How were you discovering Cornish tunes?
Travelling to the Pan Celtic Festival in Ireland encouraged us to look out for Cornish tunes and dances, it created a demand for performance material if you like. There was already a small cannon of material there anyway, people like Ralph Dunstan and the Old Cornwall movement did collect quite a lot. But when you accept that melodies can move around quite independently from the songs they become attached to, you do find jobbing tunes that have been slowed up to fit singing that can be speeded up again to make dance or a session tune. It turned out that there was a much bigger canon of music than we had appreciated. The Tea-Treat Tunes were wonderful, they were sitting there ready to go. Some of the old Cornish mediaeval Carols were particularly interesting as they originally derived from a form of circular dance and naturally adapted as dance music.
There was also an enormous drive to write our own tunes. If you’re a Cornish person playing in a Cornish dance group, and writing a tune for a dance that becomes inescapably Cornish doesn’t it!
I was recently looking at the collection we did in 1997, the Racca Project [ Racca Cornish Tunes for Sessions Project 1995 – 97 ]. We had about 250 tunes in there, of which about 140 had a traditional background in that they had been passed on person to person and a 100 composed. If you did a similar project now you would probably find the number of new compositions has increased by a couple of hundred or more [ see The Great Big Cornish Music Session Lowender Peran Oct 2021 ] . Some people will have seen this as an excuse to dismiss Cornish traditional music – “ It has all been newly written, hasn’t it?”. Well it is clearly not all newly written but I think all this new material is fantastic evidence of the thriving culture that we have.
How did you go about finding these manuscripts?
As dance groups we sourced our material from a mixture of places. In many respects, playing in a group that was travelling around meeting people and doing displays was quite a good way of getting feedback and little snippets of music or information. We were quite popular with the Old Cornwall Societies who tended to have a lot of local knowledge. It was not unknown to hear someone say “Oh, no, that’s not quite right” and suddenly finding just that little bit more background to some steps etc. There was nevertheless an element of going back to basics and looking at the collections of people like Cecil Sharp, Sabine Baring-Gould, and George Gardiner in Cornwall, understanding what they were doing, and what they were not doing. [ I visited Plymouth Library for Baring-Gould’s Fair Copy manuscripts and Cecil Sharp House, London for Sharp and Gardiner manuscripts]
I think my favourite set of tunes are those that go with ‘The Lark’ that Baring-Gould collected when he went down to St. Mawgan. He regularly stayed at the Falcon Inn where he collected several different tunes and versions of “The Lark”. You have this vision of him buying these old boys a beer every time they sang a new song or tune variant. So they go out for a pee, walk around the block, dream up a new tune, and go back and sing it for him to notate carefully down, and deliver another beer. Another tune for the Cornish canon! Entirely my imagination of course but it does make the point that these singers were much more musically literate than collectors like Baring-Gould believed and they would have been able to create tunes as and when they wanted to use them. We will never know if the lovely Breton sounding version of the Lark that was collected had its roots deep in Brythonic history or the beer being served at the Falcon on the evening in question.
These original collectors were actually quite limited in Cornwall. Baring-Gould, who collected hundreds and hundreds of songs – was restricted to the Tamar Valley and Dartmoor plus a few visits to St Mawgan and some correspondence. Cecil Sharp noted some 30-40 songs during a couple of visits to Camborne and expeditions to Helston and Padstow May festivities. George Gardiner focussed on North Cornwall again with some additional correspondence. This was all about the same period of time, 1890s to about 1914. What you tend to find is that they were often variants of the songs found across Britain and America but with different tunes, tunes that had somehow evolved in Cornwall.
Baring-Gould, Cecil Sharp, Gardner. Was there anything in particular that was important about that time for collecting tunes? In Cornwall, or across the U.K.?
Well, it is important to appreciate that these collectors were self-styled scholars with the possible exception of Gardiner who had an academic background. Baring-Gould and Sharp became recognised authorities but were freely interpreting what they found according to their own ideas. These were not scientific folklore studies.
For example, Baring-Gould observed that the tunes he collected with songs in Dartmoor and northeast Cornwall were different from those associated with the same songs elsewhere. He believed that this was an echo of the old Celtic world of the west. Nice idea but romanticism not historical research. What he overlooked was that this very same area had been populated by the Cornish Miners a generation before he noted these songs down. He even describes his experience as a young man listening to miners singing in a local inn as the inspiration for his collecting years later. We now recognise that the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site stretches right up to Tavistock. It was the first Cornish diaspora. We will never know how much influence on these tunes the movement of miners from the west had or how far back this influence goes in Cornish musical history but the principle is there.
Some tunes noted by the collectors are variants of the universal, some tunes distinct and part of the story I have described of shifting and changing. What is important is the way in which people owned them and used them in certain contexts. For example Bodmin Riding. The tradition itself goes back some 500-600 years and at some stage someone picked up a nice little furry dance tune to connect to the procession. It’s probably not that old. We can’t go much earlier than the 19th century with it. So where it came from, we don’t know. Was it written locally, inspired by something someone heard when travelling? But for all intents and purposes, it is now part of Cornish tradition.
After finding manuscripts, or collecting songs from folk sessions – how did you then push them into the community? And what was the response?
We needed jobbing tunes for dances, displays and ceilidhs. In the time honoured way I have described, we adapted tunes from elsewhere in Cornish tradition for the purpose. Sometimes, they were made to measure. Liskeard Fair for example is a tune fragment in the Baring-Gould Faircopy manuscript at Plymouth. It is partly in 6/8, and partly in the 4/4 time of Cornish furry dances. It is not a big leap from Liskeard Fair to a furry dance and that is how we interpreted it [Fer Lyskerrys]. A few years later, I played around with it again and did a 6/8 version making it into a jig. In a way that’s my personal creativity, only a little bit because, after all, that’s what the tune was lending itself to and I was fitting it into what I needed at the time.
We found an interesting 19th century precedent for “Jobbing tunes” recently when we were doing the Clay Country Project. A few years previously my friend and colleague Mike O’Connor had researched and transcribed the music of John Old Dancing Master of Par [early 19th Century]. There is a nice little jig tucked away in there called “Forty Thieves” which we used for the project and found that it had great affinity with the folk song “Old Grey Duck” and erstwhile mediaeval Cornish carol “The First Good Joy That Mary Had”. We clearly were not the first to adapt song tunes to dances!
The response was a burgeoning number of Cornish dance groups and processional bands in the 80s and 90s who adapted existing music and in many cases wrote new Cornish tunes.
Throughout our conversation, you’ve struck upon the link between dance and music. Could you tell us more as to how they’re linked? How are dances recorded? Manuscripts, or passed down generation-by-generation?
There are several aspects to traditional dance in Cornwall: the Step or Scoot dances, the Processional Furry Dances, Geeze Dancers and Social Dance. All of which are linked by the need to find, or create, suitable driving music. Some dances have been recorded and reconstructed, but in most cases reference to dances in folklore and antiquarian journals can be linked to living tradition.
In the broadest sense social dance, barn dancing, folk dance, or whatever you would like to call it is very open and draws widely for inspiration. Today we are very influenced by the Celtic Revival with our ceilidhs and nos lowen dancing but inspiration will come from anywhere, including popular music. So if you go to my great granny, who played concertina for dancing down at the fish cellars in Newquay in the1890s, she would play the popular tunes of the time. Some might be very traditional Cornish some would be drawn from current fashion, the latest Quadrilles, the Lancers or whatever was going around at the time. But perhaps in a somewhat less less refined way as they would tend to “ungentrify” the dances and make them a little bit more lively. Social dance has always had a very wide funnel of influence but today I think there remains a drive to connect with Cornwall and Cornish tradition. Furry dances and step dances will usually find their way into our social dances somewhere.
Step or Scoot dancing is a long-standing tradition in Cornwall. Perhaps because it was excluded by people like Cecil Sharp, it survived quite independently of the folk revival and was passed on generation to generation, especially in the moorland areas of North Cornwall. You can trace a line back to the folklore and the dialect tales of people like Bottrell recalling step dances at weddings in the early 19th century. Going back further in the 18th century the dialect word for step dancer was lapyeor. The children who sorted ore with their feet in the mining industry were called “Little Lapyeors” because of the way they appeared to be dancing. The terms “Lappior” and “Lappiores” appear for male and female dancers in the 12th century Cornish Vocabulary [Vocabularium Cornicum Cottonian Library Oxford with the Latin gloss saltator / saltatrix]. Lapyeor changed to scoot as a dialect expression during industrialisation when footwear was protected with metal plates – scoots to make them last longer.
Armed with names like “The Three hand Reel”, “Four Hand Reel”, “Broomstick dance” and “Boscastle Breakdown” from the likes of Bottrell and particularly the Old Cornwall Societies we were able to track down people who could add descriptions and show us the steps for these dances. It has to be said that our own group, Cam Kernewek, were privileged to have Arthur Biddick as a coach for our step dancing. He was Boscastle born and bred and had played and done these dances in his youth between the wars.
Guize / Geeze dancers were, and still are, a medium through which traditional Cornish dances are maintained. In short they disguise themselves with masks and costumes and process with music and a piece of “folk business” such as a dance, song, ceremony or play. For me there is a resonance with the Cornish Mystery Plays, the Gwari Meur, of the 14th-century. In those texts, you’ve got all the creatures, the beasts, the Obby Oss’, the dragons, you’ve got the Wassail and the dancing. All the things that happen in the Guise dancing today. The very last words of the very last play to be transcribed was an instruction to the pipers to play for the people to dance – ”Del yw an vaner ha’n ges” – “as is the manner and jest”. “Ges” is a jest or mocking in Cornish and seems to have conflated with “gis” for costume together with the English disguise to become our modern Geeze dancing. People dress up, they disguise themselves, and they mock.
Would it be right to assume that dances (that became traditional dances) were directly inspired from labour work? Mentally, you’d think that once you laid down your tools, you wouldn’t think about work. But, in fact, the art they created could be seen as a homage to their labour and/or craft?
We have seen that industrial footwear inspired the development of step dancing. The satisfying clack of metal scoots on a slate floor would have encouraged percussive accompaniment to the music. I have to say it is difficult to imagine that working a long shift down in a 19th century mine, walking eight miles to get there and eight miles back again would leave you very inspired and energised for partying!. In practice of course the miners were famous for their feast days – and a reputation for being as “drunk as a Perraner” as a browse through late nineteenth century newspapers will show.
There is certainly a harvest dance inspired by the agricultural labourer’s year. It is called “Cock in Britches” and tells the story of the harvest from sowing to reaping. The importance of weeding is highlighted because they restrict the corn like the fighting cock is restricted by his britches, thus the name. There is quite a different relationship between industrialisation and dance with the Tea Treats but perhaps catch up with that later.