The Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center support contemporary cultural field research within diverse communities. Through this grant program, the Center offered fellowships to individuals and organizations to work within their communities to produce ethnographic cultural documentation, such as oral history interviews and audio-visual recordings of cultural activity, from the community perspective. As part of the 2025 CCG Year of Engagement, the Center has produced a subseries of the Folklife Today podcast focused on interviews with the project teams behind these wonderful community documentation projects. In this fourth episode, we sat down with Queen Nur, who led the documentation for the Community On the Line: Urban Line Dancing CCG project.

Download the episode here

Informed by an advisory board made up of community activists and line dance practitioners, Queen and her team explored the history of the R&B or Soul Line, defined in the project application as “a body of African American expressive creative culture that includes dance, music, language, dress, social gatherings and celebrations.” Early on, Queen realized she had to determine the scale of the project and limit the interviews to the community located in and around the Philadelphia tri-state area. Even with limiting the scope, Community on the Line includes interviews with over 300 dancers, choreographers, DJs, and participants from the Soul Line Dance community.

“Our line dance community? They move together all the time. I had to scale it to Philadelphia, Delaware, and New Jersey, but it’s beyond that. When I say our line dance community moves, it moves beyond that. It moves into the DC-Baltimore area. It moves across the country, right? And so it was family gathering and family sharing together at that moment and at that time. And that’s a big part of who this community is. People say, that’s my line dance family, that’s my family. So it’s always a family when it comes to soul line dancers.”

People who turned out for the February 27, 2025 public program definitely felt the line dance family love. Over 1200 attendees traveled to the Library that day, where they filled all the corners of the Jefferson Building’s Great Hall with music, laughter, and dancing. For those present, it was impossible not to be caught up in the excitement. “That was my joy,” Queen shared. “That our community took ownership of it. And I kept hearing that. ‘Look what we did.’ It wasn’t any one individual. It was this community who came together.”

AJ Rivers is a member of the same Tri-State line dance community as Queen. In addition to contributing an interview, AJ and fellow DJ Chris Blues were part of a highly successful culminating public event held in 2023, where project participants got a chance to see early versions of the oral histories and, of course, dance to their favorite songs. Two years later, AJ was also involved in the LATL program held at the Library. When asked how he got involved, AJ shared:

“Well, I got involved in the project once I got a phone call from Queen telling me what she wanted to do. I’m like, okay. So, she broke it all down on how we was going to do this. I’m like, okay. And she wanted to get interviews from everybody. And she chased me around for about weeks. Weeks! “When you coming? When you coming?” So finally I got over there and I met with her, Aileen, and Gloria, and we did the interview. And it went great. But then as we got closer to the actual event, I got more involved with trying to make sure everything was OK. Because we didn’t know what to expect. And man, when we got there, it was off the chain. Amazing. It was like it was like the weight of the world lifted off everybody’s shoulder all at the same time.”

In addition to bringing four buses of line dance practitioners to the Library, Queen’s team also brought soul line dancing to the nation through an early morning appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America. It was an opportunity that came about while Queen was preparing press releases in the lead-up to the February LATL event. The turn-around was tight, but Queen and her team pulled together a small group and arranged for separate transportation that would stop in NYC first, and then travel to the DC area in time for the evening’s event. “The funny thing is,” Queen said, “the producer – when I spoke to her, she said ‘I’ve been wanting to do a line dance segment for over a year.’ And she said, ‘Now I know why I couldn’t do it. It had to be this day.’ […] It was history. You know, it was meant to be.”

During the collection period for Community on the Line, AJ Rivers and Chris Blues sat down to discuss the history of line dancing in the Tri-State area and provide more insight as to how DJs impact the success of an event – balancing older songs and dances loved by long-time dancers with the new songs favored by younger participants just getting started in the community. Unfortunately, before the interview could be transferred and included with the rest of the oral histories, the computer drive it was saved on fell and the data was lost. It was a moment that made for an important but heart-breaking lesson in documentation.

Even though the collection period for this particular project is over, Queen still intends to go back and re-interview both AJ and Chris, as their perspective is too important to ignore. “I’ll get them in the studio again and do that interview,” she promised, “because they were the voice of the DJs, right? And the DJs are so important. They’re critical to, this, this, to this culture, right? They, they’re critical to this living tradition. So that, that was the most challenging thing of anything. It broke my heart, you know. So what I would recommend is a couple of drives. Save it in a couple of places. That, that’s one thing. Download it immediately into at least two places, right? And then you might have one online.”

As we asked if they had any last thoughts to share before the interview drew to a close, AJ spoke up. “I’ve got a question,” he said. “Can we do it again? It was so much fun. It’s like, why can’t we just make it an annual event?”

“We were all feeling the pride in it,” Queen agreed, “and all of them understanding that our story is important and is valuable.” Both the documentation project and its culminating event, as well as the February 2025 event here at the Library showed what the line dance tradition means to people “in terms of healing, unity, family, love.”

For the complete interview with Queen Nur and AJ Rivers, visit the Folklife Today podcast page or click here for the full episode.

[Note: The intro/outro music for this episode comes from another CCG project – Sonidos de Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene. The clip features an instrumental medley performed by Avizo during an open-air concert documented in the course of the CCG project.]

Other Resources

Check out these posts about the Community on the Line CCG project, from the Library’s blogs.

From Folklife Today: 

• Community Collection Grants: R&B Urban Line Dancing on “Of the People” – by Stephen Winick (November 28, 2022)

• AFC’s Community Collections Grants: Community on the Line Culminating Celebration – by Michelle Stefano (April 10, 2023)

From Of the People, Widening the Path:

• Community Collection Grants Recipients: Community on the Line: The Culture of R&B Urban Line Dancing in the Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware Tri-State Area – by Stephen Winick (November 18, 2022)
• Community Collections Grants: Community on the Line Culminating Celebration – by Michelle Stefano (March 29, 2023)

For more photos and news releases about the Soul Line Dancing event held during February 27th’s Live! at the Library, visit the project page on In Fact, Inc’s website