Caller Tips I Wish I Had Been Given¶

By Vance Morrison 4/2024

Licensed under CC BY 4.0. You may share and adapt this book for any purpose, provided you give credit.

Target Audience¶

This document is for people who are just starting out (or just thinking about) square dance calling. You may have taken a short ‘course’ on calling, or maybe you have been mentored by a more experienced caller, or maybe you are just thinking about being a square dance caller.

There are plenty of square dance callers who are more experienced than I (I have only been calling for several years), or have been teaching calling (I have never done that), but I have one advantage over all of them: I still remember the things I had to learn ‘the hard way’. I also have learned relatively recently, so I learned AFTER things like Taminations, SqView, music for callers, or the callerlab teaching site existed, and thus have a ‘new caller’ perspective on how to use them to best effect. This document is NOT meant to be exhaustive, but hopefully you will find nuggets of information that you find useful. .

This document got longer than I expected when I started. Please don’t be intimidated by its length. It is longer partially because I wanted to SLOW DOWN and really try to explain things in a comprehensible way. Don’t feel like you have to read it end-to-end. Think of it as a menu from which you can pick and choose and only read what catches your interest.

To determine what to read, the table of contents is helpful. Clicking on a section in the table of contents brings up a link that will take you to that topic, so you can skip around with ease.

Chapters¶

To read or print the whole book as a single page, use the printable version.