Conny Taylor, Co-Founder of FAC
1921-2006

Many thanks to the 200-plus people who joined the Taylor family and friends for the memorial program and folk dance celebrating Conny’s life on December 10, 2006 at the Trinity Episcopal Church parish hall in Newton Centre, Massachusetts.

Additional thanks to all who donate to the Folk Arts Center in Conny’s memory. Donations go to the Conny Taylor Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships to FAC’s annual Oktoberfest Weekend in Fairlee, Vermont.

Cornell Sawyer Taylor grew up in Dorchester, MA and worked as a welder at the Boston Naval Shipyard during World War II. In 1944 he enlisted in the US Navy, where he served as a Quartermaster, Third Class, navigating a refrigerator ship in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean. Back in civilian life after the war, he resumed his welding job and moved to Cambridge, MA, adding folk dancing to his other interests: skiing, cycling, mountain climbing, and sailing. He attended weekly New England contra and square dances at the Boston YWCA and in Cambridge, and began teaching international folk dance and Scottish country dance in the Boston area in 1953.

Having decided to continue his education, Conny received his bachelor’s degree in Recreation from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1954. At the Cambridge YWCA in 1955 and ’56, he and his then-wife Marianne started the international folk dance classes and parties that later became the Thursday, Friday, and monthly Saturday series still run by the Folk Arts Center of New England. In those early days, Conny and Marianne learned folk dances from Lawrence Loy, Ralph Page, Dave Rosenberg, Michael and Mary Ann Herman, Dick Crum, Andor Czompo, Paul and Gretel Dunsing, Gordon Tracie, Jeannie Carmichael, Genevieve Shimer, and the many other leaders whose workshops the Taylors attended in other cities or sponsored in Cambridge. The Taylors usually presented a workshop with a visiting teacher once every two or three months.

Conny taught folk dance workshops and school programs all over New England, in Virginia and Quebec, and at Oquaga Camp in NY and Texas Folk Dance Camp. He was a frequent leader at Ralph Page’s East Hill Farm and Year End Camps and served on the New England Folk Festival Association planning committees in the 1950s.

The Taylors’ dance business was called “Folk Dancing ’Round Boston” and included a printed calendar and a folk dance record shop by that name. In 1975 Conny co-founded the Folk Arts Center of New England with Marianne and served as its first President and Technical Director. He ran the Copley Square outdoor summer folk dances and the Oktoberfest Folk Dance Weekend in Stowe, VT for many years and helped initiate FAC’s Pinewoods Camp sessions. He and Marianne received the San Antonio College Folk Dance Festival’s National Dance Award in 1982.

In recent years, Conny was a guest at FAC’s Pinewoods and Oktoberfest camps and at the San Antonio Folk Dance Festival. In his retirement, he volunteered at the Pepperidge Farm Thrift Store in Cambridge, MA, delivering bread to food pantries in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He also enjoyed his annual vacations at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL. Conny died on November 3, 2006 at age 85 after seven months of battling lung cancer.

In his long teaching career, Conny taught a broad repertoire to dancers of all levels. He is especially remembered for his teaching of Békési Páros, Bourrée Pastourelle, Bucimis, Corrido, D’Hammerschmiedsgselln, Gensci Verbunk, the Swedish hambo, Jarabe Pateño, Kamishitsa, Kreuz König, Mainzer Polka, Neapolitan Tarantella, Old Deninka, Rustemul, Sedi Donka, the waltz, and Zillertaler Laendler.

A Reason We Dance

by Charlie Rapport, December 2006

Another icon has fallen. The past year has been difficult. Perhaps we should just accept this condition as a reflection of the longevity of our activity.

But it is difficult to accept the passing of Conny Taylor, one who got so many of us into folk dancing and was then here to keep our feet honest week after week, decade after decade.

When I was in college he encouraged me to dance every time he came to our house to work with my father on publicity for the Duquesne University Tamburitzans, which the Taylors presented to Boston each year. I believe my father and Conny enjoyed and respected each other, because they both held similar strong ideas about how things should be done. Fortunately for many, they tended to be correct. They could keep talking for hours, though Conny was always just about to leave. They were both perfectionists, which is why Conny had my dad produce publicity, rather than use what was provided by the University.

I did not then really understand recreational folk dancing. I recalled from primary school the stamping, clapping, shaking my finger at my partner, and skipping around in circles, which I was hardly about to do again. I had done square dancing in high school, where I had also learned Doudlebska Polka, Road to the Isles, and Gay Gordons, which I had failed to find excessively exciting. I had seen demonstration groups at the New England Folk Festival, too, but did not relate their dances to ordinary proletarians. Unbelievable, even barbaric, to young people today, there was no recreational folk dancing done at the Folk Festival during the primitive early sixties.

But Conny made it sound like fun, so I finally began to ask questions. He told me experienced dancers met on Thursday and beginners on Friday evenings. Recall that I had been exposed to square dance and three folk dances. Thus, I decided to appear the next Thursday. However, I needed to study that night— a fetish that folk dancing soon largely cured— so I was reduced to dancing with the beginners that week. I was quite lost, of course, for I was hardly a dancer. Given who I was at twenty, I would have given it up at the end of that evening, but I was intrigued by the sophistication of the dances and impressed by Conny’s presence and confidence. He made folk dancing appear to be naturally executed by men in the company of women. Conny and Marianne danced beautifully, taught clearly, and made the whole process into great fun, while maintaining complete control over the room. I was back the following week— on Friday.

To the detriment of folk dance, there has not been a leader so confident, or a steady, consummate teaching couple since. Conny told me last summer that he stopped teaching altogether when he felt he could no longer watch dances, then carry them in his head and impart them to others without notes. And I thought of contra callers, almost all of whom carry cue cards.

Conny remained with his family until the end. They would have it no other way. An informal stable of friends and dancers visited in ones and twos to provide him with as much pleasure as we could, as well as some rest for the family, during these final weeks. That all seems fitting for a village, and Conny and Marianne founded our village, before they founded the Folk Arts Center. Might that be the greater legacy?

See Conny Taylor tributes for more reminiscences about Conny.