Album Notes

CANTERBURY COUNTRY DANCE ORCHESTRA
WITH DUDLEY LAUFMAN



This CD was named one of the top 40 New England CDs (of all kinds of music) by Yankee Magazine in July/August 2001.

The Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra is a root band of traditional New England Square and Contra Dance Music. Its LP records have inspired imitations and offshoots for the last 30 years. This 74-minute compact disc is taken from long-playing records released in the 1970s, and an out-of-print 45-rpm record made for the Country Dance Society. It is single-speed mastered by Oasis to produce this quality archive.

The musicians usually play in smaller groupings for dances around New England where Dudley Laufman has been calling dances for fifty-five years. Assembled as you hear them here, they played many places, including the Newport Folk Festival, Fox Hollow, Old Songs Festival, Morning Pro Musica, and the New England Folk Festival. Why is this music, much of it known to the American Colonists, so fresh and energetic? The Canterbury plays by ear and doesn't rehearse, arrange, and re-record. Leads are swapped spontaneously-there are surprises for the players as well as listeners. It's a happening. It's fun.

Canterbury musicians have formed or played with other bands, composed music, built instruments, played as far from home as Nova Scotia and Alaska. Although three of the musicians on the album cover are no longer living, today's orchestra has the same full Canterbury sound and played recently at the New Hampshire Folk Festival and at Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Two musicians have received special honors:

Dudley Laufman and Bob McQuillen were individually awarded the Folk Heritage Award of the State of New Hampshire.
Bob McQuillen received the National Folk Heritage Award in 2002.