A place to hang random notes and ideas for square dancing stuff.
Notes from the 2013 IAGSDC Intro to Calling
- http://dosado.com/music
- http://all8.com
- http://musicforcallers.com
- Caller lab call analysis list
Modules & Patterns
Music Ideas
Archive.org square dance without calls (already downloaded some of these, need to sort them) https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Asquaredanceswithoutcalls&sort=-publicdate
Acoustic version of Hotel California that's the right speed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1q4-tzMI28
Patter Calls
- Saturday Night Band - Come on Dance, Dance
- Bobby O - How To Pick Up Girls
Singing calls
- Rock The Boat by Hues Corporation
- Daft Punk "Get Lucky"
- Scissor Sisters "I Don't Feel Like Dancing"
- Some rendition of Irving Berlin's "Dancing Cheek To Cheek"
- Dusty Springfield "Son of a Preacher"
Need to set up a CDG player of some sort. CDG syncs music with lyrics.
Sound System
Rich Reel likes the QSC K8 http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/K8
The Samson Expedition Escape feels like it doesn't have the volume, and the mic channel is muddy.
Notes from Cowboy Dances
In "Cowboy Dances" published in 1939, Lloyd Shaw asks "Could it have been the sixties to the nineties that slowed the waltz down till it died?"
Substitute "square dance" for "waltz" and we could be asking the same question now...
Reading through patter Shaw proposes, I'm seeing examples like
All jump up and never come down
Swing your honey around and around
'Till the hollow of your foot
Makes a hole in the ground.
Promenade, boys, promenade!
Clearly we need to stop with the slow sedate stuff and kick it up a notch.
Regarding teaching kids:
One last word ! Please do not teach these dances to little children. Grade-school pupils may enjoy them but it will mark the dances forever in your community with the stigmaof "kid stuff." Well-meaning gymnasium teachers have taught the splendid circle folk dances of the peasants of Europe to girls' gymnasium classes and to little children, until folk dancing is popularly thought of as "sissy stuff," and most manly chaps will have nothing to do with it without a deal of tactful educating. Not only are the dances so vigorous and manly and strenuous that they are quite unsuited for girls' classes or children but they will thus be killed for everyone. If, in your community, you can start the dances with the manliest and most popular young fellows, with older men mixing in, the program will become a great joy. But if you see any well-meaning woman trying to teach them to children or to classes of girls, please rush to the nearest court and get out an injunction to keep her from robbing the adult public of a precious sport that really belongs to it.