What is Morris Dancing?

From an introduction to the three-page booklet enclosed with the 1976 LP of Plain Capers: Morris dance tunes from the Cotswolds; written by the squeeze box virtuoso John Kirkpatrick, and Neil Wayne - owner of the Free Reed magazine and record company.

Morris dancing started life as part of an ancient pagan ritual...

The comic characters who often accompany Morris Dancers - the Fool, the Moll (a man dressed as a woman), the Hobby Horse - all have their origins in primitive beliefs and practices although they seem to come straight out of a modern circus or pantomime. 

And the dancers themselves in their elaborate costumes decorated with ribbons and bells are typically English; and yet very foreign and strange, and their ancestors belong to a race that was dancing before national boundaries had any meaning...

Morris dancing is concerned with energy - the energy expended by the individual dancers, and the energy that the dance transmits to its participants. For there is no doubt that after every last step and flourish has been analysed, there is still some force at work which defies analysis...

In the dance, the sense are dulled by some greater power which transcends everyday human limitations. In the dance, men can be at one with the life-force, at one with Mother Earth...

Plain Capers is a logical progression from previous milestones in the Morris music revival; both by re-exploring the the roots of the traditional tunes... and by using traditional instruments as much as possible; played in much the way that the old lads of the Cotswolds would have danced to them; wit 'plenty of brisk', full of energy, with all the magical marvellous excitement of the Morris. 

The above is a typical example of the nineteen seventies spiritual revival to which I have often referred - its context being a relatively small scale but mainstream record release; and John Kirpatrick especially was somewhat nationally famous at the time, joining Steeleye Span the following year.

What I notice is how explicit and unapologetic this note is in its mystical assertions. But also that they are rather vague; and based-on an essentially fictive, idealised, modernised, and incomplete understanding of paganism (typical of the anything-but-Christianity spirituality that developed in England from the late 1800s with neo-paganism, theosophy and many other movements).

I did not see any other so explicit links between Morris dancing and paganism in the music of that time, but it was certainly implied - not least in the art work, and the feel. Perhaps its spirit was most obvious in the precursor of Plain Capers: the electric folk album of Morris On, which is musically more successful than Plain Capers, indeed a classic album of its genre:

Notice the (jokingly modernised) archetypal Morris characters - left to right: Robin Hood, the Moll, Chimney Sweep, a normal Morris Dancer, and a Hobby Horse based on the iconic 'Chopper' bicycle...