26 Nov
2016
26 Nov
'16
9:38 a.m.
In 1951 I was working on Long Island and had Tuesdays off. I went to Jones
Beach regularly and watched Ed Durlacher start on stage with his orchestra
and fill a floor in front of him with hundreds of folks off the board walk.
He could make folks who knew nothing about dance have a great evening.
Jim Mayo
In a message dated 11/25/2016 11:40:57 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
trad-dance-callers(a)yahoogroups.com writes:
Do Si Do in New York's Grand Central Park to the calls of Ed Durlacher,
who held reign as one of the most unique Square Dance Callers of all time.
His talk-through dance approach brought smiles to 10's of thousands of
common folk introduced to Square Dancing over the over the years.
Every dance matches the music or maybe the music was chosen to match the
dance only Ed knows.
From there the phrase of the music guides the dancers
through each
sequence as though it was a singing call.
Durlacher and his Top Hands orchestra went into the recording studio of
the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers in the 1950's and
recorded a library of Durlacher dances. These recordings were never released to
the public.
I obtained copies of these unknown recordings in order to preserve and
digitize them for all to enjoy and download for posterity.
The recording logs indicated the music used for each dance so we can see
how detailed the selection was.
You'll find these, issued as 10-12 dance sets, every few days at;
squaredance.podbean.com.
They can be downloaded and saved. To my knowledge this will be the only
source for these lost treasures.
don ward