Bob McQuillen and Friends at NEFFA '91

Bob McQuillen and Friends at the 1991 New England Folk Festival
"Bob "Mr. Mac" McQuillen (June 27, 1923 - February 4, 2014) was a teacher, musician, and prolific composer of contra dance tunes. McQuillen was born near Boston, but his family moved to southwestern New Hampshire when he was young. Although his father and grandfather were musicians, and Bob took piano lessons as a child, he didn't grow attached to music until after his time as a Marine during World War II. He started going to contra dances in and around Peterborough, New Hampshire, several times a week, and eventually joined the Ralph Page Orchestra...
"McQuillen was involved in the contra dance community for over 60 years. Over his lifetime, he wrote more than 1,300 dance tunes, most of which he named after people or events in his life." en.wikipedia.o...
"The New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), founded in 1944, is an annual participatory weekend festival of traditional dance and music. It takes place in the Boston, Massachusetts region each spring. It is run by volunteers and all the performers are volunteers as well... As a social dance festival, it is a community experience, the largest in New England of its kind, with about 5,000 combined admissions in the festival's four session periods.
"Participatory dancing occurs simultaneously in three halls, most prominently contra dance, international folk dance, and English country dance, in addition to other genres of dance. A variety of concerts, discussions and other more intimate performances take place in numerous class room spaces. Family-oriented events occur during daylight hours on Saturday and Sunday. A courtyard outside is devoted to Morris dancing, Rapper Sword and Longsworddancing. Sunday afternoons typically schedule dance and music demonstrations of a variety of ethnic dances, by local and distant dance groups, in the main hall. The hundreds of volunteer musicians, singers, dance callers, leaders and dance-demonstration performers are primarily from New England and every year a number arrive from more distant parts of North America." - en.wikipedia.o...
This video is one in a series of videos I recorded at NEFFA 1991, with the assistance of Martin Kessel, intended for cablecasting on BNN-TV, Boston's public access television station. All of my NEFFA '91 videos can be found at this KZbin playlist: bit.ly/NEFFA91
~ Rob McCausland
Special Thanks To:
New England Folk Festival Association www.neffa.org/
Boston Neighborhood Network bnnmedia.org
Produced by Rob G.H. McCausland Copyright 2022