Robin Dance is sung to honor the robin, especially at the start of spring, though it can be sung throughout the year. The song acknowledges and thanks this familiar bird as a harbinger of spring after the long winter: as Bill explains (audio 1), We’re honoring the robin, so we welcome it back.

The Robin Dance songs seem to imitate the song of the jö:yaik (American robin), while the side-to-side dance might suggest the bird’s hopping movements. The story of Robin Dance, in which a boy transformed into the robin gives his song to humankind, highlights the role of Earth Songs in maintaining reciprocal relationships with created beings and with each other.

Story

According to Seneca oral tradition, the Robin Dance was a gift to the people from the robin, and the robin was originally a human boy (video 2). That boy went out into the woods with his uncle on a vision quest, and while he was fasting and waiting for a vision, he grew ill and began to waste away. His uncle found him on the point of death, with his chest painted red, but the boy begged to wait another day. When the uncle returned the last time, he found a bird who told him, I am your nephew. I am jö:yaik, the robin, and from now on he would be the sign that spring was returning. He gave the people his songs as a way of honoring him and celebrating the promise of spring.

The Seneca Robin Dance is evidence of a long, close relationship between humans and robins in this region, which Western science confirms. The American robin (Turdus migratorius) already lived all across North America when humans first arrived, but robins seem to have lived close by humans since (Vanderhoff and Pyle et al. 2020). They prefer to hunt in grassy, open areas with plenty of sunlight, and so they thrive in human-settled landscapes or at the woods’ edge. In recent times robin populations have been documented to expand following patterns of human settlement (Vanderhoff and Pyle et al. 2020). Robins show awareness of people and their habits: city robins allow people to come much closer to them than their country cousins do, and they are less frightened of people walking on paths without looking at them, possibly because they have learned the predictable pattern that people tend to stay on paths (Eason and Sherman et al. 2010). Human behavior and culture shapes robin behavior: robins sing earlier in the morning when there is more light pollution (Miller 2006), and robins are quicker to run away from people in cities where people are more aggressive toward them (Clucas and Marzluff 2012).

Because robins live in such close proximity to humans and because their return signals spring, they are widely recognized even by urban denizens of this region who do not otherwise pay much attention to birds. Their song is familiar even to those who have never taken particular note of it. Because the species is so widespread, virtually all North Americans hear, and are warmed by, the lovely melody of the robin during the spring and summer, although many people do not recognize its song as such. Those who do, however, widely regard the early migrating American robin to be a longed-for harbinger of springtime and warmer weather, because this bird often arrives at the northern parts of its range and sings while there is still snow on the ground (Freedman and Frost 2023).

The difference between the common folkloric ideas of robins and the Seneca Robin Dance is that Seneca people and their ancestors have lived side-by-side with this species of bird in this territory for thousands of years, and the song was developed and preserved through oral tradition as a sign of their close relationship. That sense of intimacy with robins may be reflected in the way the Seneca story says that the robin was originally a human boy. It is not clear whether this was the first robin, or whether the robins perhaps chose this boy as an intermediary and transformed him into one of them. Either way the story emphasizes kinship with the robin, who shares something beneficial with humankind. The Robin Dance can help us understand how Seneca people understand the relationship between Earth Songs and the Earth.

Songs

The Allegany Singers recorded six Robin Dance songs in 2002 (video 3). In contrast to Standing Quiver and Old Moccasin Dance, where one song can differ widely from the next, these Robin Dance songs sound more like variations on a single theme.

The set begins with a slow introduction in free time, started by the lead singer and continued by the whole group. This introduction lays out the basic shape of the melody that will recur in all the songs. This melody includes a smaller collection of pitches than some other songs (table 1): just do, re, mi, and sol or la (songs 5 and 6 include both). Though under Western training Andrew thinks of these pitches as belonging to a scale starting on E, the songs actually emphasize B much more strongly, both by stress and by including both the lower and higher B. When Robin Dance is sung in a reverberant space like the cookhouse used for both 2002 and 2022 Allegany Singers recordings, the repetition of only four or five notes, in short, looping phrases with brief rests between, greatly reinforces the overtones resonating in the room to where Andrew found he could clearly hear the melody an octave and sometimes even two octaves higher resounding in the space.

The melody in song 1 (music example 1) begins with repeated long one-beat notes (transcribed as quarter notes) on yo:ho, on sol (̂5), then moves down to a syncopated pattern on mi–re, followed by a dip down to low sol and back up to the middle register. There are three melodic phrases, and the second and third repeat the last portion of the first. This structure could be analyzed A-A′-A′ or AB-B-B.

Songs 2 and 3 vary the melody in song 1 in different ways: song 2 shortens the first phrase and alters one pitch (going down to la instead of sol). Song 3 expands the first phrase (from vocables of 11 syllables in song 1 to 16).

Layout out the melodies graphically to show the repeating portions demonstrates that in each song the second and later phrases start by repeating the latter portion of the first phrase. Songs 4, 5, and 6 all have slightly different patterns of phrasing and repeated motives: song 4 could be labeled A-BC-BC, song 5 as A-BC-C′C, and song 6 as A-B-C-B. What all the songs have in common is that the subsequent phrases repeat and vary some element of the preceding phrases. The effect of these partial repetitions and variations, especially with the frequent rests between phrases, seems to Andrew to create an effect similar to listening to repeating fragments of birdsong.

The rhythmic patterns feature increasingly complex syncopation over a steady, moderate water-drum and horn-rattle beat at 100 beats per minute. The initial eighth-quarter-eighth syncopation in songs 1 and 2 expands in songs 3 and 4 into what sounds to Andrew like mixed meter, switching between groups of 2 and 3 eighth notes. In song 4, these syncopations actually shift the sense of pulse by an eighth note, so that the vocable ya:ne sounds like it is on the beat even though it does not actually coincide with the beats played on drum and rattle. The last song is the most syncopated, and here the rattle and drum players actually shift their beat to match with the melody, by adding a third eighth-note subdivision in between beat accents.

Movements

In the Robin Dance participants line up with all the men first followed by the women and move in a counterclockwise circle. First dancers face the center and shuffle sideways to their right, stepping first with the right foot then in the next step bringing the left foot over next to it. At the first repeat of each song (Yo:ho: yo: ...) the dancers turn around to face outwards, and then continue the same motions but reversed: now they step to their left with their left foot and bring the right foot next to it. In the last song, when the syncopations shift the beat by an eighth note, the dancers match this by taking two quick eighth-note steps on the accented noheyah and then continuing with quarter-note steps on the beats stressed by the melody. Perhaps these motions, like the melody, were inspired by the hopping and running of the robin.