About the Emerald City Hoedown
2025 marks the 16th Emerald City Hoedown.
From our earliest days, the Rain Country Dance Association included creating a hoedown weekend as one of our primary goals, inspired by events such as the IAGLCWDC hoedowns and Sundance Stompede. Starting out modestly in 2008 with one afternoon of dance workshops split between the Cuff Complex and the Century Ballroom, plus evening dances at the Cuff Complex and the Polish Hall, and with about 50 registered attendees, the Emerald City Hoedown has grown each year, now an entirely hotel-based event drawing instructors and attendees from around the Northwest and across the United States and Canada.
In 2013, we were the host for the 20th annual IAGLCWDC convention and dance competition — the first member club to completely host an IAGLCWDC annual convention in seven years! The event was scoped to be three times the size of the 5th annual Emerald City Hoedown, featuring plenty of top-notch dancing and instructors from all across North America, plus a great sense of Seattle itself, and we exceeded even those expectations by almost 50% with about 400 registered attendees!
In 2019, Rain Country again hosted the IAGLCWDC convention and dance competition — the 26th annual, this time — and we were still the only club since 2006 to host the convention ourselves. (Sundance Association in San Francisco has now hosted the 2022 convention.) We had more than 300 registered attendees plus a large number of additional dancers present for single days or evenings, especially from the local straight country-western, swing, and line dance communities.
In 2020 and 2021, the Emerald City Hoedown had to be canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, but we roared back in March 2022!
The Emerald City Hoedown is operated by Rain Country Dance Association, a 501(c)3 non-profit education organization. Event profits benefit 501(c)3 organizations.
About the Rain Country Dance Association
Founded in 2005, the Rain Country Dance Association was created to ensure that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest continues to have a strong and growing GLBTQ country-western dance scene, a scene owned and shepherded by the dance community itself. In the intervening years, we have hosted 13 annual hoedown weekends, established a strong dance night at our host bar, the Cuff Complex, plus we host periodic dance nights and special events throughout the Seattle metro area. We have trained a half-dozen superb instructors and a similar number of DJs, seeing the level of dance skill in our community climb dramatically over the years.
The Rain Country Dance Association forms the hub of strong, self-sustaining country-western dance community for the GLBTQ community in Seattle and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Rain Country is a 501(c)3 non-profit. For more about the Rain Country Dance Association, visit our website.
And be sure to check out our sister club in the Northwest: Stomptown (Portland, OR).
About the IAGLCWDC
Rain Country is a member of the International Association of Gay/Lesbian Country Western Dance Clubs (IAGLCWDC). The IAGLCWDC was founded in 1994 in Louisville, Kentucky by the representatives of eight GLBTQ country-western dance clubs, focused on networking between and supporting the growth of the GLBTQ country-western dance scene and clubs. The IAGLCWDC has included over 50 members clubs from five countries on three continents, with over 40 annual and semi-annual conventions and a dozen dance competitions over the course of the past 25 years. Their most recent convention was held in San Francisco in May 2022, after two years off due to the COVID pandemic.
The IAGLCWDC is a 501(c)3 non-profit and is a partner organization in and NASSPDA (North American Same Sex Partner Dance Association).
For more about the IAGLCWDC, visit their website.