Before the two-step, before the line dance, before even the square dance, there were the English Country Dances: dances born in sixteenth-century England that, on crossing the Atlantic, would lay the foundations of the entire American western dance tradition. Without them, nothing that followed (from the Cotton-Eyed Joe to the Boot Scootin' Boogie) would have existed in the form we know.

Birth in England: Dance in the Reign of Elizabeth I

The "English country dance" emerged as a distinct genre under the reign of Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. Elizabethan England was an age when dance loomed large in social life, from the royal court down to the rural villages. French and Italian dancing masters brought elegant, stately, and energetic dances to the court of Elizabeth I, who loved to dance. This art offered entertainment, encouraged social interaction, and also served a diplomatic function.

The queen herself was a passionate dancer. Her love of the musical arts gave rise to several generations of celebrated musicians and dancing masters, who created a whole body of dances practiced regularly by nobility and common folk alike. In 1589, when she was 55 years old, a member of her court reported that she still danced six or seven galliards every morning: a particularly athletic and demanding dance. Records from the period show that the country dance existed by the late sixteenth century, when "old and new country dances" were enjoyed at court.

But these dances were not reserved for the aristocracy. During the queen's visit to Cowdray in August 1591, "the country people presented themselves to her Majesty in a pleasant dance with taber and pipe, the Lord Montague and his Lady among them, to the great pleasure of all the beholders." Nobles and common people danced together: a distinctive trait of the English country dances that set them apart from the more formal court dances of the Continent.

John Playford: The Man Who Wrote It All Down

The decisive turning point came in 1651. The renowned London publisher John Playford produced the first printed collection of country dances offered for sale, titled The English Dancing Master, which contained the music and instructions for 105 dances. The book was a lasting success: in his lifetime it was the most popular collection of country dances of its day, and it would inspire many imitations.

But Playford was not the first to document these dances. The earliest known document containing square dances is the Lovelace manuscript, also called the "Pattricke manuscript": an anonymous, handwritten document held at the Houghton Library of Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) under the shelf mark MS Eng. 1356. The dances were written down by hand between 1621 and 1649, as much as thirty years before Playford. Who wrote it is unknown: the document bears several names and several different hands.

This manuscript contains 32 dances, of which 22 show a kinship with dances later published by Playford, though none is identical, the differences ranging from a simple variation in wording to an outright choreographic divergence. And that is precisely what makes it such a valuable document: its descriptions are less rigid than the printed ones, offer optional variations, and include notes on style. Where Playford sets a standard, the Lovelace manuscript offers a glimpse of how these dances were actually danced.

What makes these sources so important is the variety of formations they document. Country dances came in a great range of forms: square dances for two or four couples, round (circle) dances, column dances, and even line dances. Among them, the dances in square formation (the square dances) would meet a fate all their own in America.

Playford's work would be reissued continuously for nearly 80 years. Playford himself, then his son Henry, then his successor John Young, produced eighteen editions in all between 1651 and 1728, adding or dropping dances as fashions changed. It is a living library of English social dance spanning nearly a century.

Crossing the Channel: Enter France

The English country dances did not stay confined to England for long. On Friday, October 27, 1684, an English dancing master known as "Mr Isaac" (sometimes called Isaac d'Orléans in French sources, and identified by the work of scholar Moira Goff as Francis Thorpe, dancing master to the English royal court) taught the Sun King a few dances from his own country. He was brought to Fontainebleau to teach the country dances to the ladies of the court of Louis XIV. The French took up these dances and renamed them "contredanses": a term that evokes dancers facing one another (contre, "opposite"), but which is in fact a Frenchification of "country dance."

In the 1680s, possibly inspired by the English country dance and drawing on many of its figures, French dancing masters developed another type of country dance, which they called the contredanse. From this French adaptation came two forms that would play a crucial role in American history: the cotillion and the quadrille. The English quickly adopted the cotillion: a dance usually done in a square of four couples. Cotillions were introduced to America in the 1770s.

By the 1820s, the quadrille (a new type of French square dance) had become the most popular dance of high society in America. This quadrille would become one of the major sources of the American square dance, alongside the English country dances in square formation and the Scots-Irish reels.

Crossing the Atlantic: From London Parlors to American Barns

Both the court dances and the vernacular dances made the voyage to North America when the colonists arrived in New England in the seventeenth century. In New England in particular, the country dance was extremely popular until the early 1800s. Americans eagerly awaited the new dance books arriving from England; they also wrote their own dances and published their own collections.

In Virginia, dance became a pillar of colonial social life. Dancing was the dominant pastime of colonial Virginians of every class, though it was a particular preoccupation of the planter elite. Being a skilled dancer was a mark of good breeding. A market developed for professional dancing masters, who were expected to know the latest dances from Europe.

One part of this culture long remained in the shadows. In colonial Virginia, and then in the young Republic, the music at these balls was very often provided by enslaved Black musicians: the slave fiddlers played for the dances of the gentry, frequently taking the place of white fiddlers. The best-documented example is Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson: in the early nineteenth century, when his daughters and granddaughters wanted to dance, they turned to the sons of Sally Hemings: Beverly and Eston Hemings, accomplished fiddlers. These country dances imported from England were thus, from the very start of their American life, carried by Black musical labor that official history would long erase. It is these same musicians who, by making the figures their own, would give rise to the African-American invention of calling: the subject of the article The Square Dance.

But America was not England. On the inland frontiers, settlers from scattered farms would often gather for exuberant feasts and social dances. The formalism of the London parlors gave way to a freer, more improvised atmosphere. People danced in the barns, in the houses, in the meeting halls, with whatever instruments were at hand. It was in this setting that the English country dances began their great American transformation.

From the English Country Dance to Western Dance: The Great Metamorphosis

The road from the English country dance to western dance runs through several key stages:

The French cotillion, and then the quadrille, gradually replaced the English longways dances (the column dances, in which two parallel lines of dancers face each other) in American ballrooms. 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. The square formation of the quadrille became the basis for what would become the square dance.

The New England contra dance preserved the parallel-line formation of the original English country dance. The English country dance and the French contredanse, arriving independently in the American colonies, became the New England contra dance.

In Virginia and the South, the Virginia Reel survived as a popular dance, being practically identical to the English "Sir Roger de Coverley."

And in the Appalachians and the West, all these forms blended with Irish, Scottish, African, and Native American traditions to give rise to the dances that will be the subject of the coming articles in this series.

The Legacy: An Enduring DNA

The English country dances may have vanished as a common practice since the nineteenth century, replaced by the waltz, the polka, and the couple dances. Interest in the English country dance reached its peak in the late eighteenth century (the era portrayed in Jane Austen's novels) then faded quickly when social dance was revolutionized by the introduction of new forms in the early nineteenth century.

But their DNA is everywhere in western dance. The square formations of the square dance, the principle of the caller who announces the figures, the do-si-do, the promenade, the right and left through: all of it descends directly from the figures documented by Playford and his successors. When you see dancers turning in a square in a Texas honky-tonk or executing a grand square in a modern square-dance competition, you are seeing the direct echoes of dances performed in the Elizabethan parlors more than four centuries ago.

To take part in an English country dance is like taking a stroll through the history of social dance and music, from the court of Elizabeth I to the novels of Jane Austen, from the New England colonies to the America of today. And, one might add, all the way to the Texas dance halls and the country nights of Europe, for the thread has never been broken.