February 23 at 7 p.m. on WIOX: Square Dancing

Hilt Kelly and the Sidekicks: Don Strausser, Stella Kelly and Don Irwin

Tonight I am pleased to present for the first time on Catskills Folk a recording of Hilt Kelly and the Sidekicks playing and calling square dances. "Hilton Kelly & the Sidekicks: Catskill Mt. Square Dance Callers #1"was originally available as a cassette tape and has never been turned into a CD or a digitized music file.  My thanks go to Mike Teitelbaum here at WIOX who digitized the tape recording enabling it to be played on the radio. Hopefully, this will lead to wider availability of the recording in the future.

Listening to the tracks ftom this tape, WIOX listeners will realize (as I did not at first)  that square dance tunes are not necessarily the same as fiddle tunes, such as the ones on Hilt's CD "Catskill Mountain Fiddler."  On the radio program I will play as many of the familiar square dance tunes and calls as I can and compare them with square dance tunes and dances recorded by Camp Woodland in the 1940s & 50s in Norman Cazden's book Dances from Woodland, published in 1955.   Join me and delight in hearing square dance calls such as "Down the Center with a Butterfly Whirl" and tunes like Pistol Packin' Mama.  

-- Ginny Scheer, Folklorist