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Clogging is an American folk dance that has its origins in the southern Appalachian mountains of the United States of America. While it has strong ties to the step dance of the British Isles brought to the region by white settlers, clogging is also influenced by the traditional dance of native Americans, and the solo "buck & wing" dance of American blacks. Clogging is a misnomer, since in the U.S.A., it is not performed in clogs. Nevertheless, the name persists, although in Appalachia, this form of percussive dancing is often only known as buckdancing or flatfooting or just plain "dancing." In the United States, clogging takes two major forms: traditional Appalachian flatfoot dance and precision (or modern) clogging. Appalachian clogging can still be found in western North Carolina, West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and other places in the southern Appalachian mountains. Interest in Appalachian dance was significantly revived in the late 1970's and early 1980's by the Green Grass Cloggers. Cloggers in this style dance only to live music: either string band music of the southern Appalachian mountains, typically featuring fiddle, banjo, and guitar; or to bluegrass music. An excellent account of the development of the Green Grass Cloggers style of dance can be found in the book Communities in Motion: Dance, Community, and Tradition in America's Southeast and Beyond, edited by Susan Eike Spalding and Jane Harris Woodside. Precision (or modern) clogging was developed around World War II, and is danced to a variety of music, usually recorded, including rock and country & western. Teams of such cloggers tend to wear elaborate costumes similar to those of western square dancers and shoes with jingle taps. The emphasis of precision clogging is on everyone clogging the same step at the same time. Neither form, as a dance, is better than the other. The Lehigh Valley Cloggers perform mostly modern precision clogging. |
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