how one man’s passion saved an American tradition

Baby, it’s cold outside, but it’s warm at the contra dance.

On New Year’s Eve in Tamworth, crisp constellations freckle a deep black sky and the moonlight bounces off fresh white snow. Upstairs in the white clapboard Town Hall, men in short-sleeved shirts and women in long skirts are swinging their partners, heat rising to the stamped tin ceiling as hand reaches out to hand, arm encircles waist, and feet tap and shuffle across the polished wood floor.

On the stage, 11-year-old Victoria Kingham, visiting from Manhattan for the holidays, has brought her violin and is playing her first tune with the band. She’s standing next to fiddler Jacqueline Laufman, whose encouraging eyes guide her through the reel. One seat past them, at the center of the small stage, is the caller, one of the elder statesmen of the American folk dance scene, a real traditionalist.

His name is Dudley Laufman. This girl has spent summers here dancing to his music, and someday she may tell people she played with him once, this night a pin on the arcing map of history.

Laufman is being honored this weekend, Jan. 12-14, at the 20th annual Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend at the University of New Hampshire. The event is named in honor of one of New England’s great folk treasures, a dance caller who carried the torch of contra and square dance into the 20th century. By the mid-1900s, the small towns around Mount Monadnock were among the few pockets where people still participated in contra dance. Callers like Page and Duke Miller had revived the form’s popularity, and the men were singular institutions by the 1950s and 1960s.

Enter Laufman, dubbed the Johnny Appleseed of contra dance. Laufman, accomplished on accordion and fiddle, took the traditions and made them jump, bringing contra dance into the mainstream of the folk revival through word-of-mouth, and drawing hundreds of dancers who followed him around New England. They learned the steps and songs and carried them when they moved away to places like California, Ohio and Washington, D.C., where long-running dances continue to this day, revived again by a burst of enthusiasm among college students and young professionals.

“He’s charismatic, he’s out in the public, he’s got good energy,” says Ryan Thomson, a working traditional musician and part-time music instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. “Going to one of his dances in the ’70s was in some ways a little more fun … maybe that’s the wrong word. (Duke Miller and Ralph Page) were more formal. Dudley was a little more lively. Us being kind of young, we gravitated toward that.”

Much of this story is told in “Paid to Eat Ice Cream,” a recent video biography of pianist Bob McQuillen, a highly regarded peer of Dudley’s from the Peterborough area who himself has written more than 1,100 dance tunes and was a previous honoree at the Ralph Page Weekend.

The video includes perky clips from dances at the Town Hall in the 1970s. The screen is filled with flush-cheeked, happy teens and young adults stepping lively in bare feet. In a voice-over, the narrator reminisces—the gatherings were so popular that the town fathers wrote a memo saying shoes would be required and there would be a policeman at every dance.

You can imagine echoes of those dancers’ breathless voices at the contemporary Dover Contra and Square Dance, held the first Thursday of every month on the top floor of the municipal office building. On the stage, the Lamprey River Band’s three fiddles, two guitars, upright bass, piano and hammered dulcimer work a repertoire of jigs, reels and hornpipes. The room is a large, bright box edged by yellow walls, high ceilings and a wide sprung floor with plenty of room for the 50 people in skirts, Levi’s, cardigans, baby T’s, sequins and suspenders. Lines of men and women are facing each other with smiles, doing their do-si-dos and promenades down the line.

“I came down with my partner, John. He’s very passionate about this,” says Dan Carter, 38, of Gilford, gesturing toward a man waltzing competently across the floor. Carter rarely dances because the spins make him dizzy (making eye contact is supposed to help, but not for him, he says). He loves watching, though. “When you go to any of these dances, you watch everyone’s faces. They’re always smiling. They’re in the moment,” he says. “It makes you want to smile.”

Karen Vigneault, 28, of York, agrees. A friend of hers introduced her to contra dance by bringing her to an event at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She found her way to the Dover dance, bringing friends along as often as possible. “I like how all-inclusive they are. I’m single, and it’s easy to come by myself. I laugh a lot and get a lot of exercise. It does my heart good to be here.”

Carter especially likes the sociability—he and John have met dancers at conferences across the country who they run into again at a dance in some small town somewhere. He also admires the intellectual aspect. “You can see people’s minds working, thinking, ‘We can get this’,” he laughs.

Versions of these dances, English and French country and court dances, traveled across the Atlantic with the first settlers in New England and French-speaking Canada. Fiddles typically carry the melody, with pianos, flutes, accordions, fifes, dulcimers and mandolins providing accompaniment. They’ve survived for 350 years in barns, kitchens, taverns and ballrooms.

Keeping up with the dance steps to a medley of jigs and reels is a puzzle, an effort of the body and mind that can be grasped by spectators, but only fully experienced by stepping out onto the floor, reaching out to a stranger and looking each other in the eye as you swing and bow. The dances are unusually uplifting, welcoming and social—by the end of the evening,  a woman is as likely to have been asked to dance by an 8-year-old boy as by a married man; certainly everyone will have danced with and smiled at every other dancer in the room.

“It’s a community-builder. It’s not just (about) couples, but a process of meeting people you don’t know,” says dancer Janelle Shafer, 29, formerly a student at Antioch University in Keene but now a resident of Seattle visiting the area with her husband for the holidays.

Peter Yarensky, who leads the Dover dance with the Lamprey River Band and publishes the Seacoast Country Dance Newsletter, says he does not get upset when dancers are so busy talking that they sit out a number or two. “Some people will criticize me for not moving the dance along fast enough, but I do that deliberately because I like to encourage the social aspect along with the dancing aspect. The interactions are of a different quality than you get at a club or bar. People do flirt, but generally the interactions are more honest. People don’t play the games you see in other social situations.”

In one section of “Paid to Eat Ice Cream,” Laufman leads a crowd through an outdoor dance. Over six feet tall and with a body muscular from working outdoors, he cuts an attractive figure in a close-fitting T-shirt and brightly striped dungarees, his wavy hair and curved lips highlighting an amused sensuality. One of the women interviewed in the video laughs when she recalls his legions of female fans, and it’s easy to see him as a pied piper of the New England countryside.

Laufman, 75, has long made his living writing poetry, playing and teaching music, and calling dances. He lives in the same house on a Canterbury ridge that he built by hand for his first wife and four children in 1959, though he’s since divorced and made some additions to the main room. Now a door next to his computer desk leads to an unheated barn dance room, filled with posters, photographs and other mementos of his musician’s life. A door off the dance room leads through the bathroom—past the composting toilet—and into the bedroom, a charming but unheated enclosed porch. Sometimes, he admits, he and Jacqueline, who’ve been playing fiddle and living together since 1986, enjoy sleeping with the window open in the middle of the winter.

Ask him how he got started, and Laufman travels back through time, past the heady days of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra, when he was calling out hundreds of dancers a couple times a week and the band played the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Donovan; back through the barn dances with Ralph Page and Duke Miller; past his first job on a dairy farm in Fremont in 1947, where the farmer and his wife would push back the living room furniture on Saturday night for a “Virginia Reel” with family and neighbors; all the way back to childhood summers on Lake Winnipesaukee.

Laufman’s family drove up from Arlington, Mass., to a cabin on Long Island where they would be welcomed with a cup of coffee by a man who served as the informal island caretaker, selling firewood, winter ice and cream from his cows to the summer folks. He had chosen a life outdoors, scented with wood smoke, kerosene and cows, and he was his own boss. “I was 6 years old, and he was my hero,” Laufman says. He’s sitting at the head of his own kitchen table, colored glass beads sparkling in the sunny window behind him. Jacqueline is also at the table, repairing a sweater that’s doing its best to unravel. Cats wind around their feet and laps.

When Laufman was still a student, one of his teachers led trips to Ralph Page dances in Boston.

“That’s the first time I heard him. And I thought that was pretty exciting. Then I got taken to a dance up in Peterborough one time, and Ralph was the caller there. We had been dancing to the Boston band, and they were trained musicians. They played for the Boston Symphony and chamber music groups, then they would slum it by going to play for Ralph. They were very good of course, but it was very smooth music. When I got to the dance in Peterborough, it was much rougher, the music was much rougher, it had a great quality to it, and I just loved it, I thought that was the best.”

Laufman quickly noticed that the callers got “a lot of attention from the female segment of the audience.” The caller names the steps for the dancers—telling them when to allemande, when to swing, when to travel down the line—and leads the band. Laufman taught himself to call dances, and continued calling and playing throughout the 1950s. But then the scene died down quite a bit. The band was taken by surprise when they played a gig at Franconia College, in a big room with a fireplace and wood floor, and no one came.

“So I went over to the main building to get a cup of coffee, and that’s where they all were,” Laufman recalls. “And what do you suppose they were doing? They were watching television. What do you suppose they were watching? They were watching the Ed Sullivan show and the first American appearance of the Beatles. Well, that’s when we hit rock bottom.” But then a new realization dawned. “The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Donovan and those guys advocated change, advocated taking chances. So we decided to take a chance with it. We started promoting it more as live music. And then, lo and behold, we were on the way up the charts. So that’s when it all started,” Laufman says.

On the West Coast, Ryan Thomson, a student at San Diego State University in the early 1970s, was drawn to the traditional music scene, where he found the same songs his mother and grandmother had played and danced to, as well as exchange students from Dartmouth and the University of New Hampshire who were bringing Laufman’s songs west with them. A pianist, he played with fiddle players who had played with Laufman, listened to the seminal self-titled Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra LP, and learned all the tunes.

“What I was playing in California in the early 1970s was loosely modeled on what Dudley was going out here,” Thomson, 57, of Newmarket, says. “It was the great folk revival of the ’60s.”

“Dudley was a real force. Here was a character that was actually doing this full time out in New England, and I thought maybe I can dothat, too. And I did,” Thomson says.

Thomson came to Durham to check out the scene in 1977, and his first day in town, he saw a poster for “a Dudley dance” that night. He showed up, fiddle in hand. “Dudley asked me, ‘Can you play “Farewell to Whiskey?” I said sure, and I got my fiddle out. I got to play my first day in Durham. I guess that’s 30 years ago.”

Like many of the musicians Laufman has invited onto the stage over the years, Thomson still plays with him two or three times a month. One of their next gigs will be at Concord High School with their electric band, where last year they played successfully to a dance of more than one hundred students. Two Fiddles has a packed schedule. Between school appearances and private and public dances, the Laufmans played 66 gigs between Oct. 1 and Dec. 1.

A traditional musician must learn hundreds of songs, but be willing to play favorites like “Lady of the Lake,” “Virginia Reel,” “Petronella” and “Money Musk” again and again and again. Though Laufman earned his reputation by exciting musicians and dancers alike with new tunes and dances of his own creation, today he’s turned back to the form’s roots.

Things were getting too complicated, he says. In the quest to have more vigorous dances, with everyone moving and swinging, something valuable has been lost. Not only are many of the old dances not being played anymore, but the complicated steps are less welcoming to newcomers and several generations of the same family.

“I’m not going to spend more than two minutes teaching a dance. And if that’s going to be a mess, I don’t want people going home feeling bad about themselves because they can’t do it. I’d rather do something easier and have them come back later on,” Laufman says. He and Jacqueline rarely go to contra dances now, preferring to work with schools and play for barn dances.

Similarly, some folks avoid his dances now, finding them too simple. Laufman says he understands.

“I can remember when this surge started (in the 1960s) and all the kids started coming to the dances, and some of the older people were starting to hear about it. There were a lot of people saying ‘Gee, they’re not doing it the way we did it.’ And some of them stopped coming because it was too wild for them, or too fast, or too crazy. Or they didn’t like the bare feet. And they didn’t like the braless girls. All kinds of stuff like that. So Jacqueline and I go to a dance here and there, and it’s the same thing. ‘Well, that’s not the way we did it.’ You know,” Laufman laughs. “They get on my case, I get back on theirs. Sometimes they piss me off. I’m sure I piss them off, too. They want the dances to be harder, more swinging in it. I’m more interested in doing some of the traditional dances.”

“Dudley is a very controversial person in some ways,” says Yarensky, who also sits on the committee that chose to honor Laufman at the 20th annual Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend. “The sort of stuff he does now doesn’t really appeal to most of the contra dance community. He does fairly easy dances. And people are sometimes afraid of ‘What is he going to do if we let him call at a dance like this?’
“It’s also true that if it weren’t for Dudley, we wouldn’t be doing this,” Yarensky says.

When talking about Ralph Page, Laufman remembers the elegance of his style and a man who was staying true to traditions of the previous century. No matter the pace of the dance, Laufman’s authoritative voice remains his calling card, sounding out across the room in a sonorous, rhythmic, well-paced style. Few understand this melding of music and dance the way he does.

“Men balance the ladies, ladies balance the men, circle three, now down the middle, cast off. Right-hand star, and left hand back,” he sing-songs to four lines of dancers in Tamworth. When the dance is finished, the applause is resounding, punctuated with sharp whistles.

“Dudley is a master at being in front of a group of a hundred people who have never danced ever, and he can get them dancing…. It’s almost sort of like magic, he’s really good at it. He gets them all in a big circle, gets them moving, and while they’re moving he watches closely, pays attention to the tempo of the music, the groove of the tunes,” Thomson says.

John Delano, 50, of Boston, attended the Tamworth dance with his family. He acknowledges that his first response to a contra dance was, “What am I doing here?” It’s grown on him so much that he and his wife have invited Dudley and Jacqueline to play a dance for their friends on Beacon Hill.

“I like to be able to dance with my wife. I don’t get to do that very much these days. I like the historic nature of it. This is all a part of America’s heritage. A lot of these songs are hundreds of years old, and we’re dancing to them like people danced to them in the 1700s,” he says.

Honoring Laufman for his role in continuing the tradition was only natural, Yarensky says.

“There were only a couple of places where people were doing dancing, and that was pretty much all to recorded music, and it was nearly dead. Dudley took something that was largely dying out, got this large following of people dancing to it, and got this large group of musicians excited about playing for it. When those people moved away, they spread it out across the country. They would start bands, learn to call because no one else was, and start dances where they were. I had a friend who moved to Boulder and started a dance. That was true all over the place. Everyone doing this right now in the country is probably only a few musical generations from someone who learned from Dudley. It went from this little dying thing that was only happening in the backwoods of New Hampshire and a couple of places in Boston and a couple of places in the back woods of Maine to this big, national thing. It doesn’t make headlines, but it’s something that happens all over the country now, and Dudley is the reason.”

Seacoast contra dance
Bring a second pair of shoes—clean, soft-soled shoes—to dance in and water to drink.

Dover Contra and Square Dance
Dover Town Hall
288 Central Ave.
First Thursday of the month
8-10:40 p.m.
$7, $5 for students
For more information: Peter Yarensky at 603-664-2513 or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Scottish Country Dance
Greenland Town Hall
Route 151
Every Friday
8-10 p.m.
For more information: 603-773-9795 or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Deerfield Country Contra Dance
Deerfield Town Hall
6 Old Centre Road
First Saturday of the month
8-11 p.m.
$7, $3 for children
For more information: 603-463-7771, This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Exeter Contra Dance
First Unitarian Society of Exeter 12 Elm St.
Second Saturday of the month workshop/lesson at 7:30 p.m., dance at 8 p.m.
$6, $3 for students
For more information: 603-679-1915 or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Kingston Contra Dance
Kingston Town Hall
163 Main St.
Fourth Saturday of the month 8-11 p.m.
$8, $5 for students
For more information: 603-772-5355, 603-679-5448 or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

source: www.thedancegypsy.com

20th Annual Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend
Celebrating the music and dance traditions of New England past and present
Jan. 12-14
University of New Hampshire, Memorial Union Building
featuring
Tony Parkes and Carol Ormand
Bob McQuillen, Laurie Andres and Vince O’Donnell
Old Grey Goose
Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra
Tickets for the weekend are $75 in advance, $80 at the door, $50 first-timer special, in advance only; advance tickets available by calling Bob Jervis, 603-672-3231. Prices for individual sessions are $12 ($7 on Sunday afternoon), and admission to the Grand Dance is $20. Tickets are half-price for students ages 12-21 and free for children 12 and under.
For more information and a full schedule, visit www.neffa.org