Folk Dancing - A Warning

So it’s been a while and among the stuff that’s been happening was a curious encounter with Morris dancers. 

Now I had never held particularly strong views on Morris dancers, unlike some.  I was happy enough that they’re about on bank holidays keeping the old folkways alive and making small children cry.  It pleased me that there is a serious schism in the Morris dancing world between those who see it their duty to keep the moves pure and exact to those written down a hundred and a bit years ago and those who believe that Morris dancing is a fluid living thing that moves with the times.  Bit like those interminable arguments about grammar.  And while I like folk music, a lot, I have never been tempted to get involved with all those sticks, bells and hankies.

My attitude has hardened.  Let me elucidate.

The time, a few months back, a Saturday.

The place, the pleasant if alarmingly well-off Thames side town of Abingdon.  To be precise, a pub at lunch-time. 

We were meeting people and had scouted out places for lunch and this seemed pleasant with a cobbled courtyard and extensive and not too, for Abingdon, expensive a menu.  But when we returned, we found it filled with Morris dancers.

It seemed that there was some get-together going on and so every Morris dancer in the South had descended on Abingdon, and then onto this pub for lunch.  Well, we weren’t in a hurry and were hungry and hey, they were only Morris dancers.  It would be fun.

Now it turns out that there are two things we did not know about Morris dancers.  The first is that – like toddlers – they are constantly restless, always moving and, unless gently persuaded otherwise, liable to start hitting each other with sticks.  They also have no volume control.  If two Morris dancers meet for the first time in a year, they do not shake hands or hug and talk wryly about time passing or the snows of yesterday.  No.  What they do is stand at either end of a pub lounge and shout to each other with that dispiriting heartiness. that middle class and middle aged men with beards and pot bellies like to indulge in.

The other thing concerns the thing we all do know about Morris dancers.  They wear bells on their trousers.  But what only becomes apparent if you are in a pub full of Morris dancers who never stop wandering around the place, is that these bells are loud.  Very loud.  Very very loud.  If you would care to think of a loud thing, they are louder.  The practical upshot of which was that every time one walked past our table, all conversation was completely drowned out.  And as aforementioned, walking around is what Morris dancers like best after dancing, hitting each other and shouting.

At first I was inclined to be charitable.  They’re having fun, it’s better than loud sports commentary or those fruit machines that unexpectedly explode into noise just as someone is finishing their story, even Morris dancers may take their luncheon.  Then I noticed that the bells were not, as I had supposed, sewn onto their trousers but were in fact attached to a sort of mini cricket pad which was attached to the leg with Velcro.  In other words, it would have been a matter of a moment for the dancers to remove their bells and so make do with shouting at each other.  But no.  The bells had to stay on despite the genuinely surprising noise level they produced.  My charity died as swiftly as it does when I see a chugger approaching.

Still, like the Ring Cycle, it had to end some day and they departed to return to their primary task of boring adults and scaring children, leaving us in what can only be described as suffering from serious bellshock.

And that is why I will never again gaze upon a Morris dancer with kindness in my eye.

You Don't Get Me

What might The Strawbs’ Part of the Union,

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA

and Show of Hands’ Roots

have in common?

Well, curiously enough, they’ve all been used as propaganda for causes directly opposite to the beliefs of the writers/performers.

Part of the Union became the unofficial anthem of the TUC despite it being intended as an anti-union satire. Bruce Springsteen had to ask Ronald Reagan to stop playing Born in the USA at Republican party events and the BNP put Roots onto a CD it issued of British music. That last led to the creation of Folk Against Fascism.

With Part of the Union you can see how the mistake has arisen and with Born in the USA it was obvious that no-one in the Republican party had actually listened to the lyrics with any real attention. I have a touch more sympathy with Roots (and that is the most sympathy by a spectacular margin I will ever have with the those racist prats) as it contains the lines ‘we lost St George in the union jack/It’s my flag too and I want it back’ though that does refer to the Act of Union, not nationalism. But to those of us who have wandered through the folk clubs of this land, the idea that folk music is sympathetic to the right wing is truly startling. For it is a great truth that where four or more unreconstructed lefties are together, one of them will be singing an 18^th century ballad about sheep stealing. To be certain, Ewan MacColl, one of the godfathers of the folk music scene, went through a phase when he insisted that you could only sing songs from your own country but that’s a far cry from forced repatriation.

The Guardian ran a column at the time written by some metropolitan exquisite who reacted to folk music much as Ronald Firbank may have reacted to a ferret with artistic pretensions and who made the patronising assumption that because folk music is associated with the countryside and the past it was therefore right wing and insular.

Roots was inspired by the actions of the last Government who wanted to change the licensing laws concerning live music performances which would have effectively ended all live music in pubs. When it was put to one of their ministers the disastrous effect this would have on the folk music scene, he sneered in reply that his idea of hell was two folk singers in a pub in Bristol. Roots is Show of Hands’ response to this.

Oh, and if you think it is an angry song, then try this which really lets us now what they’re thinking: