You may wish to read a similar discourse on the English scene by my friend John Adams of West Yorkshire at The Village Music Project - please bookmark and come back !
Barn dancing in England may seem a pretty uncontroversial subject, but two major styles have developed over the last 20 years or so. We folk dance bands who play the noisier end of the business have been labelled Ceilidh bands - generally implying drums and/or electric guitar in the line-up, rather than necessarily playing Scottish and Irish music. (We do, but in our own style!). This distinguishes us from the more sedate fiddle and piano accordian groups, God bless 'em, whose followers call them Folk Dance Bands to avoid confusion ! A bit of history may be helpful, although as I was more involved in skiffle, Trad Jazz, Soul and Funk through most of the years chronicled, I would not advise using it for doctoral theses or even GCSE woodwork essays..
In the early 1950s, a major revival of folk dancing in Britain was sparked off by newsreel footage of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret enjoying a polite square dance in Canada. The throngs were attracted by this display of clean-living young Royals, but picked up on the Americanised aspects - bootlace ties and metal-tipped collars, dance callers (after all, largely an American invention) and fast music for running round square sets.
The high-stepping feet of the enthusiastic revivers of clog dancing in the North West of England and the complex jigs of the never-died-out Bampton Morris of rural Oxfordshire, required different and slower tempos. You could only do the square, circle, longways and couple dances described by Thomas Hardy with all the rapid foot movements if the band played polkas and hornpipes rather than American/ Irish tempo reels all night. Bands all over England started to grasp this at about the same time in the '70s.
At the same time, releases on the Topic label of melodeon and hammered dulcimer-lead music then (and now) being played in the isolated pubs of East Anglia for social dancing, provided a catalyst and some of the repertoire. More was gleaned from collections like that of Hardy and from living sources like the Northumbrian shepherds, Hutton, Atkinson and Taylor. Ideas were exchanged at the seminal English Country Music Weekends of the '80s (no, not English gatherings of Country Music but English music from the countryside...)
So the Old Swan Band
(Gloucs), Flowers & Frolics (London), New Victory Band (Yorks), Ran
Tan (Lancs), Cock & Bull ( Bucks), Oyster Ceilidh Band (Kent), Albion
Country Band (Sussex) and many more, were brought forth full term. Assisting
at the births were collector/ caller/ showmen like Taffy Thomas, Dave Hunt,
Tubby Reynolds, Eddie Upton & Hugh Rippon in hotbeds like the Sidmouth
Folk Festival. Even after fifteen years, an evolutionary dotted line
could be drawn between most of these bands and those around today :(SEE
passage
of time above)
| Old Swan Band | Token Women | Flowers & Frolics | Gas Mark 5 |
| New Victory Band | Hookes Law | Hemlock Cock & Bull | Cock & Bull |
| Oyster Ceilidh Band | Oyster Band | Albion Country Band... | Albion Band |
in fact, in many cases, only the names, personnel and repertoires have changed.......
Festivals round the country, national societies like the English Folk Dance & Song Society, and local dances large and small, have all suffered booms and busts, and it is wonderful therefore to see the Walthamstow Assembly Rooms Barn Dances going into a second year, concentrating on the English Country/ Ceilidh style.
Other major London
venues such as Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town (0171-485 2206) host several
"Noisy Style" events a month as well as a full programme of gentle,
academic and/or traditional dance, music and song events.
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