Hello, everyone, and welcome back to then again the podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. I am your host for this episode, Marie Bartlett, director of the ADA May Ivester Education center here. And today. Our special guest is Dr. Carolyn Sutton Clark, dance historian. Thank you for being with us today.

Always a pleasure. Marie Bartlett.

In this episode, we are going to talk about the state dance of Georgia, which I did not until fairly recently realize that Georgia had a state dance. So you also might be surprised, dear listener, to learn that Georgia does indeed have a state dance. And our state dance is square dancing. And it's really interesting that square dancing is also the state dance of many other states. And I am intrigued to learn more about how this occurred and why. But to begin, can we talk about the history of square dancing in general?

Absolutely. So square dancing seems to have this history. It's sort of mythological that it's this American country dance coming from the people. And really, when we're talking about square dancing, we're talking about a phenomenon that began in the 1920s. It's not well known, but really fascinating. I came to look into square dancing out of sheer curiosity as a dance historian, because I remembered taking square dance lessons in physical education classes when I was in elementary school. And I thought, well, that's a little strange. It's not football, it's not baseball, not track. How did we come to have these square dance lessons just pop up to everyone's mortification? Because we were dancing boys and girls together in elementary school. So I started going down the rabbit hole a bit about this, and it is fascinating, as many lost histories tend to be, there are reasons why their stories are not generally known. And they have these public histories that are legend or myth, having to do with a cultural imaginary of why we do the things we do. And I'd like to say first off the bat that I have nothing against square dancing. Sometimes it might sound like that just because I bring forward some inconvenient facts. But I always feel that people are doing the dance that they love to do because they love to do it. And knowing more about its origins simply helps make those practices more informed and richer. So I have nothing against square dancing whatsoever. Hopefully I'll be able to make that clear as we go. It's not hard to see from someone who does historic dance, such as yourself, that a lot of square dancing comes from the Quadrille. So the Quadrille is done in a square formation between four couples, and that's the square of square dancing. As Europeans came over to North America and the Caribbean. They brought with them their cultural dances, and there was a lot of social dancing. There still is all over the world. And every culture has something that can be called dance. And as they brought these dances with them, the Quadrille was very popular at that time of colonization and of immigration waves. So every time we have a group immigrating to what became the United States, we have these dances that were popular at the time. I like to think of it as if we maybe went to the moon and we took with know, the cha cha slide or something, and that became the national dance of the moon, the global dance of the moon. Anyway, I digress. So the quadrille, very popular dance. Side note, the quadrille was also the root dance for the cancan, believe it or not. But that's something for my next episode with you. Yes.

Now I'm going to make a note about how we're going to have a history of the Cancans, the Cancan and.

Drill teams in the US, and how, personally, I think football would not be nearly as popular as it is in the US without dance, but fascinating.

All right, I'm writing all of this down.

You know how I get. It's all connected.

It is. Everything's connected. Everything to dance.

And you, Lucky Marie, get to hear it all from all kinds of different people and directions, like, oh, yeah, I see how that fits. Anyway, there are other dances that feed into the square dance. We have some scholars that think that English Morris dancing, which is also not as old as sometimes is made out to be, has some influence. Catillion or Cotillon from France. But we have these series of dances, particularly from the British Isles, from Ireland and Scotland, Scottish country dancing, English country dancing, all have these influences on the square dance. Having said that, we come to a lot of these dances being spread throughout the United States and the Caribbean. So I've never had the fortune of going to the Caribbean yet. But people who have traveled to the Caribbean on vacation or may have lived there will be familiar with the Caribbean version of the quadrille, which is sometimes called Caribbean square dance. But it's a bit of a misnomer because it's called quadrille and actually quatrill kwatril. And it's distinctive from other kinds of quadrilles, as it would be the enslavers bringing their quadrills to the islands of the Caribbean. And then that gets mixed with some African aesthetics, diasporic ways of moving. I'm sad to say that often, as was the case in the United States, enslaved peoples were made to entertain by doing dances from the enslavers culture. And that was the case in the Caribbean. We have the quatrille, which is still recognized today. And it's actually the national dance of some of these islands now because it's so much part of the culture. Anyway, this becomes important when we start talking about the calling and the role of the caller. We have some of those dances traveling to the western part of what would become the United States. And when you think of movies and the sort of Yeehaw dances, square dances, that's where it's coming from. But the surfaces on which they danced in that era, usually they had to dance outside or on cabin floors, which could be rough, and they couldn't glide very easily. So they had to kind of pick up their feet and jump a little bit as they danced. As you can imagine, dancing outside, particularly on the grass and the little tufts, know, you have to pick your feet up a little bit. So it became a little bit more of know, jumpy dosy Doe, we think, know characterized or stereotyped in Hollywood movies. So we have these old fashioned dances stemming from people immigrating to the United States, the Quadrilles and the Minuettes from a little time earlier. As many people know, George Washington's favorite dance was the minuet. And we've talked or think about that before on this podcast. These social dances, like the reels, the Virginia reel, and other kinds of reels, Minuetes, quadrilles, and then eventually waltzes that were so important to the colonies and eventually the United States as social dances. And those were the kinds of dances that the automobile maker Henry Ford was exposed to in his youth. And this is where it really gets singular and interesting. So Henry Ford, the automaker, had a lot of power and money, and he had various causes that he believed in. And because of his very predominant influence in particularly the Eastern United States, what is now the Midwest, he would find these causes and fund them. And there were many of them. One of them was this nostalgia he had for the dances of his youth, which he saw as being rather innocent, fun, and proper. So one thing about Henry Ford is in the 1920s, he has witnessed the advance of a new cultural music and dance phenomenon called jazz, especially in the East coast amongst the African American population. Now, he was not very knowledgeable about jazz. He was just beginning to be exposed to it. And he hated it. Many people did at the time. I think many more people were interested in it. Nobody knows where the term jazz came from. There's a lot of misinformation out there on the Internet, as we all know. And one of them is about the origins of the term jazz. I like to say that if you find a source that can tell you definitively where jazz comes from, it's automatically wrong, because we don't know. There are many highly reputable scholars that have found different ideas about it and will not be able to determine a Source for it. There are lots of great ideas. Anyway, no one knows where the term jazz came from, but it was a form that arose from African American communities, particularly in the Northeast. Although we still have the Southern Duke joint origins of jazz as well, there's some traveling and influence between them. Back to Henry Ford. Henry Ford had the mistaken idea that jazz was a creation of the Jewish people. And being a well known anti Semite, he wanted to quash jazz because he felt that Jews were corrupting African Americans. And between the two of them, they were corrupting the culture of the United States. That is a very difficult history to think about. So Henry Ford believed he was going to combat jazz with a counterforce, which is the culture of his Own youth in the types of music and dances that he loved. And so there's a lot of nostalgia here in terms of Henry Ford's own ideas about these carefree days and the old timey stuff. So he and his wife bought a property called the Wayside Inn in Sudsbury, Massachusetts, in 1923, and they wanted to spread this culture through holding dances at the Wayside Inn. So, like many generations before in Eurocentric culture, he hired a dancing master. And the dancing master's name was Benjamin Levitt. Henry Ford and his wife would hold these parties where Benjamin Lovett would come and teach the old fashioned square dancing, or quadrilles, to all of these very influential people that were friends of the Fords. And it's interesting that even at this time, those kinds of dances were considered old fashioned. They called them the old fashioned dancing, but they were considered, quote unquote square nonetHeless. Because it was the Fords, people jumped on board to be present, not unlike many of the European courts, currying favor during the dances that were held know royal or noble settings. Not unlike the early days of the colonies in the United States, where people went to dances to be able to talk to the leaders of the day, such as George WashiNGton, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Again, we have people attending these dances so they could rub elbows with the movers and shakers of the times, so to speak. The quote unquote old fashioned dancing became a new trend spreading out throughout the United States. And Henry Ford subsidized this spread very intentionally. He took out newspaper advertisements that were distributed around the country that gave instructions on how to do the official version of these square dances. He invited over 200 dancing instructors from Ohio and Michigan to his hometown of Dearborn, Michigan, to learn the Virginia Real, the Shotish, the Varsovien. I think I'm saying that right, which was Henry Ford's personal favorite dance, the Gavat, the Ripple, the minuet, and other almost forgotten steps. He also, at the time, his own orchestra would travel around to play the old fashioned dance music to accompany these demonstrations. And then when the new cars came out during the 1920s, particularly the late 1920s, every time Henry Ford had his new auto show, he would arrange for his orchestra and dancers to be at these auto shows. And these were covered by nationwide radio broadcast. So people all over the country got to hear the radio, the orchestra playing, and hear about the dancing that was going on. And then all of the Ford Auto showrooms would concurrently hold dances in their own showrooms across the country. So every time the new autos came out, people would be dancing at these showrooms. And in some of my research, it shows that nearly 25% of people in smaller and mid sized towns would go to these events. That is a quarter of the population learning and listening to and taking part in these dances, which were to set music of Henry Ford's orchestra and were taught by these certified instructors in the Henry Ford method. And they came out with an instructional manual with that instructional know. Every time you have an artifact written down about dance, you can distribute it, and there's going to be different interpretations of what those dances look like. But generally you have a manual that tells you what to do. So by 1928, in schools in the United States, almost half of the public schools were teaching Henry Ford's version of square dancing. So from 1923, when he started this initiative, to 1928, is only five years. That really illustrates the influence that he had. I could get into nitty gritty details, and I invite your listeners to investigate because it's really something. But Ford really partnered up with his contacts in the American public school system to distribute these books, these manuals about how to do square dance. And it became part of the curriculum. We're talking about a time when football, for example, had not really dominated the public school physical education scene. Physical education was relatively new in the public school system at the time because PE didn't really gain hold until after World War I, when the military discovered that a lot of their young men were simply out of shape, having been displaced by the Industrial Revolution because people were in the habit of keeping themselves fit as a spare time activity. It's such a physical effort to do a lot of things on the farm or even in this preindustrial city, just washing clothes, for heaven's sake, will just wear you out for the entire week, and then you got to start all over again.

Or just like, if you need to go somewhere, you're going to be walking like a mile, maybe even more.

People did not need to seek out opportunities to make themselves more fit. If anything, they needed to rest. So PE was an intentional inclusion into the public school system to basically get young men more fit and ready for being deployed for battle. I digressed again.

I'm sorry, but they're interesting digressions, though.

Well, I think so. So PE wasn't established so much. It was like, well, we'll do a little of this and a little of that. And then Henry Ford came in and said, this is such a wholesome activity. It's however you interpret wholesome, it's good for your physical fitness, which it is. But there were a lot of other values that came along with physical fitness that were part of the campaign for square dancing. And that's where it gets a little tricky, that it teaches about moral uprightness and these kinds of values. And I'm not saying that it doesn't, but that those kinds of ideas can, they don't promote diversity in sort of the democratic American ideal. You'll probably.

There is like a secret agenda to the square dancing.

Well, there was a secret agenda, and that was to push back against minority populations. It's very open that that was the.

An open, secret dancing.

Very well said. So, yeah, I think that almost wraps up the history coming up to the official state dance movement, which really started in the 1970s. Yes.

Because when I was looking through to see when everyone got, quote unquote, their official state dance, it was fairly recent, I would think. Georgia has been a state since we were the 13th colony, but we were the fourth state and back in the 1780s, and I was just thinking, wow, it took us like 200 years to decide on a state dance. But again, the whole state bird, the state flower, the state song, the state dance, those movements really come about in the second half of the 19 hundreds. Yes. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? And how does Georgia end up with square dancing as its state dance?

In my research, I touched upon these different movements to designate official state things. And it's something that I would say I know about the dance movement, not so much about the birds and the flowers and so forth. A lot of it has to do with these initiatives for state pride that are fairly easy to get past through congressional bodies and make it look like you've done something. So they're not as contentious or they used to not be as contentious as other kinds of momentum. Anywho, the wave of promoting square dance as state dance really came about as a result of square dance failing to gain recognition as a national dance. The first push was to have square dance recognized as a national dance. Again, so much misinformation on the Internet. I have come across sites that say that it is the national dance of the United States, which it is not. There is no national dance of the United States with the codification of square dance seen in these dance manuals. Henry Ford's book was used in public schools up through the 1970s. So a really influential book. And with the designation of certified dance instructors, we have local square dance communities rising up and really enjoying the practice. And again, I think it's wonderful that people are dancing for their health and enjoyment and social bonding, but we have these square dance communities becoming formalized by becoming associations on the local level, on the regional level, and then on the national level. And the push to get square dance to be the national dance in the United States really came from two organizations, sort of oversaw, and still do oversaw the standards, how things are run, how groups are organized. This can be very helpful in terms of promoting and stabilizing dance form, just as it is helpful in promoting and stabilizing any hobby or sport or many other things. And These are neCessary. But these organizations saw that interest in square dance was really fragmenting, and they wanted to solidify the sTatus. And the easiest way, most prominent way to do that is to become the national symbol. So we have a national eagle, we have national symbol and eagle. We have other national symBols. So why not, in this view, go for square dance as A national dance? Because, Again, the Roots were not well known. They were Sort of lost in the Mists of time pretty deliberately. You look at the narrative around the dances, and it's like, oh, it's this uniquely American dance and comes from the people. And of course, this is not true. It's lovely to imagine these origins. We've always done this. We'll keep doing it. It's such a great thing, a great practice, and it's very simple in terms of its origins, and that's rarely true with anything in history.

Everything is more complicated and nuanced.

Absolutely. It's always already embedded and interwoven with everything else. But I am sure that the intentions behind these movements were very genuine in terms of their enthusiasm for the dance. There simply wasn't an initiative to try to find out more or to really think critically about what would happen and why this should be the national dance. It's just when you read the verbiage around these initiatives and house bills coming forward for the legislature, it's really very simple. It's like, isn't this a lovely thing? Let's get behind it. So the first initiative for this to become a national dance started in 1973, and they continued to 2003. So we have this 30 year span of trying and trying and trying. Let's see. I want to make sure I get this right and I don't mess up the state and the national level. 30 bills were introduced at the national level over those years to try to get square dancing approved, and one of them did succeed. So for one year, from 1982 to 1983, square dance was the national dance of the United States. It was brought forward by West Virginia Senator Robert Bird in the House, signed by Ronald Reagan, declaring square dancing the national Folk Dance of the US for one year. And the bill stated, the American people value the display of etiquette among men and women, which is a major element of square dancing. It is also a traditional form of family recreation that dissolves arbitrary social distinctions. So you see, there's a lot of very idealistic perspective there. And the etiquette piece is fascinating because you can follow that all the way back to the Middle Ages. Middle age. What we know of social dancing in the Middle Ages in the court, had a lot to do with chivalry. So that etiquette piece is interesting, the family values piece is interesting. And this democratic ideal of dissolving, quote, unquote, arbitrary social distinctions, which I don't think is really possible. But it's this idea that creates this level surface playing surface dancing surface where everybody's equal. And of course, that's never going to be the case. So just one year, it was the official dance, and it was never meant to last longer than that. So we have this national initiative, and it fails after 1983, it looks like it's not going to happen, even though there's a reintroduction every year. And so the American folk dance communities decide, okay, we can't get it on national level. Let's go on a state level, and let's get all of the states to adopt square dance as their state folk dance. And that's exactly what happened in Georgia. We have the chairpeople for the American folk dance of Georgia bring forward proposals. Their sponsor was J. Max Davis in the House of Representatives and then Senator Joseph Burton in the Senate. And this became House bill number 1519. It was signed into law on April 8, 1996, by Governor Zell Miller, designating the square dance, the official folk dance of the state of Georgia. So to answer your question from 12 hours ago, this came into law in 1996 because of a very small but highly determined group of people, which is often the case. I can't really find any evidence that this was discussed among the public. And here's where maybe some of your listeners, having lived in the area longer than I have, maybe can recall if there was any discussion about this, thinking, why square dance? Who does square dance anymore? Is this really historically the best choice for a state dance, or should we even have a state dance? But again, this was a wave. And that is why so many states do have square dancing as their state dance. It was an organized effort. I have found different numbers for how many states have square dance as their state dance, just depending on when it happened, anywhere from 21 to 33. And I hate to be so inexact with that, but that's the nature of research, too. I'm not sure at this moment. Let's just say all states have been facing this, all 50 states. As a result, there has been some pushback in some states to adopt a different official state dance before square dance could jump in there and gain that title. So it's sort of a defensive play. And one of the more obvious ones is Hawaii. Hawaii immediately adopted the Hawaiian Hula as its official state dance, as you can imagine. But also North Carolina has two official state dances, which are clogging and the Carolina shag, and Wisconsin has POCA as its official state. Only about. There are a handful of states that know had this counter movement to the movement. I love movement words, a counter movement to square dance becoming a state dance, because certain groups were paying attention and saying, why square dance? Why not indigenous dance? Or out of all the various dances that exist today, and we're talking about the 1970s, maybe only a minority of people still do square dance, like a tiny minority of people still do square dance. So why does that get this valued status? And Eric Zorn wrote in 1990 for the Chicago Tribune, there's nothing inherently wrong with square dancing, but there is something sinister about declaring it to be more valuable than any other form of dance. And I think that's the real issue here. Not to bash square dance, but to say, hey, all of these other forms of dance exist and are at least as equally valid. Also, there's the identity of what does it mean to be folk? And that is a very problematic term anyway. But to say that other aspects of folk culture, however you define it, really come from this idea of people building it for themselves and that it's very local. It's a very local practice that people have built for themselves. And we know that square dance is not that it's highly organized. So how can you have two dozen states say this is unique to our state, like the state flower or the state know, and then two dozen states have the same folk dance? It doesn't make any sense, especially just.

Some of the other things that we've talked about today, like the Virginia real. How is that not the state dance of like, it has it in the name or the Charleston for South Carolina, it has the city of Charleston and has lots of jazz roots within the state of Charleston. I'm sorry, within the state of South Carolina and especially within the city of Charleston, being such a big, important port city. Again, nothing against square dancing. Square dancing is great. And I think that it should be at least one person state dance for, especially when I think square dancing, I think about the Midwest and as you should, because the modern practice of square.

Dancing basically came from Dearborn, Michigan and the Wayside Inn in Massachusetts. But Henry Ford just really having that Midwestern cultural root rootedness. Another issue that comes when you're talking about this history and whether or not this is actually folk dance is that it is the modern practice of square dancing, highly codified. There are studs that you do and principles that you do, and you have to adhere to those things. And it's highly organized on the national level, and it costs money. You have to take lessons, you have to give dues to participate, whereas folk, you have to use recorded music and often swear dance now is done to pop songs. But interesting. Yeah. When you're talking about more of the folk traditions, it really is much more about being open to many more people, about being low cost, about something that everyone can participate in as a way of building your local community. And live music is a major component of a lot of folk practices. So it is fascinating how people's interests can go in a variety of.

Also, I realized I double checked really fast because I wanted to make sure when I said that Virginia State dance wasn't the Virginia real, that I wasn't lying. And somehow Virginia has state. It's also square dancing. Virginia State dance is also square dancing. But for South Carolina, it is the shag.

The shag, yeah.

Yes. And then I think we also. North Carolina. North Carolina's is also the shag. Oh, no.

North Carolina is clogging and the Carolina shag. And so it'd be interesting to look into those and say, okay, well, who led that? Somebody took up the baton and said, no, I think that we identify as a state by doing the Carolina shag or clogging. And it's like, well, does everyone really do identify that way?

Yes. So I wanted to also ask, do you think that square dancing is a good fit for the state of Georgia? And if not, do you think there is another dance stuff perhaps, or another several know, we don't have know, just settle on one. We're not trying know, determine or displace square dancing. But do you think that there might be other options as well? Because I feel like if everyone's state dance is square dancing, then it's not really special to the state anymore. So how do you feel that square dancing has contributed to Georgia's cultural identity or not?

Great question. After you sent me a list of possible questions and this impact on Georgia culture was one of them, I looked, I did some research into that very topic because I think that's really important. And honestly, I could not find any hint of the impact of square dance on Georgia. Now, square dancers in Georgia probably would hate that statement, but that's the difference between scholarly research and people's lived experience. You don't want to devalue people's lived experience. I think it's wonderful when people love to dance, but we live in a very diverse state. And personally, I don't think it's inappropriate to have a state dance because at that point you have to say, well, whose version of square dance is the official state dance? Honestly, who gets to decide? And that's key. Who gets to decide? Who benefits from the decision to have square dance be the state dance? I pose this question to my students when I teach in colleges and what should a state dance be? If we had a state dance? And usually the first thing that comes up is indigenous dance, and that's a really legitimate claim. Then you get into the same question. Whose dances out of this vast territory with many different peoples do we decide? Who gets to decide? What value system or metric do they use? And there just are no answers to those questions. Therefore, I don't think that that determination can be made.

It's kind of different than, say, the state flower or the state bird or the state tree. It's well, we look at this area of land, what is the most significant tree? What tree do we have the most of? We can do an actual counting metric for that and then determine even, I don't know, I feel like a state song sometimes makes sense. Know, Georgia on My Mind is a song about Georgia and home Alabama. Like, it makes sense to have those as state songs that are very popular and somehow feel like they are a part of that. Like when I think know a state flag, you get to design that to represent your state. And also we've seen even fairly recently, state flags can change to reflect the times and the people living there better. So I think perhaps even with. And also I think we've seen some songs change as well. Know, if a new song comes out that people get really excited about, well, maybe we can replace it. But when I think about square dancing, I was actually very surprised when I figured out that Georgia's state dance was square dancing. I'm like, oh, we have state dances. That's so exciting. And then I went in like square dancing. Really. I've lived in Georgia my entire life and I'm not completely sure if I've done square dancing in the state of Georgia. I know in my school they took us on a very nice field trip. It was more like a senior class trip out to a dude ranch in Colorado and we got to pretend to be cowgirls and cowboys for a week. And it was a whole lot of fun. And we rode horses through the Rocky Mountains. And the big thing at the end was that we had this big kind of cookout shindig and we did a whole square dancing thing and we all dressed up in our good old western gear and we did square dancing and it was a whole lot of fun. It was a hoot and a half. So when I think about square dancing, I think out west, more Midwest like Texas and coLorado, and places where you think about like, oh, mean, I'm not sure if this is an accurate representation, but where cowboy hats are more prevalent is where I would think that square dancing is also more prevalent. I know that we have square dancing societies in Georgia, specifically, I believe North Georgia and some of the more rural areas of Georgia. I believe that there are a fair amount of square dancing places or classes, people who gather to square dance. But then when I think about Atlanta, which of course Gainesville is not too far from where the history center is located, I don't think people get together in Atlanta to square dance. I am not aware of any square dancing societies within the more metro Atlanta area. And of course, there might be some that I'm just not aware of, but I don't feel like it is a prevalent subculture in the city of Atlanta. I could think of way more, and other dance groups that I can think of that are in Atlanta, and square dancing is not one that jumps to the top of the list.

Those are all such great points. Marie and I have come across some small groups in the Atlanta metro area. I've seen their web pages or whatnot. I think that since the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of groups have struggled to gain their footing, so to speak, or they've found other groups that are similar. We have large English country dancing groups in the area, and again, those forms do share roots. But you're absolutely right. A lot of the Square dancing initiative, coming from the late 60s into the 70s, got connected with country Western music because that was also a boom time for this sort of, again, this back to the roots Americana that became connected with a huge push for country music. And those dances absolutely existed. Know the know an old Texas gal myself, and Alcott and I Joe with the best of them and go boot scooting when I'm home and do my Texas two steps. So those are all related. For know, it's just nice to see people dancing together at all anymore.

Let me see what other questions. I think we've answered most of the questions that I have. So what are your final thoughts about square dancing and what's really the takeaway that you want people who listen to this podcast to walk away with the knowledge of?

I think that, as with anytime that I talk about dance, it's so important for me for people to understand and be aware that people dance. And there are so many different ways to dance, and it is so good for you. It's one of the best things that you can do for your physical health, your mental health, your social health, countering the epidemic of loneliness that many industrialized countries are facing. And it's a great way to be together to celebrate culture, that all of these dances come from different times and places, and they're always changing. We can't fix any of them in time, or we can't fix anything in time, really, it's all about our relationships with these historical and cultural practices. And when we are interested in something, it's very easy to do some digging nowadays and find out more about it. People often oversimplify or over romanticize dance practices, and honestly, I think that's to our detriment, because when you do that, it becomes untethered to daily life. And my life's purpose, really, is to get people dancing again, especially in the United States, where we have these weird myths about who gets to dance and who doesn't get to dance and why. And a lot of these ideas are very recent. People in the United States have done all kinds of dances for a long time. So, for example, in the disco episode, I talked about men dancing a lot. And that is just a return to the fact that men do dance. There's no saying that it's more natural for women than men. It's all cultural and historical. So dancing is such a healthy practice. And it really connects you to all kinds of music and history and culture and other people. I really am saddened thinking people don't do it because of these misunderstandings. So I think investigating something like square dance brings forward that these are real everyday life practices. And not just something that somebody else does or that doesn't have an impact on our daily lives. It does have an impact on our daily lives. That's one reason I get so distracted when I talk about it, is because I'm making these connections right and left. And it's important for me to try to make these things accessible to people in whatever way they want it. So that's really why I get excited about different dance forms and their histories and how they connect to something like a piece of legislature.

Yes, because we delved into some of the more difficult history of square dancing today. Which I think is always good to be aware of. But also, I think we'll make sure we end on a positive note for square dancing. Because as we've been talking, I've been thinking about it, and square dancing does feel like a fairly accessible form of dance. You can do it to recorded music pretty easily. You can do it to a variety of music. It doesn't have to be a certain song, a certain set of requirements for music for square dancing. Also, as long as you have a collar, you can square dance. You don't have to memorize these steps. And a lot of the steps do seem to be more simple to where, if you have the ability to move, we can make square bit dance accessible to that person. Which I think when we're thinking about a state dance, that's always a plus, is to make it a fairly accessible dance to people, something that people can do. As someone who has a background in ballet, I'm thinking, oh, goodness, if we made ballet the state dance, you have to take classes for ballet. Because there are certain moves that you do a certain way. And there is a whole lot of, I don't want to say more complicated body movements, but there are more formalized and stylized movements than that. I think square dancing has, in certain aspects, of course, square dancing can get super. I've seen some square dance competitions where I'm like, wow, that's impressive and complicated. But when I think we're trying to make square dance more simple, just for the everyday folk, it can be fairly simple. It can be just moving, walking, turning. Turn your partner round and round, I think is probably endosy Doe. Those are like, kind of the turn your partner around and round. Everyone's heard that from someone somewhere. Yeah. And then promenade. Right. Promenade or around. So there are, of course, stylized movements that go along with square dancing, but they are ones that can be taught fairly quickly to make it a fun hoe down barn dance or even perhaps a little bit more formalized. I think square dancing has that Western connotation that is a little bit more hoedowny than ballroomy, I guess. But I do think that I want to make sure we highlight some of those positive aspects of square dancing to conclude and also encourage listeners, like you were saying, to go out and dance. To go out and socialize. It's a wonderful chance to socialize with people. It's a great form of exercise. Get the world dancing again, because we've lost this group dancing is something that we've really lost. And also a little bit of partner dancing as well, is something that we've lost in the past about 50 years or so, I would say. So, yeah. I don't know. Do you have anything to add to that?

No. That's so well stated. But yes, social dance has some common characteristics. Like you said, it has to be something. If the intention and the function of the dancing is to socialize, then there are certain characteristics that promote that or support it, one of them being that it's movement that most people can do. So you're not like having people saying, oh, I can't do that. I'm sitting this one out. So it has to be something that most people can do and pick up quickly. So ideally, you might have young people, old people, people without partners, people with partners, all shapes and sizes and conditions. You want to make it fairly able for people to do together within that togetherness, accept some differences. So social dancing is often like that, and you're looking at other people so you can pick up stuff as you go. By the fourth time you've done it, you've kind of got it just like some of the line dancing is exactly like that. Where is the safest place to be? The middle, because every time you turn, you have somebody to follow. Or if you're dancing in a circle, you can look at people in the eyes and face them. Where am I going with this? So when the intention is to be social, then there are ways of dancing which promote that. And square dancing does include all of that. You can, as with any competitive endeavor, take it to some really specialized, advanced experience extremes. But there's always a place for people to begin.

I think that's a wonderful place to end, is that there's always a wonderful place to begin. And I encourage our listeners, if you are part of the state of Georgia, I think that's where a fair amount of our listeners are from, or any other state where square dancing is your official state dance, which is just about most of them. And if you're interested in learning more about that particular part of your state's heritage, it's a fairly recent heritage, but if you are interested in learning more about that, maybe check out a local square dancing group and go and try it out and see how you like it. So thank you so much for listening to then again today. And thank you, Carolyn, for being with us again. It's always wonderful to talk to you about dance, and I've already thought about five other topics that I would like to talk to you that involve. I will this will not be the end of some of our dance history podcasts because it is a fun thing. If you enjoy this, please go ahead and give us an email talk and send us we like to hear from our listeners. You can email us at info@negachc.org Tell us about how you liked the podcast and also if you're interested in suggesting topics that we cover. We're always looking for recommendations that would be interesting to our listeners. So thank you so much for listening today, and until next time, take care. Then again is a production of the Northeast Georgia History center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by Andrews Gilles, our digital and on site program our made possible by the ADA May Ioster Education Center. Please join us next week for another episode of then again.