Birdie in the Cage

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All right, okay.

All right.

You're listening to Radiolab, Radiolab.

From WNYC.

Yep.

Three, one.

This is Radiolab. I'm Lula Miller. So around this time of year in the states, anyway, the days are getting longer, the nights are getting warmer.

So everybody just find a partner.

It's dancing weather, and if you don't know them, that's fine. You can just walk up to somebody and say, Hi, I'm so-and-so. Will you dance with me? You know? Time for weddings and hoedowns, and, of course, the great American tradition, square dancing, but whose American tradition is it?

If anybody needs a partner, just raise your hand and then look around for other hands that are up.

With the two of them hosting an actual square dance, so here we go.

Join hands and circle, left.

Back to the right, don't take all night.

A little while ago, Tracy and I threw a dance party over at a place called The Bell House, that's in Brooklyn. We had a live band. Oh, the way back, left hand stop. We had a caller named Alex Kramer.

You swing mine and I'll swing yours.

We do-si-do, we do for the clam.

I'll swing mine, you swing yours.

Might have even shot through the hole in the old tin can.

Join hands in that pretty little ring.

One couple will make an arch.

Duck for the oyster.

There were about a hundred of us there that night, learning the very American art of square dancing.

Why can't I hear anything? Oh ha, it's not plugged in.

Oh, it all goes back.

I need to find a fricking adapter.

Oh, here we are to a conversation Tracy and I had in the studio before we ever got up on stage together.

Okay, so square dancing.

Lay it on me.

A dance that I should say before I started reporting this story, I'd never seen. I kind of knew about it, saw it in the musical Oklahoma.

It was inflicted on me in grade school. I know it's, yeah, but I think that's just an inheritance from growing up in the South.

Well, actually, no, it's not just a Southern thing. Besides the fact that it somehow missed me. In Miami, it was taught in pretty much every other school in the country. Quick scan of the audience How many of you had to do square dancing in school? That's something that we actually confirm later at the event.

Wow, most of the audience.

I feel like that was most of the audience. But the thing is, it doesn't just stop at schools. Square dancing is a state dance, or the state folk dance. In about 30 states, 30..

M.M. Okay.

So just to get things started off, I'm gonna take you back to the 1890s or 1890-ish.

In the late 1800s, there were many immigrants coming to this country from southern and eastern Europe.

According to folk dance scholar Phil Jamison, at that time a new wave of immigrants were coming to America.

Italians and Slavs, and Polish people, and Jewish people.

And they were seen as very different from the earlier waves of English and Irish and German immigrants.

And the old stock Americans sort of pushed back against these immigrants and said, Wait a minute, we are the real Americans. Our ancestors were here first, and, you know, think of 1890 is when the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded.

We were a generation past the Emancipation Proclamation and the Trail of Tears, and in 1892..

The pledge of allegiance was put into our public schools.

And so, Phil says, around this time, there was a national conversation bubbling up about who we as Americans are like when we say us, who is us?

Well.

According to Phil, one answer to that question came from a music scholar.

An English ballad collector named Cecil Sharp, who came to the Southern Mountains.

From about 1916 to 1918, he went all around the Appalachian Mountains in the southern U.

And was astounded that people were still singing old British ballads that had long since died out in England.

Now this was interesting to him because Sharp's idea, and he wasn't alone in this, is that. The people living in Southern Appalachia, the white people living there.

These people had been isolated here in the mountains for generations.

And were therefore the keepers of the purest Anglo-Saxon heritage in America.

And when he was in eastern Kentucky?

He came across that pure heritage in dance form.

He came across some people doing a square dance, that was a demonstration for him.

And the thing about this dance that he was seeing, it had some elements of French dances.

French cotillions and quadrilles.

Where six couples would be in some sort of formation, holding hands, moving in a circle. But also parts of it that looked like old Scots-Irish and English country dances.

And he just made this assumption that these were Anglo-Saxon people, and this is the folk dance of our ancestors.

Now, obviously, there were a lot of different kinds of people living in those mountains that he was ignoring. But despite that, or maybe more like, because of it, this idea that square dancing was quintessentially American just took off.

And shortly after that is when they started teaching folk dances in schools.

So the first place I heard any of this was this tweet thread, that was very tantalizing. It sort of pegged Henry Ford as the mastermind behind this white supremacist plot for the square dancing in all the schools in order to save white children from jazz or something.

I see so this is an attempt at whitewashing.

Basically, yes, got it now. First of all, Henry Ford was an anti-semite and, for some reason, thought Jews invented jazz and hated jazz, and he tried to promote dances from quote northern peoples. But.

Henry Ford had nothing to do with teaching square dancing in physical education classes.

That part of the tweet thread isn't quite true, but the whitewashing part isn't exactly wrong. It was actually one dance educator in Michigan.

Grace Ryan in Michigan.

Who started teaching the square dance?

As a way to assimilate the children of European immigrants to be true Americans.

More teachers picked it up. She wrote some books that kind of popularized it around the country, among teachers, and, before you knew it, Bam square dancing in schools.

From Tuscumbia, Missouri, they call themselves the Lake of Ozarks Square Dance.

And then the dance started to spread.

You all set.

All right.

People were dancing in community halls and public squares and churches and barns. By the 30s, square dancing is all over the radio as TV start popping up in American homes.

Lucky strike means find a bad cold.

By the 40s and 50s, it's huge.

The square dancing craze, sweeping across the nation, keeps on growing in New York in a big way.

Square dancing clubs start forming all over the place.

Square dancing is part of the heritage of the United States, born with the very birth of the country.

And then?

The Square Dancers of America want something from Congress. They want their dancing. Square Dancing officially named the National Folk Dance of the United States.

These groups went to Congress to say that square dancing should be the American dance. square dance is indeed uniquely American.

It's American, American.

And actually, it was officially the National folk dance from 1982 to 1983.

You mean, oh so, this is an old movement.

This is an old movement, but.

This is Leslie.

I did manage to find the congressman. Here's the door.

He is coming right in.

Who introduced some of these bills? All right, here you go.

Okay.

His name is Hello Leon Panetta.

Hey, how are you, Tracy?

Former Secretary of Defense.

And former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta.

The Leon Panetta The Clinton Leon Panetta.

The Clinton Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff.

I think this is a moment for a strong, steady hand.

Usually these days, he's on CNN answering hard questions about drones.

Responsibility of the intelligence community.

National Security.

It has to be comprehensive.

So I think he was a little surprised when I called him up and said, You know, hey, you want to talk about square dancing?

Well, it came out of nowhere, it brought back.

He introduced a bill about square dancing.

Yep, well, I actually did folk dancing when I was in grammar school and enjoyed it then and always kind of kept track of.

Back in the 1980s, he was a congressman out of California.

And there was a couple that were involved in folk dancing, George and Ann Holzer, I believe, were their names.

And he had some square dancers who were very supportive of his campaigns, so it was very much a politically kind of like, favorished type of thing.

They came to me with the idea.

But he was actually pretty kind of passionate about it when I was talking to him.

Oh yeah, I thought it made sense to try to establish and recognize it as the national folk dance.

Well, on the face of it all, that sounds harmless enough, but but wait a minute.

There was this kind of immediate and very muscular opposition to this bill.

This House subcommittee today suddenly discovered.

That about the only people who would be happy to commemorate square dancing are square dancers, one by one, dance historians, folklorists. Got in front of the mic and said, You gotta be kidding me.

To make folk dancing a national dance, to me would be a slap in the face to other art.

This makes absolutely no sense. This is a nation of immigrants. The United States is a country filled with a lot of different kinds of people from a lot of different parts of the world. To single out a dance that represents even a very small fraction of British origin immigrants would be insulting to every other cultural group.

In this country.

Everyone was like, square dancing. Seriously, what about Hula?

Isn't that a folk dance? what about tap, or, for that matter, break dancing as an expression of urban folk culture?

Not to mention the people who were here first.

And even just to put a finer point on it, I mean, you take something like the massacre at Wounded Knee. I mean, that was the culmination of a series of events that I think began with a dance. So it wasn't simply that they were being forgotten, I think they were being very violently suppressed at times. So the dance has. The question of what dance you do? is not always, it's sometimes violent, you know?

Yeah, I'm curious about, like, what would be your reaction to that argument?

Well, I mean, I certainly appreciate Indian tradition and what happened to the Indians throughout history. There's no question how abused they were. At the same time, it's important to recognize some of the things that make the United States what it is today. So I always remember de Tocqueville's comments. When he came to this country and went to the frontier, by the way, saw people, folk dancing at that time.

Yeah, I don't think that that was when de Tocqueville was here and he was looking at the West. I don't think that that was much of a time of togetherness. I mean, plenty of Indian tribes were being driven off their land.

No, it was tough.

I get, you know, I don't wanna like, start, you know, start a whole thing. But I guess it's just I'm kind of don't wanna have like, a romanticized view of that time period.

No, I don't think we have to have a romanticized view. I mean, the fact remains that all of us in our communities do recognize the importance of helping one another, and that isn't romanticizing a damn thing. And I just think at some point, it would be a nice gesture to all of those that enjoy that. To make clear that the United States recognizes, the square dance is particularly unique to the history and to the culture of America.

Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this, sure?

That was a I wish that there was a slightly more satisfying response there. I feel like you guys were not having the same conversation or something that was like,-.

Yeah, to say the least. And it made me realize that, you know, maybe I shouldn't be talking to a politician, I should be talking to square dancers. And so I made some phone calls.

Oh, are you linda? I'm linda hi.

I traveled to the heartland of America and Square Dancers hug.

Okay, all right.

That's called a yellow rock. What I found out about square dancing was actually really surprising.

Like, what?

Well, you're gonna have to wait till after the break.

Oh well, then Radiolab will continue in a moment.

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I'm Jad, this is Radiolab. We are back from break with producer Tracy Hunt doing the Dance of the Square, where we haven't actually done the dance yet. That's coming where we've left off so far. We'd seen what happened when a bunch of square dance evangelists took their cause to Congress, pushed for square dance to be the American folk dance.

Yeah, but that was in the 80s, more than 30 years ago. And I wanted to see what was going on with Square Dancing today. And I was making a bunch of calls and I eventually talked to this one woman named Linda Peterson. She was part of the effort to make Square Dancing the state folk dance for the state of Maryland, and she invited me to the National Square Dancing Convention.

Also the black one.

I will say that I did find Black Square dancers there.

You did.

I counted while I was there, about 11.

Out of how many?

About 3,000.

Oh, wow.

I guess one in 300.

That's a good, that's a ratio.

Yeah, but um, eventually.

Oh, are you linda? I'm linda.

Linda spotted me, I'm good.

I'm a square dancer. Tug Okay, all right.

And then she just takes me around and she just starts, This is Tracy, hi, Tracy, introducing me to everybody.

The right and you're all old.

I'm a man starved by the right. And there's these super complicated calls. And instead of the traditional fiddle band with a banjo and so on.

Wow.

And this is actually common. I talked to this one caller who was like, Yeah, I use J-Lo sometimes.

So after a while, I think the square dance folks decided, you know what? Let's let it, let's not stir up trouble, let's keep a positive attitude and image for our activity.

This is Roy, I talked to him and his wife, Betsy Gatta. Betsy Gatta is kind of a big deal in the square dancing world. Anyway. They made it sound like they had heard the backlash and sort of, in some way, kind of got the point.

I mean, we were talking about that. And there were times when the square dance activity, to perfectly honest, for a long time, it was a white activity.

I think that that does make you know someone like me who I'm, you know, I'm a Black person.

You can probably tell go, huh?

Like, you know, why is, you know, why is this activity that's, you know, seemingly foreign by and created by white people? Why does that have to be the National American dance, you know? And it kind of does feel like a little like, you're, you know, I'm being excluded, or I'm being told that, you know that this is what it means to be American is, yeah.

And a lot of people in our activity took heed of that and said, Yeah, you know, there's a valid point. But we still kind of felt that it was the one dance form that hopefully transcended all of that. Because it is all inclusive, granted, it wasn't, but then again, America wasn't an inclusive society.

And what we kind of wanted to do was bring everybody in, that was our strategy, We wanted to set the hook and reel everybody into the group.

And what sort of came out for me over time was that for them, you know, being the national dance, it wasn't so much like trying to make this like piece of white culture, like enshrine it into, you know, some sort of national symbol. It was more about good marketing, you know?

You know, to make square dancing better?

To get more people and keep them, numbers are declining. Yeah, and so because-.

Interesting, So their idea was, This is a way to. It's not about let's whitewash America. Or maybe it was, but that wasn't the sort of spoken idea, it was more like, let's not die.

Yeah, and while I was there, they really made a point about how square dancing is really, really just open and inclusive.

What makes it unique to us?

This is Dana Shermer. He's. He was the president of Collar Lab, that's the group that trains all the collars, and he's also the guy who said he uses cellos sometimes.

I think when you hear the music and the first time you step in there and touch hands, the magic just goes right through your hands. You can just feel the warmth and the friendliness of all the people in the group with you.

Like, you come into the square and-.

I don't care who they are, where they came from or what happens.

Nobody knows anything about anybody else, but you all have to work together.

You know, you're in the group and you're gonna have fun.

And I don't look, I'm an accountant, I don't go out there looking for accountants, I go out there and get in the square and what do you do? I'm a farmer, I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer, you know, doesn't matter. We have all kinds of people and we're all gonna dance together.

Yeah, it's like a like, an equalizer also.

Yeah, we're all together.

This is something that I heard over and over and over again that square dancing welcomes everyone, it doesn't matter who you are.

You don't worry about sexual orientation, you don't worry about color, you don't worry about where they're from. All you worry about is, can they square dance? Can they help me have a good time? square dancing? That's all that matters, so.

Now I can remember when we were we the square dance world were making some strides and opening out. In 1965, which was the year of Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, the National Convention was in Dallas, Texas, and I was there, and the country in the south was scary enough. We drove through the south in a car from New Jersey and for a while we were followed. Because they thought we might have been outside agitators who were gonna register people to vote or something. And we were just a family coming back from the Square Dance Convention but for some reason, and I do not know the background. That was the year that a group of African American dancers from, I believe the Detroit and or Chicago areas decided to attend the national convention. This could have been very scary in that atmosphere, but they were very smart and I watched them.

I'm gonna let y'all go, thank you, thank you. Then the line breaks through, just in case.

Huh, I mean, walking away from that visit, what did you make of all that, of the convention, the whole thing?

Well, it was a great experience, I felt very welcomed and everyone was really, really sweet.

I spent about 10 years of my life as a professional musician and dancer.

So Phil was actually a musician and dancer for a long time, and he was actually part of this clog group called.

The greengrass cloggers. I was on the road for seven years with that group and we traveled all over the U.S. and overseas as well.

And he says, a lot of times after these performances, people would come up and ask him, You know, where did these dances? these folk dances, like the square dance, where did it come from?

And so I'd go and look in books and try to read up on the history of these dances and all the books that were out there. Square dance books just talked about the British Isles and the hardy pioneers coming to the mountains with their dances.

And, you know, they would basically tell the same story that he told us, you know, Cecil Sharp, and how? This dance is a combination of French and English and Irish dances. But at a certain point, Phil says.

It just didn't seem right to me. Because the population of Appalachia has never been pure white Anglo-Saxon, it's always been a mixed.

So Phil would end up spending 14 years looking at letters and travel narratives, historical accounts and dance manuals, anything he can get his hands on.

And what I discovered was there was an evolution of the dances that occurred during the 19th century. And they're basically a multicultural hybrid that have elements of dances from the British Isles reels. And there's African-American and Native American influence as well, all in the mix.

Oh, what does he mean? does he mean?-?

Well, he means that they were all doing these dances, not just white people.

This was shared culture. Back in the day, you'd find African-American folks dancing these dances, and White folks dancing them, and Native American folks were dancing them.

And things from their own past would creep into this dance. For example, there's this one move in square dancing, where you have one dancer in the middle. And some people think this is actually related to something called the ring shout, which is like a traditional dance from West and Central Africa. And you know, the crazy thing is that he told me, the thing that makes the square dance, the square dance-.

Dance calling itself comes from the Black tradition.

Basically, Phil told me that when you were back in Europe. The way you learned these dances is that you had a dancing master, you had a dancing school. You go to these schools and you learn all the steps. But when you came to America, to colonial America, there weren't as many dancing masters and dancing schools to go around. And so the way that the fiddlers who were performing at these dances could tell people what the next move was, was to call it.

And this was a way for people who didn't go to dancing schools to be able to do the dances.

So you discovered that square dancing is a melting pot of dances?

Yes, square dancing is definitely, you know, a so-called melting pot dance. But what happened by the 20th century is that, basically, these traditions became whitewashed.

Oh Emma, oh ♪.

You turn around, dig a hole in the ground. Oh, Emma, oh. ♪.

Oh Emma, oh ♪.

You turn around, dig a hole in the ground. Oh, Emma, oh. ♪.

Did anyone at the hearing make the argument that he was making?

No, no, this is something that he's kind of discovered in the last few years.

It is interesting because now you're like, maybe it should be the national folk dance, but I don't know. I mean, does that still feel like someone else's dance? That you just now have a small side role?

I did. I still don't think that square dancing should be the national folk dance, but I, you know, and I told Phil that. But I was like, you know, if you told me that, you know? Black people had something to do with this dance, that Native Americans have something to do with, kind of the development of this dance. If you told me that, then I would say, oh so that actually this dance is a lot more American, you know, in that inclusionary way that we would like to think of America as then I would have thought, and maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea. And then he pointed out, Well, what about Latino people? what about Asian people? You know? Like, once again, we're like, way too multicultural a society to, like, just say.

But what if?

This thing okay.

What if you?

You could tap dance in a square dance, you can clog in a square dance. why not? You can see you can find videos of people clogging in a square formation.

You could, I don't know, do modern dance in a square dance. that's a little harder, but maybe.

It's a little harder, but.

Ballet.

Sure.

Hip hop dancing.

I could see more hip hop dancing in a square dance. Well, okay. It was at this point, when this conversation started to go somewhere, that we decided, you know what, we should have a live show. Does anyone else have any like other ideas about, like, what's a fun group dance that we can all do together?

The Charleston.

The twist? So we had done our introductory square dance with everyone and we told them this history, the what?

The butt.

Okay.

But then we heard about this one particular square dance call, and this is the one that's related to the ring shout, which I mentioned earlier. So Alex, let's talk a little bit about the last dancer tonight. So we brought our square dance caller, Alex Kramer, back on stage. But at some point you're gonna use a call, that's what's the call gonna be.

Oh right, right, right, so.

Did you forget already?

So the dance is called Birdie in the Cage.

Okay.

So the call is the first call is put the birdie in the cage, and so then what happens is, if you're the birdie at that moment, you just like, hop on in to the center of the circle and you get to do your special dance.

It can be the YMCA, the Da Butt, the Funky chicken, the funky chicken.

The Floss.

You can floss, you can Millie rock, you can kid and play, you can twerk, you can twerk.

You can nae nae.

You can, what?

Nae nae, nae nae yeah.

DOUGIE Absolutely, so that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do a little square dance and then he's gonna say, Birdie in the cage, and then everyone's gonna do whatever the f you want.

Hey, show us what you're working with.

Back to the right, don't take all night.

Go into the center with a great, big shout.

Swing your partner all about.

Promenade, promenade, go around the town.

And you'll wave it upside down. Were you dancing?

Yeah, I was trying, I was trying to.

Couple one, let's have some fun.

Couple one go out to the right circle left, with couple two birdie in the cage.

Couple one, couple, two circle left. I remember it was just chaos, it was like crazy chaos.

Bird hop out and crow hop in.

Cause, like, he was doing these calls and we were swinging around.

Circle to the left, birdie in the cage. Yeah, I was standing off, I had gotten off the stage and I was standing off to the side, leaning against the wall. And trying to just stay out of people's ways. Cause there was a lot of limbs flailing around. Yeah, there was.

Cause you didn't have much time. You're just like, I got to do my thing and then I got to get out circle and around you go.

Last chance?

Birdie number four show us what you're working with.

Yeah, it was just a hot mess, but it was the happiest hot mess I've been a part of in a long time.

Yeah, really beautiful.

Yes, it's called Poor black sheep, and it comes from a black banjo fiddle. Duo Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson, who were from Nashville, Tennessee, were recorded in I Think 1946.

So I thought it'd be a really cool idea if we just like, played his song.

Yeah, totally.

And say, Thank you, Jake.

I loved his description. I keep thinking about when he said, when he plays, it's like his brain moves into his arm. Cause I was like, when you hear it, you hear this and you're like, Oh yeah, he's just all arm.

Thank you for being here, thank you for being here.

Well, thank you, Tracy.

You're welcome.

This episode, of course, was reported by Tracy Hunt and produced by Andy McEwan. And we also had an assist on the sound design mix front from Jeremy Bloom.

Also, I just want to say thank you to Lee, Ellen Friedland, Bob Dalsimer, Alex Kramer, our caller, our amazing band from the live event. Stephanie Coleman, Courtney Harmon and Steph Jenkins. And Phil Jamison has a book out called Hodowns, Reels and Frolics Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance. You should definitely check that out, thanks.

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