It’s football time in Tennessee, which means it’s also time for fall festivals and all the folksy fun they entail: craft vendors, funnel cakes, deep-fried Oreos – and clogging performances.
Hilda Griffin is the instructor of the East Ridge Cloggers, a group of about 20 men and women who perform at local festivals such as Prater’s Mill and Ketner’s Mill, as well as area nursing homes and assisted living facilities. They also attend clogging workshops and the national convention if held closeby, like last year’s in Nashville, where they learn new routines from prominent instructors from around the country.
Griffin says clogging is a combination of dance styles brought to America by African, German, Irish and English settlers. Once here – many settling in Appalachia – they picked up aspects of one another’s dancing, fusing it into the style we know today. A rhythmic dance style, with performers typically using their heel to mark the beat, clogging differs from its cousin, tap dance, in that cloggers use double taps on the heel and toe, as opposed to just the heel.
Traditionally, cloggers dance to old-time Appalachian music played on a fiddle and banjo, but Griffin says it can be done to any kind of music that’s got a beat. Meghan Trainor’s “Your Lips are Movin” is among her favorite clogging tunes. “It’s a good, fast routine,” says Griffin, who comes up with some of the East Ridge Cloggers’ routines, while others are modeled on those they’ve seen at workshops or online.
Born and raised in Chattanooga, Griffin started clogging 30 years ago when she moved for a decade to Toledo, Ohio, where she says clogging is a more popular pastime than it is here, though she’s unsure why. It was there she saw her first group of cloggers performing, somewhat ironically, to “Rocky Top.”