Bob McQuillen wrote me a tune! If you're a member of the contra dance and music subculture, you know the significance of this to me. If not, here goes.
Bob is a treasure in the contra dance community. He's even a nationally recognized treasure, a recipient of an NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 2002. For over 50 years he has been playing for contra dances in southern New Hampshire, and he is also the genre's most prolific tunesmith. We played his "Amelia's Waltz," one of his best known tunes, at our wedding. His published tunes number well over a thousand.
Bob visits Seattle every year for Folklife, and he stays across the street with Frank and Dina Blade. On the fourth day of Folklife, he called me over to his seat at the edge of the dance floor, and handed me a photocopy out of his music notebook. "Plummer's Polka," it was titled.
He stopped over this afternoon to coach Alex and Tracey on how it should be played. "About half again as fast," he said. "Polkas are fast. Though this may be more of a hornpipe. Or maybe it's a shaddish. It's titled Polka because it's alliterative."
I have it on tape now. When I figure out how I go from cassette to .wav file I'll post it.
Hi Doug,
I was just poking around looking at blogs and searched for 'contra dancing seattle' since I lived there for a dozen years and played and danced in Seattle for much of that time. I'm a longtime fan of Mac, although since moving to Portland, Maine, over a year ago I have yet to make it Peterborough for a dance (better hurry!!).
It's a great honor that Bob wrote you a tune. I know what that means. Nice to hear you write about it and it was great to see a pic of Tracey on here...I miss many of the great contra dancing folks from Seattle.
Very best from Portland (the 'other' i.e. original Portland).
Posted by: Jenny Van West | August 19, 2006 at 05:40 PM