Floyd Dancing
Ambience: fiddle, Old Time Music band and cloggers
We’re listening to the sounds of clogging, one of the kinds of dancing you might see when people get together to hear Old Time Music. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Jackie Crenshaw: There are two kinds of dancing that we see a lot of at the store, which is flat-footing and clogging.
Jackie and Woody Crenshaw run the Floyd Country Store, where local folks gather every night to listen to Old Time music and dance.
Jackie Crenshaw: Flat-footing is really the family dance of this area, and it is a very personal style of dancing. There are accepted steps that you can learn flat-footing. You’ll see that the dancers that reallyhave become experts have very individualized styles.
Woody Crenshaw: It is called flat-footing because your feet move but they don’t come off the floor very much.
Woody Crenshaw.
Clogging is more formal. It’s like a form of tap dancing. People often wear jingle taps on their shoes, and there are set steps they employ. It can be done in partners, individually or in groups. There’s demonstrations of clogging that happen around the region where people actually dress up in costume and a troupe of people will give a clogging demonstration. The only thing you have to do is know how to bend your knees at the right time. It’s just keeping the rhythm and then moving your feet in a natural way. And then of course once you learn steps and you have taps on your shoes, you’re doing a more formal thing, which is clogging.
You can bend your knees every Friday night at the Country Store in Floyd, Virgina. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.