It was always a delicate judgment call whether to approach such people.  On the one hand, I didn’t want to ignore someone who might become interested in old-time music or dancing.  On the other, perhaps they weren’t all that happy to have their dinner atmosphere consist of obscure fiddle and banjo tunes of rural Southwest Virginia.

Sometimes I felt more of a need to approach people outside our music and dance community if our attendance was low.  The bands were paid based on money collected from the audience, and I felt bad if there wasn’t a lot, even if there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

One night, I had booked an old-time string band that, to be honest, wasn’t ready for prime time.  I didn’t like the fiddler’s playing, they hadn’t played together all that long, and the banjo player was really more of a bluegrass player.  Yet it was hard to say no to them when they asked to play, for a couple of reasons.  They were filling a hole in the schedule that I wasn’t able to fill with another band.  Also, two of the band members were regulars of the Clog Palace.  I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by expressing my opinion that they needed a couple more years of practice to be fit for even our little venue.  However, as the night of their gig proved, even several of the diehard cloggers didn’t show up.  So, faced with a rather low take that night, I decided to approach one of the diners at Capt. White’s, and explain (as I usually did with people who seemed to be unfamiliar with clogging) what we were doing, and that I was collecting money for the band.

“For them?!” responded the woman who I recognized as a waitress at the Tastee Diner down the street.  “They’re terrible.”  I leaned toward her, and with a lowered voice, I told her that the money I was collecting was for “music lessons for the band.”  She still looked annoyed at the music she was being subjected to, but also forked over a couple of bucks.  I hoped that this information wouldn’t somehow find its way back to the band.

From the bar, at the rear of the joint, emerged a waitress, with tattoos, of course. Her hulking form, topped with bottle-blond hair, loomed in my direction. Uh, oh. Was I going to get another tongue lashing about what bad tippers cloggers are? “Someone at the bar wants to talk to you,” she sneered.

That was even worse. Behind the dining room where the string bands played and the dancers clogged was a dimly lit bar. Stationed along the counter were a cast of characters that might have made Han Solo ill at ease. Half of them seemed to be in the later stages of alcoholism or lung cancer, or both. They eyed the cloggers suspiciously. Who wouldn’t wonder about this group of young people who danced to strange music, hooted and hollered, and frankly, dressed like geeks? Entering the bar was unavoidable, however; it was between the dance floor and the restrooms. Whenever I had to use the ladies’ room, I averted my eyes from the glances of the barflies. Once in the restroom, I averted my nose.

As the clog mogul of Washington, D.C., it fell to me to maintain if not cordial relations with the management, at least an uneasy peace. So, I followed the waitress/fullback through the doorway to the bar, past the barely legible sign that declared “NO TANK TOPS!” and over to the slender black man named John. Unlike most of the denizens, he was wearing a business suit. In his elegant accent, he expressed his enthusiasm for the dancing he had been watching from his barstool. “In Nigeria,” he said, “they say that Americans have no culture. But they are wrong! This is culture!” We talked pleasantly in the darkened barroom about clogging and old-time music, and I promised that next week I would bring an audio cassette of old-time music to take back to Africa with him. A man seated next to John at the bar nudged him and said, “you know, these are the first white people I’ve ever seen that can dance to the beat.”

 (This post is an excerpt of an article from the June 1997 issue of The Daily Clog.)

Appalachian Clogging 101
Learn to clog to old-time music, make friends, hang out in the bars dancing and drinking beer with other cloggers, travel to other states to camp in a open field among hundreds of hippies and rednecks, listening to music and dancing ’til all hours of the night. Eventually you will publish a monthly newsletter, and hire musicians for old-time dancing, haul sound systems and portable dance floors once a week for nearly a decade.

If it had, I’m sure I would have passed that class by, and taken belly dancing instead. Although, come to think of it, belly dancing might have led me toward a different, yet just as life-changing, course of events. I guess now we’ll never know.

At the time I signed up for the Appalachian clogging class, I was 24, and living alone in my first apartment away from the only house I’d lived in since I was born. Even though I’d only moved five miles away from the Mangin homestead in Wheaton, Maryland, I was indeed on my own for the first time. Leaving home and taking the clogging class were only two of several life-changing events in my life at that time. Those stories, however, belong on my other blog.

I had discovered clogging for myself while listening to a bluegrass band in a seafood restaurant in Rockville, Maryland, some time in 1979. The band, Stars & Bars, had a teen-aged girl (Missy Raines, now a nationally-known bluegrass musician) playing bass who kicked up some steps during one of the songs, and I was entranced by what I saw. She had a big smile on her face, and it was clear that her dancing was yet another way for her to express the joy she felt in music. I didn’t know the name for her kind of dancing, but later on, when I saw the clogging class announcement in Montgomery County’s adult education course schedule, I figured it was the same thing. At least I knew it wasn’t belly dancing.

The first thing I learned from our instructor, Karen Kuhel (who danced with the Footloose Cloggers) was that she did not teach people to dance to bluegrass music, only “old-time music.” I didn’t know at the time what old-time music was. She gave us a brief description of it, but I had to figure the rest out on my own. Fortunately, she told us that there was a place in Takoma Park where you could go and hear a live old-time band and dance to it.

Before I ventured there, I went to the public library where I worked and searched the record collection for anything resembling the music Karen played in class. I managed to find one Clark Kessinger album, to which I practiced my clogging after class. I could never count on picking up the steps on the fly in class; I usually had to try to memorize the movements and work on them repeatedly during the week that followed. I was always a lesson behind the better dancers in class, but I persevered. A week after the final class, I had learned everything that Karen had to teach about clogging.

It took a while before I, too, could express my musical pleasure through my feet. But when I did, it almost felt like flying. When the music and the mood was right, it was as if I was lifted ever so slightly off the floor as my feet shuffled, chugged, and stomped along. It was a Zen-like feeling, and from the moment that I finally “got” clogging, I began to seek out live music to dance to as often as possible. Live music was important because it was part of the Zen-ness of clogging, that feeling of being in the moment. Plus, back then we only had vinyl LP recordings. Records skipping while you danced to them was a major problem for cloggers.

Eventually, I made it out to the Takoma Tap Room, which was a local bar in Takoma Park, Maryland. It was a dive, but one night a week, there was an old-time band playing, and cloggers shuffling away. It wasn’t long before I became a regular. The cloggers and others who came to listen to the music, formed a quirky subculture that formed the basis of the social network that sustains me today.