In Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities, Susan Eike Spalding brings to bear twenty-five years' worth of rich interviews with black and white Virginians, Tennesseeans, and Kentuckians to explore the evolution and social uses of dance in each region. Spalding analyzes how issues as disparate as industrialization around coal, plantation culture, race relations, and the 1970s folk revival influenced freestyle clogging and other dance forms like square dancing in profound ways. She reveals how African Americans and Native Americans, as well as European immigrants drawn to the timber mills and coal fields, brought movement styles that added to local dance vocabularies. Placing each community in its sociopolitical and economic context, Spalding analyzes how the formal and stylistic nuances found in Appalachian dance reflect the beliefs, shared understandings, and experiences of the community at large, paying particular attention to both regional and racial diversity. Written in clear and accessible prose, Appalachian Dance is a lively addition to the literature and a bold contribution to scholarship concerned with the meaning of movement and the ever-changing nature of tradition.

A picture book about the making of Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring, her most famous dance performance Martha Graham : trailblazing choreographer Aaron Copland : distinguished American composer Isamu Noguchi : artist, sculptor, craftsman Award-winning authors Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan tell the story behind the scenes of the collaboration that created APPALACHIAN SPRING, from its inception through the score's composition to Martha's intense rehearsal process. The authors' collaborator is two-time Sibert Honor winner Brian Floca, whose vivid watercolors bring both the process and the performance to life.

In Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics, old-time musician and flatfoot dancer Philip Jamison journeys into the past and surveys the present to tell the story behind the square dances, step dances, reels, and other forms of dance practiced in southern Appalachia. These distinctive folk dances, Jamison argues, are not the unaltered jigs and reels brought by early British settlers, but hybrids that developed over time by adopting and incorporating elements from other popular forms. He traces the forms from their European, African American, and Native American roots to the modern day. On the way he explores the powerful influence of black culture, showing how practices such as calling dances as well as specific kinds of steps combined with white European forms to create distinctly "American" dances. From cakewalks to clogging, and from the Shoo-fly Swing to the Virginia Reel, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics reinterprets an essential aspect of Appalachian culture.

For the first time, a book on vernacular dance provides detailed case studies about a range of forms: old-time square dancing in Virginia, Indiana, and Newfoundland; African-American step shows; clogging; Cherokee traditional dance; historical reconstructions of 18th-century dance; and modern contra. This book fills a need from graduate studies to high schools, which are mandated under the Educate America Act to teach dance in historical and cultural perspective. Those interested in folklore, anthropology, dance history, ethnology, aesthetics, American Studies, Appalachian Studies, and more, will benefit from this work as they learn how vernacular dance reflects and shapes communities. The work is divided into four sections. Each section is prefaced with an introductory essay that sets the essays and interviews into a theoretical context. Continuity and Change deals primarily with dance forms that have developed organically within a community. Conserving Tradition considers the conscious efforts of people from a particular culture to maintain a vernacular dance tradition in the face of change. Inventing Tradition examines revival dance and historical dance reconstructions. Finally, Practical Suggestions for the Documentation of Traditional Dance will benefit readers who want to try their hands at research and documentation.

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.

A commission and its context -- The creation of a dance piece -- Appalachian spring performed -- Americana between war and peace -- An American icon