Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

18. Bloomington Quarry Morris

— 176 — 18 BLOOMINGTON QUARRYMORRIS At the dance, those who were traveling to week-long dance camps were being exposed to a variety of dance styles other than contras and squares. One of these was morris dance. This traditional English ritual dance, observed, recorded, and taught by Cecil Sharp, had been at the center of the early English folksong and dance revival. According to Sharp’s theories, folk cultural forms such as morris dance were invested with pre-industrial meaning and thereby could counteract or challenge the social effects of modernity. Sharp taught morris dancing to Americans, including Appalachians, during his American collecting trips, and consequently morris was adopted by the American Country Dance and Song Society and also by settlement schools and other cultural institutions in their instructional curricula. This was the primary route taken by morris from English tradition to American folksong revival. But postwar folksong historians have identified other instances that call into question the pre-eminence of Sharp’s antiquarian teachings on morris in America (see, e.g., Cockrell 1997: 47–53; Krause 1991, 1992). And even in recreational programs, for example, morris was not always antiquarian: in 1910 when Mary Neal came to New York to teach, her populist views on morris were — 177 — Bloomington Quarry Morris covered in the New York Times. And there is evidence of some traditional community morris recorded in American literature and art. Although these instances suggest the precedent for a broad range of possibilities of American morris experience, it was largely Sharp’s quasi-anthropological discourse that fueled morris revival at the time Midwestern teams were forming. Even so, 1980s dancers quickly found ways to subvert antiquarian doctrine, invoking from it explicit references to sexuality, boisterous behavior, celebration of community, and ritual inversion. Indeed, the historical and intellectual recovery of the populist morris revival came after the development of local populist techniques. Bloomington’s earliest significant exposure to morris was probably the 1975 Pinewoods trip that included Frank, Laura, Ted, and Dillon. In February of 1976, then–CDSS president Jim Morrison came to Bloomington and taught a morris workshop. The workshop was held at Bloomington Music—Paul Ford remembered dancing in the long, dark hallway. It is possible that later practices were held, but no one remembered them, and no team was yet formed. That December, Frank, Mark, Teri, and Ted were exposed to morris again at the Berea Christmas Country Dance School, and when they returned in January, practice sessions were convened with the idea of forming a Bloomington team. The Fieldtown tradition—morris dances are grouped stylistically by “tradition” or town of origin—was chosen as the team’s first style. “Balance the Straw” and “Lads-a-Bunchum” were among the first dances learned. The team practiced throughout that spring and gave its first performance at the wedding of Randy Marmouzé and Martha Steele, July 16, 1977. By then the team had uniforms of sorts—blue cambric shirts and jeans. A hobbyhorse had been made for the team—Mark Schneider wore it and played a major role in its construction. The dancers at that performance were Toby Bonwit, Mark Feddersen, Frank Hall, Teri Klassen, Laura Ley, Martha Marmouzé, Amy Novick, and Anne Reese. Melissa Leavell and I provided musical accompaniment on fiddles. Probably the association of morris dancing with weddings was borrowed from other morris revival communities, which were few in number at the time. In any case, morris became a fixture at Bloomington dance group weddings, and its trademark association with fertility and — 178 — Old-Time Music and Dance sexuality was established as fundamental to the Bloomington morris experience. It was in such a manner that English antiquarian doctrine was naturalized as community tradition. The noise of the sticks and bells were said to “wake up nature,” and the high leaping of the dancers, through sympathetic magic, to make crops grow tall. Morris was thought to stimulate the fertility of newlyweds, but it was also used to bless vegetable gardens and was given credit for the coming of spring each year. Performed before the public, a speech was usually given promising good luck and fertility—those in the audience not interested in fertility were warned to stand a safe distance away. Here was the ironic consciousness of folksong revival in full flower. This was all done in fun—no one really believed in sympathetic magic in this way. But even through irony, the...