A social dance for adults performed without instrumental music. In general, the first
American folklorists who discovered and described the play-party defined it as a uniquely
Anglo American recreation that flourished as a part of the expanding Western frontier,
probably because of the opposition of the religions of the frontier to instrumental music.
Early folklorists noted that the play-party included “a crude set of rhymes,” and they
assumed that it died with the passage of the historical-geographical conditions that
created it, leaving few if any traces in Anglo American folk tradition.
Later field research and analysis indicated there were many local revivals of the playparty across America in places and times long after it was supposed to have died out;
furthermore, instrumental accompaniments were frequently used in this later
development of the genre, the poetry of the games was complex and well suited to the
tunes and actions of the dances, and the play-party lives on in Anglo American folk
games and music.
The play-party was first called to the attention of American folklorists in general by an
article in the Journal of American Folklore in 1907 by George Lyman Kittredge who
edited and annotated a collection of ballads and rhymes made in the mountains of
Kentucky and submitted to him by Katherine Pettit. The article included six poems that
were described simply as “play songs” and, as was typical of much folklore scholarship
of the time, included only the words of the songs and no music or contextual information.
Most of the ballads in Pettit’s collection—at least most of the ones Kittredge included
when he edited the material for publication—were well-known British traditional ballads
also found in Francis James Child’s monumental five-volume compilation, The English
and Scottish Popular Ballads ([1882–1898] 1965), but the six “play songs” were short,
nonnarrative “rhymes” that clearly were designed to accompany dances or singing games.
For example:
We are marching down to old Quebec,
Where the drums and the fifes are a-beating;
Americans, they have gained the day,
And the British are retreating.
The war’s all over and we’ll turn back,
Ne’er to be parted;
We’ll open the ring and take a couple in
So release the broken-hearted
Mrs. L.D.Ames’ seminal 1911 article “The Missouri PlayParty,” which was also
published in the Journal of American Folklore, went far beyond Kittredge’s listing and
was the first widely disseminated folklore publication that actually described the playparty as play, discussed its history, social, performance contexts, and included
transcriptions of the tunes of the playparties as well. Ames began with a statement that
the Missouri play-party was at the height of its popularity “some thirty years ago”
(approximately the late 1870s and early 1880s) but had almost completely died out; she
continued with the significant statement that the games were preplanned adult recreational dances, describing them as
“a dance without the music of instruments.” She began an ongoing controversy by noting
that the words of the songs were “a very crude lot of rhymes—crude in sense and in
form,” and by claiming that the events were held as an alternative to dances because of
the opposition of frontier religion. This was not so much, she wrote, because of opposition to musical instruments per se on the part of churches and churchmen, but
because “regular dances where the music was furnished by a ‘fiddle’ were held, for the
most part, only in the homes of the rough element and were generally accompanied by
drunkenness and fighting.”
Ames described the actual play itself in general terms: “The playing consisted in
keeping step to the singing, and at the same time going through various movements: as
swinging partners by one hand or both; advancing, retreating, and bowing; dancing in
circles of four or eight; promenading singly or in pairs, sometimes hand in hand,
sometimes with crossed hands; weaving back and forth between two rows of people
going in opposite directions, and clasping right and left hands alternately with those they
meet; etc.”
The next article in the Journal of American Folkloreto deal with the play-party
(Hamilton 1914) took exception to Ames’ discussion of the passing of the play-party by
claiming that “the play-party in northeast Missouri is anything but dead,” introducing
evidence that “in a certain class of sixteen studying rhetoric here [the Kirksville,
Missouri, Normal School] there is one student who knows all the songs but two in Mrs.
Ames’ collection, and has heard them at play-parties,” and telling of a girl of twelve
years of age who “has been to nine play-parties this year.” Hamilton included thirty-eight
playparty texts apparently collected from her rhetoric class but concluded that “the
indications are that in a fewyears the playparty in northern Missouri will be a thing of the
past.”
In succeeding years, there was a continuing number of other regional reports and
collections of play-party songs and dances published in folklore journals. The pioneering
book of play-parties, Leah Jackson Wolford’s The Play-Party in Indiana, was published
in 1916, but the single most widely distributed and widely accepted discussions of the
genre were written by Benjamin A.Botkin. Botkin selected the playparty as the subject of
his Ph.D. dissertation, published an article “The Play-Party in Oklahoma” in the
Publications of theTexas Folklore Society Series in 1928, and expanded and developed
his research into a book, The American Play-Party Song (1937). Botkins publications
served to codify the conclusions of the early play-party scholars and to make them even
more widely known. Botkin in general accepted and seconded the description and
analyses of the play-party done before him but placed particular stress upon the idea that
the words that accompanied the dance were “crude poetry of a crude people.”
By the mid-1940s, there were enough regional collections of play-party songs—often
including music and descriptions of the dances—published or included in archives that
Altha Lea McLendon was able to prepare and publish “A Finding List of Play-Party
Games” referencing “302 versions and 315 variants” and demonstrating that play-party
songs had been collected from Missouri, North Carolina, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine,
Oklahoma, Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio,
Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and Illinois (McLendon 1944). Her finding
list quickly became the standard index to the playparty and seemed—in conjunction with
Wolford and Botkin—the final word on the subject.
An essay by Keith Cunningham published in 1972 in the regional folklore journal AFF
(Arizonsi Friends of Folklore) word reopened the subject of the play-party, included an
analytical review of previous research, introduced evidence gathered from recent field
research in Arizona, Illinois, and Missouri, and included an exhaustive structural analysis of the games’ poetics. Cunningham applied John Ciardi’s scansion and explication
system of poetry to a quatrain from the widely reported play-party song “Miller Boy” and
concluded that the verse followed a consistent pattern, all components of which serve to
accelerate the verse. There were two major and two minor stresses per line, with a varied
but relatively large number of unaccented syllables, six alliterations, two assonantal
rhymes, three approximate rhymes, and two syllabic end rhymes; there was also a minor
fulcrum in each line and a major fulcrum between the third and fourth lines. The study
concluded that the extremely complex verse of the poetry of “Miller Boy” was a direct
reflection of, and very well suited to, the music and actions of the dance as it was played.
Cunningham introduced field evidence indicating that there were many local revivals of
the play-party across America in places and times long after the frontier had passed and
when the play-party was supposed to have died out, and that instrumental
accompaniments were frequently a part of the performance of these later examples of the
genre. Also presented was evidence that the play-party lives on, not only in American
popular culture, as Botkin noted, but also in Anglo American children’s tra ditional
games such as “Farmer in the Dell,” “Go in and out the Window,” “London Bridge,” and
“Ring Around the Rosey” and—the fact is not without irony—in the form of tunes such
as “Turkey in the Straw,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Sally Goodin,” and “Shoot the Buffalo,”
which have been a major element in the repertoires of many Anglo American fiddlers,
banjo players, and other folk instrumentalists whose traditions made them their own.
Keith Cunningham
References
Cunningham, Keith. 1972. Another Look at the Play-Party. AFFword 2:12–23.
Hamilton, Goldy M. 1914. The Play-Party in Northeast Missouri. Journal of American Folklore
27:266–288.
Kittredge, George Lyman. 1907. Ballads and Rhymes from Kentucky. Journal of American
Folklore 20:251–277.
McLendon, Altha Lea. 1944. A Finding List of Play-Party Games. Southern Folklore Quarterly
8:201–235.
Wolford, Leahjackson. [1916] 1959. The Play-Party in Indiana. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical
Commission. rev. ed. by W.Edson Richmond and William Tillson. Indianapolis: Indiana
Historical Society Publications. Vol. 20, no. 2.