The region of the American South where the Piedmont meets the Blue Ridge Mountains and North Carolina meets Virginia is famous for its traditional banjo and fiddle music. Just before the steep rise of the mountains lies the small community of Round Peak, in Surry County, North Carolina. Round Peak was home to a driving and distinctive style of old-time music that was developed by a group of legendary fiddle and banjo players in the early twentieth century. When Round Peak's musical heritage was exported to the larger folk revival on a series of influential LPs in the 1970s, the older musicians in the area became mentors to young people who traveled to Surry County to learn their music. Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham, Kyle Creed, and Benton Flippen were the most well-known of the Surry County old-time musicians. Their music was the focal point for an important extension of the midtwentieth-century folk revival. Most work on this tradition has acknowledged the importance of dancing as an accompaniment to Round Peak music, but has little more to say about it.1 This essay compiles the history of traditional in Surry County and describes the state of traditional in the community today. It establishes as not just an accompaniment to music, but an essential component of a musical performance.2Dances in Surry CountyDancing is of central importance to old-time music in Surry County. It is not just something that people do at events called dances, but is the inevitable accompaniment to any event where good old-time music is being played. The audience shows appreciation for the music by dancing. The musicians can tell that they are playing the local style correctly if there are dancers. A band may be playing on a stage in a concert, and people will climb the steps and on the stage behind them or next to them.Most forms of American vernacular country dance-that is, where two or more couples coordinated figures-have their origin in English country This type of became popular during Oliver Cromwell's reign and was further popularized by Playford's The English Dancing Master, originally published in 1651. These longways dances spread to the continent, where they were taken up in France, Spain, Germany and elsewhere. Country dance became contredanse in France, and under that name it seems to have reentered currency in England again, now called dance. Another important French innovation was the evolution of the cotillion, a variation on contra done in square formation (Blaustein 193-95).In the United States, all kinds of country dancing, contra and square included, were popular until well into the nineteenth century. Square dancing was still done by the members of polite society into the 1860s, but by the 1890s, it had all but disappeared, except in the countryside. Longways, or contra, dances declined in popularity even in most rural areas, save for New England, where they have persisted into the present day (Blaustein 196-98). The square was revived in other regions of the country as part of a Folk Dance movement starting in the 1940s and continuing through the 1950s. Contra dances were also revived during the 1960s, first in New England and later all across the United States, including in many of the larger cities of the South.H. E. Taliaferro, a native of Surry County, remembered young people's love of dances in the 1820s. He writes: [T]he younger ones preferred the sound of the ?fiddle,' a ?seven-handed reel,' and ?Old Sister Phebe' to a log-pole schoolhouse (18). In addition to the fiddling and sevenhanded reels, Taliaferro remembered one John Senter as one who loved apple brandy, and danced the ?double shuffle' (185). Drinking and dancing are always associated in Taliaferro's stories, though his descriptions have a tone of wistful nostalgia rather than of moral outrage or condemnation. The most extensive discussion of music and in Fishers River attaches them to local courtship rituals. …