Morris Musings

Last October, I joined a Morris side and it's the best thing I've ever done.

May Day 2024

A few years back, before I had reached my current rank of folk musician and knew not the ways of our most important traditions, a friend of mine mentioned offhand that they'd gone to see the Morris dancers dance up the sun on May Day.

I was familiar with Morris in a distant sort of way - I knew that EFDSS had something about dancing in the acronym and that there were some swords possibly? bells? - and I even had one friend who was a Morris dancer (still is, though last we spoke he was talking about possibly retiring at the spry age of late-80s), but it was all terribly peripheral and I had questions.

A year or two later, in May of 2024, the usual Tradfolk directory hit my inbox, and in a moment of purely hopeless curiosity - I was quite sure there would be no May Day Morris dancing anywhere within a thousand miles of Denver - I checked to see what the North American offerings might be. Fast forward a couple of days, and I was up before my 4am alarm dashing up to Longmont for my first taste of Morris.

(this was facilitated by my best friend and roommate, who, bless her, agreed to drag herself out of bed to give me a ride)

May Day morning, 2024

The idea of dancing up the sun was just about the most magical thing I could imagine when I first heard it. How deliciously human, what a glorious way to spend our free will! To paraphrase Steve Roud in The English Year, it's difficult for us modern humans with our SAD lamps and our questionable and precarious global trade empire to imagine how important the end of winter would have been to people even just a century or two back (indeed, Roud quotes a Victorian source considering the same question, though substituting gas lamps, so perhaps it is closer to two centuries than one). Winter, especially in the cold northern climes of England, was harsh and difficult and mind-numbing, and the return of spring was justifiably welcomed heartily each year. Dancing up the sun was the least you could do in gratitude for making it through another one.

That we still do this (some of us, the lunatics), is a testament to that little bit of wonder that, properly tended, takes over a fully grown adult's heart at a truly alarming rate until you've strapped bells on yourself and you're singing to a goose (this one might just be me).

It's the only way to live.

The lollipop man has a real big stick...

July or so of last year, I was emailing with the Maroon Bells Morris side to ask if autumn was still the time for them to welcome new dancers, and then suddenly it was October, and I was driving to Boulder full of nerves but in that entirely serene way that tells you you're on the right path.

There's a lot of chatter in the folk scene about being "welcoming" - you can't hardly blink without seeing a gentle guide in Folk London or a full scale study by Access Folk - and they're all excellent and correct, but if you're looking for an example of what that actually means, look no further than the Morris people.

I can't speak for every side, of course, and my experience is perhaps a bit narrow, but I suspect Morris people are largely the same most places you go. In the case of Maroon Bells, they schedule new dancer training for once a year. They never stop teaching, of course, but having a "beginners, please, come join us, no really, it's fine!" made it much less intimidating to try to join up. Sallie, our fore (and one of the founders of the side) is also wonderfully communicative. I had a full email of what to expect with plenty of notice before the first practice in which to read it, and she greeted me by name when I arrived looking, I'm sure, a bit lost and doe-eyed.

They also immediately handed me a stick. This has much to commend it.

The welcome really started back in May of that year, though. The side was all very enthused to have drawn a dawn audience, and my friends and I were objects of curiosity and slight concern for our sanity. There were even enough of us present, when combined with the non-dancing family members who had been dragged up before the sun, that they taught us a dance near the end (Shepherd's Hay, of course). I was hooked.

This May, a year later, I got to dance up the sun for the first time, and it was every bit as magical as I'd hoped.

A few weeks later, I was off to my first Morris Ale (that's a blog post of its own, someday), and I'm now dancing twice a week (Cotswold and border) and Morris has generally sort of taken over my life in the best possible way.

It feels impossible to think that I'm now coming up on a full year since I started dancing - that's somehow not long enough and also longer than I can conceive of. I can't imagine my life without it (and, most importantly, the people it's brought into my life) at this point. Morris dancing brought me home in a way I can't fully describe.

If you're feeling a little lost, maybe go find a Morris side. Can't hurt.