This is an excerpt from the NashVillager newsletter, your human-powered daily guide to Nashville. Click here to subscribe.
I successfully avoided line dancing, square dancing or any kind of boot scooting for four years in Nashville — until last weekend.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for group dancing. The collectively known song coming on was the best part of every quinceañera growing up. But this is… well, a little different.
Bells Bend Farms’ square dance was pitched to me by one of the aforementioned sick colleagues I won’t name — who sadly couldn’t attend. And now I felt I had to go, in their place.
I walked up to the large circle of swinging and smiling folks with something closer to bees than butterflies in my stomach when one of the members of our group, who is Jewish, turned to another Jew and said, “This is just like the hora.”
“Just like” is not for me personally to gauge, but I could see some of the similarities between this and the dance best known from Jewish weddings the moment she said it.
This kind of activity, this ritual, among family, friends, neighbors and strangers is shared by so many cultures, and being new to one variation of it with that in mind helps you see how much more we have in common than we have different.
What is square dancing?
The English Master A square dance diagram from The English Dancing Master, published in 1651
Well, it’s Tennessee’s official state dance for one. But if you, like me, were wondering why the heck it’s called this: It’s because the traditional form starts as a square made up of four dancing pairs, or eight people (as shown in the diagram from The English Dancing Master).
It has roots back to English country dances in the 1600s and French quadrilles and cotillions in the following century.
There was a folk music revival in the ’50s and ’60s. (You can hear more about it in this 2021 episode of Fresh Air, featuring singer-songwriter Ben Harper and his mother, Ellen, who runs the Folk Music Center in Claremont, Calif.) That revived interest brought back folk and square dancing to the mainstream — which tracks with my great-grandma’s commitment to going out square dancing at least once a week well into the triple digits of her life.
Where can you square dance in Middle Tennessee?
Bells Bend Farms, as mentioned, hosts these events in West Nashville largely spread by word of mouth, but follow their Instagram for a post, usually the week of. It was $15 ($7 for children under 12), began at 6:30 and was still going strong at 11:30 p.m. when we left to get midnight breakfast at Monell’s in Germantown.
If you’d like to join an ongoing club of fellow fans, there seem to be a few active ones:
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM