The rituals observed after Dudley Laufman left his body proceeded in accordance with his specifications.

Laufman died at home, in the presence of family, at 3:30 a.m. on Monday, July 13. Five years earlier, his “men’s group” had, at his request, dug the grave where he would be interred.

He selected a clearing in the forested outer edge of his property in Canterbury, where a wooden bridge curves over a gully and treetops weave to form an alcove around the gravesite. Their branches were ornamented with ribbons for his burial, a mobile of crimson and baby-blue cloth strips that dance lyrically with the breeze.

Laufman’s casket was built two years ago and stored in a shed behind the house, where over time it became encrusted with stubborn wasp nests his family subdued by spraying repeatedly the week before his death.

While on hospice, he negotiated revisions to the three-page program for his funeral, which he’d drafted and mailed to his children in 2018. He acquiesced to his eldest daughter, Heidi Eide’s, more pragmatic suggestions: No need to rent a pipe organ if the church had one in working condition, and in the interest of time, he conceded, it would be enough for a friend to perform just one of the three songs assigned to him.

Since he liked the idea of a green burial, Laufman was laid to rest by 1:30 p.m. the day he died. A bouquet of timothy grass marks his grave, little more than a few flaxen wisps bundled on a dirt mound.

For many years, the renowned fiddler and dance caller, credited with reviving contra dancing in the 1960s and ’70s and recognized for his influence in barn dancing with a National Heritage Fellowship in 2009, had prepared for the practicalities of death. He “gracefully lost his dignity” as his health declined, accepting the assistance of home health aids and never shunning any of the more than 50 guests who visited him in his last two months, Eide said. Yet, when Laufman died at 95, he wondered what he could have done differently to delay the inevitable.

“He would never say, ‘When I die.’ He would always say, ‘If I die.’ He was very sad that the world was going to be without him,” Eide said. “He was tired of what he called ‘the ordeal,’ just having to be toileted and sleeping all the time. It was not how he wanted to live his life, but if he had been able to be a young man again, absolutely he would have lived forever.”

The late Dudley Laufman (center) surrounded by his children in 2013. Credit: Courtesy of Heidi Eide

Laufman was born in February 1931 to parents who lived in Arlington, Mass. Eide speculates, watching the family’s overgrown garden in Canterbury through a kitchen window, that the impulses Laufman nurtured in his lifetime — returning to the land, reigniting an agricultural dancing tradition — were born with him, only as a kind of rebuke of affluent suburbia and its comforts.

He graduated from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1952. A Quaker, Laufman objected to military service on religious grounds and instead fulfilled his civil service duty with three years of work as an occupational therapist at a mental health hospital in Brattleboro, Vermont. He purchased his nearly-2-acre property in Canterbury from the Shakers in 1959 and began to homestead.

This was the home Eide knew until her parents’ divorce when she was 8: A rope tethered the back door to an outhouse, suspended like a handrail for navigating at night. No running water meant the family drew water from a private well with a hand-cranked pump. Their diet began and ended with what they could cultivate from the land.

The orchard gave grapes, raspberries, rhubarb, peaches and pears. The garden gave corn, onions, potatoes and tomatoes; green beans for canning, hard beans for storing and buckwheat that Laufman’s first wife, Eide’s mother Cynthia Dunbar, would thresh and mill into flour for bread.

They were year-round vegetarians with the exception of Jan. 25, Burns Night, a celebration of Scottish poet Robert Burns, which called for haggis. It all traced back to Laufman, partly by choice, partly by the meager circumstances of life as a working musician. It was a self-sufficient and unpretentious life.

“He followed a different path his whole life. I mean, he was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, that era. He was a back-to-the-lander when back to the land really hadn’t taken off,” said David Millstone, a dance caller and historian based in Lebanon. “He was ahead of the curve and, in many ways, just kept on his own individual path.”

Laufman opens Millstone’s 2007 documentary “The Other Way Back” with the mystical moment that set him on that path, a pristine recollection from his time working on a dairy farm in Fremont: After a long day of chores, milking dozens of Jersey cows, they would gather for a corn roast and begin their merriment with a hymn sing.

“A man played the fiddle, his wife called the dances, and I was just a kid there and I did the dancing. There would always be a fire in the fireplace, there’d be the smell of the wood smoke,” he recollected, a coy smile beginning to curl at one edge of his mouth, “and the firelight gleaming in the girls’ hair.”

The story, repeated, became a part of his mythology.

“That was it; I was hooked for life,” he said.

The late Dudley Laufman leads his family in a traditional dance at their home in Canterbury in an undated family photo. Credit: Courtesy of Heidi Eide

From the late 1960s into the early ’80s, Laufman dominated New England, calling dances virtually every night from Maine to Connecticut. His signature Dudley Dances drew acolytes from far reaches and bred a generation Millstone refers to as the “contradance diaspora” that followed Laufman’s mold.

Feeding brusque instructions into the microphone, Laufman would conduct the crowd with a few purposeful, charismatic syllables. “And the other way back, the other way back” spun a circle of dancers into reverse. “All swing” magnetized partners to one another and sent them swaying.

In 1965, he brought the New England Contra-Dancers to the Newport Folk Festival. In the world of folk music, their stature was diminutive. The collective’s name featured three-quarters down the festival lineup, trailing blockbuster performers such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But when they played, 16,000 people — or more, Laufman estimated, speaking to Millstone for the documentary — stretched down a hayfield to listen, and it was “tremendous.”

“We had filled right out into the field, all dancing, jigging up and down, and they just loved it,” Laufman said.

Laufman often hired just one or two musicians to accompany him, and treated the stage not as sacrosanct but permeable, as an open invitation for sit-in musicians to join, to perform, to enjoy and to leave.

In tapes from the New Hampshire Folk Festival of 1985, preserved in the special collections and university archives at the University of New Hampshire Library, Laufman filters on stage with the Canterbury Orchestra’s flautists, fiddlers and accordionists. Calling and dancing were a tradition shaped by community.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the evolution of an extensive career brought him and then-wife Jacqueline Laufman to schools, where they, itinerant musicians, would ply young ears with their dueting fiddles. Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki, then a first-grader at the since-sunsetted Canterbury Children’s Center, was entranced.

“I was completely smitten with the whole feeling of the combination of the tunes and the dancing,” said Tirrell-Wysocki, now a professional fiddler, an heir, like many others, to Laufman’s musical sensibility. At age 8, Tirrell-Wysocki began fiddling lessons with Jacqueline in the wood-stove-heated shed off the Laufmans’ home, later taking an apprenticeship under Laufman himself. The couple introduced him, still a beginner, to the fold without hesitation.

“I was encouraged to participate in this tradition long before I was very good. It was not just a skill you have to practice on your own in the hopes that someday you’ll be good enough to play in front of someone,” Tirrell-Wysocki said. “The course of my entire life shifted when I encountered him and his music, it’s no exaggeration to say.”

In November 2025, Laufman lost his balance while leaning on the back of a chair to throw wood into the fireplace and fractured his hip. He didn’t receive care for almost a week, dismissing the injury as a bruise. He made a full recovery following a partial hip replacement and rehab. Then, his health teetered into a decline.

He continued calling dances as long as his voice and body, slowly enfeebling, permitted him to. His 95th birthday in February was a well-attended gig in Groton, Mass., where he mustered impressive spurts of energy that carried him up and down the dance hall stairs. He could no longer play the fiddle, but he made good use of his melodeon, a small button accordion. The band behind him dampened his weakened voice, and, surrounded by experienced dancers, he didn’t need to call many moves. But privately, he confided in Eide that he had been forgetting calls, and that distressed him.

The late Dudley Laufman sits by the fire of his Canterbury home with his then-infant daughter Heidi. Credit: Courtesy of Heidi Eide

A few months before her father’s death, Eide published his mailing address to Facebook, inviting the sympathies of strangers. Cards and letters poured in. “Sometimes the letters would make him cry, and he’d want to have me read them to him again,” Eide said.

Although he kept a voracious appetite, eating three meals a day, in the end, he lost 40 pounds in three months, simply wasted away.

Eide’s eyes crinkle behind clear, oversized acetate glasses like her “poppa” wore. Humor comes to her in cynical fragments in the wake of his death. His confounding weight loss provokes an unbidden thought: “I wish I could do that.”

Outside the family home, she climbed onto a stone ledge to survey the property, knowing he preferred it wild and unkempt, and remembered the apple tree he referred to as “my apple tree” despite its wormy fruit. The tree fell from old age a few years ago, she said.

Indoors, a real bathroom and, hanging in a basket from the kitchen ceiling, saltines and Cheez-Its, extra toasty, reveal a man mellowed from his dogmatism. In the future, a neighbor may purchase the property — the family can’t afford to convert it into a writer’s retreat or museum, Eide said — but in the meantime, it will remain home to Laufman’s belongings and his partner, Nanci Aguiar.

Passing mentions of Laufman’s foibles infiltrate conversations about his way of being. In childhood, Eide and her siblings learned to share their father with the public, and around women, he had a wandering eye.

“On a personal level, his is a complicated story. He’s a complicated individual. There’s the man, and then there’s the dance person,” Millstone said. As a friend and musical reference, Laufman was “someone who’s in touch with the old ways of doing things at the time when they’re supposed to be done, doing the apple-picker song in the fall when it’s apple picking time, and doing the old dances. He was ahead of the curve, and in many ways, just kept on his own individual path.”

The Sunday after Laufman’s death, Tirrell-Wysocki appeared at a concert honoring him at Shaker Village. His voice rang with an amused lilt as he told the audience that, asked about his favorite waltz, Laufman had picked not one but two: one for playing, “Ash Grove,” and one for listening, “Emilia’s Waltz.”

Tirrell-Wysocki would play the listening tune for his teacher, “just maybe,” to hear from the beyond, but first he revisited Laufman’s book of poetry, “Walking Sticks.”

“I would hope to keep in my own employ,” Laufman wrote, “singing jigs for coins, poems for joy. Perhaps I’ll become a wandering minstrel, pastoral still, but restless. All quite strange to me who has roots down that are rural. The only permanence we know is change.”

W. Dudley Laufman will be memorialized at the Canterbury United Community Church at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. The service will be open to the public.