Ask anyone who grew up dancing in central New Hampshire what a "Dudley Dance" was, and most could tell you without pausing: furniture shoved back against the walls, a fiddle tuning up in the corner, and a caller's voice steering a room full of near-strangers through a reel until they moved like they had known each other for years. Dudley Laufman, the contra and barn dance caller and fiddler whose devotion to live music helped drive the twentieth-century revival of traditional New England dancing, died in mid-July 2026 in New Hampshire, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. He was in his mid-90s.

Laufman grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, the eldest of five children, and came to New Hampshire in 1947 to work on a dairy farm in Fremont. It was there that he wandered into his first old-time kitchen dances, an experience he described decades later in an interview for the NEA: he was hooked from the moment he smelled the wood smoke and heard "the rosiny sound of the fiddle." He called his first dance the following year, in 1948, at an agricultural school in Walpole, Massachusetts, taught by Ralph Page, a dancing master from Keene who became his mentor. In 1957 his first wife, Cynthia, gave him a fiddle, and he taught himself to play it by watching a local fiddler, Dick Richardson, and practicing at home.

He settled in Canterbury, New Hampshire, in 1959, and the town remained his home for the rest of his life, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader. In 1965 he formed the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra and brought it to the Newport Folk Festival that same year, per the Andover Beacon. Roughly ten musicians and dancers traveled with him to Rhode Island to perform the Virginia Reel and Petronella for the folk festival crowd, and over the four days he crossed paths with Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. Through the 1970s the orchestra kept up a punishing pace, averaging more than 300 engagements a year, and cut an early long-playing record of New England jigs and reels.

For years he was, in the words of pianist and friend Larry Siegel, "kind of the only game in town": if you wanted a barn full of live contra music in central New Hampshire, you called Dudley. Siegel later wrote a musical theater piece about Laufman's life, drawing its lyrics from an old interview, and staged it at the Peterborough Town House in 2017. "Many people who grew up around here grew up dancing to Dudley," Siegel said, comparing him to Henry David Thoreau, a man "marching to the beat of a different drummer."

Laufman later married Jacqueline, and from 1986 the two performed together as Two Fiddles, touring New England, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Hawaii, Quebec and the Midwest, often booked six to nine months out. They built their own home in Canterbury with a small ballroom attached, where they hosted dances on fifth weekends. Dance organizer Duncan Coolidge, describing what made Laufman's calling work for a crowd of mixed ages and experience, said he "makes it easy for Grandma and the grandkids and everyone in between."

Recognition followed the dancing rather than the other way around. In 1999 Laufman represented traditional New England dance at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. In 2001 New Hampshire gave him its Governor's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement. And in 2009 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in folk and traditional arts; NEA folk arts director Barry Bergey delivered the news by phone. "I couldn't believe it at first," Laufman said. "And it took some while to set in." The playwright Ernest Thompson, best known for "On Golden Pond," said of him: "I think Dudley Laufman belongs in the pantheon of genuine American artists."

Laufman kept calling into his nineties. Twice a year for more than four decades he drove to Camp Quinebarge on Lake Kanasatka in Moultonborough to run its barn dances, and in 2023 the camp renamed its recreation hall "Dudley Hall" in his honor. "Thank you, Dudley," said Eric Carlson, the camp's co-executive director, calling him "an incredible part" of the camp's history. Laufman, then 93, said the honor ranked among the proudest moments of his life.

What Laufman leaves in New Hampshire is not a monument but a habit: barns and grange halls across the state still fill on Saturday nights with fiddle music and a caller's voice, a pattern he spent more than seventy years insisting on in an age of recorded sound. His recordings with the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra and with Jacqueline as Two Fiddles remain in circulation, alongside the books of poetry and broadsides he wrote and she illustrated. Dudley Hall still stands at Camp Quinebarge, and the ballroom the two of them built onto their own house in Canterbury outlasted him as a place where neighbors could, on a fifth weekend, still move the furniture back and dance.