Copies are £10 plus postage from Peter at peter.barnard@me.com
The book’s introduction
An Evening of Dances from the Yorkshire Dales
Social folk dancing in the Yorkshire Dales continued into the second half of the 20th century. The village dances were very popular, with combinations of folk and Old Time dances enjoyed. The pattern for an evening’s dance often blended these two styles. Those occasions were social gatherings, and dancing was a important vehicle for getting together.In the last century various collectors visited the Dales and recorded interviews with dancers and musicians who could remember what went on. Transcripts of these interviews can be found at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House in London, at the British Library, and at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes.
In 2020 local musician and researcher, Bob Ellis, published a wonderful book (There was None of this Lazy Dancing!) in which he set out the collected tunes, dances, and accounts from those people. It is a fantastic resource.
In reading the book I became aware, not only of the similarities and differences between some of the various versions of the dances and tunes, but also of the gaps in some of the accounts of the dances that were regularly danced. Indeed, in some of the accounts, only a list of the dances that were performed regularly – or danced on a specific date – is given, but without giving accompanying details of how those dances worked. This might have been because the dances were so well known that the collector did not need to describe them. Later accounts talk of how the dances were not called; everyone there knew them so well.
The variants of some of the dances described could be different dances, perhaps danced in different villages or at different times. Equally, the variations could represent ad hoc changes made on the spur of the moment in that setting; or they could reflect the time lag – in some cases 40 years – between the recollection and when the individual last did the dance.
I am a caller of folk dances, a dancer and a dance musician. I became particularly interested in what the programme of an evening’s dancing in the Dales would have contained. As a result, my research has taken me past the content of Bob’s book to other sources of folk dances in the north of England and across the border into Scotland - as I believe that these dances were probably popular and danced in this wider area. As time moved on, couple dances – many that we would now describe as Old Time dances - seem to proliferate. Indeed, accounts in the 1970’s talk of ‘every other dance being a couple dance’.
These dances deserve to be more widely danced, and this book seeks to redress that. The aim of this book (and that of the Dales Traditional Music and Dance Collective) is to realise all the dances mentioned – some described, others merely listed – in Bob’s book, enough to re-create a typical programme for an evening’s dancing. My key target audience are dance callers and dancers.