I caught the line dancing bug, and it’s only a matter of time before you do, too. On a recent evening in Philipsburg, Montana after a drawn-out big sky sunset, I stepped inside the wood barn at The Ranch at Rock Creek, following the twang of a convivial country tune. “We’re the biggest nobodies in Montana,” the lead singer quipped before his band began their set. A group of girls descended upon the dance floor, swaying across the room in unison. They were line dancing, of course, and it took very little time for me—the tenderfoot—to join in.
In the recent past, line dancing has undergone an astonishing revival that has gained traction both online (TikTok made it a “new favorite hobby”) and in real life, with country bars that offer line dancing nights opening up all across the country. Earlier in 2024, the documentary short Stud Country (directed by Alexandra Kern and Lina Abascal) debuted, painting a striking portrait of L.A.’s history of queer country and western line dancing. Pile all of that on top of the Yellowstone craze, Beyoncé’s glam cowgirl era, fashion collaborations with the likes of Orville Peck, Pharrell’s exploration of the Black cowboy for Louis Vuitton’s fall 2024 menswear collection, and Bella Hadid’s decamp to the Lone Star State, and the message becomes crystal clear: there’s never been a better time to slip into a pair of cowboy boots.
The origin story of line dancing, like any other kind of creative expression, is layered. Cultural influences ranging from European folk dances to African-American movements and patterns had a hand in shaping Western line dancing as we know it today. For award-winning music journalist and historian, Robert K. Oermann, the earliest Western group dance he can remember bears a familiar tune.
You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in, and you shake it all about, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, that’s what it s all about. “I think it dates back to the 19th century,” he tells me over the phone from his home in Nashville. From there, this kind of group dance experienced a steady progression—a square dancing “craze” in the post-war 1940s, the bunny hop and hand jive in the ’50s, the twist of the ’60s, disco in the 1970s, the electric slide popularized by Marcia Griffiths circa 1980s, and the “Macarena” and “Cha-Cha Slide” in the decades following.
During the heyday of line dancing, records were made explicitly for line dancing (Billy Ray Cyrus’s 1992 hit, “Achy Breaky Heart” being an example). “Rather than a novelty, it was institutionalized in big country music. It was very driven by the dancers themselves rather than by what was on the radio,” Oermann explains, adding that other genres like pop music have, at times, seemingly forgotten about dancing. “I do believe people love to dance and periodically the gatekeepers at the top, the people that are making the records who think they’re creating the culture, forget that the people who actually consume, they crave this. And it’s eternal.”
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For those unacquainted with line dancing, it’s a partnerless dance in which a group of people move together to a repeated sequence of steps while arranged in one or more rows, typically facing the same direction. “I enjoy drifting off into my own world,” Audrey Bradley tells me, the lead wrangler at The Ranch at Rock Creek. “You watch a lot of people moving only their feet and maybe hips when they dance. Once I start, I put everything I’ve got into each dance waving my arms, clapping my hands, throwing a few shimmies in there. I like knowing I can make these dances my own while still sticking to the choreography.”
That notion of “losing yourself” comes up a lot when talking about line dancing. When I chat with Drew Demeterio (a recent graduate and graphic designer), she calls it a flow state. “When I get onto the dance floor, especially now that I know the dances, I forget about all of my issues.” After turning 21, Demeterio and her friends checked out a country-themed bar near campus in Boston. “It was an off-night and I figured no one would be there, but I walked in and it was packed to the brim and everyone was line dancing.” From there, she was hooked. “I would go like twice a week, then it was three or four,” she says. After moving back to the New York area (where she’s from) Demeterio found a new line dancing community in Stud Country, which has programming in Brooklyn, as well as at line dance events like Buck Wild at Desert 5 Spot which has outposts in both Los Angeles and Brooklyn.
“Our weekly Bootloose Line Dancing Night, led by the legendary dance instructors Mike and Diana (who also have a residency at the Cowboy Palace), was designed to make it easy for everyone to join in the fun,” Desert 5 Spot ‘Sheriff’ Wade Crescent says, adding that the venue’s line dancing has grown in popularity so much that they’ve had to add additional sessions to keep up with the demand. “It’s clear that line dancing is experiencing a revival. It all goes back to community and feeling connected with one another and the best part is, once you’ve mastered a dance or two, you’re set for life—it’s a skill you can carry with you wherever you go.”
Community is at the heart of what makes line dancing so appealing to me. No need for a romantic partner, no need for rhythm, really—simply a desire to move (and make mistakes) in unison with everyone else on the dance floor. “I started queer line dancing at Stud Country in L.A. during the hardest year of my life,” Manon Carrié tells me, who co-teaches with Rivkah Reyes at Desert 5 Spot in Brooklyn on Sundays for a line dancing event named Buck Wild (where they go by the line dance personas Sugarfoot and Spitfire). At the time, she didn’t care for country music and hadn’t line danced before, but gave it a try.
“Picture walking into a room that immediately feels like a portal out of L.A. into a southern country dance hall, neon signs, and disco lights bathing euphoric queer dancers stomping, laughing, and spinning together to a blasting mix of country and pop songs,” Carrié says. She describes the feeling as being contained in the moment—“hyper present in this collective rapture that feels simultaneously exciting, beautifully queer, and safe.” Demeterio echoes this sentiment. “Not to be hokey, but it’s a spiritual feeling doing things in unison with other people,” she says. “We’re all just one unit. That’s what makes it really easy to fall in love with line dancing, I think.”
Once I finally heel-toe my way to the barn’s dance floor, it was like jumping in a stream. My ballet background helped with navigating some of the movements, but other times I found myself facing the opposite direction of everyone else—but unlike ballet, it’s fun to mess up while line dancing. “Some of our best barn dances happen with people who may not even get the steps down,” Amy Driscoll (another employee at Ranch at Rock Creek) says to me. For the next couple of hours, I savor that ever-elusive flow state, the bliss that comes from moving in synchrony with other humans—and the affirmation that I do, in fact, want to be a line dancer.
