There Goes Sally Goodin

The biggest thing in Arizona these days, next to the Grand Canyon, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Navajo Reservation, is square dancing. Upwards of 10,000 Arizonans-young couples, middle-aged folk, teenagers and an old gentleman in the central part of the state who's 80 if he's a day-are cutting an old-fashioned rug to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw," "Ragtime Annie" and "Little Brown Jug." It's epidemic from Williams to Wickenburg, from Kingman to Clifton, in the big cities of Phoenix and Tucson. At the mink-lined desert hotels and the comeas-you-are dude ranches, in school houses, meetin' halls and just plain living rooms, the bug has bitten deep. Maybe it's the same bug that has nipped the nation as a whole. For there's no doubting that the square dance has become an important and wonderful part of postwar Americana a facet of our culture as democratic as Election Day and more fun than a wedding.

But then again maybe it goes deeper in Arizona than just a postwar revival. Ours is the youngest of all the states, remember. And we're only a generation or so removed from the sturdy pioneers who rolled in along the valleys of the Salt and the Gila, and, while they kept a weather eye out for inhospitable Indians, square-danced their troubles away in the shadows of tall cactus and pine trees. So there are those who say that square dancing never really died out in Arizona. They say that Arizona swinging with the rest of America in a resurgence of this exhilarating pastime is simply Arizona doing what comes naturally.

How naturally we've taken to it can be seen from the extent to which square dancing has crept under the skin of Arizona. Phoenix has no less than 25 square dance clubsneighborhood aggregations, mostly, with such catchy names as Boots and Bustles, Heel and Toe, Jumping Cactus, Chicks and Hicks, Promenade and Bells and Bows. And at this writing some 500 new couples every week were mastering the strenuous and diverting complexities of such dances as "Sally Goodin" and "Double the Dose." Tucson has about a dozen clubs, and there's at least one-sometimes more-in every Arizona town big enough to sport a postoffice and a general store. In the wake of all this a small but prospering square dance industry has grown up. A lady in Scottsdale is giving all her time to the making of square dance shirts for the gents and dresses of flaring calico for their taws. A tailor in Phoenix is specializing in Western shirts for male square dancers whose prime specification is: "The louder it hollers, the better I'll like it."

One of Phoenix' big Western stores staged a special square dance style show last winter for a square dance club in the capital city. A record shop set about the making of square dance records under its own label for nation-wide distribution, and Arizona saw the birth of its first square dance magazine. It's called "Thread the Needle," and it's published in Phoenix by an ex-filling station operator named Joe Boykin, who got out of the filling station business and into the square dance business full time because it looked like a very good thing.

The square dance idea, indeed, has worked its way deeply into the fabric of Arizona. At the Phoenix rodeo last March the most vociferous applause went to a troupe of square-dancers-on-horseback-a mounted quadrille, they called it. The Dons Club took an exhibition group of square dancers on its famous Superstition Mountain Trek. There on the slopes of the eerie mountain they executed their graceful patterns beneath the same stars which once-so the legend goes-watched men die in their search for mythical gold. Square dancing was an early Saturday night staple of Arizona's infant television and has even wormed its way into radio commercials (it was inevitable!).

The square dance bug seems to have got in its first good licks in Arizona soon after the war ended. But long before it became a craze, little groups of purposeful people square danced in solitary contentment, confident that This Was It and that the public some day would catch up with them.

Bud Brown was one of those people. He's a school teacher in Phoenix and the owner of a big barn where week after week the timbers quiver to the thump of dancing feet, the rasp of violins and the deep and comfortable plunk of a bass fiddle.

"Ten years ago," says Brown, "we were making excuses to our friends why we were square dancing. Now our nonsquare dancing friends are making excuses to us why they haven't got around to getting started."

And, say Bud Brown and others among Arizona's square dance experts, it's only just beginning.

"I don't think we've reached our peak here yet," obWhen the folks out here get together with a good caller, good music, and just any kind of hall, it is a bet you'll see some mighty fine square dance groups swing into action.

served a veteran square dance caller. He's one of a hundred or more accomplished practitioners of this exacting art in Arizona who are as much in demand nowadays as a beautiful co-ed with a Cadillac convertible. In Phoenix they've formed their own callers' club and meet regularly to swap new square dance gimmicks and talk shop, in much the same fashion as doctors at a meeting of the county medical society. These callers say that Arizona can claim a not insignificant amount of credit for helping to spread the square dance gospel throughout America. Every year it catches the fancy of thousands of winter and summer visitors converging on the state from points east, north and west. With time to burn, they're soon responding to the beguiling call of "sets in order!" whether in the ornate interior of some posh resort or on a plain slab of concrete in the middle of an unpretentious trailer village. Then back home they go, to Oregon, Wisconsin and Indiana, and first thing you know new square dance clubs are starting up in Portland, Madison and South Bend But in Portland, Madison and South Bend it's not likely they'll square dance quite like we do. For Arizona has a style all its own-or almost its own. Square dance-wise, we've oriented ourselves with Texas on the east and turned our backs on California to the west. Our mode of dancing is one which prevails pretty generally through the Southwestern "cotton belt" Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. That is probably not illogical, since Arizona has been settled in great part by westing emigrants from Texas and thereabouts. The style of dancing to which we adhere is characterized mainly by a shuffling two-step (step-close-step), with just a bare suggestion of a hop. It's fairly fast-about 135 metronome beats per minute-and thoroughly vigorous, as befits a state which, however short of sophistication it may be, certainly abounds in vigor.

Californians, on the other hand, go in for a straight, smooth shuffle step. Their feet scarcely leave the floor and the sound they make is akin to that of several hundred pieces of sandpaper being rubbed across the floor in chorus. Another contrast is to be found in the use of callers. Over there they are professionals, working for pay-as high as $60 a session. One caller runs the show right through an evening. Here the callers pridefully cling to their amateur standing. For each dance there's a different caller, and as many as 10 or a dozen will get a chance at the microphone before the evening ends. Arizonans like it that way. They say it makes for more variety.

The California style of dancing is followed pretty generally up the West coast and across the northern tier of states. In and around Kentucky folks subscribe to a kind of square dancing known as the "Kentucky running set"-very fast and breathless. And up New England-way the dancing is extremely staid and proper, because, of course, New England folk are staid and proper.

Burney Shook, one of Phoenix' most popular callers, sums it up this way: "We may not dance as smoothly as they do in other places. But we have a heck of a lot of fun."

Shook, however, is among those in Arizona who think we should purge our square dancing of a few of its eccentricities. He suspects that it's pure heresy on his part to urge conformity upon a people who revel in their rugged nonconformity. But, he says, some of our little peculiarities are plumb baffling to folks who come from somewhere else to spend the winter or summer with us and drift out of an evening for a session of do-si-do and putcher-little-foot. Typical of these eccentricities, says Shook, is the handhold most frequently used hereabouts. (In square dance parlance, of course, it's known as a "hand-holt.") The gent and his pretty girl grab each other's hand with a sort of thumblock, and away they go. Shook says it ought to be a simple hand-clasp, as it is elsewhere. And "swingin' on a corner like swingin' on a gate" means a hand swing in Arizona but a hip swing everywhere else. Shook thinks we ought to hip swing, too. "It's awful for me to say these things," he says, with the uneasy air of someone suggesting that women shouldn't be allowed to vote. "But they're true."

The situation may right itself, though. Our square dance sages say the trend is toward a melding of square dance styles all over the country. It's the result of mammoth square dancing festivals, such as those which attracted thousands in Phoenix and Tucson last winter and their counterparts in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and other places. Callers and dancers from all over the country mingle at these festivals and take home new ideas. The day yet may come when every gent in America grabs his pretty girl with the same "hand-holt" and non-conformity will become a dead issue.

But if styles of square dancing merge, the styles of calling doubtless will remain distinct and apart. For Arizona square dancers like both the "chanting" caller and the "singing" caller. If one is their entree, the other is their dessert. The names are almost self-explanatory. The chanting caller talks or chants his call, about the same way he'd recite "Mary Had a Little Lamb" but with considerably more gusto. The singing caller sings it to the tune of the music.

Many of Arizona's callers have learned their craft from the old master himself-Dr. Lloyd "Pappy" Shaw of Colorado Springs. Shaw is the nationally-recognized father of modern square dancing and the author of several books on the subject, and achieved the remarkable feat of substituting square dancing for football at the school where he serves as superintendent. Every summer he conducts a callers' school to which aspiring callers from all over the country repair in joyous pilgrimage.

Chanting callers love to improvise. They call it “trimming,” or “patter,” and it consists primarily of gentle nonsense thrown into the call-odds and bits of rhyming persiflage. Often the caller does his “trimming” right on the spot, without giving it too much thought ahead of time. The general idea is to stretch the dance out, keep the dancers amused and on their toes and well, shucks-just have a little more fun. Anything goes so long as it rhymes and fits into the pattern of the dance.

A bit of “trimming” might run like this:

Or:

“Trimming,” called by that or some other name, is a practice which prevails not alone in Arizona but pretty much wherever folks block themselves off in groups of eight to “promenade one and promenade all and promenade around the hall.” Equally uniform is another characteristic of square dancing. That's its temperateness.

In a word, square dancing and liquor just don't mix. The gent and his gal who never used to start out on an evening without a snifter or two to tone them up are downright teetotalers now that they've taken up square dancing. It's too fast and requires too much alertness. The liquor people may not be overjoyed at this turn of events. But the soda pop bottlers are as pleased as punch-unspiked, that is. They've got a corner on the square dance refreshment market.

Perhaps it's this quality-its all-around wholesomenessthat has helped to give square dancing its enormous appeal in Arizona, and everywhere else for that matter. But that's by no means all of it. Those who have watched the extraordinary rise in square dancing's popularity say that other factors have played a part in it, too.

To begin with, it seems to represent a surge in the direction of plain and homely living and family unity after the cynicism and upheavals of the war. “The biggest fun,” remarked one caller, “is to see a whole family come in the door -father and mother, daughter and son, and maybe even the grandparents!” The resurgence of square dancing seems also to represent a new and keener awareness of our American democracy, which in itself may be a by-product of World War II and the Cold War. And certainly there is something inherently democratic about square dancing, bringing together, as it does, into one rhythmic mishmash all classes and manner of people. Then, too, it answers a deep craving within people for companionship. It melts down inhibitions and gets neighbor acquainted with neighbor.

As an enthusiastic square dancer and caller in Phoenix -a man named Merrill Robbins-expressed it: “I'm telling you if you want to meet your neighbors, just start going square dancing. Why, in a week's time I'll see 800 to 1,000 people.” That's the odd and fascinating thing about square dancing. It seems to carry its own magic right along with it, working little miracles to the pulsating accompaniment of pounding feet and sawing fiddles.

There's the story they tell of the young fellow who was working for a large business firm in Phoenix. Doing pretty well, too. Head of a small department, in fact. But he was plagued with timidity. And he knew it was holding him back.

Well, sir, he commenced square dancing. He gained self-confidence from it, and poise. First crack out of the box he hit his boss up for a raise for himself and his whole department and got it!

There's the story, too, of the woman who was going to her doctor every week or so with vague complaints of one kind or another, all smacking of the neurotic. He could find nothing wrong with her and, finally, on a hunch, took out his prescription pad one day and wrote upon it the name of a square dance club and the date of its next meeting. She followed the prescribed treatment and enjoyed it no end. Fixed her up, too.

But square dancing doesn't depend on its therapeutic value for the irresistible appeal that it has evidenced. Far more people without inhibitions and hypochondria than with them are responding to the bewitching charms of Sally Goodin & Co. They do it simply because it's fun, and that's reason enough in a world in which pure pleasure is an elusive and fleeting thing, vying always with stern reality.

Will it last-this square dance fad, or revival, or whatever you want to call it? Nobody can be sure, of course. But a fairly safe guess is that it will-for a long, long time, at least. For square dancing has its roots deep in the soil of our nation and of our state. They're as deep as our concept of freedom. And it was that which sent the pioneers scrambling across the mountains and into the valleys of the Salt and Gila to tame the Arizona wilderness and square dance between times in the shadows of the tall cactus and pine trees.

A thoughtful Arizona square dance devotee put it nicely when he said: “It's just plain American, and I think it's here to stay.”