West Virginia’s annual Appalachian String Band Music Festival is not just about old-time fiddle and banjo music. Flatfoot dancing goes along with those tunes like peanut butter goes with jelly, maybe even more so.
There’s more than a few seasoned flatfooters who will talk about a dance step that’s been shuffling through our hills and hollows since this land was first settled.
Flatfoot dancing is tough to define. An elderly West Virginia flatfooter of note once said “The music just goes in your ear, down through your soul, and comes out through your feet.”
The Appalachian String Band Music Festival’s flatfoot dance contest draws a crowd of several hundred dancers who compete in three divisions: youth, seniors and open. Each dancer flatfoots for a panel of esteemed judges. They all dance on the same piece of plywood to the same old time tune.
Asheville North Carolina senior dancer Rodney Sutton won the whole shebang a few times. He noted that flatfoot dancing is not clogging.
“I usually say to people that flatfooting is to clogging as old time music is to bluegrass,” Sutton said. “Flatfooting is the older style of dancing. You’re not thinking about anybody else. You’re just listening to the music and you are the drummer yourself.”
Dancer Becky Hill comes to the Clifftop, West Virginia festival from Washington, D.C. She enjoys flatfoot, clogging and tap, and defined all of them, flatfoot especially, as percussion dance.
“We’re thinking about it as a musical instrument,” she said. “So we’re thinking about how the dance is a drum, akin to a drum set, and how it kind of can copy melody, or give a counter rhythm or support the down beat.”
She’s 39 now, but Michigander Greta Van Doren joined a flatfoot workshop here at Clifftop when she was 18, and has been hoofing it back every year since. Van Doren plays music, and square dances, but believes that flatfoot is at the heart of what music is to dancing.
“Old time music is dance music,” Van Doren said. “It makes you want to move your body. And I think that the flatfoot dancing actually is even more of a part of the music itself than some forms of dance, because you are the drums. You are the percussion with your feet. So it’s like a way to participate in music that’s fuller than just sitting and listening.”
Rodney Sutton said his daughter is a second generation flatfoot contest winner. He said like the old time music that’s danced to, flatfoot is meant to be passed on from the elders to the youngsters.
“We have mentors here,” Sutton said. “Some of them are not dancing like they could four or five years ago, but it’s the same thing happening. People learn from being in their families a lot of times and going to Saturday night dances, of which a lot of those have died out, so young people don’t have the chance to be out on the floor with a bunch of really good flat footers to pick it up from them. But this helps, and Clifftop is a big part of helping keep this tradition alive.”
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