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This is a series of installments that Stella wrote starting May 2013, since we moved to a new Web Host and new Blog. Larry B felt it appropriate to re-post the series on our new Blog site. Perhaps We will get Stella to continue her story and maybe some other future articles from “The Line Dance Guru”

Part 1

The story of the Line Dance Guru as you know her today but what she has never told about her life before she came to the U.S.A. and after she first arrived as a British tourist on holiday for a week.

I was born on a freezing cold night in Ashton-U-Lynne Lancashire in the North of England February 2nd 1953.I was the 3rd child born to parents Stella Ball and Charles Ball. Mum was a London Royal College of music teacher and Dad, a former Grenadier guard and personal Queens’s regiment to Queen Elizabeth when she was just a teenager. I was the first girl and soon to be followed by a third brother, so there were 4 of us for many years till my sisters came a long 8 years later 18 months between them, now there were 6 children, 3 boys, 3 girls.

To say our child hood was dysfunctional would be an understatement even by today’s standards, where it seems more and more children are raised in homes of abuse or just plain neglect. The difference was back then it was all kept quiet and swept under the rug. The neighbors ignored the screaming domestic abuse between my father and mother unless occasionally it became so disruptive they would make an anonymous call to police. Not many homes had phones in those day’s but we were fortunate the next door neighbor had a phone, and when the police arrived they would calm the situation and just leave, often with me clinging to the officers leg begging to be taken away with them. The law was such at that time that unless one or the other spouse was willing to file charges they could not arrest anyone.

My Mum had a great sense of humor, was utterly charming and men found her irresistible. My father super intelligent, who spoke many languages and possessed a vast knowledge through books but was a full-blown alcoholic and was addicted to codeine which you could buy over the counter. He was prone to violence when in on codeine and alcohol to my mother and older brother Charles in particular.

A line dance is a choreographed dance with a repeated sequence of steps in which a group of people dance in one or more lines or rows without regard for the gender of the individuals, all facing the same direction or facing each other, and executing the steps at the same time. Line dancing is practiced and learned in country-western dance bars, social clubs, dance clubs and ballrooms. It is sometimes combined on dance programs with other forms of country-western dance, such as two-step, western promenade dances, and as well as western-style variants of the waltz, polka and swing. Line dances have accompanied many popular music styles since the early 1970s including pop, swing, rock and roll, disco, Latin (salsa suelta), rhythm and blues and jazz.

The Madison was a popular line dance in the late 1950s. At least five-line dances that are strongly associated with country-western music were written in the 1970s, two of which are dated to 1972: “Walkin’ Wazi” and “Cowboy Boogie”, five years before the disco craze created by the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977, the same (approximate) year the “Tush Push” was created. The Electric Slide was a Disco-based line dance created and popularized in the mid-1970s.

Over a dozen line dances were created during the 1980s for country songs. The 1980 film Urban Cowboy reflected the blurring of lines between country music and pop, and spurred renewed interest in country culture, and western fashion, music, and dance. “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” was choreographed by Bill Bader in October 1990 for the original Asleep at the Wheel recording of the song of the same name. The Brooks and Dunn version of the song has resulted in there being at least 16 line dances with “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” in the title, including one by Tom Maddox and Skippy Blair.

The 1992 hit “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus helped catapult western line dancing into the mainstream. In 1994 choreographer Max Perry had a worldwide dance hit with “Swamp Thang” for the song “Swamp Thing” by The Grid. This was a techno song that fused banjo sounds in the melody line and helped to start a trend of dancing to forms of music other than country.

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