Dudley Laufman obit

National Endowment for the Arts Statement on the Death of National Heritage Fellow Dudley Laufman

 

He was not on the list.

I

t is with great sadness that the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledges the passing of dance caller and musician Dudley Laufman of New Hampshire, recipient of a 2009 National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts.

The name Dudley Laufman is so closely associated with the contra and barn dances of New England that most long-term residents refer to local gatherings as “Dudley Dances.” Laufman came to New Hampshire in 1947 to work at a dairy farm and began to attend these local dances. He called his first dance in 1948 and soon started his own musical group for the dances, which later became the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra, a group that averaged 300 or more engagements each year in the 1970s. He also performed and presented workshops with his partner Jacqueline as the duo Two Fiddles.

In a 2009 interview with the Arts Endowment, Laufman described his first experiences with traditional dances while working on a dairy farm in New Hampshire: “They'd move the furniture out, invite the neighbors in, and we'd have a dance…. And Jonathan would sit at one end, and he'd play the fiddle. And Betty or somebody'd play the piano, and Betty called the dances. And she used the Henry Ford book, the Good Morning Book, and she called the dances out of that. And we'd dance, and there was the smell of the wood smoke, and the firelight gleaming on the girls' hair, and the rosiny sound of the fiddle, and I was hooked. That was it.”

Learn more about Laufman and read the full interview at arts.gov.