We baby boomers never learned to dance properly. Unlike our ancestors, who stepped onto a dance floor with a fairly clear idea of the well-prescribed patterns their feet should make, we’ve always tended to launch into a series of movements that can only be loosely interpreted as an actual dance. We gyrate a lot, that’s for sure, and usually while standing at a comfortable distance from our partners. We shimmy, we shake and we sway. We waggle our hips a bit, we wave our arms, and sometimes we even throw in a pirouette or two for effect. For most of us, at least, dancing through the decades has been a simple matter of stringing together whatever casual steps come into our heads while the music plays.

Boomer dances are mongrel maneuvers with no official names. We just kind of make them up as we go along.

I was reminded of this quirky evolution of modern dancing while hanging out in Rockland last weekend during the North Atlantic Blues Festival. There were thousands of people jammed onto the waterfront – twenty-somethings and gray-haired people nearing retirement, lawyers and nurses and leather-clad bikers, all of them grooving to the hot sounds soaring out over the harbor. While many were content to sit and tap their feet under the sun, others felt the need to get up and dance when the music moved them. And from what I could see, there were no traditional dance styles in evidence, but merely scattered knots of people moving around randomly for the pure pleasure of moving.

There were the robot dancers, for instance, whose arms and legs moved in a rigid, mechanical way reminiscent of C-3PO in the “Star Wars” movie. There were the aging hippie dancers, who glided around the hot top in their bare feet while waving their arms like Isadora Duncan and making the occasional balletic leap.

Some of the males celebrated the moment by merely shifting their weight glumly from one foot to the next and snapping their fingers to the beat. There were people doing something close to an Irish jig, people dancing in Hopi Indian fashion, and still others whose head-bobbing and arm-flapping looked an awful lot like a National Geographic special I once saw about the mating rituals of the whooping crane.

If not for my bad back, I probably would have been right out there with them, too, doing that comical hybrid of disparate dance maneuvers I’ve managed to cobble together since high school.

It’s not that boomer types like me can’t learn real dances; it’s just that the music we grew up with never really lent itself to an orderly series of steps that even came close to choreography. We never had a Charleston to call our own, nor a jitterbug, Texas two-step, fox trot, cha-cha or tango.

Our dances had names like the Tighten Up, the Shing-a-ling, the Jerk, the Swim, the Boogaloo and the oh-so forgettable Funky Chicken. Our dance routines came and went so fast that we wound up incorporating bits and pieces of each of them over the decades, creating in the process a laid-back, anything-goes form of dance that we dust off for every festival, concert and wedding.

But at least we were smart enough over the years to leave disco entirely out of the mix.