Laufman is lord of the (country) dance
By Catherine Foster, Globe Staff, 4/12/2002
''Ladies, make a circle. When I say `Paul Jones,' ladies turn around and
polka with the man behind you.'' He adds, gruffly, ''If you don't know how to
polka, it's time you learned.'' They learn. There's something about the way he calls that helps even the
neophytes pick up the steps quickly. Maybe it's the underlying sense of welcome;
maybe it's that the steps are simple. But teaching people dances that have been
done here for 350 years - and playing the music to accompany those dances - has
been Laufman's life for more than half a century. This passion has taken him
around the country and won him national recognition. But right now, it's the
fifth Saturday of the month, so he's at home, calling another of his ''kitchen
junkets'' in a room he and his partner, Jacqueline Laufman (who has taken his
name), built for that very purpose. Laufman, 71, described as the Johnny Appleseed of country dancing, is
credited with bringing traditional New England dancing to a wider audience. On
Sunday, Laufman will come to Club Passim in Harvard Square for a rare dance and
concert. With him will be the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra, making its
first appearance at the club in more than 30 years. Ever since the first settlers came, people have danced. The gentry brought
English and French country and court dances with them; common folk brought
simple reels. Jigs and reels, accompanied by a fiddle, were done in log cabins
on dirt floors, in kitchens and meeting houses. The dances provided a social
outlet for people living hard lives on isolated farms. In town, people danced in
taverns and private ballrooms. While this type of dancing gradually died out elsewhere in the United States,
it remained vital in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. David Millstone, a
teacher living in Lebanon, N.H., made a film about the rise of contra dancing -
a form of country dancing - called ''Paid to Eat Ice Cream.'' He says the late
caller Ralph Page is credited with bringing these old-time dances to Boston in
the '40s and keeping the traditions alive for the next 20 to 30 years. Meanwhile, in the '40s, Laufman was living in Arlington and spent summers in
Fremont, N.H., where he worked on the nearby Mistwold farm. On Sunday evenings,
the farm's owners, Jonathan Quimby and his wife, Betty, would move the furniture
out of the way for a dance. Quimby played the fiddle, other neighbors played
piano, and Betty called out the Virginia reel from a book. All the neighbors
would come and dance. ''It was a combination of the wood smoke, the firelight gleaming off the
girls' hair, the rosin-y sound of the fiddles,'' recalls Laufman, sitting on the
stone threshold of his house and enjoying the spring sun. ''That's how I got
hooked. It was a social, romantic thing for me. These parties that we have here
now - and all the dances I do - are an attempt to relive that vision.'' Laufman went to an agricultural high school in Walpole that had square dances
every Monday night. He started calling at 17 or 18 as a way to meet girls. He
kept calling through agricultural college, where he got halfway through a
program to become a dairy farmer before losing interest. In 1959, Laufman bought the 2-acre parcel where he now lives ''for $15 an
acre,'' he says with a grin. In this rough-hewn house, he raised a family. Early
in life, he knew he wanted to be his own boss, so over the years he did odd jobs
while trying to make a living as a musician and a poet. And he called dances. He was decades younger than other callers and, by all
accounts, charismatic. Other dances mainly featured squares, but Laufman was
interested in contredanses - folk dances in which couples face each other in two
lines. (The name change to contra dances had nothing to do with the Nicaraguan
rebels.) He attracted a younger crowd. ''I'd let dancers do it their own way,
let them dance barefoot, shout, fart, whistle,'' he says. Flocks of hippies
followed him around, drawn by word-of-mouth to the latest ''Dudley dance,'' as
did the musicians he encouraged to play with him. Millstone, who used to go to those dances in South Strafford, Vt., in the
'70s, says: ''Throughout the '70s and '80s, virtually every dancer I knew either
learned from Dudley or learned from a caller who had learned from Dudley. In the
same way that Page popularized contra dances for a previous generation, Dudley
was the individual most responsible for the resurgence of contra dance in those
years.'' Bob McQuillen, the dean of contra dance musicians (and the subject of ''Paid
to Eat Ice Cream''), remembers Laufman's influence. ''He brought in music we
hadn't played,'' he says. ''He was scouting around for new tunes, and they were
swell. And he also called dances that hadn't been done. He did new ones written
by himself and others.'' Sarah Bauhan, who lives near Portsmouth, N.H., grew up playing onstage with
Laufman. ''Dudley came to the little school I was going to and taught us to
dance when I was 10. He gave me my first [penny] whistle to play. I started
playing at 12, and I haven't looked back.'' Preserving tradition Laufman and his merry band of musicians got invited to the 1965 Newport Folk
Festival. They needed a name, so someone came up with the Canterbury Country
Dance Orchestra, even though Laufman was the only member from that town. ''We took about a dozen musicians and dancers and talked about the jig, the
reel, and the hornpipe,'' recalls Laufman. ''We were there with Bob Dylan, Joan
Baez, and Donovan. What a time that was!'' Soon they were invited to play at
Club 47, the earlier incarnation of Club Passim. In 1972, the orchestra put out
the first LP ever of traditional New England dance music. ''It was a very exciting time for music,'' recalls Laufman. ''We attracted
large crowds, sometimes 300 people. The young people brought a freshness to it.
It was something that had almost died out. But I couldn't have done it without
older dancers' knowledge.'' Many of the old-timers were put off by newcomers who were noisy, unwashed,
and didn't pay attention to the calls. The hard-core dancers formed their own
dances. And the gas shortages in the '70s prevented people from driving long
distances, so new callers and new dances sprang up. But all fads evolve. The smaller rural dances struggle to keep going, while
the urban dances pack them in. The nearly 20-year-old Thursday night contra
dance at the Cambridge VFW Hall on Huron Avenue often draws more than 200
dancers of all ages. ''The dancers today, most of them are the offspring of that particular crew
that was dancing back in the '70s,'' says Laufman. ''Their children are no
longer back-to-the-land, they're computer programmers and high-tech people.
They've taken over the contra dances and made it into a high-tech kind of
thing.'' Dancers today, he thinks, want more complicated, technical dances. But Laufman is no longer part of that scene. ''I got left behind, but not
out,'' he says philosophically, waving off a sluggish wasp. The popularity had
taken him ''totally by surprise. I had no thought of groupies, recordings,
concerts. I just wanted to play for dances. It was a wave, and I rode it. It was
a way of making money. I'm glad it's over now.'' These days, he's more interested in passing along the old traditions. Since
1986, he and Jacqueline, as Two Fiddles, have made their living calling
traditional New England dances like the Virginia reel, Portland Fancy, and Paul
Jones - dances that beginners can get quickly - at weddings, camps, elder
hostels, and private parties. They've also taught thousands of children in
school residencies how to do-si-do, alamande left, and promenade. They're passing along their skills to apprentices and students. They've
published books and CDs of traditional dances and fiddle music, and the
Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra last fall re-released its 1972 album on CD. Their efforts to keep the old traditions alive have been recognized: They
were selected to represent traditional dancing at the Smithsonian Folklife
Festival 1999 in Washington, D.C. And Laufman won the 2001 New Hampshire
Governor's Arts Award for Folk Heritage. Seeing beauty On Easter Sunday, Laufman called a dance at the Hutchinson Sugar House in
Canterbury. As the last sap of the season boiled in a long tank in another room,
about a dozen dancers stepped forward to learn some old-time dances that their
Colonial ancestors would have done in spots just like this one. Even 50 years later, the music and the dancing still move him. And for a
fiercely independent New Hampshire guy, he expresses quite frankly why they do.
''The rise and fall of the notes can bring tears to my eyes. There's the
physical part of the dance, I look at the whole thing. I see women dance, and
this dancing brings out their beauty. Then there's the social aspects. Even with
the little kids in schools, the element of romance is still there. I try to keep
it that way.''
This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 4/12/2002.
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2002 Globe Newspaper Company.