>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Fiddler Kevin Carr can make your toes happy. ().

"Shared experience creates deep ties ... and has undeniably contributed to the rapid growth in 25 years of the contra dancing community nationwide, from probably 20 contra dances across the country in 1970 to over 400 today."

— Donna Hebert "The Nirvana of the Contra Dance"

By Jeff Petersen

Observer Staff Writer

Larry B. Smith had the fortune of growing up as a fifth-generation Brasstownian.

Now he's bringing some of that Brasstown. N.C., spirit to La Grande.

His enthusiasm for traditional music and dance and for the annual Spring Music and Dance Festival is contagious. The festival, which welcomes folks from throughout the Northwest, starts Friday for a weekend of contra dancing and old-time music.

"We had such a long, hard winter, with cabin fever and everyone stuck inside," the 29-year dance-calling veteran Smith says. "Then we got a real burst of spring. The highlands are greening up now, and it's time to shake off the rust and celebrate surviving."

The three-day festival is a highlight of the year for the sponsoring Northeast Oregon Folklore Society, which brings the community together through monthly contra dances and bluegrass jams.

Registration for the festival, based at the Catholic church and at The Olde Meeting House, is $75. Call Catherine Paul at 963-4606 to see if spots are available.

Smith, a caller at many of the local contra dances, will teach English country dance this weekend and is among many attractions including the high-spirited music of the band Three Wheeling.

Traditional dancing is growing in popularity, not just in Northeast Oregon but nationwide. As Donna Hebert writes in "The Nirvana of the Contra Dance," "When the band is hot and really grooving, the dancers pick it up and dance differently, just a little more wildly, shedding more of their daily cares as they respond to the call of the fiddle."

Smith, 49, heard that call as a child in Brasstown, a town of about 250 in the southwestern tip of North Carolina. The community in the foothills of the Great Smokies was one of two in the United States to have a Danish Folk High School, which are found all over Germany and Scandinavia but are rare here. The "high school" is more of an adult educational institution where people learn to participate as democratic citizens and create a communal spirit.

At the Folk High School in Brasstown, people also experimented with farming methods and learned trades and crafts, building community and self-realization. Smith's father, Bert Smith, came to the school at age 17 to learn a trade and later became the school's head dairyman, a post he held for many years.

Part of the school revolved around singing and dancing. Every Friday night, Smith recalls, the community would join in for "the games" — since dancing was frowned upon by the area's dominant religion.

Smith's parents met each other at one of these dances.

Today the school is a mere shadow of its old self, and the mountains have filled up with summer homes, mostly for Atlanta and Florida people. The school now caters to a leisure-class elite who take courses in such topics as basketry, weaving and painting.

Smith took four years of dance instruction at the school, and as providence would have it, brought that knowledge West when his wife, Jill Gibian, landed a job teaching at Eastern Oregon University in 1985. Today Gibian teaches Spanish and Latin American literature. The couple have two children, Julian Liam, 9, and Grayson Shamus, 6.

As a dance instructor, Smith is keeping alive the legacy of Cecil Sharp. Sharp was concerned that England was borrowing from other countries and not keeping its own cultural heritage alive, but then in his research discovered remnants of country dancing alive and well and sought to preserve those

remnants.

Sharp eventually helped establish the Country Dance and Song Society, to which Brasstown became affiliated, and which continues today to be a thriving organization. Musicians, teachers and callers would be imported for special weekends like the one La Grande is playing host to this weekend.

Such weekends were rare then. Today a person could go to one every month somewhere across the nation. Smith, in fact, has taught at 12 to 15 of these weekends, trying to pass on the traditions of English country dance.

The great thing about country dance, Smith says, is you don't have to be a world class dancer like Barishnikov to be a success.

"You can walk off the street and in 10 to 15 minutes be dancing and having a great time," he says.

The tin whistle and Irish drum player says the rhythms of the music are very driving. Such songs as "Old Soldier's Joy," "Angeline the Baker" and "Down Yonder," Smith says, "pick you up and move you along."