`Dancing to the cowboy beat’> Line-dancing craze draws mixed crowd to Brewer’s Silver Spur

Barbara Corson is going through a transformation that even she cannot fully understand. And it’s happening so fast that she is not certain where it will end.

Slowly but surely, Corson is going country.

Last Wednesday night, she was one of 150 or so locals who turned out for the weekly line-dance lessons at the Silver Spur Saloon and Dance Hall in Brewer. Corson showed up in a white blouse, knotted at the waist, and a loose blue skirt that ended at the tops of her white cowgirl boots.

This has not always been her standard evening attire, as she quickly points out. Then again, everything about her emerging fascination with the world of country and western has been taking Corson by surprise lately.

“I was never a country and western fan,” Corson says breathlessly after completing a rigorous series of turns on the dance floor. “There was time when my husband would put on country music and I’d tell him to shut that stuff off. But I always loved to dance. So when this place came along, that was it. Now I love it.”

Corson is one of a growing number of people who have eagerly given themselves up to the country-dance craze that appears to be sweeping the country much like the twist and disco once did. People who would never before have set foot in a place like the Silver Spur are now lining up in orderly rows to learn step dances like the El Paso cha cha, the cowboy twist, the cortland vine, and even the tush push.

The reason for its wild popularity, as the many converts will tell you, is that country and western just ain’t what it used to be.

“The music has gotten away from all that twangy stuff and gotten into a almost a rock thing,” said Corson, who works as a nurse at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. “It’s upbeat for a change. And in line-dancing, you just get up and have fun with everybody and you don’t need a partner. Bangor really needed a place like this.”

That sentiment is precisely what prompted Babe and Stanlia Bellefleur to buy the old Show Ring bar in Brewer and turn it into the Silver Spur. A year ago, Babe was a builder and plumber in Limestone. Stanlia, his wife, was a hairdresser. After opening the doors to their dance hall on April 28, they have become the owners of one of the busiest clubs in town.

“This place really started as a joke,” Babe said as a steady stream of patrons began making its way into the hall at about 7:30 p.m. “While we were building a house we started coming to Bangor on weekends, and we noticed there wasn’t much country and western around. We had been involved in country dancing in another state — line-dancing and couples-dancing — and knew how popular it was. We thought people here would enjoy something like this.”

This being Wednesday, Stanlia, the line-dance teacher, takes her place on a small elevated platform at a corner of the large dance floor. She wears a flouncy blue blouse, tight blue jeans with a silver chain belt, and black suede western boots. The crowd — mostly women, young and old — splits off into a series of horizontal rows that stretches to the back of the room. Few people have come to sit; the tables bordering the floor are mostly vacant.

With the first notes of Alan Jackson’s bouncy “Chattahoochee,” Stanlia demonstrates the first few steps of the Tush Push.

“Right heel … toe home,” she says as the crowd tries to follow along. She moves through a “right vine,” an essential sideways step in line-dancing, and then into a little bent-knee hop called a “hitch.” As the dancers run through the moves, the place takes on the atmosphere of a light-hearted aerobics class — lots of clumsy footwork and easy laughter.

At Stanlia’s patient prodding, the group puts several steps together with comically frustrating results. A few dancers get so confused they simply stop and shake their heads.

“I teach one sequence until they’re comfortable with it, and then go to the next,” Stanlia explains. “When you put them together, it’s like a puzzle. They get discouraged, but I tell them not to panic and to have fun. ”

Behind the bar, Sharon Knapp serves a few people who have decided to sit one out. She is 27, and grew up listening to rock bands like Led Zeppelin, while also maintaining a lifelong interest in country. She says the fusion of sounds produced by the current crop of country artists has brought lots of new people into the fold.

“I’m in here with my friends and my mother comes in with her friends,” Knapp says. “I was down in Washington, D.C., recently, and all they were doing were country line-dances.”

Because it’s a group activity, Knapp says, country dancing is a non-threatening way to meet people.

“You don’t have to go up and ask someone to dance,” she says. “You just get up there with everyone. If you want to meet someone, you can ask them to show you a certain step. There’s a lot of that going on here.”

Michael Hale, who works days at the radio station Y-97, plays CDs inside a booth built to look like a stagecoach. Over the last few years, he has watched country music evolve into a chart-crossing hybrid that appeals to all tastes.

“There’s so much variety now,” he says, looking out over the rows of hip-wagging, hand-clapping, heel-toeing dancers from his stagecoach window. “Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks — the big stars are anywhere from 25 to 42 years old. They grew up with bands like ZZ Top, and they’ve brought that background to country. One cut can be a Merle Haggard tune and the next one is like a rock song from the 1970s. Garth Brooks’ favorite band as a teen-ager was Kiss. It’s got to influence their music.”

Popular as country has become since it shed its hillbilly image, not everyone is ready to hop on the band wagon. Some of Barbara Corson’s friends at Eastern Maine Medical Center, for instance, still scoff when they hear about her plans for a night on the town.

“They say, `You’re going to a country place? You’ve got to be kidding.’ They can’t believe it. But all I can say to them is that they’re missing out on all the fun,” Corson says.

A minute later, she’s back on the floor, stomping and clapping as the Bellamy Brothers wail, “Everybody’s dancing to the cowboy beat …”