A Man's a Man for a' That ~ Williams is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Thomas Wilson in 1816 and published in A Companion to the Ball Room, London. It was interpreted by George Williams in 2024. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.
SINGLE FIGURE (Each strain repeated)
Hands 3 round on the ladies side hands 3 round on the gentns. side lead down the middle up again & allemande
OR THUS Set & change places with 2d. Cu: set & back again & whole poussette
DOUBLE FIGURE (Tune played twice thro' with repeats)
Set & hands across quite round with 2d. Cu: set & back again lead down the middle up again set to top Cu: swing corners chain figure four round with top Cu: & turn your partner
The music consists of two 4 bar strains. Probably played as a reel rather than a strathspey.
The RSCDS is interpretting Wilson's DOUBLE FIGURE
Wilson defines most of his figures in his An Analysis of Country Dancing, 3rd Edition.
The animation plays at 120 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily. Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.
The dances of George Williams (including interpretations like this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
A1 | 1-2 | 1s+2s set |
3-4 | 1s+2s half right hands across | |
A2 | 1-2 | 1s+2s set |
3-4 | 1s+2s half left hands across | |
B1+2 | 1-6 | 1s lead down, turn, lead up to 2nd place as 2s lead up, 1s face 2s |
7-8 | 1s+2s set to neighbor | |
A3 | 1-4 | Swing corners: Partner right, 1st corner left |
A4 | 1-4 | Partner right, 2nd corner left |
B3 | 1-4 | Face partner, four quick changes of rights and lefts |
B4 | 1-4 | 1s partner two hand turn |
If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.
If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the perils of youtube. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=AMansAManForAThat-Williams
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2024 by George Williams. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2024 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021,2022,2023,2024 by George W. Williams V
My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.