house big enough to dance in, they'd build a

house big enough to dance in, they'd build a great big platform out in the yard...and dance on that.

We started dancing about five o’clock and dance ’til about eight o’clock Sunday morning. It was a lot of fun...My grand-daddy would call the figures, you know, and when you got on the floor he’d holler, ‘Partners in places like horses to the races...’ and then you talk about swinging, we’d really swing.”

Music for the dances was provided by community members—anyone who happened to have a fiddle or banjo along and felt like playing. “There used to be several people in the community that were real good with violins,” said Raymond Johnson. “And there were two of them that I can remember especially that would play the mockingbird song. They could actually make the bird sing on the thing.”

One man who remembers playing the mockingbird song himself is Stant Weaver of Washington. He was the leader of his neighborhood’s get-togethers, and the Friday night dances were held in his family home where his parents had also had dances.

Stant is a self-taught musician~“I didn’t learn it in school, that’s for sure. I reckon I had talent.” His family bought an organ when he was 10 years old, and he began to practice right away.

“I had sense enough to know that you had to play a piece all the way through or you wouldn’t learn anything-You wouldn’t improve. I stuck with it." “With his appetite for music whetted, he soon acquired a violin and learned to fiddle; next, he taught himself to play guitar.

Stant recalled a fiddler whom he remembered simply as Grigsby, who influenced his own playing greatly as a young man. “We’d play ‘Under the Double Eagle’ and ‘Mockingbird’-He was old (at least he seemed old to me then) but he could play. Whew!”

With this weekend’s Country Valentine’s Dance, RAAC will be rekindling the same kind of old-time family fun that was central to the county’s community life a generation ago. 'Hie dance is open to the public and children are more than welcome.