Country two-step is a fast dance, around 190bpm, based mostly on six-count patterns. There are variants, such as Triple two-step, which are danced to slower music. Occasionally I will refer to the faster two-step as Texas two-step by contrast with these variants.
Country two-step is almost exclusively danced to country music, though there are some non-country songs that would make a good two-step. But, considering that two-step music is barely faster than jive and almost as fast as quickstep, what makes two-step music into two-step music? Apart from the fiddles, steel guitars, and the twang in the singer's voice, that is.
Country two-step is a smooth-feeling dance. Correspondingly, the music has a smooth feel to it. This can be attributed to the bass part: the bass hardly ever plays more than one note per two beats, that is, it plays in the rhythm of the "slows" that you dance. Swing music at the same tempo would have a much more complicated bass part, related to the triple steps in the swing patterns.
Since two-step music is quite fast, some people are tempted to count it half-time. That is, they count in what we might call "slow beats", each of which is as long as two fast beats. So who is to say that I am right and they are wrong?
Well, there are songs that are on the edge between jive - fast east-coast swing - and two-step. Other songs may be two-step music, but if you would slow them down a bit they would be good for swing. Conversely, songs for triple two-step have the same character as Texas two-step music, just slower. If you accept that those slower tempos would be in the mid one hundred bpm, then two-step should be slightly faster, not a whole lot slower.
Also, all two-step music has the snaredrum-on-the-backbeat rhythm. In other cases, such as west coast and east coast swing, hustle, nightclub two-step, we accept that that the snare drum comes on beats 2 and 4 of the bar. So why not also in two-step?
In the QQSS rhythm, each quick is one beat and the slows are two beats each, so that makes six beats per pattern. Some people, especially if they have some musical education, feel the discrepancy between this pattern length and the fact that the music is in four-quarter time. You can read more about this elsewhere in this course.
The two-step rhythm is counted QQSS, but it was not always like that. In the early 1990s, there were still many people counting SSQQ. If you have danced American style ballroom, you may know that this is the rhythm of Arthur Murray's "Magic Step" foxtrot. This is no coincidence. The way two-step is danced these days is the product of a long evolution, but a deciding factor was a development in the early 1980s, the days of the movie Urban Cowboy, when people started dancing foxtrot patterns to country songs.
The QQSS count is preferred these days because it better fits the structure of the patterns, but there is no musical reason for preferring either way of counting. Since the pattern length is not the same as the bar length (six beats against four, see above), it would be futile to look for musical reasons to count one way or the other.
URL: http://www.eijkhout.net/ftb/text_files/Twostep.html
Last modified on: Sunday, May 6, 2001.
This file is part of "Feel The Beat", a musicology course for dancers, by Victor Eijkhout (victor at eijkhout dot net), who appreciates being sent additions or corrections on the material in this course. Copyright 2000/1 Victor Eijkhout.
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