English Country Dance Resources

For dances in the Philly region, please see our Nearby Dances page.

Resources on this website

Scott & Jenny's Dance database (tune name, meter, formation, key)
Pandemic Socials Presentations by GCD members during Pandemic Zoom sessions.
Jenny Beer & Joanna Reiner's Dancing on Campus For anyone starting or leading a campus-based dance group: Notes from a discussion and presentation at NEFFA 2002. Still relevant.
Jenny Beer's Notes from Caller Class
GCD in Memoriam (Alas, much in need of updating. Future project.)

NEFFA Links--the most extensive set of folk music & dance links on the Web.
Country Dance and Song Society. GCD is an affiliate of this 100+ year old umbrella organization for English, Contra, and related social & performance dance and song traditions. CDSS Affiliated Groups Page They keep an Event Calendar for affiliate events across the continent. Explore the CDSS online store for your endless listening and learning pleasure. CDSS runs a lot of programs, most notably summer camps sessions , some for adults, some all-ages, at Pinewoods Camp in eastern Massachusetts, the mid-Atlantic, on Lake Huron and New Hampshire.
Pinewoods Camp
The English Country Dance Mailing List. Subscribe to the whole list or to a weekly report.the ECD list archives cover many decades.

Cambridge Folk Index lists the source for most published ECD dances.
Barn Dance Index
RegencyDances.org for late 18th, early 19th century country dances and footwork.
CDSS online history and research resources.
60 years of English Folk Dance and Song. published dances
Compendium of ALL the Playford Dancing Master volumes with a quickly searchable database. The scanned original pages of these 1,053 dances and tunes can be a bit hard to read, but what a great resource. Bob Keller's labor of love.s
How to read Playford--what all those symbols and abbreviations mean.
Library of Congress Dance texts An unbelievably rich collection of several hundred dance manuals -- most in .pdf copies of all pages as well as text files of each book. Browse facsimilies of Playford, Walsh, Young....
5 Things -- weekly interviews of ECD callers, musicians, organizers by the Historical Tea &; Dance Society in Los Angeles which kept us together during the pandemic.
SCA articles and research on English Country Dance (Scroll down a bit.) The Society for Creative Anachronism is a different contemporary stream of ECD revival and choreography. This is a list of their dance research newsletter archives. The piece on How to Reconstruct a Playford Dance explains the symbols, footwork, and figures as Playford abbreviated them.

Colin Hume's website contains so many layers of information that you can spend a week and only absorb part of it!
Social Dance Historian Susan Guardiola's Kickery website.
Hundreds of ECD dance animations courtesy of George Williams in Santa Barbara.
Gary Roodman
John Sweeney's website is full of articles, videos, dances in several genres from a UK perspective.

The Barnes books have 1500 of the most used ECD tunes: Barnes Books Index. You can buy them from Kate Barnes, either for ipad or in old fashioned spiral bound paper.
Purchase CDs or download music via the CDSS online store, or CD Baby. The CDSS store also has books of dance and music collections.
Chamber's tune search will print the music for most any Anglo or Celtic traditional tune, often with several versions. Tunes are available in several formats--pdf, abc, gif, etc. For example, "Off She Goes" turns up 51 versions, "Apley House" 12.....

CDSS resources portal. A wealth of practical information for dance leaders: sample policies, many podcasts and webinars, materials from presentations and conferences.
Dance injuries: Focus on Scottish Highland Dance injuries (but still relevant to us English Country dancers!)-- shin splints, heel spurs, ankle pain, wise warm-ups, icing and other immediate care for injuries.
Bruce Hamilton's advice on giving feedback to callers (which applies to many other situations as well.)
CDSS has compiled resources on interpersonal safety at dances.