With the use of phrases like “strap on” they just may succeed.
Morris dancers urge young to strap on the bells
This was included by Yahoo News in its “Odd News” category.
Me and an ex were thinking off joining up. We ran into a troop of them outside a pub last year, scary stuff.
I’m listening to a bit of RATM playing kick out the jams, so now i’ve got strap on the bells running through my head. It works pretty well.
I was out dancing on Boxing Day and there were several dancers under 30 present.
However, many of the long established sides, including mine, have an aging membership. The young dancers these days tend to start new sides. As they get older, they drift towards the established sides or give up.
The idea of Morris dancing dying out is raised about every two years. In the intervening years, the “hot news” story is that women have started dancing. (This has in fact been the case since the late 1800s.)
This story is mainly a combination of “publicity froth” and the media looking for an easy angle to make fun by relying on stereotypes.
I doubt any other nation treats its folk traditions with such scorn.
Shirley, you jest!
Our men’s Morris side folded a couple of years ago when we got down to the last four dancers. The associated ladies side still has a lot of members which, surprisingly as some of them are quite attractive, didn’t pull in new men.
However, a few of us have reformed as a mixed Morris side - we’ve only got five dancers so far but it’s looking good, and we’re having fun. 
If we can get a lot more dancers, I quite fancy being the unicycling fool.
The “news” story is basically manufactured: the reality is (so I am told by those who care about Morris politics) that numbers are actually increasing.
Wassail!
Morris always seems to be able to raise a smile in the audience. Possibly in some cases for the wrong reasons. How did it get started all those years ago Mike? Was it just for entertainment purposes, or some deeper reason? And has its form changed very much over the years?
My uncle does Morris dancing.
Oh the images you have flooded my mind with.
My uncle is a Morris.
No one really knows.
There are references to Morris dancing in the time of Cromwell. (In Bradmore, near Nottingham, six dancers and a fiddler were arrested for dancing on the sabbath.) However, we have no idea what those dances were like.
“Year zero” for the modern Morris is fixed at Boxing Day 1899 when a folk song collector, Cecil Sharp, first saw Morris dancing being performed. He was originally interested in the music rather than the actual dances, but years later he started to learn and write down the dances then teach them to people with an interest in such things.
From that “beginning” a whole new tradition has grown, and there are around 15,000 dancers in the UK, as well as teams as far afield as Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Hong Kong, and (in the Netherlands) Utrecht and Helmond.
Going back before 1899, there were a few surviving teams in the late 19th century, but it was more or less dying out until Shar “saved” it by changing it forever.
Genuine “traditional” teams still exist in Headington and Bampton in Oxfordshire, claiming a 450 year unbroken heritage. There are some roughly similar traditions in Winster and Hayfield in Derbyshire. (There are other dance traditions too which come under the broad heading of “Morris”, such as clog dancing, longsword dancing and so on.)
But many of the tunes we use today are Victorian, or even later, and I have little doubt that the steps that we (try to) do today are more precise and formalised than they were when it was a genuine rustic tradition. Then it was danced once or twice a year. Now we dance almost every week.
Some of the tunes are obviously much older, being in minor keys and obscure modes that show that they pre-date what we now think of as “the proper rules of music”.
Some of the moves in the dances can be seen to be similar to the “courtly” dances of Elizabethan times. Others are “obviously” fighting dances, and a tiny few of them may have some connection with “fertility rituals” - although the common association of Morris dancing with “pagan fertility” is fanciful.
Where did it come from? My guess, slightly iconoclastic, but sincere, is that the common thread of Englishness is the ordinary working man pretending to take things seriously whilst really making fun of them. We take the dancing seriously, but there is a strong thread of irony running through the whole thing.
Thanks for that Mike. Interesting.
Mike,
From all the PMs I get about you, many feel there is a strong thread of irony running through everything you do. You’re pretending to take things seriously whilst really making fun of them.
I could never do such a thing, could I?
Billy