Seneca Square Dance: A Song History
The Traditional Tune Archive files "Seneca Square Dance" as an American reel from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri, and says the source of its name is obscure. One theory is that the title points to the Seneca people, many of whom were resettled in Oklahoma, where a sizable community still lives in the northeast of the state, not far from southwest Missouri. Another is that it refers to the town of Seneca, Missouri, which may itself have been named for the tribe. The tune has gone by many other names, including "Waiting for the Federals," "Take Me Back to Texas" and "Higher Up the Monkey Climbs," and the archive suggests some of these point to a long history in the United States. It reads one of them, "Shelby's Mules," as a reference to the Confederate cavalry general Joseph Shelby.[1]
Russell Lee, Dancing the Paul Jones at square dance. Pie Town, New Mexico, photograph, 1940. Farm Security Administration collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A rural square dance of the era; the photograph is not connected to the tune.
In January 1926, in Richmond, Indiana, the tune was recorded for Gennett Records (issued as number 3284) by Sam Long (1876–1931), a Kansas-born fiddler who lived at various times in Oklahoma and Missouri. According to the archive, Long was the first fiddler from the Ozarks to make records. County Records later reissued his performance on the album Echoes of the Ozarks.[1]
In later decades the tune spread widely and became part of the core repertoire of the old-time revival. Ry Cooder also used it in his score for the film The Long Riders.[1] Among mountain dulcimer players, it appears in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a collection of popular tunes from the dulcimer jam tradition.[2]
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