Many people believe that Country & Line Dance is a traditional North American genre, comparable with the farandoles, bourrees, tarantellas, and other dances of Old Europe. This is not the case!
By creating a comparative table of dances practiced in North America from the 17th century to the present days, we find all the dances that lie at the intersection of two axes:
- one representing the states or provinces of the North American Continent
- the other representing both the ethnic origins of the inhabitants of these lands and the folkloric contributions of immigrants.
At the cross point of these two axes, we find: polka, western waltzes, Cajun waltz, jazz, powwow dance, blues, etc., and square dance, foxtrot, jitterburg, charleston, lindi hop, madison... and, in terms of time periods, "country & line dance," which appeared amidst this galaxy of dances around the 90s‼️
So, what exactly is the origin of the American Country Line Dance?
In fact, while the Folk and Western style existed since the conquest of the West and the Gold Rush of the mid-19th Century, these words primarily apply to the music and songs. Dancing in lines on American folk songs is a phenomenon of the last quarter of the past century.
I know that many will be disappointed...
But what does "line dancing" even mean? You simply need to:
- remain in a line while dancing
- AND follow a choreography written for the music of the chosen song.
Note: Many new dances appeared in the 1960s: the stroll, the twist, the mash potatoes, the hully gully—all these new rhythms are danced in solo and based on a limited number of steps... but there were no choreographies written specifically for those songs.
Today, it is generally accepted that the first line dance was performed in Columbus, Ohio in 1957: Click on [50s], under the "labels" column on the right of this screen.
