Grandma Austin’s Golden Hair

When Juanita Carr, now Rush, was a little girl her grandmother Nancy Austin, came to live with her and her family. Apparently, prior to that, Nancy Austin would, like they did in the old days before Social Security and nursing homes, spend a few months with each of her children. As she aged, dementia started manifesting itself. As she advanced in her dementia, there were one or two episodes that made Mama Carr fear for her safety, and so Grandma Austin was brought to stay with Mama Carr and her brood.

Joan (pronounced like Joanne – Joan said her mama, Katie Carr Peterson, told her that during the Great Depression they were too poor to afford extra letters in her name!) was Juanita’s niece, but thanks to the twenty-years difference in age between Joan’s mother and her Aunt Juanita, was only a year younger than Juanita. Grandma Austin would spend hours just sitting in her chair, and Juanita remembered that she and Joan would treat Grandma Austin like a big ol’ compliant doll, and would take turns brushing her golden hair which was long, beautiful and wavy.

The years went by, and after Juanita had moved to Muskogee in the mid-1970’s, she remembered those times, and wondered if she really remembered the color of her Grandma Austin’s hair right. She mentioned it to her sister, Edith Carr Wilson. Edith Wilson retrieved a memento that she had saved, in an envelope or something like that, and inside was a lock of hair she had kept. It was Grandma Austin’s hair, and it was, indeed, golden.

Grandma Austin loved music and dancing. Apparently, her favorite was called “Shoddish.” There seems to various spellings of this, several others being Schotticsche and Schottisch (pronounced Skottish).

A side trip to Google, thence on to Wikipedia yielded the following. The schottische came to the USA from Europe and there are countless variations of the dance. After 1848, a number of old ballroom variants of schottische were danced in California. The “Five-Step Schottische” and a Highland Schottische with modifications were included on lists of ballroom dances of the period. Four of the variants had quite striking similarities with the second half of each dance described as turning with two-step. This is similar to the old “Glide Polka” (step-close-step, with no hop) or the galop (glide,change,glide) In Texas alone there have been schottische-like dances with names such as Drunk, Blue Bonnett, MgGinty, and Douglas. Schottische variations include a straight leg kick, a kick-hop and a standing hop. Both include the traditional hop that is part of the schottische.

In the southern United States at the start of the 20th century the schottische was combined with ragtime; the most popular “ragtime schottische” of the era was “Any Rags” by Thomas S. Allen in 1902. In New Orleans, Buddy Bolden‘s band and other proto-jazz groups were known for playing hot schottisches. It is also danced as a Western promenade dance in Country and Western dance venues, oftentimes after the Cotton-Eyed Joe.

One of Mama Carr’s prized possessions was a radio (Juanita Rush has been heard to remark that growing up, her family would have had to stand on a crate to see the poverty line), and they would play it for Grandma Austin. Whenever a Shoddish came on, Grandma Austin, who was in her eighties, would spring out of the chair and dance like a lithe twenty-year old woman with a joyful expression on her face! When the song ended, she would sit back down, apparently no worse for the wear, and resume her silent ways. Juanita remembers Grandma Austin teaching her to dance the Shoddish, many hours of enjoyment. Now in her late 70’s, Juanita says she’s sure she doesn’t remember how to dance the Shoddish!