How I got started clogging

Who knew that a dance class would change my life? Although I no longer have the adult education flyer, I am pretty sure it didn’t read like this:

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.

Posted on May 4, 2008

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