Talking Feet: Flatfoot, Buck, and Tap (Documentary of Traditional American Southern Dances)

Shared by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: The tourists and adventure-seekers who first arrived in the hills of southern Appalachia in the late nineteenth century clearly thought they were dreaming. In breathless accounts, they described the edenic land they had discovered, one that seemed to exist in a different century from their homes in the industrialized North. Instead of cities choked by smog and factory horns, there were wide open hills, populated by a peculiar, antiquated people. They farmed the land and spoke in near-Elizabethan tones. They entertained themselves at night with fiddles and banjos. Even their dancing was wild, unhinged: country frolics by the light of the moon. These heavily romanticized reports laid the groundwork for a perception of Appalachia that the region has never truly escaped. Outsiders continue to view the mountains and their inhabitants as simple, even backwards. This attitude has colored everything from the are