Outside the long row of windows across the front of Inn on the Blues, diners on the porch enjoy a soft July night. Inside, it’s quiet at 6:30, but by 7 p.m., the tables are packed and the room is roaring. Half the people are here for dinner, the other half are turned toward the red-walled stage, waiting for David Surette to take his seat behind the mike. Surette is doing what most younger musicians dream of. He gets to live where he wants—South Berwick, in this case—make music his day job, and fly to gigs around the country. All this, for contra dance.

From Boston to Seattle, people are lining up to dance to the authentic New England flavor of this traditional music, and Surette, both as one of New England’s finest finger-style guitarists and a member of Airdance, one of the country’s premier contra dance bands—is one of the people they’re paying to see.

Raised in North Conway on Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, the University of New Hampshire graduate has traveled far while remaining close to his home. The following are some excerpts from an interview with Surette just before his recent CD release show for “Northern Roots,” his first solo recording in nine years.

Back when you were playing bar gigs, what kind of music did you play?
It was a combination of singing and some things that were blues oriented. But I started playing contra dances around the same time. I went to my first contra dance at the University of New Hampshire, around 1981 or ’82, in the Memorial Union. It was Swallowtail, and I just thought it was fabulous. So I’ve always been drawn toward traditional music, even in the things I liked in high school, when I was playing rock. You know, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, they would cover old blues songs, so then you’d go to look up Robert Johnson or Elmore James or whoever it was. The same thing with other artists, like Taj Mahal or David Bromberg, that had folk roots. The more I looked in that direction, the more I really found myself interested in that kind of music. And I liked the community aspect of the music making, that it was a little closer to the ground. There wasn’t a big separation between the stage and the audience. In a folk festival, a lot of the audience members are people who play instruments themselves, who play recreationally, who get together regularly, and are actively involved with the music. It’s not that other genres don’t have that. There’s lots of people that play blues guitar on the side, but there seems to be this unique participatory aspect of the folk world that I really love. I was drawn to that.

Can you explain where contra comes from?
Sure. The repertoire and the dances originated in the British Isles and France. The name comes from the dancers lining up opposite each other. It’s been popular in New England since Colonial times, but it sort of ebbs and flows. The modern resurgence really happened in the 1960s, with Dudley Laufman, who is a caller and a musician, and his group, the Canterbury Orchestra. He was kind of young and hip and charismatic, and it coincided with the back-to-the-land movement and the hippies. It all kind of evolved into this phenomenon all on its own. It was New England-based then, but at this point, there are little pockets of it all around the country. So there’s a thriving contra dance scene, for example, in Seattle and Portland, Ore., and there’s a really big one down in Charlottesville, Va., in Washington, D.C. There’s all these little pockets.

Is New England still the capital?
Yeah. In this area, the Monadnock region is very strong. The Greenfield, Mass., area is very strong. The Boston area is very strong.

Where do people hold dances?
It tends to be town halls or Grange halls. Sometimes you get a gym or something, but that’s not that great. Sometimes they’re at a VFW or Elks Club. Anyplace that has a decent size dance hall and a stage. But a New England town hall is really the best. In Greenfield, they actually have a Grange that’s been converted into a full-time dance hall, the Guiding Star Grange, and it’s classic. It’s got the nice little stage, it’s all wood, with the wooden dance floor, the white clapboards on the outside. It’s perfect.

How many people are coming to dance?
Anywhere from 100 to 250. Greenfield has usually anywhere from one to three dances every weekend. So a lot. And it’s different dances every time. That’s very unique though. Most places have a dance once a month or twice a month.

So you’ve been playing in that world for 15 years now.  What influences are shaping the scene, what’s drawing people in?
Several bands, ours among them, feature bass and drums, as well as the traditional pairing of piano and fiddle. So the bands are getting a little more groove oriented, putting a little more grooves and rhythms into what was before a fairly straight sound, and the rhythms are changing a little bit. And in fact the way people dance, instead of being quite so straight, you know, it’s a little more kind of get-down and get-moving that happens. I think it’s a reflection of different people being involved and the times changing a little bit. … There’s a whole bunch of kids that are coming up in their teens and 20s that have only ever heard contra dance as being this funky type thing, as opposed to the way it used to be. And then there are these festivals, like Falcon Ridge in western Massachusetts, that have big, big dance tents that attract all sorts of young people, as well as the more established contra dance crowd.

Did you ever make it to a Dudley Laufman event in its heyday?
I was younger than that. I wish I did. He is a pretty interesting guy. And at this point, he’s kind of moving in the other direction, in the opposite direction of the groove-oriented bands and bass and drums. He performs in a very simple setup with his wife Jacqueline, very small, he prefers barn dances or kitchen dances, he doesn’t like to use amplification, or (he uses) very, very simple amplification. So he’s trying to really strip it down back to basics, not have it get so out of hand. It’s nice that the scene can accommodate room for a lot of different things happening.

What about your new CD? It’s the first guitar- and mandolin-led arrangement in this genre of music, is that correct?
The idea was to take this repertoire, the traditions that make up the influences on the music—Irish music, Scottish music, French Canadian music—and have the mandolin and the guitar be the featured instruments. So half of it is solo finger-style guitar, which really doesn’t get played at a dance, it’s not something you would do. It’s just a more personal representation of that kind of music. There’s been a lot of things that focus on the traditional kind of music of the South, the Appalachians and Delta blues and all those great southern musical traditions. You know, I could play blues. I play country, Doc Watson-style picking, but I thought this was more uniquely mine I guess. … It was just my idea to focus on the northern roots music, and have it be guitar and mandolin, rather than like another fiddle album or something.  Also, in traveling around the country with the band, it did occur to me that that would be perhaps what people would be interested in, it would be more unique to have something that was a little bit of New England.

How did you choose songs you decided to work with?
I kind of was looking for balance. You know, a balance between the different musical traditions, between slow and fast, guitar and mandolin, solo numbers and group numbers. I wanted to involve some fellow musicians, but I wanted to have a good chunk of it be something I could play solo. I also hadn’t done a solo record in a long time, so coming up with the material was no problem. It was more of a question of selecting which ones to use. There’s so many. That’s the great thing with traditional music. There’s a whole repertoire waiting for you. So you select the tunes that really speak to you, and then the arranging of them puts a personal stamp on things.

Dave Surette and Susie Burke
Thursday, Aug. 11
Hot Summer Nights Concert Series
downtown South Berwick
7 p.m., free
www.burkesurette.com