Hi folks,

I started contra dancing in the late ’70’s in Philadelphia. As I mentioned in blog #1, I first started dancing at the Tuesday night square dance at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a house band and local caller most of the time, though I remember occasional times with callers “from away” like Sandy Bradley from Seattle, and bands like Arm and Hammer String Band (with Pete Sutherland and Joel Eckhaus) from New England. I really wasn’t paying much attention to the bands, just wanted to dance. It was so much fun! When the local “contra dance” started on Thursday nights in the early ’80s, it was same band and caller every night and honestly pretty much the same tunes and dances! Once again, we didn’t care that much. It was exciting.

Unionville Town Hall. Long about Spring/Summer of ’81 there started being flyers at the dances announcing a dance at the Unionville Town Hall, a venue none of us had ever heard of. The band was Swallowtail, a band from New England who were “on tour”! Band members were George Marshall on English concertina, David Canteini on woodwinds, Ron Grosslein on fiddle, Tim Van Egmond on hammered dulcimer, Timm Triplett on piano. Both George and Tim called. I had never heard of them, though I suspect others had. This was something very different from the norm and dancers awaited the June date with great anticipation. Unionville is an historic village in East Marlborough Township, Chester County, PA, maybe an hour west of Philly. They call it a “historic” village now but what I remember was a dilapidated building out in the middle of nowhere with rickety wooden steps in the rear of the building that ran up to the second floor “dance hall”. Band member Tim Van Egmond remembers the building as brick, I thought it was wood (possibly because of the steps), similar to an old “Grange Hall”, but we both remember it being pretty run down (in other words, really fun to hold a dance in!) Clearly the building was no longer used as the “Town Hall” but it’s a great name we all agreed.

The night of the “big event” arrived and I remember getting there a bit early, pretty excited. I got to help the band move an old square grand piano down from the third floor to a spot in front of the stage. The band had been told there was a piano at the hall but not that it had not been used in 20 years and that it was covered with bird poop.. Timm scratched his head as they proceeded to try to tune it. I temporarily went on to surveying the hall. When you entered the 2nd floor from the outside stairs, the first thing that you saw was a good sized hole in the floor that went straight through to the room below. I’m not sure a whole body could fit through it, but I thought so maybe at the time. Certainly a leg would go through, hah! No problem,.. the dance organizers but a couple chairs around the area to prevent any problems. hah hah.. (I don’t remember there being any problems but I still doubt the hall would have passed any modern day safety inspections). The rest of the hall was recognizable, sort of dark and dingy (bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling maybe), chairs along the wall, lots of old wood, and of course a nice springy wood floor!

Meanwhile, back at the piano… By dance time, the best Timm could do was get the piano in tune with itself but a half step low. That meant, in order to be in tune with the concertina, he would have to be playing A tunes in A#, D tunes in D# etc. While Timm said he was struggling, the dancers certainly did not notice. (Maybe it helped to have played a lot of the old Bb and Eb hornpipes that I know the band played) These days most bands on tour bring electric keyboards rather than relying on a “piano” or “PSO” (piano shaped object) provided by venue unless they have previous experience and even then a keyboard allows the piano player to face the band and/or the dancers. But this whole “band on tour” thing was pretty new! The dance was packed and my memory was of a really fun and exhilarating time. It certainly made me a Swallowtail fan and I remember soon after taking trips to New England to dance to them (Brattleboro dawn Dances come to mind).

Full Circle. So after I moved to Maine in the mid-eighties, I started playing and then calling for dances and eventually started touring myself with my bands Scrod Pudding and T-Acadie. That’s probably a story for another time, but sometime in the early 2000s I got contacted by the Swallowtail guys. George was going to be out of town and they needed a sub for their dance at the Guiding Star Grange in Greenfield for a January MLK day dance. I said well I don’t play concertina, but they said that didn’t matter just needed someone who called AND played and there weren’t a lot of callers to choose from.. I was quite honored and I ended up calling half the night and played bass and guitar. The night after I stayed with David and Anne and remember a late night chat with David about stuff, including the “old days”. That’s when I first asked him if he remembered the Unionville Town Hall dance and found out that whole experience was as memorable for the band as it was for me..

I’ve always wanted to tell this story.. See y’all next month – bill