Seattle Contra Tunes 1979-202121

42 Years 1979-2021

Seattle Contra Dance Tunes

from Phil Katz

Phil Katz is a Pacific-Northwest contra dance musician of 42+ years experience, who has collected and played tunes for contradancing in the U.S.,

plus tunes from other regional traditions underlying contra playing (eg English, Quebecois, Irish, Scottish).

This site makes available, in abc format, approx. 700 tunes actually played for dance evenings, as well as a Google Sheet of over 1700 medleys of tunes that fit well together in support of individual called dances. Tunes were played in Seattle-area bands: Salmonberry, Scotsbroome, Pleasures of Home, Small Pleasures, Grey Owl, Fresh Cider, Full Scale, Common Ground, North Trunk Highway, Sleeping Giant, and Paddy's Handcar, plus the band that played in tribute to Vivian Williams in the months after her January 2023 death, and an English-ceilidh-style band (in Seattle) Woodland Flowers.

This page is for scholars of traditional American music. Converting abc's to sheet music, as well as navigating any copyright issues, is left up to the users. Phil's current favorite online sites for converting abc's to sheet music pdf's and downloading them are:

https://colinhume.com/music.aspx#

https://editor.drawthedots.com/

where you use the right-hand pulldown menu to print.

(If you want a nice clean pdf instead, choose print from that same pulldown but when it comes to choose a printer, choose "save to pdf" as your printer before you click the final Print button.)

https://www.montrealsession.ca/editor.php

(Here, you have to paste in %%writefields HBONSZ after the abc file, if you want the source, notes, history, origin fields [that appear on-screen w/ the sheet music] to also in appear in the pdf you generate for printing.)

The goal here is to make available the musical history of tunes actually played for contra dances here (including the tune versions played), and the medleys of tunes played together. Included are dates the medleys were played, and in which bands. In the abc files for many tunes will be interesting history and other notes on individual tunes. Where that became voluminous, I included a separate text file (.rtf) with the same tune-name as the abc file, so you'll see it in the abctunes folder, and click on it if interested. By no means is this archive comprehensive of all bands that played here; there were many and I certainly didn't play in all of them. But having played in 9 bands over the period, with various and numerous colleagues (many of whom were themselves tune collectors and scholars), it certainly gives a substantial sample.

Below is also a small view of a spreadsheet (Google sheet) of about 1700 medleys used at the various bands' gigs. Tunes, band names, dates when used, and often some notes on the origins or history of the tunes or medleys. To best utilize this spreadsheet I recommend you click on its upper-right-hand corner to get it to open in a new browser window or tab.