The square dance is arguably the most emblematic dance in American history, and the most paradoxical. Born of the meeting between aristocratic European traditions and the raw reality of the Frontier, it became the very symbol of rural community life. But its history has its shadows too: the systematic erasure of African-American contributions, and a political instrumentalization that says a great deal about America's racial tensions.

The European Ancestors: From Cotillion to Quadrille

The square dance was not born all at once. It is the product of a long evolution that begins in the European parlors of the eighteenth century. A French dance called the cotillion became popular in America in the late eighteenth century. It was a square dance for four couples. Cotillions largely replaced the English country dance in American parlors, an enthusiasm for French fashion that perhaps honored the assistance France had given in the defeat of the British during the American Revolution.

Then came the quadrille. By the 1820s, a new type of French square dance called the quadrille had become the most popular dance of high society in America. Its popularity spread by flatboat and by steamboat, and the older Scots-Irish reels took on its four-couple formation. The Lancers, a five-part quadrille brought over from France, became especially popular in the cities of the East Coast and in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The dances of English origin and two eighteenth-century French dances (the cotillion and the quadrille, both of which involved couples in square formation and combinations of dance steps such as the "ladies' chain") were a primary influence on the square dance.

But these formal dances from Europe had a problem: they required prior instruction. The European dance forms that preceded the square dance were not guided by a dance caller. People learned the dances at dancing schools and from traveling dancing masters. Having the time and money to learn these dances set the middle and upper classes apart from the lower ones.

This is where the innovation that would change everything enters the stage.

The Invention of Calling: The African-American Revolution

The Southern Appalachian square dance is an American hybrid that incorporates elements of dance traditions from varied cultures. It is built on a foundation of Scots-Irish reels and includes elements of English, French, African-American, and Native American dance. The most crucial innovation (the dance caller) was the result of African-American ingenuity.

How did it happen? As early as 1690, enslaved fiddlers played for dances on the plantations of Virginia, and by the mid-eighteenth century, enslaved musicians were common at white social functions, both urban and rural, throughout the American colonies. By playing for the dances of white people, these musicians learned the figures by observation. African-American fiddlers often provided the music for dancing schools, dancing masters, and high-society balls. As they played their instruments, some also learned the dances and the figures.

And then, at some point, these musicians began to call out the figures aloud. The written evidence of the nineteenth century suggests that the first callers were African-American musicians, and that the practice of calling was common in Black culture across the country before it was taken up by white people and became an integral part of Appalachian dance.

The earliest known trace is paradoxical: it is a complaint. In 1819, the architect Benjamin Latrobe (the very man who worked on the United States Capitol) described a ball in New Orleans where a Black musician called out the figures, and grumbled about his "forced and vile voice." The man who scorned the practice hands us, without knowing it, its first written record. Of some fifty mentions of prompting recorded in the first half of the century, three European travelers thought it worth noting that the calling was done by an African-American musician: a sign that the practice was foreign to them, and that it was already well established where they came upon it.

This innovation was revolutionary: it made the dance accessible to everyone, with no need for prior lessons or dancing masters. It is thought that many of these musicians became callers because of the gap in literacy and formal training among the enslaved people of the time. Calling probably followed naturally from the call-and-response convention of African music, with the response, in this case, being the dance steps themselves.

This invention was not welcomed by all. The dancing master Charles Durang called the practice a "vile custom, spoiling the melody of the tunes." But calling won out despite the resistance, because it was quite simply more efficient, and more democratic.

The Regional Styles: Not One Square Dance, but Many

As the square dance spread across the continent, it diversified into several distinct regional styles:

The Southern and Appalachian square dance remains the closest to the folk roots. It includes elements of Scots-Irish, English, French, Native American, and African-American dances. It features in particular the Big Circle (a large circle that can hold an unlimited number of couples) and the traditional four-couple squares.

The Northeastern square dance, popular in New England, New York, and Canada, is more synchronized and draws more on the quadrille and cotillion for its figures. The couples face one another in pairs and may know the calls well enough to perform them without the help of a caller.

The Western square dance, more complex and dynamic, was influenced not only by the quadrille and the Appalachian dances, but also by the Spanish and Mexican dances of the Southwest. Although the Western square dance also borrowed from the quadrille and the contra dance, it was more closely tied to the Appalachian mountain dances such as the Big Set and the Kentucky Running Set. It was further influenced by movements from the Spanish and Mexican dances of the West and Southwest.

The Great Revival: Henry Ford and Lloyd Shaw

By the early twentieth century, the square dance was in decline. The couple dances (waltz, foxtrot, then the dances of the jazz era) had supplanted it in the ballrooms. Its survival depended on the isolated rural communities, especially in the Appalachians and the West.

Two men would bring it back to life: for radically different reasons.

The first is Henry Ford, the automobile magnate. Ford blamed Jews for the invention of jazz, which he held to be a plot to corrupt society, and believed he could counter it by returning America to dances and music he deemed traditional and white. In 1925, he announced that he would supplant jazz with the square dance and brought 200 instructors from the Midwest to Dearborn, Michigan. His dancing master, Benjamin Lovett, published the manual Good Morning in 1926. Above all, Ford pushed the dance into the public schools: by the late 1920s, about half of all American schools were teaching it.

The irony is staggering: Ford devoted a fortune to promoting, as a symbol of white purity, a dance born of racial mixing, and whose founding innovation, calling, had been invented by Black musicians. This episode, its ideological drivers, and the oversimplifications it gives rise to today are the subject of the article Henry Ford and Square Dance, in the In Focus section of Western Dance.

The second figure is a far brighter one. Lloyd Shaw, a school superintendent in Colorado Springs, Colorado, set about collecting and documenting the dances of the West in a way radically different from Ford's. Shaw gathered the dances and music of the small towns of the West to round out the material presented by Ford and Lovett, and in 1939 published Cowboy Dances, the first reference work on the Western square dance. Shaw trained the Cheyenne Mountain Dancers, a troupe of teenagers who toured more than 50 major American cities in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1949, the American Academy of Physical Education awarded a citation "to the Lloyd Shaw program of folk dance, as an outstanding contribution to physical education."

Shaw is generally recognized as the true architect of the square-dance revival in America: a revival founded on respect for tradition rather than an ideological agenda. His nickname, "Pappy," became synonymous with square dance across the country.

But behind "Pappy" there was Dorothy Stott Shaw, and she deserves her due. A poet, librarian, and teacher at the Cheyenne Mountain School, where she worked alongside Lloyd for forty-five years, she was far more than a wife in the shadows. She oversaw the costumes, guided and advised the young dancers, and handled the endless details that allowed Lloyd to devote himself to his work. Most historians now agree that she played a decisive role in the movement. After Lloyd's death in 1958, she became a major figure in square dance in her own right: executive secretary of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation from 1964 to 1979 and a sought-after lecturer, she carried the legacy alone for fifteen years.

The Golden Age and the Decline

After World War II, the square dance saw a considerable boom. The square dance rose from a regional folk dance to an American art form largely thanks to the efforts of Lloyd Shaw, who gathered dance instructions from callers all over the country to fold into a national physical-education program for high schools.

Square-dance clubs opened across the country. Callers began to extract individual calls from the traditional dances and recombine them creatively, giving rise to Modern Western Square Dance: a more codified form in which the caller improvises sequences in real time and the dancers must know a standardized repertoire of figures.

The square dance was designated the official folk dance in many states. The count varies widely by source (from 22 to 31 states) because some laws distinguish between a "state dance" and a "state folk dance," and because several designations were temporary. In 1982 and 1983, resolutions of Congress named the square dance the national folk dance of the United States, but here again, these were time-limited resolutions, never made permanent. This wave of designations, beginning in the 1970s, was the result of an organized campaign by the square-dance community to make it the national dance.

But from the 1980s on, modern square dance began to decline. The growing standardization of the calls (with difficulty levels codified by the Callerlab organization) made the dance less accessible to newcomers. The clubs aged without bringing in new blood. Today, traditional square dance survives mainly in the folk festivals and Appalachian communities, while the modern version maintains a dedicated but shrinking community of clubs across the country.

The Legacy: Far More Than a Dance

The history of the square dance is a mirror of America itself. A dance born of the meeting of every culture (English, French, Scottish, Irish, African, Native American, Spanish) that was by turns celebrated as a national symbol and instrumentalized for ideological ends. A dance whose founding innovation (calling) is the fruit of African-American genius, but whose official history long erased that contribution.

Today, historians such as Phil Jamison, author of Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance, are working to set the record straight about these multicultural origins. And in the mountains of North Carolina or the dance halls of Texas, the square dance goes on living in its most authentic form: that of a community dancing together, guided by the voice of a caller, in a formation centuries old but still alive.