Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1748, with a Variety of the Newest Minuets, proper for the Violin, Hoboy, or German Flute (T. Davis, London 1748)

Dance manual/reference by T[homas] Davis (composer; also author of the advertised 'Twelve SOLOS by the same Author' and 'The Judgment of Paris by Mr. Arne' listed on the title-plate). Printed for H. Waylett at the Black Lyon in Exeter Change in the Strand, London 1748. Source: IMSLP scan (DATA/LIBRARY_OF_DANCE/ABBYY TXT/1748-Davis-Twenty_Four_(IMSLP).txt, 7.4 KB OCR). CONTEXT: A H. Waylett-imprint annual country-dance almanac for the year 1748, distinct from the larger Walsh quartet of 1748 publications (LOC-1748-WALSH-PART1, LOC-1748-WALSH-CALEDONIAN, LOC-1748-RAMEAU, plus the Compleat Country Dancing-Master omnibus). Davis's 'Twenty Four Country Dances for the Year 1748' establishes Waylett's Exeter Change imprint as a second-tier London competitor to Walsh in the mid-century annual-country-dance market. Directly analogous to the later Thompson 1771 annual (LOC-1771-THOMPSON-24) and Randall 1771 annual (LOC-1771-RANDALL). STRUCTURE: 24 numbered longways country dances (1-24), each consisting of an engraved tune plate (treble + bass, suitable for Violin / Hoboy / German Flute) plus 3-6 lines of figure-prose directly below the tune. Typical longways-minor figure vocabulary: 'foot it & cast off one Cu.', 'right hand & left quite round', 'cross over two couples', 'cast up to the top', 'hands a-cross half round & back to back', 'lead down the middle', 'turn in the 2nd Couples Place', 'dance inside below the 3rd Couple'. HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE: documents the mid-century English longways country-dance annual genre in a rival-to-Walsh imprint; bridges Walsh 1740 Compleat (LOC-1740-WALSH) and Walsh 1748 Part I (LOC-1748-WALSH-PART1) in the publisher-competition landscape. ATTRIBUTION LINEAGE: the named composer T. Davis appears here in both country-dance-composition and instrumental-SOLOS capacities, establishing him as a mid-Hanoverian multi-genre London composer-publisher at Waylett's imprint. Has_Step_Detail = Partial: figure-level longways-prose is present in the OCR for all 24 dances at the figure-sequence level (cast-off / cross-over / lead-up / hands-round / right-and-left / turn); the individual dance titles are engraved on the tune-plates and did not OCR — TITLES DEFERRED for future manual facsimile review. Registered for corpus completeness and Waylett-imprint attestation (precedent: LOC-1721-WEAVER-ANATOMICAL, LOC-1760-NOVERRE, LOC-1760-LONDEAU, LOC-1752-DUKES). (1748). Imported from local collection.