HISTORY OF CLOGGING         

CLOGGING is a true American dance form that began in the Appalachian Mountains and now enjoys widespread popularity throughout the United States and around the world.

As the Appalachians were settled in the mid 1700's by the Irish, Scottish, English and Dutch-Germans, the folk dances of each area met and began to combine in an impromptu foot-tapping style, the beginning of clog dancing as we know today.  Accompanied by rousing fiddle and bluegrass music.  CLOGGING was a means of personal expression in a land of new found freedoms.

The word "Clog" comes from the Gaelic and means "time".  CLOGGING is a dance that is done in time with music - to the downbeat - usually with the heel keeping rhythm.

As CLOGGING made its way to the flatlands, other influences shaped it.  From the Cherokee Indians, to African Blacks and Russian Gypsies, CLOGGING has enveloped many different traditions to become truly a "melting pot" of step dances.

For the most part, CLOGGING evolved as an individual form of expression, with a person using their feet and an instrument to make rhythmic and percussive sounds to accompany the music.  At the turn of the century, many CLOGGERS began to add this developing step dance to the square dances that had been enjoyed in their communities for decades.  One of clog dancing's most renowned founders, Bascom Lamar Lunsford of Asheville, North Carolina, helped to popularize the art of team CLOGGING by adding it as a category of competition in the annual Mountain Dance and Folk Festival held in Asheville during the late 1920's.  A group called the Soco Gap Cloggers won the competition with a routine featuring precision mountain figures accompanied by freestyle step dancing.  The Soco Gap Dancers became will known for their energetic style.  In a performance for the Queen of England, it is reported that her majesty remarked at the footwork as being much like "CLOGGING" in her country.  The term stuck, and the step dance emerging in the Southern Mountains became known as "clog dancing".