Susan Eike Spalding’s Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities examines six unique dance traditions and communities in central Appalachia. Spalding’s study relies on a combination of archival sources and ethnographic observations and interviews to show the wide variety of dance traditions in the region.
Chapters 1 and 2 serve as an introduction to the rest of the volume, and are where Spalding introduces key themes that arise throughout the book, such as the significance of cultural exchange and the balance between individual self-expression and adherence to group aesthetics within each of the six dance communities. The study communities are in eastern Kentucky, northeast Tennessee, and southwest Virginia.
Each of the following chapters are devoted to one of the six dance communities. Chapter 3 looks at the dancing tradition at the Beechwood Family Music Center in Fall Branch, Tennessee, especially “the ways social and economic shifts may have contributed to changes in dance traditions of Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia” (30-31), including the dancing at Beechwood, as the rural area was transformed by industrialization. Chapter 4 examines an African American dance tradition referred to emically as “the old breakdown,” in Martinsville, Virginia. The dancing here, Spalding says, is different from the other dance traditions in that, “The emphasis on partner interaction was central to this particular community’s dance, unlike some other communities, where couples connected repeatedly with other couples and with the whole group” (80). Chapter 5 focuses on a distinct, regional dance tradition in Dante, Virginia, that is marked by cultural exchange between European Americans and African Americans brought by job opportunities in the coalfields.
Chapter 6 is an historical look at the dancing that was taught at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky. This chapter is a bit of an anomaly in the book as it does not rely on fieldwork. For this reason the chapter seems somewhat out of place in the study, although it does set up the following two chapters. Spalding suggests (159) that the dancing at Pine Mountain set the stage for the dance revivals in the communities she examines in the following two chapters, but doesn’t explicitly detail the connection between them.
Chapter 7 examines the dance tradition at Hoedown Island in Natural Bridge State Resort Park in Powell County, Kentucky. This is a tradition largely maintained by one individual, Richard Jett, who organized dances from 1962 to 2006, out of the conviction that “square dancing offers great opportunity for achieving individual and community unity and happiness” (165). Chapter 8 focuses on the Carcassonne Square Dance in Letcher County, Kentucky, a tradition that was interrupted for several decades following World War II, but was revived in the late 1960s “soon after the establishment of the Carcassonne Community Center, through joint efforts of community members and the Appalachian Volunteers and VISTA workers” (189), and has had a long history of welcoming outside influences and participation.
Overall, the book is a nice study of dance traditions in the region. One minor complaint is that although the book is full of excellent photographs taken by the author, pulled from personal collections or archival sources, such as the Kentucky Folklife Program Archives at Western Kentucky University, and the Berea College Southern Appalachian Archives, they are printed so small it is difficult to really examine them.
The study does come across as a bit unfocused at times—each of these communities alone could serve as a topic for a book-length study. Spalding does address this in the afterword, reasoning that “by placing these six communities side by side, it is possible to see similarities and differences and to get a more nuanced picture of the culture, or cultures, of the Appalachian region” (220). This point is well taken, but at times the book does seem unbalanced, perhaps because the fieldwork in each of these communities was done at different times over a period of more than thirty years.
However, Spalding is right in that examining each of these communities in the same study allows for what the book probably does best, which is to show the breadth and variety of cultural groups and traditions in central Appalachia, a region sometimes still popularly thought to consist of a homogenous culture. This work dispels that notion and stands as an excellent study of dancing traditions in Appalachia, and the people, communities, and social circumstances that have created them and molded them over time.
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[Review length: 735 words • Review posted on April 20, 2016]