid.

123 Quoted in ibid., 128.

124 Richard Nevell, A Time to Dance: American Country Dancing from Hornpipes to Hot Hash. (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1977), 60.

125 Seeger, 39; Jones, 85, 124.

44

County“ square dance team at the 1928 Rhododendron Festival. Alhtough the Haywood County team placed last in the first festival competition, Same Queen and his Soco Gap Dancers later became a regular winning fixture at MDFF.126 In 1939, President and Mrs. Roosevelt invited Lunsford to bring a selection of entertainment from his region to the White House for the entertainment of the British Monarchy. Along with musicians and a dance group from Alabama, Lunsford brought Sam Queen and his Soco Gap Dancers, who performed the clogged-through version of big set dancing. In reaction, Queen Elizabeth remarked that the Soco Gap Dancers‘ performance resembled English clogging; this is believed to be the origin of the term —clogging“ used to describe clogged-through square dancing and its successive styles.127 Another product of spectacularity and also the influence of contemporary theatrics, teams began to use taps on their shoes to produce a larger, louder sound. Musicians also started using electric instruments.128 John Reeves, a member of Sam Queen‘s Soco Gap Dancers, reported in an interview with Mike Seeger, —As far as we were concerned, all they done was make a racket; so that would take away from the figure itself and the quality of the performance.“129 Eventually, the shoe taps and electric instruments were banned from Lunsford‘s festival. One judge commented that the taps had been banned to reduce noise so that the music could be heard.130 Perhaps the ban of taps also had something to do with their association with modern theatrics and commercial, urban-based touring performance companies.

126 —Dancing Club of Leicester Wins Contest,“ 5.

127 Bonner, 33.

128 I have been unable to date these improvements, but speculate that they occurred previous to 1960 (based on dates of interviews, etc.)

129 John Reeves quoted in Seeger, 41.

130 Jones, 58.

45

Figure 14: Soco Gap Square Dance Team (Courtesy of Lunsford Collection, Mars Hill College)

Despite the ban, taps were used by cloggers outside of Lunsford‘s festival–in public performance and at other regional square dance competitions (at this point, un-networked) where clogging started to appear. Like the use of clog steps, some tap-supporters recognized the power of the taps in creating interest for the old forms. Dr. W. Amos Abrams, former president of the North Carolina Folklore Society, recognized that the use of taps created excitement among the crowds: I have had and still have some misgivings about supporting the use of steel toe and heel plates, but I must say that in my dancing, too, perhaps, for all things there is a season… I would not wish cloggers to use steel plates while dancing in my living room or on my brick patio, but on an open platform above the crowd… or even on a stout plywood platform beneath a tent… these steel plates attract, stir the blood, and add to the effectiveness (yes, the spectacularity) of the entertainment. I have seen their power on the spectators on many occasions.131

The loud, rhythmic sounds and the high level of energy produced by the clogging team had a special —power,“ a spell-binding characteristic that intrigued and excited a captive audience. This power could justify boosterism of clogging, but it was too excessive for MDFF. MDFF, reflecting the interests behind Lunsford‘s redressive cultural intervention, shaped the image of folk perceived by spectators who looked for America‘s (by way of the South, by way of

131 Ibid., 128.

46

Appalachia) receding innocence and purest, untainted heritage. Through these circumstances, American team clogging emerged. As a result of MDFF‘s illusion of WNC folk at a tourist-driven festival in Asheville, clogging was presented to an audience that wanted to believe that in these folk expressions was an opportunity to reconnect with something missing in their own lives and, in the process, experience a better life than otherwise existed–perhaps related to working industrial jobs, living in an industrializing world, and longing for strong kin-networks and geographic rootedness that was negated by the Protestant cultural impulse to seek salvation in the world independently. Clogging became a ritual for reclaiming or expressing heritage and an opportunity to experience communitas, a sense of unity and belonging to something larger than one‘s self–especially for Protestants whose religion disfavored iconoclastic pilgrimages and other highly elaborate ritualized spiritual worship. In order to gain access to this shared clogging heritage, myth, in varying degrees, replaced historical fact. Lunsford and MDFF are now largely forgotten by active cloggers–reserved in the memories of —old timers“ and in a few academic books and articles left for questioning cloggers to discover. The importance of this mythic inversion allows for greater room for interpretation; thereby, clogging (as a ritual of heritage and communitas) serves a very large number of otherwise diverse individuals. For those who are regional, clogging is Appalachian; For those who want something —of“ the South, clogging is Southern; For those in Northern cities or in Pacific cities–distant from Colonial Atlantic America–who want to be part of a whole, clogging is American. The visual culture of dance, ritual of symbols rather than texts, allows clogging to have the greatest width of intimate meaning among an otherwise diverse group of participants.

47

Figure 15: Bascom Lamar Lunsford (in white) overlooking big-set dancers at MDFF in —Old City Auditorium“ (1960s) (Photo by Bob Lindsey, from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

Figure 16: Scene outside Asheville Auditorium during MDFF. Bill McElreath on guitar, 1970. (Photo by Bob Lindsey from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

48

Figure 17: MDFF Champions: Valley Springs Smooth Dance Team, 1970. (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

Figure 18: Erwin Dancers at MDFF (Photo by Bob Lindsey from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

49

Figure 19: Smooth Dancers at MDFF (late 1960s) (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

Figure 20: Dancers at MDFF, 1968 (Photo from D.H. Ramsey Library, Mountain Dance and Folk Festival Collection, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

50

“ITERLUDE”

By the 1950s, clogging was in demand—especially by tourists visiting WC resorts such as Fontana Village, in the antahala Forest, where Bill ichols and others exhibitioned the team and solo styles for the entertainment of summer guests. ichols was a WC native, and grew up around clogging at regional community events and festivals. The demand for clogging at Fontana Village eventually led ichols to standardize his method of teaching, which was especially useful when Fontana Village hosted annual square dance workshops. For pioneering the standardization of team clogging, ichols is considered the “grandfather of contemporary clogging.” 132 Square dancers, eager to learn a new and exciting style of square dance, picked up the style and started their own clogging teams throughout the region—including orth Georgia where “Big John Walters” taught clogging to his square dancers.133 Among Waters’ students was Violet Marsh who moved to orthern California for a short period of time, but long enough to teach western square dancers there how to clog.134 Organized square dancing, WC tourism, and the Grand Ole Opry (where the Ralph Sloan dancers introduced the “Appalachian style square dance” in 1952135) were significant forces in spreading clogging onward from the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, clogging was often featured in various folk festivals; towards the end of these two decades, many folk festivals attracted antistructural hippies. Clogging also spread in that “longhaired” tradition, notably led by

132 Bill Nichols, interview by author, March, 2009.

133 ibid.

134 Carolan, Linda. "Grand Ladies of Clogging: Linda Carolan Reminisces with Clogging Pioneers Violet Marsh and Sheila Powell." Double Toe Times: December, 2005. 10-17.

135According to Archival material, courtesy of Grand Ole Opry, cited individually in this thesis for the convenience of future researchers; The Stoney Mountain Cloggers also frequented the Opry beginning in the 1950s and others have followed since. By 1952 (when Ralph Sloan first introduced clogging on the Opry), the Grand Ole Opry was aired on clearchannel radio, WSM, and welcomed paying tourists into their —live audience“ at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. By 1955, the Grand Ole Opry was televised. The dates when clogging first appeared on the televised Grand Ole Opry is thus far unknown. Square dancers preceded cloggers on the Opry, present on the radio show from its 1925 inception; originally called the WSM Barndance the show featured —square dance tunes“ and —old-time“ string-band favorites.

51

the Green Grass Cloggers which formed in 1976 in Eastern orth Carolina. The television skit comedy show, Hee Haw, first aired in 1969, and also televised clogging groups; in the 1980s, Hee Haw hosted an “International Clogging Championship” at Opryland Theme Park in ashville. Winning groups were given a featured performance on the show. Organized square dancing is very significant to the spread of clogging and also to the development of codified, written notation systems (which cloggers call “cue sheets”); organized square dancers, in general, are very concerned with codification—especially in western states, such as California, where dancers relied on written instructions for oldtime dances from America’s colonial coast.136 These square dancers are responsible for the recreational format of “clogging conventions” and “workshops,” generally lowcost, organized (not commercial) weekend opportunities for cloggers to gather, learn routines from wellknown choreographers, purchase music, clogging shoes, and other cloggingrelated merchandise, and perform for each other in a concluding “exhibition” showcase or themed production.

136 Janice Hanzel (San Francisco), interview by author, February, 2006.

52

CHAPTER 3

AMERICAN CLOGGING HALL OF FAME AS PILGRIMAGE NETWORK AND RITUAL

EXPRESSION OF SACRED AND SECULAR VALUES

This chapter is concerned with clogging in one normalized phase where pilgrimage occurs, maintaining clogging communitas. As I focus on American Clogging Hall of Fame (ACHF), I uncover many Protestant religious or cultural themes; Protestantism is as much a religion as it is a culture or set of cultures. A spectrum of religious intensity exists between these poles, including where only secular interests exist. These differences are leveled through clogging communitas and made possible by the Protestant imprint on American secular culture–both share many common values. The previous chapter demonstrated the ability for clogging to express the heritage of disparate ethnic categories (Appalachian, Southern, American, Anglo-Saxon, etc.). A major intention in this chapter is to explore the spiritual value spectrum that is expressed through clogging rituals and ACHF pilgrimage. In this chapter, I suggested that many Americans trace or express values in addition to (or as a part of) heritage through team clogging, especially in WNC. In Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio, Thomas S. Bremer argues that —religious adherents have more in common with tourists than one might imagine.“137 Bremer outlines four aspects of tourism by which religious syncretism can be observed: —the making of distinctive places; the articulation of particular identities; the desire for aesthetically pleasing experiences; and the commoditization of objects, experiences, and even people.“138 These four areas are analyzed throughout this chapter, although not organized as four distinct sections. As I support pilgrimage aspects of American team clogging in this chapter, the commonality Bremer outlines between tourism and pilgrimage, evidences ability for cloggers to choose for themselves the heritage or origin of expressed values, sacred or secular, during their journeys and ritual clogging performances; pilgrims and tourists coexist in these clogging rituals.

137 Thomas S. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3.

138 Ibid, 6.

53

I deliberately lean in this chapter towards sacred rituals, to demonstrate that they can and do exist. In order to support this, I explain the process of sanctification of various clogging elements– either assigning sacred meaning to an otherwise secular ritual or place or stripping a secular object of spiritually offensive relics. Here, objects either become sacredly pleasing or neutral (or secularly pleasing or neutral). This function parallels —baptizing the culture“ in Edith and Victor Turner‘s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Victor Turner used this phrase in describing Gregory the Great‘s rededication of pre-Christian shrines in Mexico. Gregory the Great was quoted: —The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there. For if these temples are well-built, they must be purified from the worship of demons and dedicated to the service of the true God.“139 In order to support clogging and ACHF pilgrimage as expressions of shared values, I use Turner‘s metaphorical —baptism“ in this chapter to demonstrate the sanctification of clogging culture: customs (dances) and also place (WNC). Lunsford and many other community dance enthusiasts in the first quarter of the 20th century mirrored Gregory the Great‘s rededication of temples, stripping community dances of foreign idols (especially alcohol and promiscuity) and rededicating them to social or Christian service; this rededication was usually as simple as praising the dances publicly for their positive social or sacred functions and qualities (orally, through written manuals, performance programs, etc.). This sanctification can benefit the cultural condition in addition to the spiritual condition; others still might be altogether dispassionate. However, in order to share an —aesthetically pleasing experience,“ only positive or neutral reactions can exist. Cloggers simply manage the degree of religious intensity by which they personally respond to or participate in a pleasing, shared experience. For example, ACHF competitions begin with a prayer–usually a specific prayer that mentions —Jesus Christ“ if not directed to Jesus rather than God. The opening prayer typically thanks Jesus (or God) for the opportunity to gather together —in fellowship the fellowship of others,“ and asks for the safety of the dancers–requesting a blessing of —protection“ through the weekend‘s activities and on their journeys back home.140 Because this Protestant prayer is within the boundaries of —dominant culture,“ there are probably few (if any) dancers that take direct offense. However, I hypothesize that

139 Gregory the Great, quoted by the Venerable Bede, 1955. Re-quoted in Turner and Turner, 51.

140 Personal visit to ACHF National Championship, 2005 (specifically for this research). I have attended many other years as a participant, without engaging in intentional academic ethnography.

54

there is great diversity among the cloggers in their level of engagement in direct worship during moments of prayer; while some are praying along, others are —going through the motions“ of a civic ritual normalized in Appalachia, prominent in the South, and typical in greater America. Harmonious coexistence during these moments is evidence of the homogenous effects of leveling rituals--Turner‘s communitas reign. The birth of team clogging in WNC is significantly important in maintaining this spiritual spectrum in addition to the cultural ethnic categories discussed in chapter two.

“Baptizing The Customs”

This section deals with the sanctification of community and percussive styles of American dances, which combined to form team clogging. Community dancing is a source of great American religious controversy, traceable to European Puritanism. English Puritan writer, William Prynne presented a tirade on dance in Histriomatrix. In 1633, Pyrnne wrote: Dancing for the most part is attended with many amorous smiles, wanton compliments, unchaste kisses, scurrilous songs and sonnets, effeminate music, lust provoking attire, ridiculous love pranks, and all of which savor only of sensuality, of raging fleshy lusts! Therefore it is wholly to be abandoned of all good Christians. Dancing serves no necessary use! No profitable laudable or pious end at all….The way to heaven is too steep, too narrow for men to dance and keep revel rout. No way is large or smooth enough for capering roisters, for skipping, jumping, dancing dames but that broad, beaten pleasant road that leads to Hell. The Gate of Heaven is too narrow for whole rounds, whole troops of dancers to march in together.141

Pyrnne‘s sentiment demonstrates an extreme intolerance for dancing and merriment. On American soil, religious bodies have experienced division concerning tolerance of mixed dancing or dancing in general.142 The ambiguity of —sober mirth“ has left room for widely varied interpretation to the question: When does fun go too far? Recreational justification also results from this ambiguity, evidenced in the Social Gospel movement of the Victorian era, (the Gospel of Leisure, Muscular Christianity, etc.) where recreation was justified through the —rededication“ of activities to positive social (if not sacred) service.143 A distinguished leader in this movement was the Young Men‘s

141 William Prynne, quoted in Richard Nevell, A Time to Dance: American Country Dancing from Hornpipes to Hot Hash (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1977), 29.

142 Nevell, 29.

143 Gerald Gems, Linda J. Borish, and Gertrud Pfister, Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization. (Champaign: Human Kinetics, 2008), 174-192.

55

Christian Association (YMCA), emphasizing the —everybody plays, everybody wins“ mode of competitive sports and the doctrine of —preach what you practice.“144 Lunsford faced this historic controversy between conservative Protestantism and recreation as a promoter of music and, especially, square dance events. He was a religious man (a Methodist by denominational association) and, according to correspondence between his daughters and biographer Loyal Jones, he had extensive Biblical knowledge. However, preachers criticized him for promoting dancing and as being —shiftless.“ He served as a Sunday school teacher until the church requested that he give up organizing square dances. Lunsford did not give in.145 Like the YMCA, Lunsford —preached what he practiced,“ praising regional music and dance for their positive functions, including their ability to raise individual and community virtue and dignity. Lunsford saw the church‘s discouragement as hypocritical; According to Loyal Jones, Lunsford referred to Hambone, a cartoon character: —De preacher, he object to de banjo, but he always pat he feets.“146 Jim Miller, a Leicester resident and friend of the Lunsford family, remembered church people talking negatively about Lunsford‘s dancing, —But whenever they needed to raise money, Bascom would be the first one they‘d go to, and he‘d give more money than any of the rest.“147 After Lunsford‘s death, his daughter Merton said —I was never doubtful of his faith and deep belief in God. This, plus his knowledge of the Bible, was a great comfort to him during his confinement (after his stroke).“148 In order to reconcile the conflict between dance and the Protestant doctrine that was relative to Lunsford‘s faith in God, Lunsford —baptized the customs,“ Edith and Victor Turner‘s phrase denoting Christian syncretism.149 Lunsford was not alone in this rededication of culture and recreation; he was actually

144 YMCA, —History of the YMCA Movement“, http://www.ymca.net/about_the_ymca/history_of_the_ymca.html (accessed on March 15, 2009). I also would like to note here that my first weekly clogging lessons were organized through a YMCA —after school“ program in LaBelle, Florida, in 1988. The mission of the YMCA is —To put Christian principals into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind, and body for all.“ The YMCA motto is —We build strong kids, strong families, strong communities.“

145 Jones, 99.

146 Ibid.

147 Ibid., 100.

148 Ibid.

149 Turner and Turner, 51.

56

relatively —late in the game“ to be facing this controversy–an indicator of the conservative hold-out of Appalachian Protestantism. Late 19th and early 20th century dance manuals reflect the Social Gospel impulse of the Victorian era. An increase in physical education programs in public and private schools gave instructors an opportunity to teach certain dances as exercise. Folk dancing, community dancing (American rounds and squares), and —Simple Clogs“ were useful methods of instilling —natural play and games of childhood.“150 In a forward to Athletic Dances and Simple Clogs, Jesse Feiring Williams of Teachers College at Columbia University praises new attention being paid to the utility of physical education (this manual was written for teachers of dance in physical education programs): When the historian of the future comes to chronicle the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, he will note the great increase in published reports, monographs, and books treating of physical education. If he analyzes the material at all, he will comment, doubtless, upon the new view point, the educational approach, the broader utility, the more functional character of both theory and practice.151

The Athletic Dances and Simple Clogs provided instruction for —wholesome“ and —delightful“–no doubt sanitized–physical activities, appealing to the greater good of society. When presenting folk dances from non American (moreover, non Anglican) countries, careful screening ensured dances met the —American condition.“ 152 Imprinted by dominant Protestantism, the American condition preferred simple (rather than elaborate, object-based), community-style dances which emphasized whole groups of dancers (even if divided into couples) with no intimate contact; one-on-one closed-partner dances were less resistant to denunciation of sensual or lewd conduct.153

150 1925 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Schools of Detroit, quoted by Jesse Feiring Williams, —Introduction“ in Marjorie Hillas and Marian Knighton, Athletic Dances and Simple Clogs (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1934); Elizabeth Burchenal, Folk Dances and Singing Games (New York: G. Schirmer, 1909, revised 1933)

151 Jesse Feiring Williams, —Introduction“ in Marjorie Hillas and Marian Knighton, Athletic Dances and Simple Clogs (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1934).

152 Luther H. Gulick, —Preface“ in Elizabeth Burchenal, FolkDances and Singing Games (New York: G. Schirmer, 1909, revised 1933)

153 Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans At Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial ew England (New York: St. Martin‘s Griffin, 1995), 114.

57

The condition of masculinity also confronted dance in Protestant-influenced America. The authors, physical education instructors Marjorie Hillas and Marian Knighton, address masculinity and dancing in physical education programs: One of our main objectives [in writing Athletic Dances and Simple Clogs] was the arrangement of dances vigorous enough to satisfy the needs of a boy during the period when folk and other types of dancing have no appeal. Our problem, then, was to find the right type of movement in which a boy could find joy in dancing. Everybody probably knows singing games, simple folk dances and simple clog dances for the girl. The modern boy or girl is capable of a more vigorous type of dancing. Such Dances should embody large free bodily movements. They should include something of the stunt quality (not purely gymnastic steps) with sufficient character so that the dancer not only learns accuracy in movement, poise, control and relaxation, but has an opportunity for rhythmic and dramatic expression…The character-quality of a dance is as essential educationally as practice in rhythmic accuracy.154

Hillas and Knighton prescribe athleticism through gymnastics and clogs as —the right kind of movement“ for boys. Country dances and clogs were among the most popular forms welcomed into physical education programs during the early 1900s because of their utility in promotion of civic virtue and their non-threat to masculinity, somewhat respectively; country and percussive dances achieved harmony with the Protestant condition as rituals of heritage or, in the case of clogs and other percussive dances, rituals of masculinity, athleticism, and competitive individualism (as long as alcohol or aggression were not present). The social utility of percussive dances in the early 20th century show a significant turn from 18th century America. In Puritans At Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial ew England, Bruce C. Daniels paints quite a different picture of percussive dance and civility in America during the late 1700s: Usually done solo, jigs were aggressive dances associated with drunken sailors trying to outdo each other in boastful competition. Always regarded as unsavory by New Englanders, at their least jigs engendered vanity and excessive pride; at their worst they provoked fights and brawls. When men started dancing dueling jigs it was usually a sign that a wedding reception, dance, or waterfront party had gotten out of control.155

If, by the Rhododendron Festival of 1928, percussive solo dances had not made their way into conservative favor (which I believe they had, as long as alcohol was not involved), the opportunity for their aggressive behaviors to get out of hand were further controlled in the clogged-through square dances. Behavior was maintained and restricted by the patterns and formations, commanded by a caller.

154 Hillas and Knighton, 7.

155 Daniels, 115.

58

While the clogged-through square dance restricted group movement, the improvised percussive footwork was only limited by the dancer‘s ability to keep time with the rhythm of the music; otherwise, the possibilities for individual percussive expression with the feet and legs were unlimited. Community dances were always the most favorable for American conservatives who otherwise accepted no dance at all.156 Clogged-through square dancing resolved any remaining unsavory aspects of solo percussive dance expression. The combined form, team clogging, embraces both poles of individuality and corporateness; improvised footwork might also be a reserved outlet for just enough showing off to embrace any remaining need for expression of competitive individuality. The availability of individuality amid corporateness might also satisfy a Protestant impulse, enabling dancers to express individuality even when functioning as a collective. As evidence to the importance of both poles (especially among —old-timers“), I consider documented reactions to the introduction of precision styles of clogging which started in the late 1950s, pioneered by James Kesterson and his Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers from Hendersonville, WNC; in this style, the footwork was choreographed and dancers matched style of the entire body as best as they could.157 According to Mike Seeger, Kesterson‘s group worked with a Northern choreographer, resulting in the choreographed, uniform style. In precision clogging, the pole for individuality was eliminated and many old-timers, like Bob Phillips, expressed their remorse for the lack of individuality: [Kesterson] took the mountain clog dance, and he jazzed it up to bring it up more like a modern dance. They used quite a bit of clog steps, you know, as far as their footwork. But each dancer is dancing exactly like the next one. The Rockettes would be a good example. [The Rockettes, in comparison to Kesterson‘s dancers] might not be the the same kind of footwork, but they kick the left leg together, the right leg together. Kesterson said anybody can do the old mountain style. What he wanted to do was liven it up. Well I don‘t go that way. I try to stick to what is the old way, near as we can. The people are so confused today. It‘s utter chaos really.158

In order to meet the —American condition,“ community dancing and clogs were rededicated to service and stripped of alcohol, effeminacy, promiscuity, and paganism (maypoles, for instance) and

156 Ibid., 114; Gerald Jonas, Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1935), 41-51.

157 Spalding and Woodside, 176; Seeger, 10; Michael Ann Williams, Smoky Mountain Folklife (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 56.

158 Gail Matthews-DeNatale, “Carrying on the Old Mountain Clog Dance: Thoughts about Freestyle Clogging: an Interview with Bob Phillips“ in Spalding, 129.

59 praised (rededicated) for their usefulness in physical education programs, as a model for proper etiquette and citizenship, and, in some cases, as a superior crusade against lascivious dances in vogue.159

“Baptizing Western orth Carolina” The Appalachian region as a whole has experienced a similar —baptism.“ Throughout its history, WNC has served the needs of diverse tourist industries: —health tourists“ that sought healing in the sanitariums and hot springs; mountain and outdoor recreation enthusiasts such as hikers and snow skiers; and people drawn to regional culture (including regional crafts, music, and dance, and even specifically to Country music tourism in nearby Pigeon Forge or Nashville, Tennessee).160 However, Religious tourism is of specific interest to this thesis and it was developing before Lunsford‘s festival started. George Cook, a northern tourist visiting WNC in 1894, wrote, —I have been to the ”Land of the Sky‘ [and] it is the most magnificent country in the world... It is God‘s country.“161 By the twentieth century, WNC offered the picturesque setting for a number of religious retreats, conferences, and meeting centers–blending religion, culture, and leisure. Historian Richard D. Starnes authored Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western orth Carolina and reserved one chapter to discuss the history of religious tourism in the area. Starnes writes: By World War I the region [WNC] was home to large and popular resorts for southern Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, establishing western North Carolina as an important gathering place for the South‘s largest religious bodies. The influence of these religious resorts extended beyond simple leisure for the faithful. In the twentieth century these facilities emerged as important centers of religious education and social reform, simultaneously fulfilling the leisure demands of southern church people. Some became retirement communities for both clergy and laity, and all shaped the faith practices of Protestants from across the South and nation. As permanent religious communities organized around the principles of service to God and acceptable leisure, these resorts introduced new forces into western North Carolina‘s tourist economy.162 According to Starnes, the picturesque mountain setting was most important to the development of religious tourism, especially for southern Protestants who saw the region (—the highlands“) as —a place

159Nevell, 61-77; Ford, Good Morning.

160 Martin, Tourism; Outdoor recreation, the —back-to-nature“ movement, was also bolstered by urban dissatisfaction and Romanticism of wild spaces. Gems, 189.

161 Quoted in Richard D. Starnes, 92.

162 Ibid., 93.

60

for quiet reflection, a beautiful place to become closer to God and to prepare for His work.“163 Many Protestant denominations formed their own mountain retreats where their clergy, piety, and general members could reflect and renew religious commitments: Presbyterians, Montreat; Baptists, Swannanoa Valley; Southern Baptist, Ridgecrest; Methodists, Southern Assembly, later known as Lake Junaluska Assembly and Trinity Methodist Retreat Center.164 Many of the centers sold second home or retirement home property to members who wanted to spend summers or establish permanent residency among likeminded neighbors in an idealic setting.165 According to Starnes, —the retreats shared many activities with other regional resorts, but their religious character often dictated the types of leisure pursuits visitors could enjoy.“166 Religious tourism, similar to the effects of MDFF, has no doubt had a reflexive impact on the culture in WNC.

Figure 21: Montreat Smooth Dance Team at MDFF (Courtesy of D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

163 Ibid.

164 Ibid., 96-101.

165 Ibid., 106.

166 Ibid., 107.

61

Through mountain missions, camp revivals, settlement schools, and Protestant migration, Appalachia was transformed from an ideal into a reality. Life in WNC was, in many regards, a homogenous WASP region. Lineberger Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Fred Hobson, grew up in WNC in the 1950s. In his essay —Up in the Country,“ Hobson shared his experiences in a homogeneous environment: These were my friends, all of Celtic and Scotch-Irish stock, though I certainly wouldn‘t have known that at the time, just as I had no idea that there were in northern cities people called Poles and Czechs and Lithuanians. We knew only white and black. I had a casual black friend or two, but none of those classic interracial boyhood friendships celebrated by Deep Southerners, simply because there were few blacks around. As for Catholics, there was not a single family in the county until I was sixteen, and then only one; and Jews were as remote and unknown as Zoroastrians. I thought all of this when during college in the ”60s, I saw a ewsweek map of religious inclinations in the United States; the color red was for Protestant, and the only completely red area in the entire country was northwest North Carolina.167

A result of regional —baptism,“ many tourists in WNC encountered other religious tourists, Protestant re- settlers, and native converts. WNC became a Protestant Mecca, a consistent and dependable liminal experience. Travelers visiting the Appalachian region, either to trace their cultural heritage to the —noble savage“ or for religious retreat, were not simply tourists–they were pilgrims. Journeys to the mountains became ritual pilgrimages of renewal.

Spiritual Journeys to the Clogging Capital of the World Lunsford‘s work in promoting regional square dance and music through MDFF emphasized values, dignity, cultural worth, and redemption, and began to assume a sense of religious form and fervor. Lunsford spoke of his festival administration in religious terms; he referred to the promotion of regional traditions as —his calling,“ referencing the (sometimes dramatic) religious experience that —calls“ Protestant preachers to the ministry. 168 Lunsford described his work as the spreading of —the gospel of the value of our traditional American cultures.“169 This statement reflects Lunsford‘s

167 Fred Hobson, —Up In The Country“ in Balk Talk From Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, eds. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford (Louisville: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 180.

168 Jones, 9.

169 Ibid., 66.

62

sentiment that the value of traditional arts from his region should not only be elevated, but also be spread for the benefit of others. Lunsford acted as an apostle. Lunsford compared his selection of talent at the festival to the biblical story about —separating the wheat from the chaff“170 and justified his selection as custodial responsibility to the —message“ he communicated through MDFF: —I can‘t see any place for a bunch of irresponsibles to come in and break into the continuity of the message I am trying to give.“171 In a 1934 program, the following passage appears: Opening of highways, the advent of automobile, telephone and radio, introduce factors that are supplanting somewhat the old time folk entertainment. Still there are coves and valleys which are slow to surrender individuality to the modern urge. There is also the strong spirit of veneration for traditions that keep the folk dances and folk music alive. These things are so interwoven into the lives of these people that it is almost as sacred to them as their religion.172

Lunsford‘s festival promoted the illusion of a pseudo-tribal culture where religion was inseparable from music and dance. In the midst of this tribal illusion a utopian cultural blueprint was created, promoted as cultural tourism, and supported harmony among Protestant tourists in the region, searching for suitable leisure opportunities; A pre-condition was met to the formation of communitas. Americans WASPs, especially in America‘s South, could turn to MDFF and to team clogging, a new dance form born in these circumstances, to satisfy a longing for connectedness with a missing whole, ritualized through a shared experience. According to Victor Turner, pilgrimages are an expression of the communitas dimension of any society.173 Protestant tourism in WNC is close to Turner‘s utopian communitas, where the leveling feature that hides crevices of diversity is not needed in order to maintain intense social bonds. However, cleavages do exist here including differences in Protestant denomination (Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.), definition of heritage (Appalachian, Southern, American, Anglo-Saxon, etc.), and geographical differences in the scattered communities where the tourists live their everyday life.

170 Quoted in Ibid., 52.

171 Quoted in Ibid., 56.

172 Asheville Chamber of Commerce, Seventh Annual Mountain Dance Contest and Mountain Music Festival program, August 2-3, 1934. Duplicate provided by Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, NC.

173 Turner, Dramas, 32.

63

Moreover, Protestant pilgrimage experience has its own distinct characteristics. In his essay, —Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: The place of Jerusalem pilgrimage in the various Christianities [sic],“ Glenn Bowman characterizes the pilgrimage practices of Greek Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism. According to Bowman, Protestant religion stresses an individual (over institutional) relationship with God. Thus, Protestant pilgrims —tend to want to witness Christ himself and not his putative agents, and prefer to frequent places, such as the area around the Sea of Galilee or the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem where they can imagine Christ in situ, rather than monuments thrown up by two thousand years of devotion to his memory.“174 Clogging in WNC reflects this characterization as a place to participate in lived Christianity rather than conscious iconophilly. Victor Turner wrote, —[pilgrimage impulse] may be present even among those Protestant denominations regarding it with least favor.“175 Turner continued, illustrating how Protestant camp revivals can be considered a proximal pilgrimage, on the outskirts of town, so to speak; relative locality (minimally peripheral) justifies routinization of sacred journeys sanctioned by Protestant religious bodies. According to Turner, however, —some form of deliberate travel to a far place intimately associated with the deepest, most cherished, axiomatic values of the traveler seems to be a —cultural universal.“ If it is not religiously sanctioned or encouraged, it will take other forms.176 Distant pilgrimage within Protestant culture did take other forms, including team clogging at the American Clogging Hall of Fame (ACHF). Since 1981, the ACHF —National Championship“ has been held at the Stompin‘ Grounds in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. Five years prior to the founding of ACHF, National Clogging and Hoedown Council (NCHC) was established to: (1) promote communication and a friendly atmosphere among all dancers; (2) establish a written vocabulary of basic steps and terminology; (3) collect information on various styles of clogging and hoedowning, particularly basic steps and figures along with their history; and (5) encourage production of good recorded music for clogging and hoedowning.177 Dan Angel, then a member of the NCHC Board of

174 Glenn Bowman, —Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: The place of Jerusalem pilgrimage in the various Christianities“ in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 116.

175 Turner and Turner, 241.

176 Ibid., 241.

177 Bonner, Preface.

64

Directors, proposed the idea of a —hall of fame“ program to his fellow board members. In an interview with Dan Angel, he told me the intention of his hall of fame idea was to recognize —the old masters of clogging that had been doing clogging for many, many years. And we have been successful in adding those people to the Hall of Fame.“ He continued, —That was the reason it was started, to recognize past and former leaders of the old traditional clogging.“ NCHC decided the hall of fame idea was beyond the scope of their organizational focus, and did not adopt Angel‘s proposal. Angel doesn‘t recall bitterness or ill feelings from either party; Angel continued to serve as an officer for NCHC into the 1990s. He recalls, —NCHC has always been competitive…they had good competitions but they wanted to stick with making sure we had the rules and regulations down and adhere to those. They wanted to go that route instead of with the [American Clogging] Hall of Fame.“ Angel presented the idea of the American Clogging Hall of Fame to Kyle Edwards, owner of the Stompin‘ Ground, in 1981 who embraced the idea. The inductees have been announced each year at a clogging competition held at the Stompin‘ Ground in October, typically the peak month for colorful fall foliage.178 The Stompin‘ Ground was built by Kyle Edwards, a —tradition-oriented“ clogger whose mother danced in Lunsford‘s favored Sam Queen‘s Soco Gap Dancers, including in 1928 Rhododendron Festival and in their 1939 performance for the King and Queen of England at the White House.179 (Edwards was also Sam Queen‘s nephew.) Edwards himself competed clogging, beginning in the early 1950s at Lunsford‘s festival and at various other competitions, including one held at the Cherokee Indian Reservation, and his two children, Burton and Becky, are known as masters of traditional and precision styles of clogging and mountain dance.180 The Stompin‘ Ground is less than eight miles from Lake Junaluska and what is now known as the Trinity Methodist Retreat Center. Religious tourists who drive by the Stompin‘ Ground see a sign outside that says: —Stompin‘ Ground,“ —Family Fun,“ —WNC‘s Largest Dance Floor,“ —Country, Bluegrass, & Gospel Music,“ and —Clogging Capital of the World.“181 The promotion of family fun in an attraction that blends popular and religious performance places the Stompin‘ Ground within a

178 Dan Angel, interview by author, March, 2005.

179 Seeger, 43-44.

180 Ibid, 46.

181 Photo by Dixie Daimwood, 2007.

65

constellation of civil religious attractions that stretch from Branson, Missouri, eastward to Myrtle Beach, North Carolina.

Figure 22: —Clogging Capital of the World“: Sign Outside Stompin‘ Ground (Maggie Valley, NC) During 2008 ACHF Championship (Photo by Dixie Daimwood, Orlando, FL).

Figure 23: The Melody Hoedown Cloggers, 1985 œ Clogging Line Dance at ACHF National Championship, Stompin‘ Grounds (Photo by Jeannine Fisher Rickard, McDonough, GA )

—Family friendly“ or —wholesome family fun“ are programming themes throughout tourist destinations located in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Nashville, Tennessee; Myrtle

66

Beach, North Carolina; and Branson, Missouri.182 In Holy Hills of the Ozarks, Aaron K. Ketchell observed the close relation between Christian religious tourism and pilgrimage in Branson, Missouri. According to Ketchell, Branson‘s conservative tourism practices are informed by a style of Christianity that emphasizes what people do rather than what people think. Ketchell writes, —From Harold Bell Wright‘s [author of regional fiction] chastisements of ethereal theology and theologians to the anti- intellectual antics of modern-day hillbilly comics and the ”down-home‘ morals they are said to represent, this populist aversion to social privilege has permeated the area‘s [Branson‘s] promotion of lived Christianity.“183 Ketchell‘s formula for Branson-style lived Christianity exists at the Stompin‘ Ground in Maggie Valley, WNC; both destinations share fictional religious histories and —down-home“ iconography. Ketchell places tourist theatre attractions in Branson as heirs of the area‘s religious camp-meetings in both form and function, fusing religious worship with wholesome entertainment in performance and —tourism-mediated piety.“184 According to Ketchell, Branson‘s theatres, not unlike the Stompin‘ Grounds, promote gospel music, —innocent country,“ and —a distinct construction of domestic appropriateness expressed through the rhetoric of ”family values.‘“185 In so doing, Branson intersects religion and leisure, pilgrimage and tourism. The Stompin‘ Ground, the —Clogging Capital of the World,“ is a similar intersection of religion and tourism, embedded within the marketing promise of —family friendly.“ In an interview with Mike Seeger, Kyle Edwards spoke about his vision in building the Stompin‘ Ground and the type of activities that are held there: It was a 25-year dream; it took me 25 years to get the material, the junk steel to build the building. And it was a mutual dream my mother and myself had, and it‘s just a dream come true. We don‘t sell alcoholic beverages; it‘s [clogging and mountain dance] a family

182 Although it is not significant to the focus of this thesis, it is worth noting that clogging is a performance fixture at many theatres and tourist attractions within these destination cities, including the Carolina Opry in Myrtle Beach, Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, the Grand Ole Opry and the late Opryland theme park in Nashville, Silver Dollar City in Branson, and in many other attractions large and small along the tourist strips of these cities.

183 Aaron K. Ketchell, Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007), xvii.

184 Ibid., xxi-xxii.

185 Ibid., 93.

67

entertainment and it‘s the only sport I know where there‘s no age gap, everybody gets to participate. To us, it‘s like baseball is to other people. It‘s a character-builder. It‘s something our community‘s proud of and it‘s known throughout the country… When these kids are in here, dancing, they ain‘t out on the streets in trouble, you know, and it seems to take the place of a lot of that…Clogging is probably the only sport where there‘s no age gap. From 2 to 82, everybody that does it, enjoys it, and it‘s great exercise. If you love it, you get hooked on it; it‘s a good way to get high without drugs or alcohol.186

For Edwards, clogging mirrors Baseball–a studied American civil religion. Civil religious qualities, similar in function to Social Gospel, sanctify activities for a wide spectrum of religious intensity. Functioning on the level of a civil religion, team clogging at the Stompin‘ Ground serves as a leveling communitas, uniting the widest, common experience of values–ranging from pure civic recreation, to —religion in general,“ to specific Protestantism (not to mention the cleavages that exist between Protestant denominations); leveling also hides difference between Protestant worship and culture. For example, if a clogging team is dancing to Southern gospel music, which is religious in nature, some cloggers might experience the ritual performance as worship while others have a less intense religious experience–or a secular experience might replace religion altogether. The values expressed through clogging are similar regardless of the level of religious devotion that generates them. —Family friendly,“ for instance, can be appreciated equally between Protestant clogging families and clogging families in general, although for the former the responsibility to nurturing youth in a wholesome environment are part of a spiritual (rather than civic) obligation. Protestantism has left its imprint on civic virtues in America and therefore religious and civic particularisms are leveled through shared expression of values such as clogging rituals and ACHF pilgrimage. The lack of age gap among cloggers at the Stompin‘ Ground, boasted by Edwards, is a pride shared with modern square dancers, anecdotally boasting square dance as —a dance that knows no age.“187 Ageless dancing, on one hand, is a sign of generational manifest destiny. Initially, Lunsford accepted clogging as a vehicle to keep a greater number involved and interested in the square dancing. Although purists objected, the youth simply combined two older forms of dance (an emergence from within the same cultural boundaries) and the new form became popular and has since demonstrated its durability. The clog steps proved useful to traditionalists committed to revival and transferring the

186 Seeger, 45.

187 Sets in Order, Square Dance. online video: http://www.archive.org/details/square_dancing (accessed February 10, 2009)

68

culture from the oldest generations to the youngest; clogging was an agent of cultural intervention and cultural propagation. The intergenerational aspect of —family-friendliness“ as a Christian value in the United States can be traced back to New England Puritanism. In Puritans At Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial ew England, author Bruce C. Daniels states —the stages of leaving and arriving in the earthly world both had serious purposes in Puritan thought.“188 Youth were most impressionable and moral habits learned at a young age would color behavior patterns through life, the next generation of the society as a whole.“ Daniels notes, —adult behavior for the youthful was the ideal; somewhat less than adult behavior was both the reality and the expectation.“189 Puritans honored the past and honored the elderly as makers of the past. The elderly generation was also the closest to natural death and therefore were expected be extra attentive to moral conditions.190 In Brief Essay of the Glory of Aged Piety, Cotton Mather warned the elderly, that the young —cannot reverence you unless your grave looks as well as your gray hairs demand it.“191 An activity or ritual, such as square dance or clogging, that has the capacity to include participants of all ages, is seemingly successful in uniting the group on shared community values and social commitments. Team clogging, in this regard, is a ritual of communion and continuity. Transferring the traditions, tastes, and values from the oldest generation to the youngest is, in itself, an ideal. Square dance, as an organ of social control, transmits religious and cultural sentiment, cultivating adult values among youth. In competition, religious values manifest in —sportsmanship“ and rules of play (the ethical dimension of American team clogging) which discriminate against disrespect, humiliation, inhospitality, and discourtesy.192 As organized team clogging reached a normative stage through standardization and institutionalization, new categories of team clogging emerged, expanding from clogged-through square dance to clogged-through line dancing. Line dancing was introduced into square dance communities as

188 Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial ew England. (New York: St. Martin‘s Griffin, 1995), 186.

189 Ibid., 190.

190 Ibid., 186.

191 Quoted in Ibid., 191.

192 Paul Spencer, Society and the Dance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 8-9.

69

an activity that didn‘t require a partner.193 Clogged-through line dancing made an easy transition to the use of non-country popular music, courtesy of Disco line dance, and onward to categories that resembled varsity drill and cheerleading teams. Teams expanded the precision footwork to include elaborate choreographed body gestures, scoured for group precision and rhythmic synchronization by trained judges. Categories that broke free from the restrictive code of square dance patterns created new possibilities for group precision, bodily movement, team interaction, and costumes that broke from the rural idiom; they also created new challenges to the —family friendly“ aesthetic. Some teams pushed the limits of what their bodies could do and sometimes pushed the limits of what ACHF and the Stompin‘ Grounds were willing to accept. I interviewed an ACHF officer (also a judge), about the expectations for dance teams on stage at the Stompin‘ Ground during American Clogging Hall of Fame events: LM: The values of [American Clogging] Hall of Fame are the same as the Stompin‘ Ground‘s– family friendly… I know from my experience with what we‘re trying to push about the dress codes and body moves, I have had excellent support from families. Not just from directors but families telling me, —I really appreciate what you‘re doing.“ Anything that you see on the stage (now we don‘t have that much control over what comes in and out of the building) but what we present on stage, so to speak, out on the floor, we do expect them to be at a certain level of dress and body moves. If they get out of line they are penalized severely [via point deductions made to team scores]. Most everybody is cooperating with us on that. If it‘s a team that doesn‘t know about that yet, hasn‘t‘ run into a situation where the reps and judges have been calling them on it, they‘re very cooperative when we tell them what we expect out of them--even apologetic. This whole thing started when a director approached me and said: —You know, the way some of these teams are dancing on stage, I have to cover some of my little girls‘ eyes when people are on stage dancing.“ She said, —Can we not do anything about this?“ and from there we went. I don‘t want to be associated with something where you feel like you have to cover the little kids‘ eyes because of what you‘re putting on stage. A child, for goodness sake, is part of the family and very influenced by what they see. So, we don‘t ever want to be in a situation where we‘re presenting things that would start a child down the wrong road by what they‘re seeing done and called —Hall of Fame.“

AH: How do these rules apply at ACHF competitions outside of Maggie Valley? LM: If it‘s any [American Clogging] Hall of Fame competition, they have the same rules. And we expect them [dance teams] to abide by them. I know from seeing some of the flyers from other organizations that sanction, they promote: —We don‘t have a dress code,“ and all I can think is: —Poor you.“ You know, our society of today is sadly lacking in self respect in the way they present their bodies when they go anywhere. And

193 Bill Nichols, interview by author. March, 2009.

70

we don‘t want to promote that on our stage at [American Clogging] Hall of Fame functions. I can‘t control what you wear when you come in and out of our building. But I can control what you wear when we allow you to get on stage. What we present to the audience, we do expect it to be family oriented.

AH: What about the music? Are there expectations about what music is allowed? LM: We don‘t‘ allow any kind of music that‘s got bad language in it. If its music that‘s got dirty implications in it, they‘ll get called on it also. Unfortunately, there‘s a lot of the music that some of us older folk aren‘t used to listening to: rock and rap and whatever these things are called. I don‘t‘ even know what they‘re saying, you know, I can‘t understand what they‘re saying. So somebody might point it out to me later, you know, —Why didn‘t you call them on that?“ Because I don‘t understand what their music is saying. I‘m listening to the beat and watching to see if they are staying with the beat or whatever. I have no clue what the music is saying. Of course if its country or pop or light rock usually I‘m going to recognize it. And even religious music. There are some teams that dance to religious music. Of course, we don‘t have any problem with that. There are some teams that we‘ve had to ask to clean up their music and they do. You know, they‘re [the director/choreographer] not paying attention either when some of these singers feel the need to curse, and they‘re just dancing because of the good beat of the music and then it‘s like an —oh my gosh“ situation when it‘s pointed out to them. And they don‘t mind, cleaning up the music like that.194

During my interview, Lib Mills evidenced liminality (relief achievable outside of everyday life) at ACHF competitions: society lacks self respecting citizens and ACHF has created an environment, through strict sanctions, where conservative families can rely on the promise of —family friendly,“ consistent with the Protestant concern of nurturing youth towards a savory life path. Competition rules reflect the sanctity of the Stompin‘ Ground and ACHF. General rules guiding ACHF competitions ban alcohol outright, restrict bodily expressions of vulgarity or promiscuity (—not family oriented“), and restrict the modesty of clothing–mostly directed towards the female dancers. The following is printed in the 2009 ACHF —Competition Rules and Information“ document, available through the organization or as a download on the ACHF website: 7. Disqualification œ Annual Championships in Maggie Valley œ for a dancer dancing more than twice in a Contemporary dance category. All Solos and Duo/Duets - violation of the dress code AND Body moves not family orientated

8. DRESS CODE: O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing in ALL categories!

194 Lib Mills, interview by author, March 4, 2009.

71

9. DISQUALIFICATIO: Use of alcoholic beverages on premises!!!195

Alcohol was discouraged by Lunsford at MDFF, but with a different sense of priority. For Lunsford, alcohol posed the problem of unreliability, especially among musicians. He said, —You have to choose people you can depend on…You may have the finest musician in the world, but he may not be reliable. He may drink too much. You may have to choose somebody who‘s not as good a musician but who can be depended on.“196 Loyal Jones reported on Lunsford‘s attitude on alcohol through several of his interviews: —He liked the good old-fashioned whiskey that they made back in the mountains–the genuine article,“ Artus Moser continued. —When Dr. Emrich, the director of the folklore section of the Library of Congress came down to visit his festival, Bascom presented him with a pint of ”that good old mountain dew.‘ He [Lunsford] would take a nip, but he was not a drinker. He would not get drunk, but we would take a nip all right.“ Lunsford sometimes mentioned drinking to be sociable, but he had little use for people who could not control their drinking, especially musicians who couldn‘t be depended on. —Alcoholic beverages were on his list of taboos…other than a little eggnog at Christmas,“ his daughter wrote. —He used to say that a fellow did not have much on the ball if he had to depend on whiskey to have a good time or express himself. He loved people, all people. He got his ”highs‘ from being with them and sharing music and dancing and yarns.“197

Loyal Jones‘ interviews reveal Lunsford‘s cautious tolerance of alcohol, reserved for certain social situations. For Lunsford, drunkenness was more threatening than alcohol itself. Lunsford‘s daughter shows a similarity between Kyle Edwards, owner of the Stompin‘ Ground, and her father: the use of dance and music as a positive —high.“ Observations I made onsite in 2005, the ACHF National Championship started with a Christian prayer followed by the congregational singing of the Christian hymn, —Amazing Grace.“ In a recorded interview in 2006 with a clogger from WNC now living in San Francisco, Joey Hill and I often strayed from formal question and answer format and commenced in —talking shop.“ We were both raised in Southern Protestant homes and understood the dominant Protestant make-up of competitive clogging teams that compete in the mountains of WNC. At the time, I had started a clogging team in the university community of Gainesville, Florida, and the make-up of my new group was unlike teams I

195 Bold face emphasis as published in: American Clogging Hall of Fame, —Competition Rules and Information“ (2009), 1.

196 Quoted in Jones, 59.

197 Ibid., 90.

72

danced with or witnessed in the past. In addition to the typical WASPs, my team included children that were Catholic, Jewish, Egyptian, African, and African-American. I expressed during my interview that bringing (and being responsible for) this new group to ACHF —Nationals“ gave me a different perspective on the religious nature of competitive clogging events. Some of my students and their families expressed, not discontent, but culture shock in the environment of open Christianity, especially during the prayer (with the specific salutation, —Lord Jesus“) and the congregational hymn singing. Joey Hill responded to my story: Yeah, I can see that. But at the same time, too. It is a dance that is very grounded in a culture. And I wouldn‘t expect to go to a Jewish dance and not hear Jewish prayers. And there is a lot to be said about people being willing to take chances and stepping into a different comfort environment. These people just have to accept, when you go into that environment [pause] and I don‘ t think the dominant culture has any more responsibility to shed its [pause] you know they‘re not making you be here? You know what I‘m saying? I think everyone gets skippy about these things as they get older. I probably have major disagreement from some people whose opinions I respect a great deal, cause I get more and more conservative about these things. But the idea of me going into a Jewish wedding and expecting them not to sing Jewish prayers or dance the hora–its ridiculous.198

This expression of clogging culture in WNC, as demonstrated in my interview with Joey Hill, projects Christian tribalism. In this model, clogging can serve as a ritual expression of heritage which is intrinsically Christian. The illusion can become a real experience in a world made through rules, pilgrimages, ritual processes, and leveling communitas. As demonstrated in my interview with Joey Hill and in the 1934 MDFF program mentioned earlier in this chapter, the illusion of a community where dance and music shared sacred meaning became, for many, a reality. People can gain access to both Christian and ethnic heritage through clogging ritual expression; their ability to do so relies only on their ability to believe Christian tribalism is possible. As illustrated by Lib Mills, the obsessive concern with family oriented-ness is praised by many participants (as Lib Mills stated, by families, not just directors). Organizations such as NCHC and ACHF were established to communicate or normalize clogging by standardizing rules and categories. ACHF, with its permanent National Championship held at the Stompin‘ Ground in WNC, went a step further in standardizing values, incorporated into the rules in which the dances are judged. The civil religious sanctity of the Stompin‘ Ground was codified by the sanctioned rules of ACHF.

198 Joey Hill, interview by author, February, 2006.

73

At ACHF regional competitions, a team must place first or second in a specific category in order to receive an invitation to compete at the National Championship held each October at the Stompin‘ Ground. During the 2009 season, twenty-three regional competitions were held, including events in the following (exhaustive list of) states: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.199 As Lib Mills stated during her interview, the rules that govern the National Championship at the Stompin‘ Ground are enforced at regional competitions sanctioned by ACHF. The establishment of institutionalized competitions, governed by a universal set of policies, transfers the sanctity of the Stompin‘ Ground to way points along the strata of ACHF pilgrimage including state and county fairs, high school auditoriums, civic centers, and other regional venues for competition. ACHF competitions resemble Turner‘s modern Christian pilgrimage, but they also contrast in some degree. Turner claimed that modern Christian pilgrimage tended to have liminoid characteristics (—open, optational, not conceptualized as religious routine“) rather than liminal (—belonging to the mid- stage in a religious processual structure consisting of rites of separation, limin or margin, and reaggregation“).200 According to Turner, modern Christian pilgrimages —tend to be generated by the voluntary activity of individuals during their free time.“201 Turner acknowledges that even organized group pilgrimage still relies on voluntary action. However, ACHF teams differ from groups in the level of interdependency among individuals within the group. Teams rehearse together and qualify at regional competitions together and thereby individual team mates assume an obligatory responsibility to each other, —we‘re all in this together.“ After all, an eight-couple square dance team cannot compete without its eighth couple. Although the individual has the ultimate say in participation and can, at any time, remove his or herself from the team, there is a pressure that must be recognized in teams that might not exist in general groups. In a youth or family situation, there might also be obligation enforced by family policy or patriarchy. I remember a —you started it, you‘re going to finish it“ policy in my own family that informed my commitment to sports —when the chips were down,“ and especially 4-H swine raising which always seemed like a better idea before the day-to-day care taking was well in progress. My

199 American Clogging Hall of Fame, —ACHF Calendar of Events œ 2009“ (2009).

200 Turner and Turner, 231.

201 Ibid, 232.

74 parents never had to force me to finish a clogging season, but I remember it happening among team mates who became distracted or diverted by other activities or interests. Through team pilgrimage and patriarchal dogma, ACHF reverts to pseudo-liminal, pseudo- tribalism. In Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure, Turner describes two types of liminality: rituals of status elevation and cyclical and calendrical ritual. ACHF, with is seasonal calendar of competition events and its annual National Championship held in Maggie Valley each October, qualifies as the latter. Turner explains calendrical ritual as a process —in which, at certain culturally defined points in the seasonal cycle, groups or categories of persons who habitually occupy low status positions in the social structure are positively enjoined to exercise ritual authority over their superiors.“202 Through ACHF pilgrimage, clogging Christians are elevated from martyrdom in the secular world, enjoined in an environment of Christian fellowship, shared faith in the —family friendly“ promise, and open Christian worship. Again, the illusion of homogeneous communitas camouflages the extent to which others share such intense sacred motivation–on the very same teams, in the very same pilgrimages, in the very same clogging rituals. Teams from various communities compete at regional competitions for the opportunity to pilgrimage to Maggie Valley in the height of fall colors to experience a retreat from the mundane, self respectlacking society, to participate in lived Christianity through bodily veneration of neighbors (and thus, their Creator) in a —family friendly“ environment, and to experience open Protestant worship alongside —wholesome“ dancing and music at the height of the of a journey, the central ceremony of complimentary opposition. This pilgrimage is undertaken within a familiar group of team mates and families, outward to a far-off Clogging Mecca. Turner writes: But in the present age of plural values, increasing specialization of function and role, and potent mass communication (the publication explosion, in particular, has brought the whole of man‘s past within the range of all literate people, in cheap paperbacks), pilgrimage–with its deep nonrational fellowship before symbols of transmundane beings and powers, with its posing of unity and homogeneity (even among the most diverse cultural groups) against the disunity and heterogeneity of ethnicities, cultures, classes, and professions in the mundane sphere–serves not so much to maintain society‘s status quo as to recollect, and even to presage, an alternative mode of social being, a world where communitas, rather than a bureaucratic social structure, is preeminent.203

202 Turner, Ritual Process, 167.

203 Turner and Turner, 39.

75

A process rich in processes, the —baptism of culture“ sanctified a pilgrimage, fueled by the inertia of a root paradigm. From MDFF to ACHF, team clogging already underwent a number of ritual transformations. Team clogging originally attracted tourist spectators seeking distraction from the mundane in their own lives and developed systematically into a culture where tourist participants (cloggers) and familiar spectators actively engage in embodied ceremonies of liminality. In revealing this phenomenon, I do not wish to indicate that all American Clogging Hall of Fame participants are Christian, nor do I wish to indicate that American Clogging Hall of Fame is intolerant of other religions or cultures. The importance of this chapter to my research is to further demonstrate that team clogging can serve as an expression of spiritual (or secular) identity, ethnic identity, or tribal identity. More amazing in this discovery, the power of communitas relies on an experience that is shared. However, many of the cloggers are unaware that identities expressed in this shared experience are diverse. Edith Turner wrote, —those who journey to pray together also play together in the secular interludes between religious activities.“204 In ACHF, the reverse is true: many who journey to play together, pray together; the differences between those who do and don‘t are clogged away.

204 Ibid, 37.

76

CONCLUSION

I have demonstrated in this thesis how competitive team clogging originated (starting in 1928 as the emergence of clogged-through square dance). The excitement of cloggers on stage is met with an area that is equally exciting for future study. I have demonstrated how ritualized competitive clogging and ACHF pilgrimage serves to maintain unity within an otherwise diverse group of individuals. I have specifically demonstrated how the introduction of clogging at a folk festival in WNC attracted various participants tracing disparate heritage and identity within common cultural reservoirs in Appalachia, or Appalachia by way of the South. I have also demonstrated team clogging‘s ability to level cleavages between ideological beliefs and intensity of spiritual involvement (including spiritual worship through team clogging). For four years I have formally struggled with the complexity of clogging heritage. I followed it down the ethnic path until I found individuals who did not share ethnic interests in team clogging. I turned to religion which, at first, made sense to me through my own experiences in a rural WASP community that took part in clogging communitas and pilgrimages. Clogging wasn‘t exactly worship for me growing up, but let‘s just say we knew all the words to the gospel songs we clogged to and we didn‘t miss church unless we were on a clogging pilgrimage. If the teammates would argue with each other, an adult might intervene with —Do you think Jesus likes the way you are acting?“ I traced religion from many angels: specific Protestantism, civil religion, etc. For every variable I tested, my theories always seemed flawed. This constant failure was very frustrating, especially since I felt like I should know the ins and outs of the clogging world; I have participated in organized clogging for 21 years and I am now a team director and a certified judge. I have been self-gratified in my journey as I uncovered new history along the way, recorded new interviews, made new friends, and distilled various myths. However, I still wasn‘t able to get to the root of clogging which I understood to be a folk dance. But who were the folk? What defined our shared clogging heritage? I have travelled internationally, representing the United States in various international folk festivals (including Brazil, Costa Rica, Canada, and Wales) where I heard members of folk dance groups from other nations eloquently explain the significance of the culture their dances represented–fishing villages in Italy and

77

shepherds on stilts in France. When it was my turn to share, I always found myself in that familiar awkwardness, like asking about dinosaurs in Sunday school. —Back when…,“ it usually started. My frustration was more intense for not being able to define the heritage that the clogging community was so avid for boasting. It is common to hear cloggers say that clogging is —part of our heritage“ or —in our blood.“ T-shirts can be purchased with slogans like —Clogging is Life (the rest is just details),“ —If clogging were any easier, it would be called football,“ —Clogging is friendship set to music,“ —My husband said I had to chose between him and clogging… I‘m gonna miss him,“ —Instant cloggers…just add music,“ and even —Jesus is his name, Clogging is my game.“ Such material aspects of the organized team clogging world reflect the larger-than-life identities expressed through participation in team clogging. It wasn‘t until I discovered Victor Turner‘s theories that I realized that team clogging was an expression of many heritages and functioned as a vehicle for building intense unity among all participants, regardless of the micro to macro scale of geographically-defined ethnic heritage, or level of religious intensity. All of this diversity is usually overlooked as —dominant culture.“ However, Turner‘s theories enlightened my study on how dominant culture casts a shadow of communitas, unifying individuals who would otherwise never be in contact and who are also quite diverse. Where I was frustrated before I now see functioning rituals: How can cowboy and hillbilly iconography exist on the same competition stage and nobody seems to see the difference? Moreover , the frontiersman and 49er? This functions to allow greater numbers of people to share an experience and the iconographic confusion allows the intense bonds to form. The vagueness which is intrinsic to the meaning (not the definition) of authenticity, heritage, and ethnicity, serves an important role in unifying the largest, most diverse assemblage possible. Thus, the aspects of team clogging that have been the most complex–those great sources of inner clogging-world conflict regarding interpretation of traditional authenticity and acceptance of creativity– are what give the form its widest appeal. The greatest shared pleasure gives clogging its greatest chance of surviving in perpetuity--functioning as propagated immortality. Controversy functions to keep the form from expanding too suddenly, without first building consensus through compromise. Together, complexity and controversy control the boundaries and cohesion of the team clogging world on every level– including within sanctioning organizations such as ACHF and within the clogging teams as units in themselves. Inside these boundaries, hiding mostly in the realm of —dominant culture,“ are a diverse group of individuals that literally clog away their differences.

78

APPENDIX A

TEAM CLOGGING TIMELINE (Assembled by author)

1928 —Folk Frolic“ organized by Bascom Lamar Lunsford at Rhododendron Festival, Asheville, North Carolina. (June)

1930 Mountain Dance and Folk Festival emerges as an independent event in Asheville, North Carolina.

1935 According to Kyle Edwards (interview in Talking Feet), Clogging appears at a square dance competition in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

1939 Lunsford brings selection of Appalachian entertainment to White House to entertain British Monarchy, including Sam Queen and the Soco Gap Dancers. Queen Elizabeth says their dance resembles English clogging.

1950 Square dance team founded at Mars Hill College and tours with Bascom Lamar Lunsford in the southwest. Lunsford gives the team a name, Bailey Mountain Square Dance Team.

1952 Ralph Sloan and the Tennessee Travelers introduce —Appalachian style“ footwork and square dance on the Grand Ole Opry.

1957 The Stoney Mountain Cloggers first appear on the Grand Ole Opry.

1959 Separate categories are created at Mountain Dance and Folk Festival for cloggers and smooth dancers.

1965 David Hoffman films Lunsford, regional musicians, and dancers including James Kesterson and the Smokey Mountain Cloggers (precision style), in making —Bluegrass Roots.“

1968 —Big John“ Waters teaches Violet Marsh team clogging in Chamblee, Georgia.

1969 Sam Queen murdered.

1970 Violet Marsh remembers first seeing clogging line dance, The Real McCoy.

1972 First performance by neo-traditional team cloggers, The Green Grass Cloggers, at Cherry Hospital in New Bern, North Carolina.

79

1973 Violet Marsh relocates to Northern California and starts the Diablo Mountain Cloggers (1973-1976) At that time, Lucy Johnson was teaching in Southern California, and Jerry Duke was teaching at UCLA.

1973 Bascom Lamar Lunsford dies.

1974 Bailey Mountain Cloggers founded at Mars Hill College, built on legacy of Bailey Mountain Square Dance Team.

1976 National Clogging and Hoedown Council created to standardize clogging competition rules, train judges, standardize clogging steps, and create a network of sanctioned competitions. (Bill Nichols, Violet Marsh, Sheila Popwell, etc.)

1977 Stoney Mountain Cloggers tour with Charlie Daniels Band (1977-1978).

1978 Stoney Mountain Cloggers appear on Hee Haw.

1979 The Fiddle Puppets, professional dance troupe, organized by four members of theGreen Grass Cloggers: Rodney Sutton, Amy Sarli, Ed Carson, and Eileen Carson.

1980 Ralph Sloan (Grand Ole Opry) dies. His brother, Melvin Sloan, pledges to continue his legacy by taking over the Tennessee Travelers and continuing a tradition of team clogging on the Grand Ole Opry.

1980 Tennessee Moonshine Cloggers appear on Hee Haw.

1981 American Clogging Hall of Fame is founded at the Stompin‘ Ground in Maggie Valley, North Carolina; ACHF is established to honor past leaders in the development of clogging.

1981 The Buffalo Chips form in Atlanta (Gay men‘s clogging team organized by members of a gay bowling league who recruited Bonnie Roberts as their instructor).

1981 The Barbary Coast Cloggers formed as an all male clogging group in San Francisco. The group recruited Janice Hanzel as their instructor.

1982 The Grand Ole Opry‘s Tennessee Travelers are renamed the Melvin Sloan Dancers.

1982 Stoney Mountain Cloggers (Ben Smathers) sues Charlie Daniels Band for $1 million over video recording rights.

1983 The Melvin Sloan Dancers are invited by President Reagan to perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

80

1984 Mike Seeger starts documentary work for Talking Feet, after receiving a grant from the Smithsonian Institute in 1983.

1985 The Buffalo Chips give their final performance, dedicated to their publicist Gene Williams who was in a hospital several blocks away. Williams died less than a month after, the first of over half of the Buffalo Chips that would die from AIDS.

1990 Ben Smathers of the Stoney Mountain Cloggers (Grand Ole Opry) dies.

1992 Mike Seeger‘s documentary film and accompanying book, Talking Feet was released.

1992 Stoney Mountain Cloggers retire from Grand Ole Opry.

1994 Fiddle Puppets changes its name to —Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble,“ led by Eileen Carson.

1996 NCHC publishes the Encyclopedia of Traditional Appalachian Square Dance, by Bill Nichols and Garland Steele.

1998 Clogging Champions of America formed —to generate more activity and interest in clogging and competition, to promote a spirit of fun and fellowship, and to make sure the beginner clogger will get to enjoy competing as much as the clogger who has been in it for years.“

2003 Clogging Competition held at XXVI AU Junior Olympic Games.

2009 Dynamic Edition appears on MTV‘s America‘s Next Dance Crew.

81

APPENDIX B

LUNSFORD COLLECTION AND MDFF TIMELINE (Courtesy of Mountain Dance & Folk Festival, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville)

1920 Bascom Lunsford composed Mountain Dew, released by Brunswick in 1928 and performed by Lulu Belle and Scotty Wiseman, Grandpa Jones and Roy Acuff.

1922 Lunsford, with the help of Dr. Frank C. Brown of Duke University make the first recordings of Lunsford's collection on wax cylinder recordings.

1925 Lunsford collaborates with newly formed NC Folklore Society to preserve his ongoing collection. Dr. Robert Winslow Gordon and Lunsford collaborate on archiving the ongoing collection. Lunsford introduces Jimmy Rodgers to Ralph Peer of Victor Records.

1927 Lunsford was asked to introduce a group of musicians and dancers from various Appalachian communities at Asheville's Rhododendron Festival. The event was called The Mountain Folk Song and Dance Festival. The popularity of the performances convinced Lunsford to continue this presentation yearly. He would later rename the event the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival.

1928 Referring to the Festival, the June 7th edition of the Asheville Citizen, reported that it "...should be a permanent thing, something that might be continued from year to year as a festival of western North Carolina - on the order of the greatest festivals of other nations which have been handed down from generation to generation."

1929 30 and 1 folk Songs for the Southern Mountains is published. It was collaborated with composer/conductor Lamar Stringfield on a ballad and folk song collection.

1930 The first year the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival is held under this name and as an individual event.

1931 While serving as reading clerk at the House of Representatives in Raleigh from 1931-34, Lunsford and the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival won the advocacy of Democratic Floor Leader Sam J. Ervin of Morganton. Ervin helped by lending more credibility to Lunsford's work as well as the Festival.

82

1934 Sara Gertude Knot attended the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival and was so impressed that she asked Lunsford to assist her in founding the National Folk Festival in St. Louis in 1935. Her experience at the Festival in Asheville gave her an awareness of the value of traditional American culture.

1935 Dr. George W. Hibbit of Columbia University invited Lunsford to record the mountain folk songs collected over the years. A collection of 315 items (7 volumes) was produced by memory alone and is now in the Smithsonian archives.

1939 Lunsford and Mountain Dance and Folk Festival performers entertained the visiting King and Queen of England at the White House by request of President Roosevelt and Eleanor.

1946 The Mountain Dance & Folk Festival prompted other serious towns and cities to see the value of preserving truly American traditions. John Lair of Renfro Valley, KY collaborated with Lunsford to establish Renfro Valley Barn Dance.

1948 With Lunsford Mountain Dance and Folk Festival as a model, Chapel Hill and Raleigh, NC collaborated with Lunsford to establish the Carolina Folk Festival in Chapel Hill, and the C State Fair Folk Festival in Raleigh.

1965 National Educational Television produced a one-hour documentary, Ballad of a Mountain Man. It traced Lunsford through the back roads of his home, Madison County, to the homes of several of the performers he often invited to his festival.

1967 Shindig on the Green is born as a progeny of the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival. Each Saturday night at 7 PM from July 4th weekend through Labor Day weekend, performers of all ages and abilities gather on the lawn of the City/County Plaza in downtown Asheville, NC to play for the enjoyment of it. A stage showcases as many of the performers as possible until 10 PM. The event is free with plenty of lawn space and entertainment.

1982 North Carolina Public Television documentary, From Our House to the White House (1/2 hour) showcases several elements of traditional dance and music along with historic highlights of the Festival.

1985 A North Carolina Public Television documentary, This Time Each Year highlights a biography of Lunsford as taken from perspectives of those who knew Lunsford and the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival.

83

1986 The Southeast Tourism Society listed the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival as one of the top 20 Events from 1986 through 1991.

1989 North Carolina Public Television documentary, Mountain Dance & Folk Festival is released and is a recipient of a television production award. It was aired nationally in 1990 with each airing of the documentary receiving top Neilson ratings for each 1/2 hour of broadcast.

1991 Mountain Dance & Folk Festival and Shindig on the Green received top billing in the Southeast Tourism Society's Top 20 Events.

1995 Mountain Dance & Folk Festival was recognized by the Governor's Year of the Mountains promotional program as one of NC's premium events of prestige and authenticity.

84

APPENDIX C

2008-2009 ACHF RULES AND TEAM CLOGGING CATEGORIES (Courtesy of American Clogging Hall of Fame)

AMERICA’S CLOGGIG HALL of FAME Competition Rules & Information Sanctioned Categories:

Traditional Couple Freestyle Footwork Traditional Couple Precision Footwork Contemporary Precision 6 Cpl Southern Appalachian 4 Cpl Precision Line Show 8 Cpl Southern Appalachian 6 or 8 Cpl Precision Line Formations Acapella Country Hoedown 6 or 8 Cpl Smooth Traditional Line 4 or More Cpl Hoedown 4 or More Cpl Precision Small Team Exhibition Running Set Hoedown Running Set Precision Exhibition Props Exhibition

onSanctioned Categories: Buck and Wing (Traditional Duet) Traditional Duo MAX TIME LIMITS: Contemporary Duet Contemporary Duo 8 minutes - All Traditional Categories Show Duo/Duet Short Duo/Duet 5 minutes - 4 or More Cpl Open Precision Traditional Solos Contemporary Solos 4 or More Cpl Open Hoedown Flatfoot Acapella Solos Show (3 minutes setup time) Choreographed Solos Open Acapella Team - Stomp Small Team Line Small Team Line Formations 3 minutes - Line, Line Forms, Trad. Line,

Small Team Show Production (Super Teams) Exhibition, Small Teams, Props Exhibition, Acapella Team,

Duo/Duets (1 minute setup time)

MI TIME LIMITS: OE HALF of MAX for ALL Contemporary Categories TIMING for Teams: Freestyle FOOTWORK Categories - Begins when last dancer starts dancing and ends when the first dancer stops dancing. Precision FOOTWORK Categories - Begins when the first dancer starts dancing and ends when the last dancer stops dancing. Age Divisions: Team and Duo/Duet Solo Flatfoot (Males & Females compete against each other) Tiny Tot 6and under 3 and under Pee Wee 7 - 9 4 - 5 16 - 19 15 and under Elementary 10 - 12 6 - 7 20 - 25 16 - 30 Junior 13 - 15 8 - 9 26 - 31 31 and over Senior 16 - 18 10 - 11 32 - 40 Young Adult 19 - 29 12 - 13 41 - 50 Adult 30 œ 50 14 - 15 51 and over Senior Adult 51 and over

Team age division is determined by AVERAGE age. Duo/duet age division is determined by age of oldest dancer.

General Information: 1. At the Annual Championships in Maggie Valley A dancer may only dance twice per contemporary dance category. NO limit for Traditional Categories. At regional competitions, there is no limit to the number of times a dancer may dance.

2. Callers of figures must dance on stage with the team.

3. 5 judges are required (At least 3 MUST be certified). Highest and lowest scores will be dropped and the 3 middle scores averaged.

4. The same 5 judges must judge a dance category. You may not use different judges for different age divisions for the same dance category.

5. A Rules Official will be in attendance and will have the final say regarding any rules infractions.

85

6. Point Deductions: A. A 5-point deduction will result if improper number of dancers is used. B. A 3-point deduction for dress code violation C. A 3-point deduction for body moves that are not family orientated D A 1-point deduction for every 15 seconds or portion thereof, exceeding or not meeting the given time limits. E. A 1 point deduction for each dancer not dressed correctly (Male position dancer must wear slacks. Female position dancer must wear skirt or dress) F. A 1-point deduction for placing dancers on stage. EXCEPTION: Tiny Tot age division. G. A 1 point deduction for a director being at the MC table, Scorers Table, or touching the sound equipment H. A 1-point deduction for not holding HOME position in Southern Appalachian, Smooth, 4 Couple Precision and 6 or 8 Couple Precision I. A 1-point deduction for couples not becoming active to perform small circle figures J. A 1-point deduction for each required figure not performed and each corner/ partner swing not performed K. A 1-point deduction for improper progression L. A 2-point deduction for everyone not dancing in A cappella team. A 1-point deduction for a dancer missing a step in A cappella Team 7. Disqualification œ Annual Championships in Maggie Valley œ for a dancer dancing more than twice in a Contemporary dance category. All Solos and Duo/Duets - violation of the dress code AND Body moves not family orientated 8. DRESS CODE: O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing in ALL categories! 9. DISQUALIFICATIO: Use of alcoholic beverages on premises!!!

ACHF COMPETITIO RULES 4 COUPLE PRECISIO 6 or 8 COUPLE PRECISIO

Dancers Minimum of 8 dancers for 4 couple. 6 or 8 couples - not both - Any number of males and females. See rule #6.

Figures MUST use SICILIAN SETUP for figures in 6 or 8 Couple Precision Traditional mountain figures. Minimum of 2 big circle figures. Minimum of 4 different small circle figures with progression between each figure. Corner/Partner swing required after each small circle 4 figures.

Dress Code Dancer dancing male position MUST wear slacks. Dancer dancing female position MUST wear dress or skirt. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. NO Fannies, NO Midriffs, NO Cleavage, NO ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Traditional drag slide steps are encouraged. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement 4 Couple PrecisionProgression must be on inside of set in a counter clockwise direction. 6 or 8 Couple PrecisionProgression must be on the circumference of the set in a counter clockwise direction. 6 or 8 Couple PrecisionCouples may not progress across center of set while performing small circle 4 figures. BothNo dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ no vocals. Music breaks allowed.

Callers Figures may be called but is not required.

Time Limit 8 minutes

86

SMOOTH

Dancers 6 or 8 couples œ not both - Any number of males and females. Must have an even number of couples. See rule #6.

Figures MUST use SICILIAN SETUP for figures. Traditional smooth mountain figures. Minimum of 2 big circle figures. Minimum of 4 different small circle figures with progression between each figure. Corner/Partner swing required after each small circle 4 figure.

Dress Code Dancer dancing male position MUST wear slacks. Dancer dancing female position MUST wear dress or skirt. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. NO Fannies, NO Midriffs, NO Cleavage, NO ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Gliding step on ball of foot

Movement Counter-clockwise movement on the circumference of the set in dance progression. Couples may not progress across center of set in small circle 4 figures. Couple oriented dance while performing figures and formations. No dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ no vocals.

Callers Figures must be called and heard from within the set.

Time Limit 8 minutes

RUIG SET HOEDOW and RUIG SET PRECISIO

Dancers 4 couples - Any number of males and females. See rule #6.

Figures English quadrille with 1 active couple (traveling) 1 Opening figure 1 Closing figure 4 different visiting couple figures led by 4 different couples. 3 connecting or break figures (break figure occurs at the end of the progression by the active couple when they return to their home position in the circle)

Dress Code Dancer dancing male position MUST wear slacks. Dancer dancing female position MUST wear dress or skirt. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision: Precision footwork using Running Step (performed using a soaring, graceful run on the ball of the foot) Active couples must not stop with running step. Variation allowed - Inactive couples may perform some rhythmic motion with no break when becoming active. Freestyle: Freestyle footwork using Southern Appalachian steps with rhythmic sound.

87

Movement Freestyle: Dancers must not start simultaneously. Precision: Dancers must start simultaneously Progression must be on inside of set in a counter clockwise direction. No dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ no vocals.

Callers Figures must be called and heard from within the set.

Time Limit 8 minutes

COUTRY HOEDOW Dancers 4 couples - Any number of males and females. See rule #6.

Figures Traditional mountain figures. Minimum of 2 big circle figures. Minimum of 4 different small circle figures with progression between each figure. Even and Odd Couples MUST start small circle figures in 4 Couple Precision

Corner/Partner swing required after each small circle 4 figures.

Dress Code Dancer dancing male position MUST wear slacks. Dancer dancing female position MUST wear dress or skirt. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Freestyle footwork using Southern Appalachian steps with rhythmic sound.

Movement Dancers must not start simultaneously. Couples must ”square set‘ prior to doing 1st figure. (Identify HOME position by swinging partner) Progression must be on inside of set in a counter clockwise direction. Quadrille - (4 couple square) formation with 1 or 2 couples traveling. Inactive couples must ”hold home position‘. Couples may not progress across the center of the set while performing small circle 4 figures. No dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ no vocals.

Callers Figures must be called and heard from within the set.

Time Limit 8 minutes

SOUTHER APPALACHIA

Dancers 6 or 8 couples œ not both - Any number of males and females. Must have an even number of couples. See rule #6.

Figures Traditional mountain figures. Minimum of 2 big circle figures. Minimum of 4 different small circle figures with progression between each figure. Even couples Must HOLD HOME position

88

Corner/Partner swing required after each small circle 4 figures.

Dress Code Dancer dancing male position MUST wear slacks. Dancer dancing female position MUST wear dress or skirt. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Freestyle footwork using Southern Appalachian steps with rhythmic sound.

Movement Dancers must not start simultaneously. Couple oriented dance while performing figures. Progression must be on inside of set in a counter clockwise direction. Couples may not progress across the center of the set while performing small circle 4 figures. No dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ no vocals.

Callers Figures must be called and heard from within the set.

Time Limit 8 minutes

LIE SMALL TEAM LIE (O SACTIOED)

Dancers Minimum of 5 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6(A & B). SMALL TEAM LIE: Minimum of 3 dancers, but no more than 8 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females

Figures Figures are not allowed.

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps 100% precision footwork. NO progressive steps are allowed.

Movement All dancers must face same direction at same time. Dancers are not allowed to face each other in the same line. All lines must move in the same direction at the same time. Dance must start and stop on stage. No clogging onto or off stage. No progressive movements. No dancing as couples. No rise & shine or individual dancing. No body contact is allowed. No stage movement that appears to be a stage production. Hand, head, body movements are encouraged. Jazz & floor movement is allowed œ don‘t over shadow footwork.

Music Any type of music is allowed. NO dirty language!

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 3 minutes MAX & 1.5 minutes MI

89

LIE FORMATIOS SMALL TEAM LIE FORMATIOS (O SACTIOED)

Dancers Minimum of 5 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A&B). Small Team Line: Minimum of 3 dancers, but no more than 8 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females

Figures Figures are not allowed.

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Dance must start and stop on stage. No clogging onto or off stage. Progressive movements are allowed. No dancing as couples. No rise & shine or individual dancing. No body contact is allowed. Trading of lines, twisting of lines, passing through lines, bending of lines, rotation, V‘s, columns, interaction of lines are allowed and encouraged. Hand, head, body movements are encouraged. Jazz & floor movement is allowed œ don‘t over shadow footwork.

Music Any type of music is allowed. NO dirty language!

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 3 minutes MAX & 1.5 minutes MI

TRADITIOAL LIE

Dancers Minimum of 5 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A & B).

Figures Figures are not allowed.

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps 100% precision footwork. Footwork MUST be traditional style steps - drag slide clogging. NO progressive steps are allowed.

Movement No hand, head, or body choreography. All dancers must face same direction at same time. Dancers are not allowed to face each other in the same line. All lines must move in the same direction at the same time. Dance must start and stop on stage. No clogging onto or off stage.

90

No progressive movements. No dancing as couples. No rise & shine or individual dancing. No body contact is allowed. No stage movement that appears to be a stage production. ONLY feet may touch the floor.

Music Country or Blue Grass or Traditional style music only -- with or without vocals.

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 3 minutes MAX & 1.5 minutes MI

EXHIBITIO SMALL TEAM EXHIBITIO

Dancers Minimum of 5 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A & B). Small team: Minimum of 3 dancers, Maximum of 4 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A&B)

Figures No figure restrictions. This dance may OT be recognized as choreography that fits any other category. (Except Small Team)

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Stage production numbers should be performed in this category. Dance must start and stop on stage. No clogging onto or off stage. Progressive movements are allowed. Body contact is allowed. Any kind of movement is allowed. Hand, head, body movements are allowed and encouraged. No Individual or Freestyle dancing O props are allowed.

Music Any type of music is allowed. NO dirty language!

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 3 minutes MAX & 1.5 minutes MI

PROPS EXHIBITIO

Dancers Minimum of 3 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A & B).

Figures No figure restrictions. This dance may OT be recognized as choreography that fits any other category.

91

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Stage production numbers should be performed in this category. Dance must start and stop on stage. No clogging onto or off stage. Progressive movements are allowed. Body contact is allowed. Any kind of movement is allowed. Hand, head, body movements are allowed and encouraged. BODY PROPS ARE allowed These props MUST be attached to the body and MUST NOT Leave the body the ENTIRE routine.

Music Any type of music is allowed. NO dirty language!

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 3 minutes MAX & 1.5 minutes MI

SHOW SMALL TEAM SHOW (on Sanctioned)

Dancers Minimum of 3 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A & B). Small team: Minimum of 3 dancers, but no more than 8 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females.

Figures No restriction on figures.

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps 80% clogging steps. 20% any other kind of steps.

Movement Theme is required. Stage choreography is required. Must not be recognizable as another category. Creative opening and closing is required. Heavy emphasis on creativity and showmanship. Simple stage props are allowed. Music, choreography, and costumes must all blend to carry out a theme. Any kind of movement is allowed. No dancer on stage not dancing at all.

Music Any kind of music is allowed NO dirty language!

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 5 minutes

Setup Time 3 minutes

92

Production (Super Teams!) (ot Sanctioned)

Dancers Minimum of 20 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females.

Figures No restriction on figures.

Dress Code O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps 80% clogging steps. 20% any other kind of steps.

Movement Any kind of movement is allowed. Props Are Allowed. This can be any kind of choreography œ no restrictions apply.

Music Any kind of music is allowed

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued - from on stage or off stage.

Time Limit 5 minutes

ACAPELLA TEAM **OTE RULES CHAGE FOR THIS CATEGORY

Dancers Minimum of 5 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. See rule #6 (A & B).

Figures No figure restrictions.

Dress Code O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Progressive steps are NOT allowed. Dancers must start together and end together. ALL dancers MUST dance at ALL times. (Missed steps are considered as not dancing,) O props are allowed. All sound MUST be caused by feet in clogging shoes on floor.

Movement Dance must start from, and end on stage. No dancing onto or off stage.

Music O music is allowed.

Callers Dance must NOT be called or cued except to begin routine - from on stage or off stage.

Judging Judges must face away from stage and judge the clarity and intricacy of performance.

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

93

Open A CAPELLA TEAM (The Stomp Category!) (ot Sanctioned)

Dancers Minimum of 3 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females.

Figures No figure restrictions.

Dress Code O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Progressive steps are allowed. Props are allowed. Emphasis on creativity.

Movement Dancers may enter and exit stage during routine

Music O music is allowed.

Callers Vocal cues are allowed.

Judging Judges will face stage and judge the clarity and intricacy of performance as well as how props, claps and vocal cues compliment the overall sound and footwork.

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

4 or MORE COUPLE PRECISIO **OTE RULES CHAGE FOR THIS CATEGORY Dancers Minimum of 8 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. Must have an even number of dancers. See rule #6 (A & C).

Figures Traditional mountain figures. Minimum of 1 big circle figure. Minimum of 2 different small circle figures

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Dancers must start simultaneously Progressive movements are allowed. Couple oriented dance while performing figures and formations. No dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ with or without vocals. Music breaks are allowed.

Callers Figures may be called, but is not required.

Time Limit 5 minutes

94

4 or MORE COUPLE HOEDOW **OTE RULES CHAGE FOR THIS CATEGORY

Dancers Minimum of 8 dancers - Any combination of males and/or females. Must have an even number of dancers. See rule #6 (A & C).

Figures Traditional mountain figures. Minimum of 1 big circle figure. Minimum of 2 different small circle figures.

Dress Code ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Freestyle Southern Appalachian footwork with a rhythmic sound. Dancers must NOT start simultaneously.

Movement Dancers must not start simultaneously Couple oriented dance while performing figures and formations. No dance lifts, pull throughs, splits, tosses, leaps, cartwheels, or flips are allowed.

Music Traditional music œ no vocals.

Callers Figures must be called and heard from within the set.

Time Limit 5 minutes

BUCK and WIG – (Duet)

Dancers 1 couple -- 1 male and 1 female.

Dress Code Traditional costumes (males must wear pants, females must wear skirts) ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Traditional drag slide steps are required. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Use the whole stage. Do not separate from partner and dance across stage from each other. No clogging onto stage or getting off stage.

Interaction Dance as couple holding hands as much as possible using plenty of arm turns.

95

Dance WITH EACH OTHER œ not just to the audience.

Music Country or Blue Grass or Traditional style music only, with or without vocals.

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

TRADITIOAL DUO

Dancers 1 couple -- male/male or female/female.

Dress Code Traditional apparel required. Males must wear slacks. Females may wear slacks or dress. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Traditional drag slide steps are required. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Use the whole stage. Do not separate from partner and dance across stage from each other. No clogging onto stage or getting off stage.

Interaction Dance as couple holding hands as much as possible using plenty of arm turns. Dance WITH EACH OTHER œ not just to the audience.

Music Country or Blue Grass or Traditional style music only, with or without vocals.

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

SHOW DUO/DUET

Dancers 1 couple -- Male/female or male/male or female/female.

Dress Code Should coordinate with theme. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps 80% clogging required. 20% other steps allowed.

Movement Theme is required. Stage choreography is required. Creative opening and closing is required. Heavy emphasis on creativity and showmanship. Simple stage props are allowed. Music, choreography, and costumes must all blend to carry out a theme. Any kind of movement is allowed.

Interaction Dance WITH EACH OTHER œ not just to the audience.

Music Any kind of music. NO dirty language!

96

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

Setup Time 1 minute

COTEMPORARY DUO

Dancers 1 couple -- male/male or female/female

Dress Code Any type of costumes. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Any type clogging steps allowed. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Use the whole stage. Do not separate from partner and dance across stage from each other except for short period. No clogging onto stage or getting off stage.

Interaction Dance as couple holding hands as much as possible using plenty of arm turns. (Includes male/male) Dance WITH EACH OTHER œ not just to the audience.

Music Any type of music. NO dirty language!

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

COTEMPORARY DUET

Dancers 1 couple -- male/female

Dress Code Any type of costumes. ALL outfits MUST be coordinated in material, style, and color. O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing

Steps Precision footwork. Any type clogging steps allowed. Progressive steps are allowed.

Movement Use the whole stage. Do not separate from partner and dance across stage from each other except for short period. No clogging onto stage or getting off stage.

Interaction Dance as couple holding hands as much as possible using plenty of arm turns Dance WITH EACH OTHER œ not just to the audience.

Music Any type of music. NO dirty language!

Time Limit 3 minutes max & 1.5 minutes min

97

Guidelines for SOLOS DRESS CODE: O Fannies, O Midriffs, O Cleavage, O ragged clothing! Contemporary, Traditional & Flatfoot

Time limit will be 20 seconds on Rise and Shine or 32 beats of music. Any kind of steps are allowed in Contemporary. ONLY traditional drag slide steps are allowed in the Traditional. Only old time drag slide low to the floor rhythmic steps are allowed in flatfoot solos Dancers will line up on stage facing judges. When music begins, start dancing and ”Go for it‘. Each dancer will have opportunity to Rise and Shine beginning with dancer on your right. Return to line on your left. When ”Rise and Shine‘ is complete, all dancers ”Go for it‘ till music stops.

Choreographed Solos

Time limit: 2 minutes maximum, 1 minute minimum. Interpretation of music (steps & moves). Emphasis on Creativity & style. Must contain 80% clogging. SIMPLE props are allowed IF USED! Music: Any type music may be used.

A Capella

Time limit will be 20 seconds on Rise and Shine. Any kind of steps are allowed. This is a dance of sound, rhythm, and patter. Be sure you have all three included in your steps.

Judges will turn their backs to dancers. Emcee will give number to judges and cue Dancer to —Start“. Dancer will stop dancing when emcee says, —STOP“.

Short Duo/Duets

Time limit will be 32 - 48 seconds on Rise and Shine. Any kind of steps are allowed.

Couples will line up on stage facing judges. When music begins, start dancing and ”Go for it‘ as a couple. Each couple will have opportunity to Rise and Shine beginning with coupler on your right. Return to line on your left. When ”Rise and Shine‘ is complete, all couples ”Go for it‘ till music stops.

98

APPENDIX D

SAMPLE ACHF JUDGE SCORE SHEET (SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN CATEGORY) (Courtesy of American Clogging Hall of Fame)

99

APPENDIX E

2008 ACHF NATIONALS œ ROSTER OF TEAMS/CITIES BY CATEGORY (Senior, Young Adult, and Adult Teams Only) (Courtesy of American Clogging Hall of Fame)

100

101

102

103

104

LIST OF REFERENCES

"CSR". "Ben Smathers of The Stoney Mountain Cloggers." February 1969: 25.

Adams, Natalie Guice and Pamela J. Bettis. Cheerleader! An American Icon. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2003.

Advertiser. "Opry's Ben Smatehrs At Mountaineer Opry." April 1, 1976.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1983.

Angel, Dan. "Lest We Forget: the Sloan Dancers - Grand Ole Opry." The Double Toe Times, March 1998: 8, 10.

Asheville Chamber of Commerce. Mountain Dance & Folk Festival: An Annual Event in Asheville . Carolina. Asheville, NC: Asheville Chamber of Commerce, 1945.

–. Seventh Annual Mountain Dance Contest and Mountain Music Festival. Asheville: Asheville Chamber of Commerce, 1934.

Asheville Citizen. "Famed Dance Teacher Arthur Murray Dies." March 4, 1991.

Asheville Times. "A Big Night In The Festival Program." June 6, 1928: 4.

Babcock, Barbara, "Introduction" in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babcock. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Battle, Bob. "Honoring Late Dancer: Lebanon To Stage Ralph Sloan Days." Ranger Texas Times, July 2, 1981.

Becker, Jane S. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk 19301940. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Belden, Henry M., and Arthur Palmer Hudson. The Frank C. Brown Collection of orth Carolina Folklore; Folk Songs from orth Carolina. Vol. Volume 3. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952.

Beliajus, Finadar Vytautas. Dance And Be Merry; Folk Dance Pageantry. Chicago: Clayton F. Summy Co., 1940.

105

Bellah, Robert N. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. Second Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Bellah, Robert N. and Phillip E. Hammond. Varieties of Civil Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in revaluation. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

–. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Billings, Dwight B., Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Louisville: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Billy Deaton Publicity Services. "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Town & Country Show)." September 10, 1991.

Blaustein, Richard. "Old-Time Fiddling and Country Dancing in North America: Some Reconsiderations." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Bloodworth, Bob. "Ben Smathers Returns Home as 'Opry' Star." Timesews, January 14, 1976.

Boles, John D., ed. A Companion to The American South. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Bonner, Frank. Clogging and the Southern Appalachian Square Dance. Akworth, GA: The Bonner Company, 1983.

Bowman, Glenn. "Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: The place of Jerusalem pilgrimage in the various Christianities" in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Bremer, Francis J. The Puritan Experiment: ew England Society from Bradford to Edwards. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.

Bremer, Thomas S. Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Brooks, Floyd and Eloise. Carolina Mountain Clogging: Clog and Hoedown Basics. Morganton, NC: Catalina Printing, 1977.

106

Brown, Tony. "Square Dancing: It's Not Just for Cowboys Anymore." Missouri Weekly Magazine (The Weekly Magazine of The Daily Dunklin Democrat), May 9, 1980: 2B, 3B, 4B.

Bruner, Edward M. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Buckman, Peter. Let's Dance: Social, Ballroom & Folk Dancing. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.

ButnerCreedmore ews. "For The Smathers Square Dancing Is A Way Of Life." November 13, 1975.

Burchenal, Elizabeth. FolkDances and Singing Games. New York: G. Schirmer, 1909.

Carolan, Linda. "Grand Ladies of Clogging: Linda Carolan Reminisces with Clogging Pioneers Violet Marsh and Sheila Powell." Double Toe Times: December, 2005.

Caudill, Harry M. ight Comes To The Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.

Casey, Betty. The Complete Book of Square Dancing (and Round Dancing). Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2000.

Century II Promotions, Inc. "Stars of The World Famous Grand Ole Opry Ben Smathers and the Stoney Mountain Cloggers with the "Up Town Grass"."

Chicago Park District. The Square Dance. Edited by Lawrence (Bud) Bol. Chicago: The Best Ford Co., 1958.

–. The Square Dance. Edited by Lawrence (Bud) Bol. Chicago: the Best Ford Co., 1950.

CitizenTimes. "(Graduation Announcement: Tommy Crook)." August 1, 1976.

Clabough, Casey Howard. "The Imagined South" in Sewanee Rview, vol 114, no. 2 (Spring, 2007).

"Clogging Hall of Fame champs perform on Opry."

Coleman, Simon and John Eade, eds., Reframing Pilgramage: Cultures in Motion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Conser, Jr., Walter H and Rodger M. Payne, eds. Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture. Louisville: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

Country Music ews. "Ben Smatehrs & the Stoney Mountain Cloggers Members of the Grand Ole Opry." 1973.

Daniels, Bruce C. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial ew England. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.

107

Dawidoff, Nicholas. In The Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Day, Douglas. "Folk Dance in the Early Years of the John C. Campbell Folk School." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Desmond, Jane C. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Donnelly, Peter. "Playing with Gravity: Mountains and Mountaineering" in Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience. Patricia Vertinsky and John Bale, eds. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Doss, Erica. TwentiethCentury American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Duke, Jerry. Clog Dance in the Appalachians. San Francisco, CA: Duke Publishing Co., 1984.

Eade, John and Michael J. Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Edwards, Joe. "Ben Smathers, Clogger Supreme." Chattanooga ews, Febraury 25, 1986.

–. "Smathers keeps the clogging beat." Meridian Star, February 16, 1986.

–. "Sloan requires dancers to have fun, fun, fun." The ITEM, May 20, 1990: 19.

–. "He's a 'Square' One, At Dancing, That Is." Tifton Gazette (Georgia), April 10, 1976.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006.

Eipper, Laura. "Opry's Ralph Sloan Dead of Cancer." Tennessean Living, March 13, 1980.

–. "Dancing Again: Ben Smathers Takes to Road." The Tennessean, July 11, 1980.

Eubank, Nathan, and Mickie Estes. An Overview of Square Dancing on the Grand Ole Opry. (Research Presented to the Country Music Foundation October 11, 1990), 1990.

Evans, Christopher H., and William R. Herzog. The Faith of 50 Million; Baseball, Religion, and American Culture. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.

Evans, Mari-Lynn, Robert Santelli, and Holly George-Warren. The Appalachians: America's First and Last Fronteir. New York: Random House, 2004.

108

Fallwell, Marshall. "Ralph Sloan's Been Keeping Time on the Opry for 20 Years." Country Music, November 1973: 18-20.

Farwell, Jane. Folk Dances For Fun. Delaware, OH: Cooperative Recreation Service, Inc.

Ford, Henry. Good Morning: After a Sleep of TwentyFive Years, Oldfashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. Dearborn, MI: The Dearborn Publishing Company, 1926.

Frost, William Goodell. "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains." Atlantic Monthly, March 1899. Reprinted in Appalachian Images inFolk and Popular Culture, ed. W.K. McNeil. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.

Gaut, Licia. "Opry Star Sets Special Show for Greg Wright." Timesews, March 23, 1977.

Gems, Gerald R., Linda J. Borish, and Gertrud Pfister. Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization. Champaign: Human Kinetics, 2008.

Goldsmith, Thomas. "Melvin Sloan celebrates anniversary." The Tennessean, March 23, 1990.

–. "Smathers dead at 61." The Tennessean, September 14, 1990.

Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978.

Grand Ole Opry. "Ben Smathers." Program, September 15, 1990.

–. Program, September 11, 1993.

–. "Melvin Sloan." Program, March 14, 1980.

H. F. (Herb) Greggerson, Jr. Herb's Blue Bonnet Calls. El Paso, 1946.

Hance, Bill. "Ralph Sloan's Dance Team Won't Die, Brother Vows." ashville Banner, June 11, 1980.

Hanson, Mary Ellen. Go! Fight! Win! Cheerleading in American Culture. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1995.

Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2004.

Harris, Jane A., Anne M. Pittman, Marlys S. Waller, and Cathly L. Dark. Dance A While: Handbook for Folk, Square, Contra, and Social Dance. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Highwater, Jamake, Dance: Rituals of Experience. New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions, 1978.

Hill, Samuel S., ed. The ew Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Volume 1: Religion. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

109

Hillas, Marjorie and Marian Knighton, Athletic Dances and Simple Clogs. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1934.

Hoffman, David. Bluegrass Roots,DVD (1964).

Hopkins, David. After Modern Art 19452000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hughes, Richard T. Myths America Lives By. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Hurst, Jack. "Daniels-Smathers pairing is unlikely hit." The Seattle Daily Times, July 19, 1981.

Ingram, Wayne (Buddy). "Cedars of Lebanon State Park: 60 Yeras of Music and Dance." The Tennessee Conservationist, July/August 1997: 13-16.

Inscoe, John. "The Discovery of Appalachia: Regional Revisionism as Scholarly Renaissance" in A Companion to the American South, ed. John B. Boles. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Jamison, Phil. "The Green Grass Cloggers: The Appalachian Spirit Goes International." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

–. ""Square Dancing" in Haywood County, North Carolina." The OldTime Herald; Volume 8; umber 2.

Jensen, Mary Bee and Clayne R. Folk Dancing. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1973.

Jones, Loyal. The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford: Minstrel of the Appalachians. Appalachian Consortium Press, 1984.

Ketchell, Aaron K. Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. London, England: University of California Press, 1998.

Klein, Maury. The Genesis of Industrial America, 18701920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Knowles, Mark. Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002.

Lawrence, John Shelton and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.

110

Leach, Ruth Ann. "Smathers' anniversary perfect date for debut." ashville Banner, September 18, 1990.

Lebanon Democrat. "Melvin Sloan Dancers win scholarships." January 16, 1998.

–. "Sloans inducted into America's Clogging Hall of Fame." October 1997.

Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Lunsford, Bascom Lamar. "Folk-Lore in Western North Carolina." The Southern Tourist, April 1926: 13-14.

Lunsford, Bascom Lamar and George Myers Stephens, It's Fun To Square Dance: Southern Appalachian Calls and Figures. Asheville: The Stephens Press, 1942.

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A ew Theory of the Leisure Class. New York, NY: Schocken Books, Inc., 1976.

Malone, Bill C. Don't Get above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. University of Illinois, 2006.

Malone, Jacqui. Steppin' On The blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Mansfield, Brian. "They're clogging off the stage: Stoney Mountain Cloggers retiring from the Grand Ole Opry." The Tennessean, September 11, 1993.

Martin, C. Brenden. Tourism in the Mountain South: A DoubleEdged Sword. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

Matthews-DeNatale, Gail. "Carrying on teh Old Mountain Clog Dance: Thoughts about Freestyle Clogging, An Interview with Bob Phillips." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

–. "Wild and Yet Really Subdued: Cultural Change, Stylistic Diversification, and Personal Choice in Traditional Appalachian Dance." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Meadows, Tracy A. "Traditional Old Time Appalachian Clogging Dying Out or Just Evolving?" The DoubleToe Times, February 2006: 12-16.

"Meet Melvin Sloan."

111

Melvin Sloan and The Tennessee Traverlers. "The Tennessee Traverlers."

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in SeventeenthCentury ew England. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966.

Murdoch, David Hamilton. The American West: The Invention of Myth. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001.

ashville Banner. "A First For Fritz." May 8, 1980.

Neese, Sandy. "Ben Smatehrs Dances Opry's Tune." The ashville Tennessean, October 1, 1982.

Nevell, Richard. A Time To Dance: American Country Dancing from Hornpipes to Hot Hash. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1977.

Neville, Gwen Kennedy. "Kin-Religious Gatherings: Display for an 'Inner Public'" in Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism, ed. Celeste Ray. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003.

–. Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Nichols, Bill, and Garland Steele. The Encyclopedia of Traditional Appalachian Square Dancing. Lilburn, GA: The National Clogging Leaders Organization, Inc., 1996.

O'Donnell, Red. "Ben Smathers - "Dancemaster of Tennessee"." ashville Banner.

–. "Sovine Quite Mill Job For Singing." ashville Banner, June 5, 1976.

–. "Summer TV Series Set For Starland Vocal Band." ashville Banner, June 16, 1977.

Oermann, Robert K. "Square Pegs: To the Melving Sloan Dancers, nothing's better than clogging." The Tennessean, June 6, 1998.

Ogilbee, Mark and Jana Riess. American Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys and Spiritual Destinations. Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2006.

Opry ews.March 11, 1998.

Opry otes.October 28, 1997.

–. June 9, 1997.

112

–.May 27, 1997.

Owens, Lee. American Square Dances of the West & Southwest. Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1949. Peterson, Richard a. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Pickin' and Singin' ews. "Cedar Hill Square Dancers Make Colorful Picture On Stage." January 31, 1955: 6.

Price, Joseph L., Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2006.

Ramsey, Gertrude. "Opera Hosue Was Entertainment Center Here for Many Years: Old Auditorium Also Was Popular; Great Names Were On Its Billboards." The Asheville Citizen, March 26, 1950.

Ray, Celeste. Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003.

Record World. "Cloggers Join Lennons." July 12, 1969.

Rhododendron Festival: Celebrating The Establishment of a ational Park in the Great Smoky Mountains. Asheville, 1928.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness (Revised Edition). New York, NY: Verso, 1999.

Sack, Daniel. Whtiebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Sims, Martha C. and Martine Stephens. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005.

Seeger, Mike. Talking Feet: Buck, Flatfoot and Tap, Solo Southern Dance of the Appalachian, Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountain Region. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1992.

Sessions, Robert, and Jack Wortman. Working In America: A Humanities Reader. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.

Sets In Order. The Caller/Teacher Manual for The Basic Program of American Square Dancing. Los Angeles: Sets In Order, 1969.

–. The Illustrated Plus Movements of Square Dancing. Los Angeles: Sets In Order, 1983.

Shaw, Lloyd. Cowboy Dances. Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1939.

113

–. The Round Dance Book. Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1950.

Shaw, Lloyd, and Frederick Knorr. Cowboy Dance Tunes. Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1949.

Sklar, Robert. MovieMade America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

Sloan, Melvin. ""To Jerry"." Letter, November 4, 1981.

Smart, Ninian. The Religious Experience. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1996.

-–. Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Smith, Frank H. The Appalachian Square Dance. Berea, KY: Berea College, 1955.

Smith, Raymond. Square Dance Hand Book. Dallas, 1947.

Spalding, Susan Eike. "Frolics, Hoedowns, and Four-Handed Reels: Variations in Old-Time Dancing in Three Southwest Virginia Communities." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Spalding, Susan Eike, and Jane Harris Woodside. "'We Tended To Project a Lot of Energy': Reminiscences about the Early Days of the Green Grass Cloggers, an Interview with Dudley Culp." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

–. "'You Have to Watch Your People': Calling Old-Time Appalachian Square Dance, an Interview with Veronia Miller." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

"Special Country Talent Award 1964: The Stoney Mountain Cloggers."

Spencer, Paul. Society and the Dance. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Starnes, Richard D. Creating The Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western orth Carolina. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Stearns, Marsall & Jean. Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1994.

114

Stoneback, H.R., Hillfolk Tradition: Images of Hillfolk in U.S. Fiction Since 1926 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University, Ph.D. dissertation) 1970.

Terry, Walter. The Dance in America. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1956.

The Asheville Citizen. "Asheville and Auditorium Praised By Minstrel Field." December 6, 1904.

–. "Dancing Club of Leicester Wins Contest: Rector's String Band First Among Orchestra In Folk Festival." June 6, 1928: 5.

–. "Festival Program." June 6, 1928: 5.

–. "Festival Reaches Climax in Gigantic Pageant." June 21, 1929: 1.

–. "Field Minstrel Co. Breaks Own Record: Over 4,000 People Witness Popular Production Here." September 12, 1915.

–. "The Arthur Murray System Brings The Greatest Dancing Teachers Right Into Your Home." September 28, 1920.

The Auditorium. "Al. G. Field Greater Minstrels (Program)." 1909.

–. "Al. G. Field's Greater Minstrels (Program/Ad)." September 11, 1908.

–. Fifth Annual Tour of Gus Hill's Minstrels (Program). Asheville, NC, October 12, 1920.

–. "Lew Dockstader And His Minstrels (Program/Ad)." March 10, 1909.

–. "The Al. G. Field Greater Minstrels (Program)." September 7, 1907.

The Double Toe Times. "America's Clogging Hall of Fame 1997 Annual Dance Off." March 1998.

"The Melvin Sloan Dancers: A Grand Ole Opry Tradition."

The Southern Tourist. "Music, Songs and Folklore of the South: An Asheville Attorney Who is Doing Much to Preserve and Popularize the Type in Vogue During Early Pioneer Days." March 1926: 61-62.

"The Stoney Mountain Cloggers." 1975.

"The Stoney Mountain Cloggers Retire (Press Release)."

The Sunday Citizen. "Field Minstrels Here on Friday: Show Is Said To Be Better Than In Recent Years." September 19, 1926.

Timesews. "Grand Ole Opry Stars to Perform in Hendersonville Jan. 17." December 16, 1975.

115

–. "Local News." April 12, 1979.

Tolman, Beth, and Ralph Page. The Country Dance Book. Toronto: Coles Publishing Company Limited, 1980.

Tomilson, Will. "Opry star sues Charlie Daniels for $1 million in tape tiff." ashville Banner, June 10, 1982.

Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987.

–. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

–. The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969.

Turner, Victor and Edith L.B. Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

Tyler, Paul L. "Square Dancing in the Rural Midwest: Dance Events and the Location of Community." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Urr, Jay, "Fiddle and Fiddlers' Conventions" in The ew Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol 12, Music, ed. Bill C. Malone. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Urry, John. Consuming Places. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Vaughan, William. Romanticism and Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Vertinwky, Patricia, and John Bale. Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Whisnant, David E. "Finding the Way between the Old and the New: The Mountain Dance and Folk Festival and Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Work as a Citizen." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

–. "Festivals, Folk Music" in The ew Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 12, Music, ed. Bill C. Malone. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008

Whiting Publicity & Promotions. "Legendary Dancer Melvin Sloan & His Late Brother Ralph To Be Inducted Into America's Clogging Hall of Fame." Press Release, October 25, 1997.

Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. North Carolina Press, 2002.

116

Wilson, John F. Public Religion in American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.

Woodside, Jane Harris. ""Clogging Is Country": A Precision Clogger's Perspective." In Communities In Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

117

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

J. Andrew —Andy“ Howard is completing his Master of Arts in American Dance Studies at Florida State University. Previously, Mr. Howard earned a Bachelor of Science from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Florida. Raised in LaBelle, Florida, he started clogging by age eight and is currently the founder and director of the Orlando-based percussive performing ensemble, American Racket. Under Mr. Howard‘s direction, the troupe has performed represented United States dance and music heritage in Brazil, Costa Rica, Wales, Quebec, and Manitoba in addition to national and regional events, conventions, festivals, competitions, theme parks, and as contracted entertainers for corporations including Goodyear Tires, National Association of Home Builders, United Arts of Central Florida, Hardrock Casino, Sea World Orlando, and Walt Disney World Resort. Recently, the company performed with 17 cloggers and four musicians representing eight states collectively in Festival Gigue en Fete in Sainte-Marie, Quebec. Currently, Mr. Howard resides in the College Park neighborhood of Orlando, Florida. He is employed fulltime as the Director of Public/Community Relations and Education by Orlando Opera Company. Mr. Howard received a Telly Award for writing and producing —Beyond The Music: 50 Years of Orlando Opera Company“ for Orange TV and two —Arts+ Awards“ by United Arts of Central Florida in 2007 for —Operational Excellence“ and —Collaborative Partnership.“ He currently serves on the Public Relations Committee for the Orlando/Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau, Special Events Committee for Orlando Repertory Theatre, Advisory Committee for Opera America‘s Young Friends of Opera initiative, Trustee for the Negro Spiritual Scholarship Foundation, and a member of Leadership Orlando Class 75.

118