Kentucky artist takes clogging worldwide during COVID-19

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Forget high-end studios and top dollar instructions. Carla Gover honed her dancing skills at square dances in the mountains.

As a young girl, she’d “shuffle, step, toe, step” to the fast-paced rhythm of a good fiddle tune. That kind of music, she says, just fills you with happiness to the point where your feet can’t help but move.

Now that she’s grown, when she reminisces about it, you can almost taste the cornbread and savory beans that were staples at those gatherings.

For this folk artist, Appalachian flatfooting and clogging is so much more than her career. It’s just as much as part of her heritage as the life skills she learned from her grandmother. Think along the lines of quilting, canning and killing chickens.

If you really want to learn a dance that’s part of a culture, you have to learn it from the source, she says.

You have to be able to imagine those beans on your tongue and your feet tapping out a beat to a live fiddle in the mountains.

In an unexpected way, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the Eastern Kentucky native, who’s toured internationally, to share her gift of dance and rhythm with people from all over the world.

Now that she’s building out a digital dance platform, her clogging and flatfooting students are as far away as Sweden, and they’re learning from a true child of Eastern Kentucky without ever having to get on a plane.

Appalachian flatfooting and clogging were born in the mountains but came from a variety of influences including European dances, the traditions of the African slaves and movements used by indigenous tribes who’d occupied the land for centuries.

Like a lot of performers, her income completely evaporated when the COVID-19 hit Kentucky in March 2020. Her brand is very much singing, song playing, storytelling, and dance, and the avenues for public performance dissipated with social distancing.

In early 2020, she was bracing for one of the biggest touring years she’d ever had scheduled. Gover and her string band had trips booked to Wales, Ireland, Mexico and Serbia, and they’d even landed some funding from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation to help defray the costs.

She was going to bring Eastern Kentucky traditions across borders to share the arts and dispel the culture’s stereotypes. Part of the trouble with the narrative around Eastern Kentucky is that it largely comes from people who’ve taken the time to learn tradition but don’t have roots in the region.

There are talented people in the mountains, she said, and they should be sharing the story.

Gover compared learning to clog to learning to hula. Someone who took a few hula lessons on a cruise ship can only walk you through the motions.

You’ll get a better sense of the culture from a true islander. You’ll learn about the food people eat, the places where people gather, the instruments they play and the people they loved who plucked those strings.

Those memories are the difference between sharing skills and sharing heritage.

And even though she wasn’t able to do it in person last year, she’s still telling Eastern Kentucky’s story.

Gover had to rethink how to reach people, so she launched targeted Facebook ads and mastered Instagram in a way she hadn’t before.

She saw so much success with online introductory courses that she recently launched an eight-week, interactive class that capped out at 54 people. That’s currently closed, but she has plans to host another one this fall.

So many of the students she’s working with can fit her $297 digital course fee into their budget, but they wouldn’t necessarily be able to handle all the costs that come with buying a plane ticket and visiting Kentucky.

Several of her students are elderly, she said, and they don’t get around as well as they once did. Clogging is rough on the knees, but even so, it becomes more doable when her dancers don’t have to get out of the house and get to an in-person lesson to try it.

Even as more people get vaccinated and the pandemic wanes, she plans to keep using that digital platform to reach people she couldn’t otherwise.

She can tell people about her Eastern Kentucky grandmother who loved the music of the mountains but thought that dancing was a sin. She can talk about what it was like to grow up in a place that still put energy into living off the land, and doing and making things for themselves.

She can share all those stories between the heel-heel toe-toes and the shuffles, step, toe, steps.

And while she looks forward to beingable to perform for crowds again, she’s also grateful for this unlimited new audience this difficult year has brought her.

WANT TO CLOG?

Learn more about Carla on her website at carlagover.com and interact with her on Instagram @KentuckyCarla.Join her “Appalachian Flatfooting and Clogging” Facebook Group to hear about upcoming digital class opportunities.