Written
by Jerry Flemmons, Travel
Editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
in The
Article
submitted to SSQQ by Sylvia Tucker
Looking
back it seems that in Texas, 18 was considered the proper age at
which to dance in public, meaning at a beer joint.
Perhaps
that was simply the ritual’s legal threshold and custom really
had nothing to do with it, but regardless, I remember well my
first turn on a dance floor. I was 18, finally, and the beer joint
was Saturday-night full and boisterous. My partner was much older,
perhaps 25, someone’s sweetheart or wife who had agreed to dance
with me while he – a
largish, dour man – leaned against the bar and watched. The
music, doubtless a country and western dirge of woe, came from two
unamplified guitars and a scarred upright bass. And – because
this was Texas – we, of course, danced the Twostep.
A
rigid etiquette governed this coming-of-age ceremony, and while
dancing in public with someone else’s woman, I made certain to
observe it. I held my left hand cupped as a rest, not a grip, for
her right hand. I held my free right arm around her, but kept the
hand well above any notion of impropriety, allowing only my thumb
to lie against her back. Our bodies almost - but not quite -
touched. We spoke little because he
was watching, and familiarity at such establishments always seemed
to breed fistfights.
We
danced only once and I returned her to him
and found other women, all with hims
of some relation, either blood or choice. But when the night was
all over, I felt, well, manly.
I had danced before
at school things and in friends’ living rooms, but this was a
manhood event for me, this publictwo-step dancing. (We pronounced it “daincing” in the
nasal prairie patois that passed for English in West Texas.)
Two-stepping had been the common shared experience of Texan
men for a century or more, the unifying occasion of socialization
for state rich in space and distance but poor in available proper
women. In early times, there were few unmarried women and no place
to meet them except public dances. Then, in my time, nice girls
didn’t go alone to beer joints; they came with their families
– and so was born that familiar ritual of watchfulness.
It’s useless to
explain the foot movements of two-step dancing. You kind of
slide-shuffle, and either you can do it or you can’t. Maybe
it’s in the genes, but I don’t remember not being able to
two-step. This peculiarly Texas dance developed, my theory goes,
because it fit fiddle and guitar music played in simple two-four
time (one-two, one-two, slide-shuffle). And, I surmise, because a dance it
required little space. Done traditionally, couples do a lot of
stationary turning.
“The Texans,”
observed an English visitor, Mary Jaques, in 1893, “cannot be
described as graceful dancers, although they have some power of
expressing the poetry of motion; their figures are supple, and
they swing and sway a great deal.”
Miss Jaques made
her observations at a Central Texas ranch dance, where she was
properly courted and two-stepped by the cowboys, as all single
women were. Back then that was the socially correct two-step
venue-ranch and farmhouses to which cowboys would come from
everywhere just to dance. (“Rode 20 miles, danced all night,
rode 20 miles back,” reads an 1881 diary entry of one cowboy who
met his future wife at just such a dance.)
Dances
moved from house to house and took place about every three months.
Families would come in wagons and buggies, men by horseback.
Fiddles and guitars would strike up in a corner and dancing
commenced, usually not ending until dawn, while babies slept
clustered on one big bed and young children played together on the
front porch.
Ranch
dances brought two noticeable things to the two-step. First, that
economy of movement. You danced where you stood because there was
no space in small rooms for long-distance dancing. Second of all,
hatless cowboys. After all, it was considered poor taste to wear
your hat inside somebody’s house.
The
dances ended, I suppose, when public drinking finally was allowed
in Texas. Beer joints became the places where young men and women
could go to meet one another. By my time, however, the mechanics
of the two-step had long since become stamped onto the collective
psyche; Texas feet just knew, instinctively, what to do. And the
traditional rite of passage, that firmly held introduction to
manhood, adapted itself to a new social scene: 18, in Texas, you
danced in public.
Change,
though, I’ve found is no respecter of convention. Real beer
joints are about gone, I believe, replaced by bars I find less
convivial. The music, I’m happy to say, remains country and
western and danceable, however loudly electrified. Young men, no
longer in someone’s home, do dance with their hats on, and I
doubt they feel a need for any kind of formal passage into
manhood. The two-step, well, it’s still done, but loosed from
its claustrophobic limits of cramped rooms, it covers a full dance
floor.
One
more thing I’ve noticed: Couples hold each other closer because
there is no he watching by the bar. Now, that appeals to me. I was
always in favor of closer dancing.
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