Dancing out of Square > Endeavors, Spring 2000

From
two-step to
Tush Push,
country is
anything but
made to
measure.

LINKS

Country/Western
Dance

Dance floor
etiquette
and tips

UNC-CH
Music Dept

Dancing out of Square
by Jason Smith

What’s a pretty lady like you doing in a place like this?” It was a roughneck Nashville honky-tonk bar—a real dive. He wore jeans, a watch chain, and a knife in his belt. But he tipped his hat and was dead sincere. Then he asked if she’d like to meet his friends.

“They told me there had been a big bar fight the night before,” Jocelyn Neal says. “A guy was dragged out and beat up because he had attacked his girlfriend. This bar has an Old West code of ethics.”

Neal knows her country bars. A given weekend may find her steppin’ out anywhere between Raleigh and Knoxville. But there’s no tear in her beer—Neal hits the honky-tonks to do research, and she truly loves it.

Now an instructor in the music department, Neal grew up in northern New Mexico, where her father taught her to dance. Two-step, waltz, country swing, and polka—the Neal family danced ‘em all, and still does, usually at outdoor community concerts. “Parking lot dances,” Neal says. The dance floor is portable; hay bales are optional.

Neal two-stepped all the way to college, then started teaching classes in country dance. One of her dance students, a music professor, asked why the steps he was learning didn’t necessarily match the patterns he heard in the music. Neal began researching the interactions of country music and dance.

Neal points out that country’s roots are intertwined with dance. Much of the music, in fact, was created specifically for square and folk dances, which rely on regular and predictable musical structures. Notions of country as art played second fiddle to the music’s role as dance accompaniment.

Humble origins, to be sure. Unfortunately, many people still think that country is three chords played in simple, repetitive structures, verse-chorus-verse till the cows come home. “There’s a small selection of tunes that the American public thinks of when they think of country,” Neal says. “Think Roger Miller’s ‘King of the Road’—it comes out of a style of country that was based on very simple chord progressions.” Neal says these prototypical country songs are built on four-bar phrases; that is, verses and choruses last 16 bars each, while the introduction, ending, and interlude last either four or eight bars each. She refers to songs that stick to this pattern as “square.”

But when Neal analyzed today’s country hits, she heard some surprising things. She found their structures far from regular and predictable—over two-thirds of the songs Neal surveyed were not square, meaning they deviated from the prototype in one of three ways.

First, many of the songs employed composed-out fermatas, where the performer prolongs a note, chord, or rest beyond its given time value, in effect adding a half-bar to a chorus or verse. Second, a high percentage of songs had phrase overlaps, which might occur when a vocalist finishes a verse at the same time the band begins an interlude. As a result, the listener interprets the same bar as both conclusion and beginning. Finally, some songs featured phrase extensions—for example, the band might add one or two measures after a verse and before the chorus, in order to create breathing room in the music.

Neal found that 69 percent of nationally marketed country tunes were irregular, or not square. Interestingly, regional country bands that had yet to break the national market remained more conservative, employing irregularity in less than half of their songs. Least likely to be square were the big-league songs on Billboard’s Hit Country Singles chart, three-fourths of which were irregular.

Regardless of irregularity, not one song Neal studied added or omitted a single beat. To understand why, just dance.

> NEXT PAGE: Bach and Brahms and country?

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