Lebanon, IN - Back to the Fifties Weekend

The Lebanon, IN Back to the Fifties Festival advertized their Friday night dance as a 'street dance' and there was truth in that advertizing. For the first time ever, Kelly and I did our thing on asphalt…in fact between the painted lines of a parking spot in front of the Boone County Courthouse. There's an art to dancing in the wild. The surface is imperfect and sometimes treacherous - it slopes in odd ways, there are bumps and grooves, there are oil slicks and discarded chewing gum and you're dancing right in the middle of this mess. Some advice: wear sneakers, pick your feet up, don't get too hung up on technicalities, and just have fun. The dance surface is imperfect, you're not going to be perfect, and that's okay! You're not putting on an exhibition - you're having fun!

The band (the Sunsetters) was decent, they kept a good beat going and played some quality fifties tunes. Personally I love the music of the fifties for dancing. It's got a kind of joyful spirit - all the enthusiasm of a youth culture that hadn't faced Nixon or Viet Nam, when all that mattered was a girl and a cool car. Something about even the sad tunes won't let you get too down.

We had a great time. Who knows, we might be remembering the fifties (okay I hadn't been born then and Kelly was too young to remember them) again next year.

Danny and the Juniors

Here's a fun little memento of 1957. Danny and the Juniors playing what (through the bad video quality of the era) seems to be an outdoor venue though the posted of the video didn't provide any information to confirm that assertion. I find something interesting in this video. Try to make out the dances that are being done and you'll see ECS (hard to tell if it's single or triple) and what seems to be a very relaxed rockabilly swing. What you don't see are the crazy aerials and breakneck pacing that you get nowadays. My father-in-law often bemoans how his beloved ragtime music is treated like the idea was to play it as fast as possible and I think his concern carries over to other genres. The music's got a danceable pace, not insanely fast and not dragging – it's being played at the tempo it was meant to be played at which means over a hundred people can get on the dance floor and they don't kill each other doing moves that take too much room or they're not capable of executing at the right speed. Nearly every modern swing band ought to remember this and maybe learn to read time signatures!