Forming part of Pendragon's “Wendy Hilton Dance and Music Series,” Dance and Its Music in America surveys the history of dance and dance music “in the lands of North America that would become the United States of America,” from the arrival of Panfilo de Narváez in Florida in 1528 to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789 (1). The scope and arrangement of the 700-page book is nearly encyclopedic in nature. The contents are arranged geographically, spanning the continent from California to Maine, and are divided into six principal parts: “Spanish Exploration and Settlement,” “French Exploration and Settlement,” “The English Plantation Colonies in the South,” “The Tobacco Colonies,” “New England,” and “The Middle Atlantic Colonies.” Each part is in turn divided into sections representing smaller geographic regions and even small municipalities. Several of the major subsections (e.g., South Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, New York) include a supplemental timeline of “Men and Women Identified in Advertisements as Dancers or Possible Dance Musicians.” Textual notes, which number almost 2,000, appear at the foot of their relevant pages within the main body of the text. The book is generously illustrated with 150 black-and-white and grayscale figures, including reproductions of music and dance notation (from both manuscripts and printed sources), textual sources, works of art, artifacts, buildings, and maps. The end matter includes a comprehensive thirty-page bibliography and a detailed index.

In the Introduction, Keller briefly addresses the social function of dance among the spectrum of social ranks, but otherwise leaves this topic for other writers to ponder. There follows a brief overview of the general characteristics of the dancing performed by the three principal populations of the early United States: Native Americans, blacks (Africans and African Americans), and European colonists. Because the bulk of the documentary evidence concerns the last group, Keller's introduction also includes a brief synopsis of the fundamentals of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European dance, including the various dance forms (e.g., line, circle, processional, figure dances), dance types (e.g., minuet, cotillion, reels), vocabulary, and choreographic notation. Each section of the main text consists of a chronological narrative surveying the documentary evidence of the presence of dance in the history of a specific region or locality from its first settlement to 1789 before moving on to the next location. Within each geographic narrative, the author gives special attention to the individuals, organizations, institutions, venues, and events that played significant roles in the advancement (and suppression) of dance in each region.

Throughout the book, the author demonstrates an impressive command of the literature, repertoire, and historical context of the subject matter. Keller is clearly passionate about dance and dance music and has made an extraordinary effort to locate and study as many relevant primary sources as possible. Rather than limiting her study to the refined dances of affluent European Americans, the author embraces a broad spectrum of stylized movements from the full gamut of the social ladder. Dance is defined here as “any choreographic activity performed to musical accompaniment, be it a single rattle, cultivated European instruments, or the dancer's own vocables” (1). In the course of the book, therefore, the reader is introduced to primary-source descriptions of a broad range of examples, including Native American ceremonial dances, slave frolics, religious convulsions, rural hops, and urbane court dances.

Although the title, Dance and Its Music in America, proclaims the book's dual purpose, music is always secondary to dance here. Nevertheless, discussions of music play a significant role in this book. Throughout the geographic-chronological narrative, the author frequently highlights the evidence of performers of dance music, including fiddlers (of both European and African extraction), “bands of music,” and other combinations of instruments. Although Keller does provide some explanation of the execution of the various dances, and even excerpts from pedagogical texts of the era, this book is not intended to serve as a primer for those interested in performing or accompanying historical dances. Nevertheless, Keller's historical contextualization of this repertoire will certainly be of interest to modern instrumental performers, especially drummers, fifers, and fiddlers, who often perform this music independently from the dance.

Throughout the book's geographical-chronological narrative, the reader is repeatedly exposed to a number of recurring themes and topics, including discussions of the myriad social occasions for dancing, public and private attitudes toward dancing, dance as a component of education, theatrical dance, and the availability of dance literature. Given the inherently repetitive nature of this mode of presentation, some readers might question the wisdom of such an arrangement. The author does not address this issue in her text, but the overall nature of the book seems to provide an implicit defense. Above all, Dance and Its Music in America represents an attempt to present, as fully as possible, the documentary evidence of the early history of dance in the various geographic regions now included in the United States of America, with a minimum of interpretation. The approach is thus thoroughly empirical; there is no attempt to provide a summary of the contents or to draw conclusions about the meaning of the book's narrative. On occasion, the author does approach the topic from a more analytical perspective, such as viewing “dancing as social mediation” (9) and “dance as a political metaphor” (449). More of this sort of interpretative or theoretical historiography could be applied to the topic of dance and its music in the early United States, to be sure, but such analysis has heretofore been stymied for want of ready access to the very sort of raw data that Keller has assembled.

On a more practical note, the quality of the 150 illustrations included in the book is uneven. Many of the figures are quite crisp and attractive, whereas others are less so, and some appear out of focus. Although this problem is unfortunate and the publisher could have addressed it before publication, it detracts only slightly from the value of the book as a whole.

Nevertheless, Keller's nearly encyclopedic tome ably satisfies a serious lacuna in the historiography of American music. In the past, readers curious about any aspect of dance and its music in the early history of the United States have been frustrated by the paucity of relevant scholarly literature. Valuable primary source materials lay scattered among a number of archives, unknown to most readers, whereas a limited number of secondary sources provided spotty coverage of the topic. As the first attempt to present a robust, comprehensive picture of this documentary evidence, Dance and Its Music in America represents a landmark achievement that will not soon be duplicated or superseded. Written in a plain, enjoyable style that is never overly technical or academic, this book represents an invaluable resource for anyone interested in studying the topic of dance in the early history of the lands that became the United States of America.