Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival and the Birth of Team Clogging

Asheville is the birthplace of team clogging, a mountain dance tradition that combines the percussive footwork of buckdancing and flatfooting with traditional southern Appalachian square dance figures. Although team clogging has often been promoted as an old mountain tradition, one that reflects a supposed Anglo-Celtic heritage, it is not that old, nor is it of British origin. Instead, it is a relatively young tradition – one that evolved during the twentieth century at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville. When Bascom Lamar Lunsford initiated this festival in 1928, he invited local square dance groups to perform in a staged competition. By the early 1930s, however, dancers at the festival were performing in matching outfits and including percussive footwork, and this new dance form eventually became known as “clogging.” No longer a participatory, community-based activity, like the earlier square dances that it replaced, it evolved into a highly competitive, choreographed dance form with energetic dance teams performing for a passive audience. Although Lunsford’s intention was to preserve and promote the mountain dance traditions, he inadvertently fostered the development of a new dance tradition – one that displaced the older traditions he sought to preserve. This presentation will explore the roots of team clogging in western North Carolina, acknowledging the now-invisible early influence of African Americans and Native Americans, discuss the evolution of this dance form over the last eighty years, examine its symbiotic relationship with the region’s tourism industry, and address some of the common misconceptions associated with this southern Appalachian tradition