What a dance looks like depends largely on the dancer. Throughout Talking Feet, though, dancers emphasize that there are no “wrong” ways of dancing, no standardized rules or steps to follow. Generally speaking, a dancer holds her arms and torso still, while her feet flick, tap, and scrape in rapid patterns across the floor. The closest modern comparison, however, may be tap dancing. Southern solo dancing was born of a combination of European, African, and Native American folk dances. It is the definitive primer on a uniquely American tradition. While the film suffers from low production values and technology that was practically obsolete at the time of filming, it is still an essential work, propelled as much by the vibrancy of its dancers as Seeger’s rigorous and respectful approach behind the camera. Amazingly, it remains the only one to date. The film, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, was the first serious attempt to survey and visually document the many different styles of Appalachian solo dancing. This was the misconception that the folklorist Mike Seeger set out to rectify with his excellent, woefully underseen documentary Talking Feet. And for the last three hundred years, if not longer, the southern hills have been home to more styles than can easily be counted. Indeed, most Appalachian folk dances are solo dances. Yet these group dances, exhilarating as they may be, represent only a portion of a dizzyingly large tradition. Stereotypes linger despite-or perhaps because of-the public’s supposed familiarity with the tradition I have seen “Appalachian-style” square dances as far away as Vancouver, BC. And to this day, there may be no single piece of Appalachian culture that remains more deeply misunderstood than its folk dances. But as Phil Jamison notes in his book Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics, it was the locals’ dancing that truly “epitomized the ‘otherness’ of this…‘strange land’” to those early visitors. This attitude has colored everything from the area’s music to its politics.

Outsiders continue to view the mountains and their inhabitants as simple, even backwards. These heavily romanticized reports laid the groundwork for a perception of Appalachia that the region has never truly escaped. Watch a full length stream of Mike Seeger's Talking Feet documentary from 1987.

Hoedowns reels and frolics