Once upon a time, Vermont barn dances were the rage

Vermont’s barns are generally for cows, but years ago, with a spare Saturday night and a broom, plenty of them played home to a now half-forgotten art — the barn dance.

Someone’s grandparents always seem to remember one, and sometimes you can still find the scruffs and scrapes of shoes and boots on the floors. But where’d those hoedowns go? What were they like? And what did they do for small, rural communities?

The history of barn dances in Vermont is dynamic with movement itself. Many of the forms throughout local history have been European inspired, influenced by early French-Canadian, Scottish and English settlers, with modifications throughout modernization. The dances spanned country styles: square, line, contra.

Some of the earliest 19th century dance events recorded in Vermont were called kitchen tunks or junkets. First mentioned in 1868 by a St. Albans newspaper, tunks entailed stripping the furniture from a farmhouse kitchen and bringing in a fiddler. Usually, they followed a community labor or gathering.

Terry Bouricius, who went to Middlebury College in the 1970s, said he’s heard plenty of folklore about those kitchen tunks from his longstanding time in the Vermont dance community.

“People would have a dance in the winter,” he said. “You know, it is not harvest season, it’s not planting season — there’s downtime. The joke, and I don’t know if it is true or not, is the fiddle player would stand in the sink so there would be more floor space.”

Though he never attended a tunk, Boruicius has gone to his fair share of community dances, especially ones focused on contra dancing, which involves partners in opposite lines, rather than in square formations. The gatherings came a little too late, roughly the mid-’70s onward, to be considered classic barn dances.

But they were an offshoot of the old Vermont tradition. Boruicius remembers dawn dances in particular — contra dances held with live music until the sun came up and dancers dropped.

“There were dawn dances in the community recreation gym in Brattleboro,” he said. “They would have a whole list of bands lined up, and they would start at like 8 p.m., and they would go till 8 a.m. with live music and people contra dancing all through the night. And occasionally there would be dawn dances in other parts of the state, too.”

He remembers them as popular events, recalling that people were willing to travel for the hurrah.

“I lived in Charlotte at the time, and we would get a carload of people, and we’d drive, you know, two and half hours to get to go dance till dawn and then take turns driving back ’cause we were all too sleepy to drive the whole way back,” he said. “I did that probably 10 times over the years.”

Barn dances played in small corners of communities for decades. By local accounts they appeared most popular in the 1930s-50s but remained a staple up into the 1970s and 1980s. Initially inspired by the western music of Nashville, many families operated small-scale bands that would travel around the state playing events, becoming something of local celebrities.

Daniel Cole, president of the Charlotte Historical Society, remembers how many people enjoyed the music of his father, Al Cole, when his swing band would play barn dances — and the dust they kicked up.

(Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship.)