All Join Hands

Dudley Laufman & The New England Country Dance Tradition

by Tom Curren

Imprint: Peter E. Randall Publisher

202 Pages, 6 x 9 in, 28 b&w images

Paperback
9781942155553
May 2023
In Stock

$25.00

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Praise

"Ultimately the book is about America writ large… and the role of music in inspiring, reflecting, and recovering the ideals of various times and people. In this time of discord, Curren hits exactly the right note…Highly recommended." - Library Journal

All Join Hands is the story of what happened when a ten-thousand-year-old musical tradition was put into the hands of a seventeen-year-old Boston boy in 1947. While in high school, Dudley Laufman apprenticed with fiddlers and callers throughout New England. Eventually, he squired the old country dance traditions through to their revival in the 1960s at the Newport Folk Festival, the Club 47, and Robert J. Lurtsema’s Morning Pro Musica broadcasts. Decades of performances in famous venues and small villages led to his receiving the National Heritage Fellowship Award in 2009.

As Tom Rush, iconic singer/songwriter says, “Tom Curren has done a brilliant job here, weaving an engaging narrative of how Dudley Laufman coordinated and energized the amazing resurgence of an ancient art form—the contradance/square dance — in New England and beyond.” All Join Hands calls for a new quickening of spirit, nurtured and energized by the traditional arts of New England.

Tom Curren is a writer, farmer, conservationist, and an historian who lives in New Hampshire with his wife, folklorist Kathy Neustadt. Since the 1970s, Tom has had an extensive career writing and speaking about New England culture, life and landscape. He has written four local town histories as well as the statewide account of Old Home Day. As part of the singing group “The Good Old Plough” he has appeared at dozens of historical societies around the state, at the Shelburne Museum, on NBC’s “Good Morning America,” and well as in special performances on New Hampshire’s Channel 11 Educational Television Channel and on WEVO, New Hampshire Public Radio. He gives presentations at local historical societies and similar gatherings throughout the region.

Tom recently published a history of the Boston-Cambridge folk music revival titled I Believe I’ll Go Back Home, about which the national Library Journal said: “Ultimately, the book is about America writ large, the power of our best (and worst) selves, and the role of music in inspiring, reflecting, and recovering the ideals of various times and people. In this time of discord, Curren hits exactly the right note.” -

Tom Curren has done a brilliant job here, weaving an engaging narrative of how Dudley Laufman coordinated and energized the amazing resurgence of an ancient art form—the contradance/square dance—in New England and beyond. ~Tom Rush, Singer/Songwriter

Clarifies the fascinating history of contradance, and at the same time delves into the social history that accompanies its evolution. The prose style, lucid and readable, is on its own reason enough to cherish this book. ~Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureaete 2011-2015

Curren has put all lovers of New England country dancing into the grand sweep of cultural and political history, with Dudley Laufman’s story as linchpin. ~Greg Boardman, Maine Fiddle Camp; Maine Country Fiddle Workshop

Ultimately the book is about America writ large… and the role of music in inspiring, reflecting, and recovering the ideals of various times and people. In this time of discord, Curren hits exactly the right note…Highly recommended. ~Library Journal

Curren pairs an evident love for traditional music and the region, detailing the figures and the history of the folk movement in Boston and Cambridge in the early 1960s… It’s an accessible history of a region and a moment in music. ~The Boston Globe