Old-Time Dance in the Upper Midwest

Old-Time Dance in the Upper Midwest

By Anna Rue

Bands like Haave’s Orchestra played for dances in the early part of the twentieth century. Haave’s Orchestra, Granite Falls, Minnesota.

Photographer: Matthias Bue. Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum Archives.

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orwegian-American old-time music has witnessed dramatic changes since immigrant families would invite their neighbors into their parlors to dance a few waltzes, but through the generations a link to the original purpose of sharing music, stories, laughter, and dances with one another has remained unchanged. The combination of all the activities that take place when people get together to enjoy old-time music has kept people coming back for more for many years. This was true of dances held among the first Norwegian immigrants in the mid-1800s and it remains true today, whether you are talking about the summertime FootNotes dances in Highlandville, Iowa, or festival dances like those held at Folklore Village in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, or the Nisswa-Stämman Scandinavian Folk Music Festival in Nisswa, Minnesota. People congregate to hear their favorite tunes, twirl around on the dance floor with their neighbors, visit with friends and family, bring their children together to play, and generally relax and have a good time. Getting together is an integral part of the dance music culture in the NorwegianAmerican tradition and the history of these gatherings in the region is a rich one indeed.

The term “old-time music” became a common phrase in the 1920s to describe the type of music played Vol. 7, No. 2 2009

at neighborhood gatherings in the Upper Midwest. This generally meant a mix of waltzes, schottisches, two steps, and polkas, but the term “old-time music” also developed plural but parallel meanings among communities in different regions of the United States. For example, the old-time music traditions of New England were heavily influenced by the Anglo-American heritage of the region and tended to emphasize square dances, ballads, sacred, and minstrel songs.

Old-time as it is played in the Upper Midwest is certainly less well-known nation-wide, but it is still very familiar to many of the folks who live there or who grew up listening to Norwegian-American dance music. Norwegian-American folk music, though, is so heavily influenced by dance, socializing, and historical circumstances that we can hardly talk about the music without talking about the contexts in which it has been played over the years.

Old-time music events in the Upper Midwest have taken a variety of forms, from house parties and bowery dances to barn dances and festival performances. These get-togethers took place in immigrants’ homes in the earliest days following immigration, when Norwegian settlers hosted house parties or private get-togethers between rural neighbors. Parties would rotate among neighbors who often depended on each other for 11

social interactions and work sharing. They were most popular in the winter months, when farm work slowed down and neighbors bundled themselves up and traveled miles through the snow in sleighs to get to a wintertime house party. Folks in the neighborhood who were known to play the fiddle, guitar, or button accordion would come together in makeshift bands, while the guests danced in the living room, parlor, kitchen, or wherever there happened to be room. Common memories of house parties (sometimes called “kitchen sweats”) include those of family and friends moving the living room furniture out of the way, rolling back the rugs to ready the house for all the neighborhood guests, passing a hat around to pay the band, and serving lunches at midnight to feed the famished dancers. Small children would have to fight for a place on the dance floor beside their parents, who would whirl adeptly around the room to the waltzes, schottisches, and polkas played by the band. Dances would continue late into the night and there are any number of folks whose earliest memories are of falling asleep at a house party on top of a pile of coats and blankets, only to be awakened for the ride home by their parents, after the music had stopped.

These cozy memories of neighborhood house parties are also closely related to summertime and work-share gatherings.

Sewing bees, threshing crews, barn raisings, and the like were considered times to get a lot of work done as a large group and were often topped off with evening dances. One type of outside dance that would take place in the warm summer evenings was called a “bowery dance,” which took place outside on a dance platform made with wooden planks, sometimes with a crude roof over the top, sometimes not. In the countryside the music from these bowery dances would carry over the fields and could sometimes cause conflicts. I have heard stories from the Decorah area of bowery dance floors being dismantled or even burned in the dead of night by disapproving neighbors. Still other venues for neighborhood dances could also be found. In his book Farmhouse Fiddlers: Music and Dance Traditions in the Rural Midwest, Philip Martin writes, “One of the best sites for dances was the one-room country schoolhouse. Most schoolhouses had good-sized floors and relatively few pieces of heavy furniture to move out of the way. Sited centrally in a neighborhood for the convenience of children, the rural schools made excellent meeting spots for all sorts of programs and socials.”1 Venues like this worked well for socializing in the early decades of the twentieth century, and they still serve many of the same functions today, even when we consider all of the changes that our society has seen over the past century.

Decorah’s own Foot-Notes and the popularly named Spring Grove Symphony, otherwise known as Bill Sherburne’s Band, have played in the Highlandville, Iowa, two-room schoolhouse since 1974, not only providing local dancers with a link to the past, but filling a need to remain connected to one another and to one’s community. These year-round get-togethers in rural neighborhoods throughout the Upper Midwest made up the backbone of many social networks in the New World, replacing the strong, localized rural networks that existed back in Norway. Even though it is rare today to find regularly-held schoolhouse dances like those in Highlandville, Iowa, they are still fresh, fun, and meaningful events to those who attend.

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Dances like these help us to remember or imagine life “back in the day,” but they are also still capable of helping us feel connected to one another several generations after some of these melodies were first made popular.

As wholesome as house parties and bowery dances sound in descriptions like ones I have just given, these get-togethers could sometimes spiral out of control or become sites of unintended or terrible incidents. Popular opinion in devoutly religious groups in the Norwegian-American community commonly associated dance music, instruments (in particular the fiddle), and dancing in general with sin and devilry. This association can be traced back to the Old Country in folk beliefs and legends. Tales about the devil mysteriously showing up at dances, challenging fiddlers in competition, inciting people to dance against their will, or of fiddlers making deals with the devil for exceptional musical skills also migrated to America from Norway.

Although beliefs that the devil was in some way connected to these dances and the fiddle eventually faded, dances and dance music were still tainted by the old tales to the extent that, for example, people were not able to explain why they felt the fiddle should not be played in church—they just knew

Music was often associated with drink and other devilish activities, as this tongue-in-cheek drawing by a famous fiddler shows. Devil on the Wine Keg, drawing originally by Otto Rindlisbacher.

Collection of James P. Leary. Used with permission.

Vesterheim

Bowery dances sometimes earned their reputation for trouble, as these two press clippings from Decorah, Iowa, show. Above, Decorah Republican, July 14, 1876. Above right, Decorah Journal, November 15, 1902.

it should not be. A possible explanation for the link between sin and dance music might be the loose correlation between dance events and unruly behavior. From time to time a guest or two might show up to a house party or a bowery dance drunk and perhaps a fight would break out. In this newspaper headline from The Decorah Republican on July 14, 1876, we see the consequences that could sometimes come from showing up to the wrong bowery dance at the wrong time (see above).

In another article in the Decorah Journal from November 15, 1902, a report from Bluffton, Iowa recounts a fight that broke out at a dance involving not only men but women as well. The report humorously compares the fierce women involved in this “free for-all-fight” to the famous bare-knuckle boxing champion from Boston, John L. Sullivan. Although no one had the misfortune of dying at this particular dance, we come away with the impression that these social dances were not always immune to rowdy and disruptive behavior— Vol. 7, No. 2 2009

even among “members of the gentler sex.” In large part the house parties and bowery dances, even when there was some amount of alcohol available, were so well-monitored and full of friends, neighbors, and children that moderation prevailed over excess and common sense worked to keep people in line.

The nature of old-time dances began to change sometime around the 1920s, however, when the car became more readily available in the countryside. As more and more people were able to afford cars, opportunities to hear touring entertainers grew and young people could choose to drive longer distances to a barn dance to hear musicians play brand new music.

It must have been a pretty attractive alternative to hearing the same neighbors play the same tunes over and over again throughout the year. Larger groups of people from wider areas sometimes resulted in more ethnic groups coming together, which meant that musical groups would have to play a greater variety of music to keep all the different folks entertained.

Barn dances did a great deal to expand tight-knit social circles of neighbors to include people from much farther away, and to expose audiences to new types of music that generally included mixes of different styles, popular tunes from America, and popular tunes from all over Europe.

In other ways, barn dances made it easier for young people to get together and meet each other on these crowded dance floors, where they did not have to mix as much with people of other generations. Philip Martin writes in Farmhouse Fiddlers that, “while young people adapted fairly well to the dance halls, those much younger or older found it difficult.

More and more, dances attracted a smaller segment of active dancers rather than a broad cross-section of the community.”2 So, as much as the crowds were becoming more diverse in some ways, they were also becoming more uniform in terms of age. This sometimes caused friction between young people when alcohol could be easily purchased outside the dance, and some dance halls gained bad reputations if fights frequently broke out in the crowds. The moderating effect that a mixed age group has on rowdy behavior sometimes went unchecked at dances attended mostly by young people.

Larger barn dance venues not only influenced the character of the dance crowds, but they helped to shape oldtime music as well. Whereas house parties and bowery dances in Norwegian neighborhoods typically showcased fiddlers, the huge spaces at a barn dance would dampen the sound of the fiddle and it would not carry as well. By the time barn dances hit their height in popularity, it was unusual to see fiddlers 13

Like many other Norwegian bands, Thorstein Skarning and his Norwegian Hillbillies combined humor and traditional tunes for dances in a variety of venues. Vesterheim Archives.

playing in the band and much more common to see a variety of horns (trumpets, trombones, tubas) and even drums.

These instruments were rarely seen at house parties and the differences in the types of tunes played began to resemble what was being played on the radio, an innovation that perhaps had as much influence on the rural dancing scene as the car.

Bands like Thorstein Skarning’s Orchestra and Slim Jim and the Vagabond Kid mixed sounds of traditional NorwegianAmerican folk music with elements of American countrywestern music and contributed to a new type of ethnicallyinfused regional music played in dance halls all across the Upper Midwest.

Old-time music and dance have seen dramatic changes over the years. These traditions have lived through social changes, shifts in musical styles, steep declines in popularity, a revival movement, technological innovation, and countless other events. Life has indeed changed since the heyday of the house party, but in many fundamental ways the enjoyment that comes from simply getting together with neighbors and friends to listen to some good music has not changed at all. Today we mostly encounter Norwegian-American music in festival settings, at weddings, or on other special occasions, and it is common for folk-music bands with a Nordic perspective to borrow not only from the ScandinavianAmerican tradition, but also from older folk music traditions from Scandinavia and Northern Europe. Even though the music we are listening to is sometimes different from what 14

folks played at house parties back in the day, and the events where we hear it are fewer and farther between, we are still connected to the tradition that compelled Norwegian immigrants to gather and dance. The desire to come together to enjoy each other’s company, hear some good music, visit and dance a little with a neighbor is so infectious and gratifying that we are still listening to these melodies and tapping our toes to them nearly two centuries after Norwegians first came to America—and with any luck we will continue to do so for many years to come.

Endnotes

1 Philip Martin, Farmhouse Fiddlers: Music and Dance Traditions in the Rural Midwest (Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin: Midwest Traditions, 1994), 56.

2 Ibid. 89.

About the Author Anna Rue is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and received a Master’s Degree in American studies from the University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is currently working towards her PhD in Scandinavian studies, with a concentration in folklore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation research is focused on Norwegian-American folk music from the folk music revival period to today.

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