The Ed Gilmore Interview

by John Brant

(part one of a three part series)
The early years

An interview was recorded in 1961 between Christmas and New Year's at the Mission Inn Hotel, Riverside CA, between the legendary Ed Gilmore and then president of the New Southwild Square Dance Society of Australia, Jack Luby. Debi Bliss, a caller's wife in Vallejo CA, transcribed the interview recently. The full interview may be seen on the Web at:www.NapaRiver.com/SquareDance/gil1.html. This article paraphrases what Ed Gilmore said and offers some direct quotes from the interview.

Modern Western Square Dancing (MWSD) got it's start shortly after WWII. Ed Gilmore was one of the early "pioneers" of the dance in the Southern California area. He later became a "traveling" caller and toured throughout this country and Canada calling dances and teaching other callers.

In the very beginning the Square Dance classes were set up for mainly married couples. The necessity for a regular partner was one of the requirements, and married couples were ideal for that. Ed said he refused to accept singles in his instruction classes, for many years, unless they made arrangements for partners because the problem of trying to pair off couples. As a result, 90% of the people were married couples.

In the Redlands/Riverside CA area Ed taught over 4000 people to dance. The largest class was 764 people. Another class had 542 people attending.

Ed Gilmore was perhaps the first to introduce "patter". It was used as a device to simplify Square Dancing. In the 1940's, the dances were taught as memorized routines. The callers called the dances the exact same way each time. The problem with that method was when couples were away for awhile they could not dance any of the new routines that had been taught. So, Ed broke the dancing down into basic figures to simplify the dancing. It was no longer necessary for dancers to memorize the routines.

There were 10 primary figures and about 14 or 15 miscellaneous or secondary figures that were not used frequently. Dancers needed only to learn 24 terms and figures to able to dance.

Before they knew it, it became important to see how intricate they could combine all of the figures and how fast they could call them with a competitive arrangement. This put each dancer in competition with the other 7 in the square, instead of cooperating with them to do a figure. It was "who can get there first". This was the beginning of the problems of Square Dancing. The small percentage of eager dancers were wanting more of the challenge, while the average dancer did not want to dedicate the time nor had the desire to dance at that level. Now the callers were having to serve these two groups of dancers. Dancers started forming their own hand picked groups.

Ed Gilmore struggled with the problem to try to reverse the trend of "competition" dancing. He felt there should be more emphasis placed on fun, movement to the music, rhythm, timing, flow, and the natural sequences. Ed stated this in the interview, " How well do you time? Are you ready at the proper time? Do you give the right number of steps to each figure and arrive at your corner at the correct time? This is the essence of good dancing, graceful carriage. These are the things that never grow old because dancing, from the beginning of man's history, has been one of the important ways for him to express emotions. It is not just physical exercise. If the emotion to be expressed is competitive feelings then it is directly opposed to whole idea of SQUARE DANCING which is complete cooperation."

Ed's comments about the problems of Square Dancing at that time were very revealing. Even though the dance form was very popular there were signs of trouble. Ed Gilmore saw what the future would bring if changes were not made. This was revealed in these statements, "They (dancers) were too busy learning figures, you see. They didn't have time to learn to dance. Now this is our problem. This is no one's fault. We don't blame this on the callers because every caller does what he knows how to do. Every caller who takes the microphone and gets up and calls will call what he "thinks" what will make the crowd love him. What he "thinks" will make the people happy. He never intentionally gets up and does things that will drive people out of the activity. The fact remains, that we have grown so tremendously in the US in the past 10 years - and especially the last 5 or 6 - that thousands of new callers have started with no training. Absolutely no training. The majority didn't even know how to dance well. Yet they are trying to teach other people to dance, and to call for them. The dancer coming into this sort of activity is the victim of a circumstance which is no ones fault but nevertheless leaves him in the position of Square Dancing for a short time and dropping out. We have had, in this country, a year or so ago we did a spot survey to determine as near as we could, and it ran around 85% turnover in 2 years."

One of Ed Gilmore's most important ideas was, "The only thing that can be sustained year in and year out is good, comfortable, rhythmical movement to music and good sociability. Remember this emphasis on sociability. The enjoying the company of other people."

The Ed Gilmore Interview
(part two of a three part series)
Time for change
By John Brant

Ed Gilmore believed it was important for callers to show strong leadership qualities. He said, "First you have to recognize that every activity is just as strong or just as weak as it's leadership, and I don't think anyone can argue with that so we must develop strong leaders. The principle leader in the square dance activity is the caller. He must be the principle leader. He must develop good dancers and good dance leaders who will lead dancers in so far as leading them through the necessary steps to make the dance function, make the club function."

Ed also believed in minimum organization and minimum of rules. Sociability was the most important thing to him. He stated it was important to avoid anything competitive in Square Dancing, and it has a better chance of surviving. This included both dancing and club business. He felt the fewer decisions made by the group the better it was.

Ed Gilmore was one of the first people in the business to advise not to call classes, "classes". He had this to say, "The word class doesn't suggest fun, it suggests work. Almost every beginner that I've ever taught in a class, the question that was uppermost in his mind when he walked in the door was, "when do I graduate? when is the class over?" And what he was saying, literally, was 'When does the fun begin?" someone had convinced him that square dancing was fun. If I bring him into a "class" he thinks this a period that he's got to get through because this is not fun, this is work and after I've gotten through with this work then I can have fun. A great number of our people never get beyond the graduation night. That's the end for them. They go out and try a club and are horribly embarrassed and give up in disgust and say, "I'll never learn."

Ed felt that the teaching should go slowly. The emphasis should be on making it fun. That is accomplished with variety, great emphasis on music, and great variety of music. He said, "These things, I can guarantee, will never lose their charm. Variety through miscellaneous terminology is a crutch. I know, I tried it. Variety through speed and complexity is a crutch, and I know, I tried it. I used to call at 150 -160 metronome beats and throw the book at them, use mob hysteria, and get real soft and then scream out a command. This is mob psychology and it will make people scream. Then one day I looked up and said "where did everybody go?" I began to think a little bit about "why do people come?" They come for relaxation and enjoyment. If they find relaxation, sociability, good people, good fun, they will stay with it. If they find competition, faction, friction, embarrassment they'll quit."

Ed recognized that Square Dancing was going through phases and dancers go through phases. He was against the popular trend of the time of "speed dancing" and doing the fancy kicks and spins. Dancers were much younger then and it was popular to add "extras" to the dancing. Ed remarked, "This is people acting like people. When they get a little bit more experience they learn that those things are just excessive, they interfere, they are rude, they interfere with other people's comfort because other people have to wait for them to do excessive twirls or kicks or something and they moderate in their approach as they mature. Every dancer comes along in the same general conclusions that I have."

Ed Gilmore had the courage to stick by his convictions. He was told by some of his good friends he would have to change and to along with the crowd. They said he was going to have to call faster and call more involved things. He said he was going to stick with his style of calling rhythmically and comfortably with great variety of formation, and continue using a great variety of music.

His methods must have been working, because during the time of the interview (1961) he was receiving 1,000 invitations per year to call. Ed said he was not calling for the money. He made more money prior to calling full time. He said he called because he loved it.

Ed not only believed the training period for Square Dancing should be extended, but several other forms of dancing should also be taught. Variety was important. He also taught Rounds, Contra, and Quadrilles. He wanted to make people complete dancers from the first night on.

The Ed Gilmore Interview
(part three of a three part series)
The music and the dancing
By John Brant

Keeping dancers interested was as big a challenge in the early days of Modern Western Square Dancing as it is now. Ed Gilmore tried to accomplish this by continuous new arrangements of things, and continuous changes in the music. Music was more important than the calling patterns used. He said that people would request singing calls he had done in the past. He would do the songs with different patterns and the dancers would not know the difference. It was the music that people remembered and wanted.

In the early 1950's there were only 10 primary basic figures. They were: Allemande Left, Grand Right & Left, Swing, Promenade, Dosado, Right & Left Thru, Chains, Stars, DoPaso, and Dosido. 14 secondary figures were added later. With even this small amount of moves a great amount of variety could be called. Different formations were called. They could be called from lines or could be done in progressive squares (progressing to other squares). By using a large variety of music it helps to keep people's interest. The music was the most important element to dancing for Ed.

The first thing Ed taught new dancers was how to move to the music. He first wanted to change people's impression that Square Dancing was a "bunch of hillbilly people hopping around violently with musicians playing off-key homemade instruments." Ed used popular modern music to help dispel the misconceptions new dancers may have had about Square Dancing. He wanted everyone to dance. He said, "The first thing I do is get all of them up and get them moving to one of our most modern sounding singing call tunes. Get them moving to it by circling left, right, promenading. I am calling. I teach with the music going. I never turn the music off. I never walk people through and then start the music. This is a bad psychology because the new dancers says "we listen while he's talking but when the music starts we do the dance and we don't listen anymore." But if the music is going they listen all the time so I do the walk thrus with the music on. This is called dance throughs rather than walk throughs."

Ed taught dancers to listen to the music. Moving smoothly with the music was important and doing it precisely, in a measured way, was emphasized by Ed. Other callers were also teaching the "smooth" way of dancing at that time.

Joe Lewis, Bob Osgood, Jim/Jenny Brooks, Bruce/Shirley Johnson, Frankie Lane, Don Armstrong, were all dedicated towards good dancing, smooth dancing, comfortable dancing for fun and fellowship. And there was special emphasis on the sociability, the fellowship, and the fun.

Round Dancing was a very important part of Ed Gilmore's classes. He made everyone join in the dance instruction. Back in the 1940's and 1950's everyone learned to Round Dance. He said if people said they did not like Round Dancing it was because they did not know how. He felt that Round Dancing took they same wrong path as Square Dancing did. It became too much, too many, too intricate, and too much emphasis on choreography. The callers could no longer keep up with it so the activities separated. This caused a decline in Round Dancing. It got as low as 20% of the Square Dancers who were also Round Dancing during the late 1950's, but later that number started to rise. Ed did not like the idea of many people no longer knowing how to Round Dance and sitting out half the time. He felt dancers should be dancing the entire evening. Dancing a great variety of things to a great variety of music was the key to success for Ed Gilmore.

Ed Gilmore passed away in 1971. His contributions to Square Dancing were enormous. He worked hard to keep the activity growing and training other callers. Many of his guiding principals are still valid today. The Ed Gilmore interview revealed that he was a "visionary". Even though Square Dancing was very popular during the years Ed was calling, he could see that if things did not change Square Dancing would have problems in the future. One of Ed's favorite quotes about the problems he saw in Square Dancing was, "It's people acting like people."

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