Country | music4dance

One of the most common requests I’ve received is to support Country Western dances. That request has come in many forms, but I don’t have personal experience with Country Western dancing (well, that’s not 100% true, I learned to West Coast Swing at a Country bar in downtown Seattle that my ballroom dancer friends would hang out at after rehearsing). I’m nearly certain that in adapting music4dance to support more country music, I’ll stick my foot in something stinky and get some negative feedback. I’m all right with that – all feedback will make the site better in the long run, just please try to be gentle 🙂 I’ve also stepped on plenty of toes with Ballroom dance which I know quite a bit about, Argentine Tango, which I know a little about and some of the social dances that fall in between on my personal knowledge spectrum.

And music4dance is pretty complicated to begin with, so adding another dimension may make it harder to use. But I’m hoping that, with your help and some iteration on the idea, we can get things to work even better in the long run.

My initial approach to adding Country Western Dance support is to review the organizations that publish competition rules, including tempo information, and see if I can work those dances into the music4dance system in a way similar to how I’ve set up the competition ballroom dances. This turned out to be easier than I expected. All three organizations that I found online (United Country Western Dance Council, World Country Dance Federation, and American Country Dance Association) list eight competition dances. Triple Two, Polka, Night Club Two Step, Cha Cha, Waltz, Two Step, Swing, and West Coast Swing. Only one of those dances wasn’t already in the database (Triple Two). Polka and Country Two Step were random additions early in the site’s evolution because a couple of DJ friends and lists published by ballroom dance studios included enough songs of those styles to make it worth my while to include them.

My biggest question was, should I create new dances for all of the dances that overlapped? After all, the Cha Cha danced in Country Western competitions is certainly not the Cha Cha I learned competing in American Rhythm (heck, the cha cha that the International Latin dancers were learning in the next room wasn’t the same dance either). I decided to follow the pattern that I’ve already established for Ballroom dances with the same name, even if they are pretty different. Rumba is probably the strongest example in the ballroom catalog of two dances with the same name that are not the same dance. But the characteristics of the music that a dancer cares most about are similar – this is true even of Rumba, where the tempo is significantly different.

Not coincidentally, I recently finished a significant project that allowed me to use the core database to easily and accurately search specifically for American Rumba vs. International Rumba. While there are a few drawbacks to grouping America, International, and Country Cha Cha together, there are a lot of advantages both in terms of how the system works internally and in making it easier to find new music for everyone (I’ve always been a proponent of genre-bending in fiction and cross-over choreography in dance).

So, there is now an active “Country Western Competition Dancing” page, and all of the individual dance pages for dances that include Country styles include the competition info for those dances. I’ll continue to tweak some of this information as I get feedback and do more research.

I realized as I was writing this post that I hadn’t addressed the fact that this change also complicated the voting mechanism. I want to encourage folks to vote on a song being a good Cha Cha, but also make it easy for them to specify Country, International, or American. I made some quick tweaks, but this is definitely a feature still under development.

Please let me know what you think (even – possibly especially – if you think I got it completely wrong). I’m interested in whether there are other Country Western dances that I should include, even if they’re not part of the core competition dances. There was a reference to Country Smooth and Country Rhythm rounds in one of the organizations rules, should I be supporting that? I’ve also used the composite tempos from the rules, combining the different levels to give the broadest range. Should I just be using the most advanced category? What else have I missed?

And as always, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

One of the comments on my last post asked:

A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to?

This question lead me down one of those beautiful rabbit holes that dance often does.

I had never heard of this dance, but I looked it up and found a YouTube video with the choreographer demonstrating the dance. It was 32 counts (four 8-counts) danced line of dance using a vocabulary that I’m not familiar with but would guess was some flavor of country dance.

Now, when I was learning to lead as a ballroom dancer, my teacher often put together a few eight counts of choreography that I could use so that I wouldn’t have to think as much about what my next move was and concentrate instead on leading my partner and making sure I didn’t run into anyone (or step on my partner’s feet). I understand this is a common technique in the Ballroom community. I ran across similar methods when learning social dances in group classes. So my first instinct was – this is just a slightly more formalized version of that technique – and it has the advantage that your follow knows that you will be doing this same sequence, so the lead should be much easier.

Following that thread, I listened to the song more closely and counted it out. It’s about 97BPM 4/4 and had the feel of an International Rumba or Bolero to me. This gave me the first level answer to the question of what else would someone play if people wanted to dance “Sea Shells” – I went to Advanced Search and selected Bolero and Rumba, limited the tempo to 95-99 BPM (an arbitrary bracket around 97 BPM) and sorted by the most popular – that resulted in this list. I’m convinced that someone who learned “Sea Shells” could dance it to any of the top songs on the list.

But I felt like I was missing something fundamental about this type of dance, and I dug deeper. I didn’t have to do much searching to find a “Dance Step Sheet” with the specific choreography that Dan and Kelly Alboro created. In fact, there were a bunch of places that listed this dance and described the steps. Poking around the websites that hosted such sheets, I found that this is a whole thing. Please pardon my ignorance here since I’m sure many people reading this post know more about such things than I do, but the concept of choreographing a few eight counts of a partner dance and naming it was completely new to me.

My understanding from a relatively brief perusal of these sites is that there is a branch of country dancing similar to line dancing where someone choreographs a number of eight counts using a specific vocabulary, teaches it at an event, and then a whole group of people can dance the same “dance.” The most experience I’ve had with these personally is Wedding Line Dances, but it seems like a fun experience. Doing this kind of dance with a partner rather than the individual line dances I’ve seen in the past feels like a great way to become more comfortable as a partner dancer. In any case, I’ll put a bunch of links at the bottom of this post to sites written by people who know a lot more about this than I do.

Back to the original question: Another answer is that some of the “Dance Step Sheets” for “Sea Shells” list an alternate song that it can be danced to. The song they list is “jumpin’ the jetty” by Coastline. Now, this is a song that shouts Swing to me and is considerably faster (126BPM) than “Blue Night.” So that blows my original thought out of the water. Here is a search for swing songs between 124 and 128BPM. Unsurprisingly, there is no overlap between this list and the one I generated for “Blue Night.” I suspect someone who knows the choreography well can probably dance it to any reasonably consistent 4/4 music at a wide range of tempos. For those who are less expert, there is perhaps an advantage to being on the slower side and having strong phrasing. And I’m sure there are plenty of folks who only want to dance this particular dance to the music that they learned it to in the first place. But as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m way out of my depths here, so if someone who actually knows something about this kind of dancing would care to jump in and help me out, please do.

The last thing I wanted to say about this subject is that I’ve had several requests to support country and line dances on the site. I plan to enable the more traditional country partner dances once I get past some infrastructure issues that are currently blocking me from adding a bunch of new dances. I’m confident I can do that and seed the lists from reliable sources to get something up and running despite my lack of specific knowledge of those dances. Then, hopefully members of the community who know more about those dances can add more. Please let me know if you’re interested in this feature. The more people raise their hands for this feature, the faster it will move up my TODO list.

I hadn’t devised a method for handling line dances before this, partly because I assumed they were all choreographed to a single song. It didn’t seem like the system I’d built would handle that very well. But based on this experience, I’ve come up with a way to “support” line dances without adding code. I’ll throw it out there, and if anyone wants to start adding line dances to the database, I’ll document it more closely and possibly even add some code to make the experience smoother. The idea is pretty simple. Just add a comment with a quoted version of the name of the line dance to the song. Then, people can search on that and get a list of songs to line dance to. Here’s the search for “Sea Shells,” which returns the two songs I’ve discussed in this post.

I will dig myself out of the rabbit hole for now and see if I can make some progress on the infrastructure issue I mentioned above.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Some interesting links related to the Western Partner dances:

Copper Knowb Stepsheets

DiceMemory Parter / Circle Dances

DiceMemory Line Dance Steps

CoutryDancingTonight – 10 Popular Partner Country Dances

Wikipedia – Partner Dance

Wikipedia – Country Western Dance

Wikipedia – Round Dance