AMOF7E is me!
Did you leave your accordian in the clothes dryer for too long? It appears to have shrunken.
What’s the story behind the gentlemen with the blackened faces?
Go Mikefule
Cathy
Talented AND good-lookin’!
What is the instrument you are playing?
The instrument is a melodeon.
For musicians: it has two rows of buttons on the melody side, each with an arrangement of reeds similar to a diatonic harmonica. One row is in G major, the other in D, which is enough to play a wide variety of traditional tunes in major and minor modes. On the left hand, there is a limited selection of basses - pairs of tonic note and chord, sufficient to play in G Maj, D Maj and E minor without too much effort.
For non musicians: it’s a squeeeze box.
Also, it ain’t mine. That’s an expensive Castagnari, worth somewhere between £1,000 and £1,500.
The black faces go with “Border Morris” - a traditional dance form from the England/Wales border (Shropshire and the like) which is loud, aggressive and has simple steps but sometimes complex figures. One version of the tradition has it that they blacken their faces to scare away evil spirits; others say it is a disguise because in the 1800s, they used to cause damage to lawns and gardens if the householders refused to provide ale and food as a reward for the performance.
I dance “Cotswold Morris” from Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and that area - a more sophisticated but less aggressive style of dance with sometimes quite complex steps.
I’m not sure when the photo was taken.
For my own team’s website, try: http://www.dolphin-morris.co.uk/
Mike
nice to be able to finally have a face to put to the posts
Chase
yes, but I wish I had a picture or description to go with Nutting-Girl Jig.
Bampton:
OY,
FU: 4ss(r); 2bs, SC (rpt.)
Ch: oss(r), 2ss; oss(l), 2ss; 2oss;2F; 4ss(r), (2bs, SC (rpt.))
Slows: 5 Str; 2bs, SC
Ch
Slows 2 7F; 2bs, SC
Ch (end 4PC(wv))
Some prefer css in place of oss
Do you need Fieldtown as well?
It’s the description of AAY2C5 (top of the next page) that I’d love to know…
Phil
Thank you Mike, for providing, after all this time, a post in which I understand absolutely nothing of the content. I guess it is the missing full stop after ‘oss’ that has thrown me. 
Fieldtown? I think I will stick with 441 and 5251233 for the moment.
You obviuosly haven’t been reading many of Billy The Mountain’s posts, have you, Naomi?
I’ve sussed that one: bird flew.
Nah, he just gets my goat , that guy.
<<PETERBOROUGH MORRIS MEN S DANCING COCKEREL PERFORMING AT UPPINGHAM NORTHANTS PHOTO 2004 >>
There are several traditional styles of Morris dancing. The one that most people think of is the style in which the dancers wear white trousers and shirts, and straw hats decorated with flowers and ribbons. The team usually has colours and a badge, and these are worn either on a waistcoat, a tabard or a “baldrick”. A baldrick is a pair of sashes, one over each shoulder, crossing in the centre of the chest and the centre of the back, and stitched together to make a single X shaped garment.
This style originated in the Cotswolds: Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and that part of England. In the last 100 years, teams have sprung up and flourished all over England, and as far afield as Hong Kong, New York, Vancouver, Helmond (NL) and even (I was told the other day) Tonga.
The traditional team comprises:
Six dancers, dressed more or less identically.
One musician.
One Fool, who has a variety of roles ranging from collecting the money, doing the announcements, filling in the gaps between dances with a bit of comedy, and so on…
and a Beast.
The Beast was traditionally a horse or sometimes a dragon. In the last 50 - 100 years, this tradition has developed so that other animals have become common. My own team is called Dolphin Morris Men because we first met at a pub called The Dolphin. When we have a Beast (which is rare) it is a dolphin.
Foresters - Nottingham’s other major Cotswold team - have a stag. Westminster Morris Men have a unicorn. Rutland M M have a chuff, which is a type of bird, similar to a crow.
There are several styles of beast. The cockerel shown in the picture is a fairly extreme example of a beast. The typical Beast has a dancer under a cloak, bearing a Beast’s head on a pole. In the hands of a skilled beast master, the Beast can be animated like a huge puppet, sufficiently convincingly that I have seen photojournalists speaking to the Beast’s head rather than to the man inside when asking the Beast to pose for photos.
One (rather far fetched) theory is that in the ancient pagan origins of the dance, the Beast was the tribal god, the Fool was the priest, the dancers were the initiates, and the crowd/audience was the congregation. There is still a genuinely mystical element in the Morris. It is more than a hobby, and more than entertainment.
Such attention to detail deserves a proper answer.
Nutting Girl is a traditional tune, and a traditional song. There is a jig to the tune.
In the Morris, a jig is a solo dance, or sometimes a dance in which two dancers take it in turns to perform, competing with each other to dance higher and better.
The Nutting Girl tune is fairly simple, consisting of three sections each in 2:4 or 4:4 time - i.e. a fairly typical folk tune.
The dance consists of the following:
A once to yourself (OY) in which the musician plays once through the opening section of music, and the dancer steps in and jumps to start the dance on the next pass through the music.
A Foot Up (FU) in which the dancer performs a short and very simple sequence of steps taking eight bars of music (about 8 - 12 seconds).
A chorus (Ch) in which the dancer performs a series of more sophisticated steps such as sidesteps (oss or css - simply different sorts) and forries/forrie capers (FC: leaps into the air in time with the music). This takes about twice as long as the foot up.
Slows in which the music is played at half speed, and the dancer does a series of clever slow steps before finishing with a set of steps similar to the Foot Up.
Another chorus.
A different set of slows.
Another chorus, ending on four big energetic steps called “Capers” or “Plain Capers” (PC).
The whole dance takes oh, I dunno, a couple of minutes max.
The complex post was me being cheeky. It was a fairly simple short hand for the sequence of steps for one version of the dance.
Imagine a solo dancer in white trousers and shirt, bells on the shins, and a decorated straw hat. The dancer has a large handkerchief in each hand to emphasise the movement of the hands. The music is played by a solo fiddler or squeeze box player. It’s all done very energetically, fairly seriously, but not without a dash of irony.
Does that clarify?
Thanks for that Mike, my own post was a little on the cheeky side too. It was more that I was astonished to find that a written notation existed for Morris Dancing, in much the same way as I was surprised that there were notations for juggling patterns.
Now siteswap (sheet music for juggling?), only defines the throws of a juggling pattern, and not the whole trick. I suspect that your notation also leaves a lot of scope for interpretation over and above the prescribed written steps. Hence the comment about you on the web site?
“Ask to see his Nutting-Girl jig and you will see a solo performance in the true sense or the word!”
Now you must not see this as a plea for me to join in, but are all Morrismen men? I can’t remember ever seeing a female dancer.
It would perhaps be interesting to see Nutting Girl as an act in the Nottingham Juggling Convention (which I HOPE to be able to attend). There will probably be a whole bunch of unicyclists there. Jugglers enjoy eccentricity of all types, and occasionally have acts from other disciplines in their shows. Discipline was probably a very bad choice of word there.
Mikefule,
Since morrisdancing seems to be an even more minority passtime than unicycling, and I am extremely nosey, I would be interested to know how you first got into it.
Cathy
You have a guy called Dave Walters in your Morris Team!?!
Ah, that quote on the site. Sorry, I missed the reference. My Nutting Girl jig is unique (to the best of my knowledge). I do a version of the jig from the tradition that originated (and continues) in Bampton in the Bush in Oxfordshire. The difference is that I play my own music as I do it. I play a harmonica, but with both hands free, and thus do all the hand and foot movements that a conventional dancer would do.
I know others who dance jigs playing meodeon, concertina or even fiddle, but never harmonica.
There are probably more female dancers than male, these days. The Morris Ring is an all malke organisation (for historical reasons); the Morris Federation started as the Women’s Morris Federation (more or less as a reaction to the all male culture of the Ring), but is now open to males and females; the Open Morris is and always has been open to male, femal and mixed sex teams.
My team happens to be all male, but this is for historical reasons. Many of us have danced in mixed teams, some still do, and we regularly mix with female and mixed teams. Gone are the days when it was a big gender-politix issue. Nevertheless, just as many girls like a girls’ night out, many boys like a boys’ night out, and I cherish that aspect of my own team.