COME AND TRIP IT New World Records 80293 Instrumental Dance Music 1780s-1920s

This record and these notes demonstrate some of the major developments in American social dancing and its music from after the Revolution up to the beginning of electrical recording in the mid-nineteen-twenties. All through the nineteenth century, dances in America were imported from England and the Continent. By the eighteen-nineties, polite society in the United States had begun to devise its own dances (largely black in origin). But there was little further development until the beginning of World War I, when the vulgar American "animal " dances (the grizzly bear, the chicken glide, the turkey trot, and so on) adopted by the French and English were reimported—disguised and respectable—for acceptance in polite society and then general acceptance throughout the United States. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, dance tempos in general increased by as much as thirty-five percent. This was accompanied by a persistent tendency to simplify the steps, to substitute subdued movements for energetic ones, and to suppress or disguise any overtly sexual elements. There was also a strong tendency to convert any dance in an emphatic 4/4 rhythm to either an alternating 2/4 or a rather precious lilting rhythm. These tendencies were to some extent moderated by the manner in which the dances were passed o