Tag Archives: Partner Dance

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2025

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Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 2134 songs cataloged, up from 1759 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of this feature in the twenty-seventeen! Thanks again to everyone who has contributed by adding songs and tagging songs with dances.

Last year, I asked for ideas about how to improve the catalog and listed a few thoughts of my own. I didn’t get any feedback, but I did implement one of my own thoughts as part of a larger project. The main holiday music page now shows songs with the largest aggregate number of dance votes first. I’ll refresh my call for thoughts on improving the catalog itself, but I won’t add any more of my own ideas. Please let me know if you have any thoughts. Even a quick email or comment on this post about how you use the catalog could be the source of the next feature.

That said, this year I’d like to focus a little more on building the catalog. On top of the normal methods of ingesting playlists that I find and the community adding and voting on holiday songs, I’d like to put out a call to band leaders,  producers (and any other role) who record music for partner dancing of any kind. Glenn Crytzer and I worked together to get his full catalog indexed on the site, and I also pulled in his list of holiday songs so they’re tagged appropriately. If you would like to work with me to index your music on the site, I’d be delighted to do that. I’m specifically calling for holiday albums today. Nevertheless, I’m happy to work with complete catalogs, even if they don’t include holiday music (I might prioritize that work a little lower for the next few weeks).

As always, 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.

Happy Holidays, everyone. May your holiday dances be the best yet!

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2024

Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 1759 songs cataloged, up from 1536 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of…

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Please help us catalog new music

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances…

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Holiday Music for Partner Dancing

It is that time of year when dancers are looking for holiday music for dancing.  That seems like a pretty good thing to be able to search for on the music4dance site.  So I thought I’d give it try.  The easy thing to do would be to just type Holiday into the search bar in…

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Special Occasions

Songs for Halloween Ballroom and Partner Dances – 2025 edition

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We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, there are 1151 songs tagged as Halloween with a positive number of dance votes.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, we’ve gone from using the general tagging mechanism where you could search on songs that had a musical genre of “Halloween” and a particular dance, to having a dedicated Halloween Songs page. Other than pulling some new lists of Halloween songs, there isn’t a lot new to highlight in this post. But I think it’s always worthy of a reminder when a dance-worthy holiday is approaching. I also don’t have a great way other than these posts to track the number of songs in these kinds of queries year over year (although that’s technically possible – probably not the most productive use of my coding time). Hopefully, the state of the Halloween and Holiday catalogs is mature enough to be generally helpful.

While I’ve got you, though, here are a few questions. Please feel free to reach out via the comment on this post or any of the other feedback mechanisms with your answers. I read all responses and respond to everything that I can.

First, the obvious: is there anything about searching for Halloween music that you would like to see improved? Most of the new features over the last few years have come out of conversations with members of the community. And on a tangentially related note, are there other holidays or more complex queries that you’d like to see represented on the site?

Next, if you have Halloween playlists you’re willing to share, please do. I can reasonably easily pull in lists of various formats. My main requirement is that the songs be well-defined (title, artist, album, if possible) and that they be associated with a form of partner dance. Or take a run at adding a few of your favorite songs or voting on your favorite dance styles for songs that are already in the catalog. If you’re up for a bit more of a project, I’m still offering free premium memberships for folks who have the knowledge and are willing to vote on the danceability of songs, especially those that don’t have any votes at all. There are about 500 Halloween songs currently in the catalog that don’t have any dance votes. 

Finally, as always, 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.

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Please help us catalog new music

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances…

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Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

Halloween is fast approaching, and I’m updating the music4dance Halloween catalog to include more partner dance Halloween music. I’ve pulled some generic Halloween playlists and cross-referenced them with the existing music4dance catalog. Using this method and some help from the community, we now have 340 songs available in the Halloween catalog that are also tagged…

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Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

Whether you’re a DJ getting your playlist together or a performer looking for that perfect song to craft a routine to, our Halloween collection is a great place to start. I’ve recently spent some time expanding the catalog. As of this writing, there are 222 songs tagged as Halloween with at least one vote for…

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Special Occasions

Are you looking for Halloween Music to dance to?

Halloween is almost here and yet again I am late setting up something for Halloween related playlists.  In past years, I’ve just let this go since it feels like it’s too late to get something together when I start thinking about it in mid-October.  But this year I decided to just do it. After all,…

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Special Occasions

Ballroom Songs for Your First Dance

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Wedding season is upon us again, so I thought I’d take another run at filling out the music4dance.net wedding dance catalog with wedding spotlight songs cross-referenced by partner/ballroom dance style. It’s pretty common to choreograph a first dance, and I’ve seen mothers and fathers learn a particular style of dance so they could lead/follow their offspring in a partner dance, especially among friends who are part of a social dance or ballroom community.

Cross-referencing between a tag and a dance style is something that the music4dance database is set up to handle exceptionally well. But, of course, someone has to add the tags and vote on the dances. I recently did a round of collecting information from Spotify playlists, but that is never as good as community members contributing their ideas. Please consider adding your own first dance or other wedding spotlight songs to the database.

On that note, I’m seeing more and more different wedding spotlight dances (for lack of a better term). I mentioned Mother/Daughter the last time I looked at wedding dances, but now I’m also seeing Father/Son, Brother/Sister, and Last Dance, just to name a few. This pattern has me thinking about the most helpful format for the wedding dance page. I like the simple table format because I can get a quick idea of the distribution of different dance styles of songs in the database compared to the spotlight event, but that probably isn’t the best way to look at the data from the perspective of someone looking for a song to dance to and gets worse if I add more columns.  I’m leaning towards another generalization of the Holiday page. The top-level page would be linked to each of the spotlight dances (First Dance, Mother/Son, etc.), and then each of those pages would look like the holiday page with a list of all songs that suit the event and links to drill down to a particular style of dance.

I don’t think I should be adding wedding songs like processionals, recessionals, etc., because I’m pretty sure people don’t dance partner dances to those. But as I type this, I can’t shake the thought of a father and daughter Viennese Waltzing down the aisle to Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway.” I’m also not ready to tackle the line dances that are often done during the reception, as there are sites that specialize in line dances, and from what I can tell, the set of these dances that are used at wedding receptions is small enough that it doesn’t require a database to keep track of them.

But are there other spotlight dances that we should be tagging? Can you think of different ways to organize the catalog? If you have ideas about this post or the site, comment below or use 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.

P.S. Since I don’t have a great way of tracking historical song counts, I will note here that as of this writing, there are 1771 songs tagged as Wedding and have at least one dance vote, of which 1131 are tagged as First Dance.

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias. If you want to find…

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Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

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Halloween is fast approaching, and I’m updating the music4dance Halloween catalog to include more partner dance Halloween music. I’ve pulled some generic Halloween playlists and cross-referenced them with the existing music4dance catalog. Using this method and some help from the community, we now have 340 songs available in the Halloween catalog that are also tagged with at least one dance style.

One of the side effects of pulling in generic playlists is that many songs in the database are tagged as Halloween but don’t have any associated dances. These songs are hidden by default since they don’t do a lot of good for someone searching for music to dance to. But premium members can see them and other songs that I haven’t been able to match to online music catalogs, which lets those folks dig into some of the data that might have hidden gems.

I’ve been going through these songs and adding dance tags where they make sense to me, but I could use some help. If you’re interested in pitching in and aren’t already a premium member, I’d happily give you a month’s premium subscription in return for your help. If you are already a premium member, I’d extend your membership for a month if you tag some Halloween songs with dances. Let me know if you’re interested in the offer.

Even if you’re not up for helping with Halloween song cataloging, please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Ballroom Christmas Music (2023)

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Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to partner dance to.  I haven’t made any major changes to the Holiday Dance Pages this year, but there is plenty of new music to browse.  Last year, we were at 667 songs, and I was hoping to break 1000 for this year.  Which we did.  As of this writing, music4dance has 1536 songs cataloged that are tagged as both Holiday and have some kind of partner dance associated with them.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this effort!

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: James Joseph

This Holiday season, I am trying something new.  I’ve partnered with James Joseph to offer a special holiday promotion.  From now until the end of the year, if you support music4dance by subscribing at the Bronze ($25) level or donating $25, you’ll receive an electronic copy of Jim’s book Hear the Beat, Feal the Music .  This is a great resource for dancers working on improving their musicality (see my full review here), and I’m grateful to Jim for providing this opportunity for the music4dance community.

Click here to subscribe or donate.

If you aren’t in a position to provide financial support for this project, there are plenty of other ways to contribute.  Specifically, to help build the Holiday Music catalog, you can:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • Add new music through the Add Song form.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please email me at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog mentioned above or any other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

Searching for Music

Ballroom Dancing to Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift

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The recent Dancing With the Stars episodes featuring Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift‘s music caused a significant spike in traffic at music4dance.net, with dancers looking for music by those artists.

I find this exciting for many reasons.  There’s the obvious reason that more traffic means more people showing interest in this project.  It also reinforces the idea that dancing to music you enjoy is good, even if it’s not exactly the music that co-evolved with the dance.  This is one of the reasons I started music4dance in the first place and one of the reasons that I continue to spend time on the site. Another reason I’m excited is that even without doing a push, as of this writing, 58 Taylor Swift and 37 Whitney Houston songs are tagged with some kind of dance in the music4dance catalog.

It also made me realize that I haven’t checked in on how well the site handles searching by artist in years.

Here’s a quick overview of what the site currently provides.

  • Do a general search for an artist’s name either from the search control in the title bar or from the main song library page
  • This will result in a list of songs, many of which have the artist you searched for listed in the artist field.
  • At that point, clicking on the artist’s name will take you to a list of songs that we’ve cataloged by that artist.

This generally works1, and a significant number of people are landing on the Taylor Swift and Whitney Houston pages, so I have to count that as a success.

There are also some significant drawbacks that I can see and likely plenty that I can’t.  So, I will generate a quick list here for your perusal.  Please respond with feedback if you find any of these particularly onerous or if there are issues not on this list that you find more annoying.

  • There is no way to get to a list of artists cataloged on music4dance, so you have to do a general search for artists to get to a link that will take you to the artist page.
  • The artist field is a general text field, so typos and variations creep in2.
  • The artist page is pretty sparse; it’s just a list of songs that contain the artist’s name in the artist field. There are probably other things that we could include on the page.

What do you think? Are these your top issues with how I’m handling artists? Or are there other things that you find more pressing? Let me know, either way.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and read every comment and email. So please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or about the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. I’m working on getting out my annual holiday music post. Meanwhile, if you’re looking to put together a holiday playlist or searching for the perfect song for that holiday party exhibition piece, the posts from previous years should give you something to start with. Or you can just head to the holiday music page and see what you find.

Related Posts

What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and…

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The Pink Martini Solution

Not all artists are created equal when it comes to creating dance-able music.  For instance, one of my favorite artists of all time is John Coltrane.  Do you see him well represented in the music4dance catalog?  Absolutely not.   Because a consistent tempo just isn’t a core part of his music.  Which is part of the…

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  1. And – bonus – their names correctly autocomplete when you type them in the search box.  This seems like a simple thing that one would expect in any search box on any site, but it’s a pretty heavy lift to get working correctly. ↩︎
  2.  I intentionally de-emphasized the artist in my original site design.  The artist field is just a free text field that can contain anything.  That ends up being somewhat random, between what I’ve pulled from various sources and what users have entered.  In the case of Whitney Houston,  Hold Me is listed with Whitney Houston & Teddy Pendergrass as the artists.  This works all right since the Whitney Houston artist page is just a search for the keywords “Whitney Houston” in the artist field.  But in the case of Taylor Swift, there are several songs that are listed as “Feat. Taylor Swift” in the title and her name isn’t in the artist field at all.  So they wouldn’t show up on the Taylor Swift page.  The Joker and the Queen by Ed Sheeran is one example of this issue.  One fix to this is to do some cleaning up of the catalog and make sure that the featured artists show up in the artist field as well as (or instead of) the title field.  Another is to take a step back and build a more complex scheme, possibly leaning on something like musicbrainz.org to center more on artists. ↩︎
Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

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Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias.

If you want to find a dance that fits the song you love, here are some things that can help. In my next post, I’ll cover the other direction – finding a song to fit your dance.

First, consider visiting your local dance studio and asking a professional. The other professional that could help is your wedding DJ; sometimes, they are also dance teachers or at least know a dance teacher to connect you with.

In tandem with going to a professional, some features of music4dance.net can help. The first is to try searching for your song – you can type the title into the search box in the menu bar or on the Song Library page. If it’s a particularly popular song, you might also include the artist to see if you can get to the specific version of the song. But oftentimes, variations on a song by different artists still maintain enough of the same characteristics to be danced to the same dance. So be creative in your search and see what you come up with.

For example, try typing “Fly me to the moon” into the search bar – including the quotes to get songs with that full title rather than all the songs with those keywords. And we’re probably most interested in the Frank Sinatra version, so scroll down to that or add Sinatra (outside of the quotes) to the search.

You can already see which dances folks in the music4dance community have voted on to dance to this song. There is quite a spectrum. If you click on the song title, you will get more details. Among other things that will show you that Slow Foxtrot is the most-voted dance for this song, some folks have voted for East Coast Swing and Jive but have noted that it’s slow for those dances. That’s not necessarily bad; you could speed up the song a bit (modern technology is fantastic) and get it to something still slow for ECS but not crazy slow – which might be just the right tempo for a first dance.

But what if you can’t find the song in the music4dance catalog? There is another tool that can provide some help. Try looking at the tempo counter tool (and its help page). Counting out the song’s tempo in this tool will show you which dances can technically be danced to the song. The tempo counter result doesn’t tell you anything about if the style of the song fits the dance. But this is also pretty interesting because if you’re going to go all the way and choreograph a first dance, sometimes doing something that’s a little out of a stylistic mismatch can be pretty effective. Choreographing a dance to a song that doesn’t quite fit is frequently done with showcase dances like those you see on Dancing with the Stars and can be very effective in creating a memorable wedding dance.

I hope this helped and that you really enjoy your first dance, not to mention the rest of your wedding and reception.

If you used the second method I mentioned or the help of a professional to find a song/dance combination for any of your wedding dances, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. This is a reboot of a very early blog post I wrote in 2015. Since the site has been through a couple of significant over-hauls since I wrote the first pair of wedding music posts, I think it’s worthwhile revisiting them. I may end up doing a more systematic rewrite. In that case, I’ll try to figure out a better way to index the posts to remove duplicates and/or make the fresher content pop up ahead of the old content.

Searching for Music

New Dance: Single Swing

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I’ve added Single Swing as a dance style that can be searched on and voted for in the music4dance catalog. While I think of this dance as a short-cut to use when I want to dance East Coast Swing to faster Jive or Lindy-Hop music, I’ve received enough feedback from the community that it’s considered a unique dance in its own right that I am happy to add it. From some light searching on this dance, it has gone by several names in different regions and times. Some of the names I saw were “Sing-time Swing,” “Single rhythm swing,” and “East Coast Single Swing.” It’s also one of several dances that have been called the Jitterbug at some point in the twentieth century.

I set the initial tempo to 140-184 beats per minute (35-46 measures per minute), which I found listed in several places. Since, as far as I can tell, this isn’t a competition dance, I haven’t found an “official” tempo range and am happy to adjust if someone with more expertise in this particular dance would provide feedback. I also seeded this list of songs with publicly available lists that sounded reasonable. Please feel free to go through to vote up other swing songs that you think are good fits for this dance. You can do this by adding songs or by searching for Swing songs in the Single Swing tempo range and voting up the ones that sound like good Single Swings. I’m also happy to bulk upload lists if you’ve got a CSV file or Spotify playlist of single swings that you’d like me to include.

Over the past several years, I’ve been moving the site in a direction where I hope to be able to handle more different dance styles and add them more easily. I’m getting closer to being able to add dances quickly. However, to add a lot of different dances, I’ll have to replace the underlying search engine (or wait for it to add some new features – it will be interesting to see which comes first). Some of the things I’ve done are to make lists of dances somewhat flatter and allowing search by name in most places where dances are listed. I’ve loosened the tie between types of dances (e.g., Sing, Waltz, Latin) and dance style, so that dance styles don’t have to be as strictly categorized as before. I’ve also added synonyms to dance styles, so in most places where you see the name of a dance style, other names of the dance are shown in parenthesis.

In any case, I’m always interested in what you think would be most helpful. I’m sure there are plenty of dance styles I’m not cataloging that fit into the broad category of partner dances that are danced to a specific tempo range or style of music. If you have a dance style suggestion or other comments, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider helping by adding to the Single Swing catalog or contributing in whatever other way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2022

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It’s the time of year again to talk about Holiday Music.

For the second year in a row, I haven’t done any new work on the Holiday Music page other than keeping it up to date with the rest of the site (which sometimes isn’t a small task).  But I have continued to add songs.  As of this writing, there are 953 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 667 songs last year.

Check out the current Holiday Music Catalog here.

If you are interested in helping build the catalog further (maybe we can get to 1000), here are some things you could do:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please send me an email at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.
  • In addition, general contributions will help the holiday music catalog and other efforts.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog as mentioned above or any of the other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

Reviews

Dance as Language

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I was delighted to find that the folks at the Rough Translation podcast produced an episode called May We Have This Dance?  For those who haven’t heard of it, Rough Translation describes itself as “a podcast about cultural mistranslation and what we can learn from them.”

In this episode, they explore the Lindy Hop and its odd evolution from a dance created by African Americans in 1920s Harlem to its revival when it was adopted by the Scandinavians (and others) in the 1990s.  Not being from either culture, I don’t feel equipped to talk about the core of the cultural issues addressed in the podcast and accompanying article.  But I would recommend both Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop and Stompin’ at the Savoy if the podcast piques your interest in the origins of the whole swing family of dances.  In addition, I haven’t read Swingin’ the Savoy yet but it is definitely going into my queue.

I will say that I particularly liked the discussion at about 30 minutes into the podcast about when LaTasha and Felix clicked as dance partners and dance became like a conversation.  I feel like the best of my social partner dancing has felt like speaking a language that’s more expressive than English.

Definitely check out the reference material they have at the end – if you haven’t seen the Lindy Hop sequence from Hellzapoppin, you’re in for a real treat and the clip of LaTasha and Felix was lots of fun as well.

Finally – they provided a list of LaTasha’s favorite music to dance to which I added to the music4dance catalog and then exported as a Spotify playlist.

As always, I’m happy for feedback and if you enjoy the site or the blog, please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.