MORGAN — Welcome to the Morgan Academy of Dance & Tumbling here on Commercial Street, where you'll have to forgive everyone for being just a tad prideful these days.

It isn't every dance studio in America that can point to its well-worn floorboards and say the Fab Five clogged right there.

The Fab Five are, of course, merely the hottest cloggers in the country at the moment — one of just 10 acts still in the running for the $1 million first prize in "America's Got Talent."

Here in Morgan, the Fab Five are also known as the Whitear (pronounced Whit-ee-er) sisters from up the road in Peterson — namely LaChere, Shaundalee, Cambria, Ayrion and Veva.

They were household names around here before they became household names.

The sisters first learned to clog in Layton, but after that — before they all got married, changed their last names and started families — they practiced, competed and taught right here on Commercial Street next to the Browning Gun factory store.

"Everybody in Morgan County knows them and is rooting for them," says Yvonne Kennison.

Yvonne is the longtime owner of Morgan Academy of Dance & Tumbling. She's taught dance for 40 years, 38 of them right here in Morgan, where clogging is as popular as football, guns and pickup trucks.

She remembers when the clogging craze came to Utah in the late 1970s.

"I'm not sure exactly what got it started," says Yvonne. "But I remember seeing it and thinking I want to learn how to do that and how to teach it."

She wasn't the only one. Utah and clogging went together like Astaire and Rogers — to the point that the Beehive State now challenges the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Arkansas for clogging supremacy.

Proof of that is the fact that the national clogging championships have found a permanent home at Lagoon in Farmington.

Sooner or later, anybody who's anybody in clogging has to pass through Utah.

"It just fits our culture," says Yvonne, explaining the lasting popularity of clogging in Morgan specifically and Utah in general. "It's a wholesome dance entertainment, there are no suggestive moves, and a lot of it is done to country music, which is popular in the West."

Every year, folks from Morgan County routinely pull up to the front door and deposit their 4-year-olds on the Morgan Academy's front steps, ready to start cloggin'.

"Almost every single little girl does it," says Kalie Wessman, Yvonne's granddaughter who runs her own dance studio in Coalville. "And a lot of little boys, too."

For that reason, the Fab Five's fame isn't translating into a huge boom in new students.