Folk dancing, English; Folk music -- England -- History and criticism; Folk songs, English -- England -- History and criticism
Although this list gives a very fair idea of the traditional Morris
dances still lingering in country places, two things must be borne
in mind—first, that many of these dances with different names are
practically the same dances; another tune and a very slight alteration
in the step is quite enough for a Morris dancer to say he has another
dance to show; and secondly, that the collectors have not yet finished
their work. I have in my possession quite a long list of people and
places as yet unvisited which may yield dances yet unrecorded, and Mr
Cecil Sharp has announced many dances and variants collected but not
published.
The Folk-dance has been found in the following counties:—
Gloucestershire. Monmouthshire.
Oxfordshire. Yorkshire.
Berkshire. Lancashire.
Northamptonshire. Cheshire.
Lincolnshire. Northumberland.
Derbyshire. Warwickshire.
Nottinghamshire. Worcestershire.
Sussex. Surrey.
Cornwall.
II. TUNES
A word must be said about the tunes played for the dances by country
musicians to-day.
These tunes are, of course, of much later date than the Morris and
Sword dances, and probably contemporary with the original country
dances. The musicians took any tune which was popular at the time and
adapted it to the dances, so that the tunes are not by any means all
traditional. As an instance of this, I remember that old Mr Trafford,
of Headington, told me that one day when he heard a military band
playing, he went and listened at the door of the barracks, and that he
was so attracted by the tune that he at once hummed it to the Morris
dance fiddler and adapted it to a Morris dance. To this day he likes
the tune, which he calls “Buffalo Gals,”[5] so much that he wanted Mr
Carey to take it down and use it. There is no doubt that at any given
time the musicians used to adapt to the dances any popular tune that
took their fancy, and I think that probably the name of the dance was
altered to fit the tune. Anyway the tune which Mr Trafford liked,
called “The Buffalo Girls,” had certainly been taken for the name of
a dance. The only dance tune that I have been able to discover which
has its dance steps attached to it is the one before mentioned in
Arbeau’s book. There is no doubt either that the nature of the tunes
changed considerably as the whittle and dub went out of fashion and
were superseded by the fiddle and later by the concertina, from which
latter instrument the first revived tunes were taken by Mr Sharp from
William Kimber. The tunes taken from the violin were more likely to
be played in a modal scale; for instance, Kimber played “The Rigs of
Marlow” in the modern scale, but Mark Cox, who gave it to us from the
fiddle, played it in a modal form.
[5] A Christy minstrel tune, popular some years back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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