William Dudley Laufman (February 7, 1931July 13, 2026) was an American contra and barn dance caller and musician widely credited with having helped spur the revival of contra dance in the 20th century.
Early life Laufman was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on February 7, 1931, and grew up in the nearby town of Arlington. He was the eldest of five children. His father, M. Miller, was a businessman, and his mother, Marjorie () was a civil rights activist.
Laufman attended his first dance as a boy while working summers as a dairy farmer at the Mistwold Farm in Fremont, New Hampshire, in 1948. His boss's wife hosted "kitchen junkets" as a community gathering after work, which involved singing hymns and then removing furniture and dancing folk dances called from Henry Ford's Good Morning collection. In 1952, he moved to Walpole, New Hampshire.
Contra calling career Laufman later attended the Norfolk County Agricultural High School in Walpole, Massachusetts, where there were square dances every Monday night. There he met caller Ralph Page, who became his mentor. He took up calling, modeling his style after Page's, after a warm winter disrupted his ice hockey hobby and because he noticed that callers received romantic interest from women.
Laufman graduated with an associate's degree from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts, in 1952. In 1957, his first wife, Cynthia, gave him a fiddle and he began to learn to play. He also learned the accordion, concertina, melodeon, and harmonica.
Laufman worked as an occupational therapist in Brattleboro, Vermont, from 1952 to 1955, followed by a stint at the New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord and as a proofreader for a typesetter. In 1959, he moved to Canterbury, New Hampshire.
He began calling and playing for dances, which became known as "Dudley Dances". They became popular with adherents of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1950s. At times, he was the only remaining caller of contra dances with live music.
In 1965, he was hired to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island to a 16,000-person crowd. Together with other musicians who went there with him, he founded the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra that year. His dances became popular with hippies belonging to the countercultural movement of the 1960s.
In the 1970s, his orchestra averaged more than 300 engagements per year, mostly in New England. The tradition spread across the United States as dancers moved to other regions.
Personal life
Laufman was noted for his charisma. A Quaker, he was a conscientious objector to the Korean War. He was married three times, to Cynthia Dunbar, Patty Windus, and Jacqueline Gilman, and partnered toward the end of his life with Nanci Aguiar. He had five children.
From 1959 until his death, Laufman lived in Canterbury in a house called "Wind in the Timothy" (a reference to the grass species) which he built, with assistance from Cynthia Dunbar, on a plot. It initially had no electricity or running water. His home garden provided much of his food.
Later career and death In the 1970s, other bands and callers began working dances. More aerobic "modern urban" contra dances, in which there was no longer an inactive couple, came into fashion. These were of less interest to Laufman, so he turned his attention to traditional barn dances. Beginning in 1978, he started working with the New Hampshire Artists-in-the-Schools program, teaching dances to children.
Although Laufman recovered from a fractured hip in November 2025, his health began to decline after that. He died on July 13, 2026, at his home in Canterbury, at the age of 95. He received a natural burial in a clearing at the edge of his property at a gravesite marked with timothy grass.
Awards and honors In 1990, the University of New Hampshire Archives approached Laufman to donate his recordings, writings, personal photographs and other materials to a special collection, which was named the "Dudley Laufman Collection No. 107".
In 2001, he received the New Hampshire Governor's Arts Award for Folk Heritage, and received several proclamations through the years, including one at his bedside on June 22, 2026.
In 2007, Laufman received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Country Dance and Song Society.
Laufman was a recipient of a 2009 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
The recreation barn at Camp Quinebarge, a children's sleep away summer camp, on Lake Kanasatka in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, which hosted "Dudley Dances" for 50 years, is named in his honor.
Works
Numerous poetry books
Discography With Jacqueline Laufman
Where'd You Get Them Great Chunes (alongside the Sugar River String Band) (Two Fiddles, 2007)
With Canterbury Country Orchestra
Mistwold (F&W Records F74-FW-5, 1974) Swinging On A Gate (Front Hall Records, 1974) Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra With Dudley Laufman (F&W Records CD-01-FW8, 2001) Welcome Here Again (F&W 74WWC, 2016) Here's to Every Country Dancer (F&W F72-FW-3, 2019)
References
Further reading
External links The Other Way Back, a 2007 feature-length documentary about Laufman Dudley Laufman Papers at the University of New Hampshire Special Collections and Archives