What is Clogging?

The roots of American Clogging are found in the cross-pollination of various early European immigrant, Native American and African Slave dance forms primarily in the southern Appalachian Mountain region. It was an improvised percussive solo or individual form of dancing done in social settings, such as harvest festivals, christenings, barn raisings, church socials, and the Saturday night dance. Towards the close of the 19th century, communities started to incorporate this improvisational footwork in the social, formation, and square dance figures that were also brought with Western European diaspora immigrants. Known today as “hoedown” or “freestyle” clogging, this socializing event took on many forms regionally and remained a vernacular communal activity. 

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 well known for their energetic style. In a performance for the Queen of England, it is reported that her majesty remarked at the footwork as very much like "Clogging" in her country. The term stuck, and the media used the term in documenting the performance. The step dance emerging from the Southern Mountains became known as "clog dancing". 

For reasons of aesthetics and presentation (and probably noise control), groups of cloggers began coordinating steps in unison, which brought a unity to the group, and standardization to the movement. “Precision” clogging, as it is called, is thought to have started as early as the 1950’s. As Americans became more mobile, and interstate highways offered the opportunity for dancers to travel from area to area to workshops and competitions, the popularity of clogging as a national activity increased. Clogging teams were featured on television shows, furthering its exposure, and soon clogging clubs were organized across the country, removing the form from its cultural heartland and opening it up to influences of mainstream pop culture.  

During the late 1970's, line dances appeared, done to popular tunes as well as to the traditional bluegrass band. Over the next three decades, aspects of Tap dancing, Canadian Step Dancing, Irish Hard Shoe, jazz, and even street dancing and hip-hop were incorporated into the steps being performed (successfully) by the best teams at competitions, spurring choreographers to constantly push the envelope for the new and the bold. Clogging Competitions across the country bring together teams from East and West to vie for trophies, honors and cash prizes. However, the old forms of clogging are still preserved and respected in many clogging communities. In American Rhythm, we pay homage to the old while excelling at the new in American clogging. 

 

Freestyle: 

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Our Traditional Precision - Nationals - First Place Winner 

Typical Show Duet