Out of Print
All 29 country dances from America's earliest
known printed dance collection, printed in Providence, Rhode Island in
1788, are given in modern interpretation with suggestions on how to present
the dances; Steps discussed; music with chords; full text of original included,
plus historical notes and bibliography.
CONTENTS: La Bagatelle, Cameron's Rant,
Constancy, The Fantocini, First of May, Fisher's Hornpipe, Griffith's Fancy,
Griffith's Whim, The Groves, The Isle of Sky, Lady Buckley's Whim, The
Lover in Distress, M. La Fayette, Maid of the Oaks, Miss Arnold's Delight,
The Morning Gazette, Morris's Dance, The New Russia Dance, New Star, Nightingale's
Fancy, Nosegay, The Pleasure of Love, The Pleasure of Providence, Poor
Soldier, Quesnay, Trio, Washington's Resignation, The Whimsical Lady, The
Young Widow
John Griffths, Eighteenth-Century
Itinerant Dancing Master
by Kate Van Winkle Keller
Sandy Hook, CT: The Hendrickson Group, 1989
ISBN: 1-877984-03-5
28 pp. JGK-bk: $4.00
Out of Print
This is an offprint of a study originally presented
at The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife in 1984 and published in
the proceedings of the conference: Itinerancy in New England and New
York (Boston: Boston University, 1986).
John Griffiths published the first known collection
of social dances in America in Providence, Rhode Island in 1788. The dances
were reconstructed by Charles Cyril Hendrickson in John Griffiths Dancing
Master (JG-bk). In this study, Keller traces Griffiths' itinerant career
and gives an excellent summary of country dancing in America during the
eighteenth-century including a bibliography of known dance sources. Included
in the book is a facsimile of Griffiths' second publication, the influential
A
Collection of the Newest Cotillions and Country Dances, published in
Northampton, Massachusetts in 1794.
