Card Advertising a Dinner Dance at the City Hotel, "Social Hop!," 1880

By the 1880s, cities and towns across the country sported dozens of local dance bands and orchestras that played the latest popular numbers for social occasions. A social hop was a public dance which might include any number of cotillions, quadrilles, polkas, schottisches, lancers, mazurkas, minuettes, and waltzes. Dance orchestra members typically played violin, viola, clarinet, flute, and double bass.